Christopher Nolan as a Third Culture Kid Filmmaker – my personal take

If you’ve been following this blog, then you know that probably half of my posts are Christopher Nolan-related. To be fair, I did open this blog just as I was beginning film school, and I got into my Nolan phase, so that makes sense. But why did I become so obsessed with this guy? 

Part of the reason is because I related to him as a third culture kid filmmaker. Firstly, if you’re not aware about the term, a third culture kid is someone who grew up outside their passport country or culture, or, as the academic definition goes: “A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a child who has spent a significant part of their formative years living in a culture different from their parents’ homeland and their birthplace. This experience often leads TCKs to develop a unique identity that blends elements from their birth culture and the various cultures they encounter during their upbringing. TCKs typically come from families that move due to international work, military assignments, or other global circumstances, which can include transnational marriages.” (Harmon).

There’s also this ancillary term, Adult Third Culture Kid (or ATCK), but I use the term “third culture kid” to cover people of any age that fall into the definition of being sort of cultural refugees or pilgrims. TCKGlobal also recently expanded the definition to include people who have moved from one subculture to another within the same country.

I grew up in three countries (the Philippines – my birth country; then Nepal and Armenia), and I’m sure some of the people reading this might relate. I theorized that Chris Nolan (whose mother is American and father was British) is also a TCK because one of his parents is from a different country than the one he grew up in.

So yeah, my take on Nolan as a TCK director is something crazy because his reputation is – he’s the Batman guy, he’s the Oppenheimer and Interstellar guy. When I first started getting into his work as a film student (we were assigned a 4-hour documentary on his life and work), I wasn’t sure if I could call him a TCK. This is because I’ve met people before, after my research on TCK and diaspora studies, who – after talking to them – didn’t want to be defined as a diasporan or TCK. They either rejected the idea or it was something too sensitive for them to talk about. And watching Nolan’s interviews, I got the impression that he seemed pretty secure in his British identity.

But the same time I got into his works, I was going through an identity crisis as a TCK myself, so I couldn’t help but relate strongly through his films – they gave me language for what I was going through. And I was reading deeper into his background and thinking, possibly, he was a bonafide TCK.

What was it about his background that made me think he was a TCK? Well, he grew up both in London and in Evanston, Illinois (where one of my good friends from uni is from! it’s where Home Alone was shot!), moving back-and-forth. One of the first really interesting things that I learned about him was that he and his brother have completely different accents (despite their parents staying together all those years). They just happen to have grown up on two different sides of the Atlantic. It’s kind of like Parent Trap where Chris has a very British accent, while his brother Jonathan Nolan – who co-wrote The Dark Knight and Interstellar – has an American accent, (a very Midwestern one lol). If you want to hear how different their accents are – check this out:

So while I was studying filmmakers like them, I was going through an identity crisis triggered by my bachelors thesis, a graphic novel about seven Armenian diasporans who were also grappling with their identity. They shared stories of being discriminated against in their own homeland, struggling with the language barrier (since some of them didn’t grow up speaking Armenian or spoke a different dialect), and doubting whether they were Armenian enough. 

This made me face questions about my own identity and where I belong. It also struck my unaddressed grief of living in different countries. The first year I moved to Nepal with my family (I was 10), I was very homesick for the Philippines, until I slowly fell in love with Nepal and, a year later, fully accepted our new lives there. So it was a very difficult process for me to leave Nepal for Armenia. It took a long, long time to understand and process the grief of what happened. 

At the start of 2024 (before I went to film school for my master’s), my mom was watching Past Lives, directed by Celine Song, on the airplane back from Manila to Armenia (we spent Christmas in the Philippines) and somehow the title resonated with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, even though we didn’t finish the movie, because I was thinking of my own past lives: being an eight-year-old in Manila living a very Filipino life – playing patintero with the neighborhood kids and riding the tricycle back home from soccer practice (as a former U.S. colony, yes, Pinoys called it soccer), waking up to “Tahooo!” and eating the soya-pearl with dark sugary “sauce” for breakfast, and then as a preteen and teenager in Nepal dressing up in kurtas, dancing to Bollywood songs, eating momos and chicken curry every week; and in Armenia where I would yell, “Vay!” when I’m annoyed – where I cried over my university-mates who died in the 2020 war and remembering my classmate by visiting his grave, something every Armenian here has done for someone they lost… 

It’s hard for me to talk about these three identities that I’ve had, even now. For most of 2024, I was grappling with that idea of those fractured selves, my past lives – and the grief of saying goodbye to them. It’s like I have three children, and none of them is my favorite. 

I began to draw my favorite places in Nepal. I drew the balcony where I used to read the Bible and listen to the birds, the mynas, the parakeets, the oriental magpie robins; the crows arguing, and the pigeons waking me up in the morning. 

