The Prestige and Metaphysics

Descartes shed all of his basic beliefs and senses to try and get rid of all things that were assumed. The Prestige relates to this concept in several ways.

The magicians need to see past the illusion they are being presented with. The magician's job is to fool the audience. Conversely, the magician also wants to see the illusions so that they may create their own. This parallels Descartes' desire to see past the veil of reality.

The magicians, more than wanting to distinguish illusion, want to know the truth of the act so that they may learn and repeat it. This desire to know the truth of reality is the goal of Descartes' meditation. Angier needed to know the reality so badly that he got Tesla to invent his own method of doing the transported man. But even then the only thing he wanted was to know how the rival magician did the trick. It truly displays the maddening desire and obsession to know the truth.

A moment of comparison is when the trick engineer says that he can't know how the way the transported man works, but we can do it with a double. Angier insists on doing it the way it was originally done. This parallels Descartes' idea that the senses cannot be trusted but that  he because a person thinks and realizes things they exist. The trick engineer knows that it will be impossible to figure it out without taking extreme measures. He is trusting in his own knowledge and experience. Angier is demanding his sense explain it to him.

The movie is all about people manipulating senses to fool someone's sense of reality. While it is more people manipulating than an all powerful being it almost validates Descartes' fear of the senses being fooled. Different magicians not only confuse reality for their audience but also break the illusion to sabotage each other.

The most significant evidence for the veil of reality is the cloning machine. This is by all means an incredible achievement and machine. But instead of simply displaying the wonder of the machine, he sets it up so it looks like a trick. This seems the most like a powerful being hiding reality from others. Because other magic tricks were theatrics or slights of hand to entertain. The machine was used to cause spontaneous biogenesis of a new person with the same identity. That is by any measure a god like power. But rather than presenting it as such Angier hides it behind a complex system to make sure nobody knows. This seems to completely follow Descartes' idea of a powerful being manipulating reality to fool everyone. Though Angier was clearly far from an all powerful being it is a great example of why it isn't a good idea to rely completely on the sense.