Blurred Identity

            In the movie The Prestige, Rupert Angier, a magician, has found a way to clone himself for a magic trick. This trick is meant to give the illusion of transportation. Instead of transporting the original object, the machine clones the object. We know that the machine clones objects and it is revealed to us later that he is killing the clones that are created by the machine. In order to prevent the spoiling of the trick by the many clones of him, Angier kills the clone after each show by drowning them in a tank typically used for escape illusions. I began to wonder while watching what the clones knew. Did they know they had just been cloned? Did they have the same memories as the original Angier? John Locke addresses the issue of identity and consciousness in his writing Of Identity and Diversity. Locke claims that consciousness and identity are independent of everything else. This idea means that it is possible for identity and consciousness to change from one body to another. Locke’s examples of consciousness and identity do not match the situation in the prestige exactly. We do know that when they are cloned they have some memory because when Angier uses the machine for the first time, the new Angier attempts to stop the original from grabbing the gun to kill the new. In this scenario, both the old and new Angier had memory of placing the gun near the machine for convenience. However, Locke’s example describes the consciousness shifting from one body to another with the old body no longer containing its memories. At the end, I still found myself wondering whether the Angier that ends up disguising himself as Lord Caldlow is the original Angier or if somewhere along the line of doing the transported man trick the original was killed.

            When Alfred Borden, another magician, lost two of his fingers, his twin brother whom he often switched places with also cut off two of his fingers in order to match each other. Locke specifically talks about the loss of a finger and that when we lose a finger we do not become a new person. However, Borden and his twin, Fallon, do switch places often and blur the lines of identity because they are often playing each other. There is no way of knowing which Borden and which Fallon are the true ones. Just as I was wondering about Angier at the end, I was also wondering whether the Borden that escaped dressed as Fallon was the original Borden or not.