Also, I had recurring dreams where I had a Frankenstein monster of a house: I would be in my kitchen in Manila one moment and in my Nepal house’s garage the next, and when I walk outside, I’m in Armenia – something roughly like that. Here’s part of that comic to try and explain this better:

In those dreams, I would always have a mission – as simple as trying to cook something in that old Manila kitchen, or relaying a message to a friend. But the dream changes so fast that I don’t have time to complete it. And when I would wake up and remember those dreams, I would always feel bewildered, confused, and sad. I wouldn’t exactly call them nightmares because I didn’t panic or feel afraid – it was more of a dull, numbing sense of fear of being lost, maybe being lost in the past, or in that confusing jumble of places. I don’t know when those dreams began, but they began to bother me so much that year that I started asking, Why is this happening? I would pray about it, I’d ask God what they meant. 

And so in November of that year, I decided to watch Inception. It was simply a decision because it was one of the most important films to watch. I almost watched it on one of the flights back from the Philippines that year, but for some reason, I didn’t continue, so it was timely that I did finally watch it when I was wrestling with my dreams, which is something the protagonist of the film does.

In the film, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb is a freelancer who is hired by people to steal things (like trade secrets and business plans) from other people’s dreams – he has a contraption that allows him and a team to do so; it’s somewhat like a dream-heist. But then he keeps being held back from his missions inside the dreams by the appearance of his dead wife. It was just like how my Frankenstein monster dreams would disrupt my sleep.

I stopped when I was halfway through the film because I had to do something else. So, after that, I talked about my quasi-nightmares to an artist friend who’d seen Inception before. I told her I had been praying about this. 

And after a while, she said something that changed me: “The Lord is still the God of your dreams – God is everywhere, he’s also in your dreams. And maybe he wants to tell you that… ‘I’m still there. I love you even in your dreams – and you can stop and pause there and take as long as you need.’” 

When I read that, I almost cried. It was exactly what I needed. 

A few days later I finally got to continue watching the film, and during the part near the ending where he finally lets go of his wife, I just broke down and wept. It helped me let go of some grief I had about Nepal. 

And even though I still continued to have those kinds of Frankenstein dreams, the feeling of loss, the feeling of confusion I had when I woke up, that disappeared. I had made peace with my dreams.

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But I still continued to dwell on my brokenness as a third culture kid that season. I was burned out in other areas, and it was coupled with a feeling of isolation. I didn’t have friends in person who I could confide in about this. It’s how I turned to the Nolan movies. 

There was something subliminally relatable in how he often used nonlinear timelines. We’re taken back-and-forth across different timelines, different places, and that kind of seems easy for him to write and direct – and something I found very easy to understand as a third culture kid audience member. As the Harmon definition goes: “TCKs may exhibit traits such as independence, self-reliance, and adaptability, often speaking multiple languages and having a broad understanding of global issues. However, the frequent relocations can also lead to feelings of anxiety and identity confusion, as TCKs grapple with questions about where they truly belong.”

We know what it’s like to be constantly confused, and it’s easier for us to make sense of different languages or situations because we have to survive. We are culture chameleons – we automatically try to adjust and readjust to whatever social situation we’re thrown in. We often have to deal with friends moving away, and when we come to our “home” country, we experience reverse culture shock. 

The spirit of adjustment is also embodied in this excerpt from a Rhina Espaillat poem, “Bilingual/Bilingüe.” Rhina, a diplomat’s child, was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to America in WWII. This poem talks about her relationship with her father and their languages:

“English outside this door, Spanish inside,”
he said, “y basta.” But who can divide

the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from
any child? I knew how to be dumb

and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed,
I hoarded secret syllables I read

until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run
where his stumbled. And still the heart was one.

I like this line the most: “English outside this door, Spanish inside.” It speaks of the spatial delineation of the third culture kid life. And, even though the experience can be painful, it makes it easier for us to navigate confusion and stepping in and out of different times and languages.

And so when I watch a Christopher Nolan nonlinear timeline, I just sit and accept it as it is and wait for the story to unfold. Even my fellow third culture kid friend – an Armenian who grew up in Turkmenistan – said he loved films with nonlinear timelines too. 

A few months later, I saw Dunkirk. It was about English soldiers trying to get home in WWII after losing a battle against the Germans. Watching it, I couldn’t forget how I had gone through a war myself in 2020 – the Armenia-Azerbaijan War; I was in Yerevan with my family that time – and I had many friends who went off to the army. Seven of my university-mates died, one of them was in my class (I visited his grave a few months before watching Dunkirk).

But what got me most about the film was the line from Kenneth Branagh’s character, Commander Bolton. For context: the British are waiting for rescue on the Dunkirk beach, and since their military does not have the capacity to save those hundreds of thousands of soldiers, they mobilized the civilians who are setting out across the channel in their own boats. 

Commander Bolton is standing on the wharf at Dunkirk, watching the horizon, desperate that there are so few ships ashore to rescue his men. Then he sees something in the distance. One of his soldiers gives him binoculars. Moments later, the soldier asks what he sees. There are tiny boats out in the distance – the civilians coming to get them – and he answers, “Home.” 

It moved me to tears. I wished that the same would happen to me, because one of the difficult things about being a third culture kid is that we sometimes don’t feel welcome when we go back home. Or, even though we are welcomed in different, very loving ways, the the experience of being ignored or rejected by other people back home hurts even more because we’re there trying to find a safe place, we’re trying to recover the home we lost – but then it never works out how we want it to be.

There’s also that ending scene when Harry Styles and the other soldiers come back home on the train and the people outside are just angry at them for losing the battle. They have no idea about the horrifying things those kids went through. And I get that sometimes, how people back home simply cannot understand the difficulties we go through because they’ve not been in the field with us.

There’s a similar scene in Tenet, Nolan’s 2020 film, which talks about a different aspect of reverse culture shock. For context to those who haven’t seen it: there’s a large device called a turnstile, which is kind of a time-travel machine, except, once you pass through it, you go backwards through time – the laws of physics are reversed or something like that. Everything in the natural world is going backwards to you if you pass through – you are an aberration in time.

The first time The Protagonist uses the turnstile, he’s in a bit of shock. He sees the world inverted: seagulls flying in reverse, smoke billowing in the sky in reverse, stepping on a puddle and the water reacts in reverse…

There was a time when I was a teenager, it was probably my first or second day back home in the Philippines after being in Nepal (we went back once a year) I was in a fast food restaurant and everyone around me was talking in Filipino. Suddenly, I had sort of a mental overload – I could finally understand what everyone was saying. It was like in one of the superhero shows I saw, No Ordinary Family, where the daughter suddenly gets telepathic abilities. She tells her mom that she’s so overwhelmed because she can hear everybody’s thoughts at the same time. So her mom takes her up on a Ferris wheel where she can get away from it all.

I just felt like her at that moment. It took a while for me to get used to hearing Filipino, everywhere, again. So I could imagine the Protagonist being pretty overwhelmed by the reverse world. Actually it wasn’t reverse culture shock – it was reverse world shock 🤣 But he got over it quickly and was able to drive a car right away. BRUH. plot armor…

OK, just a couple more film examples (I might write a whole paper about this someday): I like Batman Begins more than The Dark Knight because Bruce Wayne is juggling different identities. His conscience, embodied in Rachel, keeps on bugging him about who he should be, staying true to himself and all.

I like that dilemma about how he had two identities becoming more of the other – like the Batman persona bleeding into his Bruce Wayne identity. Kind of like how my three, four cultural identities overlap – and the dilemma of “Who should I be in this moment??” Because I find myself adjusting subconsciously to everyone I meet, trying to find their background so I can act in a culturally-OK way, which means sometimes repressing some aspect of my Filipino identity, or my jumble of identities. 

Chris Nolan‘s first film Following also deals with memory, the preciousness of memory. And that’s a very third culture kid thing too – to keep memories close because, through all the travels that we take, all the moving around, friends and places we will never see again — sometimes memories are all we’ve got at the moment — and so they are most precious to us.

So, after seeing these films, I had to wonder – since he captured the emotions of a TCK experience so well – was Nolan really a TCK? In April last year, I stumbled upon these passages from his biography, The Nolan Variations, by Tom Shone – here are his own words:

“I loved being in England, I loved playing rugby, I loved how different it was from America, I thrived on the back-and-forth, the change of gears, but I’d come home and the adjustment could be a little tricky. You feel glad to be home, you get to resume some friendships, but your school friends are all in different parts of the world; everyone has moved on.”

Regarding himself and his brother:

“When they meet us people are often surprised that Jonah has a completely American accent and I don’t. It’s something you have to figure out when you’re a kid. You have to make a decision: How am I going to speak for the rest of my life? Being of two countries and two cultures, I think you wind up being naturally self-conscious about that. There was a certain amount of discombobulation. I sometimes felt a little like an outsider on both continents.”

THAT LAST SENTENCE. There you go. There was also this really bittersweet part:

“I’m the product of two cultures and I’ve grown up in two places, and I think that makes you think about the concept of home a little differently, because it’s not as simple as geography necessarily… At the end of Inception, he goes through immigration and gets his passport stamped; that’s always been a resonant moment for me because I don’t take it for granted that you’ll hand over your passport and they’ll say, ‘Come in.’ I was told when I was a child that I would have to decide when I turned eighteen whether to have British citizenship or American citizenship. Fortunately, the law changed by the time I turned eighteen, so I could be both, but when I was a kid, my parents let me know that I was going to have to figure out which to be. And fortunately, I didn’t have to make that choice; it would have been impossible. So, I’ve never taken those kinds of things for granted.

“I mean for me, home now has been Los Angeles for some years because the kids are in school here, but I get to work in England quite a bit. I have this conversation with Emma a lot because she misses England, and I don’t miss it because I know that I can go back, and don’t miss America when I go to England, for the same reason. … I really enjoy going to different places; I enjoy that process of refreshing. It’s that change of gears I had growing up. I thrived on that back-and-forth. For me, it’s about switch flipping. You go from one culture, you go to the other, and I’ve always really enjoyed that change. I always found it invigorating.”

You’ve got the pros and cons of the TCK experience right here – the grief of leaving, but also the thrill of being able to wear two cultural shoes and traveling with them at the same time.

The excerpts mentions Emma, his wife and producer. It was nice finding out she was a TCK too – she was a diplomat’s child who grew up in Kenya, Brazil, and Jordan – and perhaps that’s why they clicked the first moment they met at uni 🤣 His biography also talked about how he made films with his neighbor in Illinois, Roko Belic, who was who was the son of Hungarian immigrants.

There was also this phrase he would use in interviews that got me (back in Batman Begins and even for The Odyssey, 20 years later) – “I make every film like it’s the last one. I don’t know if tomorrow I’ll get hit by a bus or something, so it’s important to us to give it all we’ve got.” And since his films show a deep understanding of the nuances of grief, I wonder where that came from.

Later, a friend who’s also a Nolan fan shared with me some clippings from this biography of a young journalist that Nolan was a part of:

Dan Eldon was also a TCK with a background like Chris – British dad, American mom – and when he was around 19, he and 13 other teenagers (including Chris Nolan) raised money for relief aid in Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi. They all traveled together there and shot a film during their journey, with Chris and Roko Belic as cameramen. It was something I could relate to because I had also done relief volunteering as a teenager for more than six months following the magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Nepal in 2015.

Later on, Dan became a Reuters journalist in Somalia, where he was killed during a raid. He was only 22. And so I figured out why Chris says, “I make every film like it’s the last one.”

Tomorrow I’m going to see The Odyssey on its premiere day here in Armenia – which is why I’m clamoring to finish this post since I’ve written a bit on my expectations for it. As you’ve already seen, it was not easy to write this post, this is my third week working on it. Well, I didn’t grow up reading Homer’s Odyssey, so I first tried to read The Iliad, then jumped on to an adaptation of the Odyssey that my friends in the Philippines were crazy about: Jorge Rivera-Herrans’ “EPIC: The Musical”.

I connected with it emotionally so deeply and almost cried several times because of how Odysseus and other characters were trying to get home, or trying to find home. What got me most was the final song, where he is finally reunited with his wife Penelope and he asks, “Will you fall in love with me again? Because I’ve changed so much–I am not the man you used to know.”

There is something just so participatory about a musical – how you can sing the songs any time of the day, anywhere, and the story stays with you – plus there’s a huge fanbase you can talk to, and besides, I grew up as a musical theater kid. So I appreciate how the musical gave voice to the emotional realm of the characters in a way that the Homer epic sometimes does not give.

Flash forward to this year – here I am, looking forward to the Odyssey film, I’m listening to all these Nolan interviews, and he would say that “the Odyssey is the combination of all my stories. All of them have been riffing off of this!”

He also mentions the Greek concept of nostos: homecoming, return, the journey to one’s homeland (it’s where we get the word nostalgia from). So I find how fitting it is that this film could fit everything I’ve been through with Nolan’s work in a nutshell.

And I’m looking forward to seeing it because I sense I will be coming full circle somehow. God has already healed me of so many things I’ve been wrestling with the past few years, and I believe that this film – no matter how it’s going to go – will provide some sort of closure to what I have gone through.

Honestly, it feels like I went through more trouble after I owned the “third culture kid” title. But it helped me process the things I had gone through over the years – kind of like a “facing the giants” moment because they were brought to the light.

And God reminded me of my true identity in Him, put poignantly in 1 Peter 2:10 –

Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

What good was my identity before I met Him? It was manmade, temporary, temporal; ephemeral, insecure. But I know now that my true home is hidden with Christ in God.

And I like that the verse speaks about a community. I’m not the only one, as I was wont to think all those years.

To help me understand this, He just so happened to use the films and the life of a fellow third culture kid – who was named after the patron saint of travelers! How poetic is that.