Apology for Inception

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it
and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they
will be there. -Mark Twain, A Fable

Christopher Nolan is one of the most interesting directors working today. He's managed to make tons of money for studios while filling his movies with his own obsessions and insights. It's on the heels of the Academy again deciding to recognize other films over Nolan's that I write this. At this point I've thought entirely too much about this movie which I think is really good but not nearly as good as many I've watched halfway through, or with one eye, but I'd better write this so I can be done with it Here goes:

Inception is not about dreams. Any criticism levied against it for portraying dreams as structured, mechanistic things isn't relevant because Nolan never wanted it to be about dreams. Nolan's making a movie about making movies. Throughout the film, while describing the dream state,the character's words could also be used to describe a movie. Take for instance:

Cobb: You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream and fill it with their subconscious.

Ariadne: How could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it's reality?

Cobb: Our dreams, they feel real while we're in them right? Its only when we wake up then we realize that something was actually strange.

Creating the world of the dream is creating a world in which the viewer can be immersed, but the viewer always brings his subconscious, i.e. his experiences, biases and expectations of the film. In Inception the subject (viewer), literally populates the dream world with his 'projections.' Nolan's characters in this movies are all familiar types who behave exactly as we'd expect them too in any heist film. The typical characters are an effort to keep the audience immersed, that is, to keep us believing in the reality of the film. Characters acting in ridiculous ways or Deus Ex Machinas are ways that this reality is shattered. Keeping the world consistent and making it feel greater than what you've so far seen make the world immersive.

Immediately after the above quotes, "Let me ask you a question, you, you never really remember the beginning of a dream do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on." This conversation follows a jump cut to Ariadne and Cobb eating in a coffee shop. Stories tend to drop us in the middle and let us figure it out as we go along, the director parceling out information to suit his purposes. This is one instance of a filmmaker's tricks being revealed.

Which brings us to the biggest trick in the filmmakers book: The process of bringing the viewer to a cathartic moment. The 'heist' in the film is to implant an idea in Robert Fischer's mind which will make him dismantle the empire he recently inherited from a father who hated him. While deciding whether to do this through anger or love, Cobb says, "We all crave reconciliation - we're catharsis. We need Robert Fischer to have a positive emotional reaction to all this." This is why people go to movies. This is why the sports movies almost always have happy endings and romantic comedies too. People go to movies to feel catharsis if just for a moment. The best of movies make that feeling overwhelming, the trite are like cigarettes, momentarily satisfying. Not all movies are after this goal, but most are, and that word is openly used several times in Inception.

The plot follows a twisting path which eventually leads us to the moment where Fischer confronts his father. Exhilarated and stressed out, Fischer meets his father and, in a powerful moment, is told that his father never wanted him to follow his path and was disappointed he did. Here's where I think a lot of people stopped liking the movie, because if this moment doesn't effect the viewer, he'll be far more likely to disregard the film. It's a strange moment. We know that the moment is manufactured by characters in the movie. Nolan's telling us it's fake. Still somehow it manages to be a moving moment. A boy, detested by his deceased father, meets him in his dreams and for him, it is a life changing moment. It's a moment divorced from reality, sure, but the catharsis craving audience still is moved.

Cobb's story mirrors this in that he is also in need of a cathartic experience, namely that of seeing the faces of his children again. He refuses to do it in dream land and insists he only wants to see their faces in real world. When he finally sees them, however, doubt is cast on his 'real' catharsis. The final shot being the top spinning and refusing to fall. It does have a more noticeable wobble than in deeper dream land, but this shot is Nolan's last little joke for the audience. More so than for Fischer, we're supposed to deeply care about Cobb's redemption and therefore the catharsis is greater for his moment of triumph. The last shot I think is a reminder to us that the emotions we've been through are as fake as those of Fischer. In his made up story, Nolan takes us through an emotional journey and at the end he's asking us whether those emotions are somehow invalidated by the possibility that they're not 'real.' For Fischer, presumably, those fake emotions drastically change his life. Many novels and movies have affected me enough that they've changed my behaviors or my thinking. Sometimes it's a subtle change and sometimes more drastic. Does it matter that those feelings were based on someone else's dream, or that they don't have any stake in the real world?

Inception is a movie that explores the meaning of catharsis brought on by art, and while it's biggest weakness is that the movie itself fails to produce that emotion in me as strongly even as another of his films about making movies, The Prestige, it's still an entertaining action/blockbuster that works harder to explore a subject than countless other 'prestige' films adored by the Academy and such.


Oh! And what does that quote have to do with anything? Nothing but that I'm not sure if I can even see this film objectively anymore because I've defended it too many times.

I Don't Want Realism I Want Magic

"Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that's sinful, then let me be damned for it! Don't turn the light on."
-Blance DuBois in "A Streetcare Named Desire"



Every movie book or play is filled with lies and misrepresentation. Characters have facades, authors have hidden motives, fiction isn't true and words don't mean what they mean to. Authors sometimes acknowledge this with a wink at the camera (the province of The Simpsons), or sometimes in a speech like Vivien Leigh's above. Lies are what makes the world of literature turn, and as Blanche DuBois suggests, there is 'magic' in these lies. It is magic that allows the worlds of Tolkien, Shakespeare, Vonnegut and Eliot to exist. And like any true magician (Prospero), the mark of good magic is that they bring you into their world, and for a moment, you forget your own. With a real magician it happens in that moment when you might wonder if there really is magic in the world, and for an author, it happens when your imagination takes over and the stark reality of life disappears. It seems, if only for a moment, that the whole world has been consumed by the author's world. Certain books, movies or plays do this to all of us. Watching the Neverending Story still has that effect on me even with all of its flaws. Star Wars is such a wonderful movie because of its immersiveness not, as is often said, because of its fairly stock characters or philosophical musings. While dropped into an immersive world we're not caught off guard by new scenes, sets or characters, because each fits perfectly into this world. The job of the author is to make us accept the initial premise, and then develop a consistent world around it. People probably choose their favorite genres around what premises they are willing to accept. Some people are willing to accept aliens and spaceships, while others are happier with love at first sight. Often we are willing to accept the most ludicrous premise if it offers us a world or life we crave more than any other (See Star Trek V, or really any Star Trek other than late DS9).

So far my examples have been primarily fantastical in nature, but this magic trick happens all the time, and we often accept it without even realizing it. My favorite example is that people often mock musicals because they express emotions by breaking into song and dance, but take, on the other hand, average movie dialogue. Stock plotting in action movies or romantic comedies has characters falling "in love" within moments of meeting or after one date. They express these feelings in short bursts of "meaningful dialogue," but, as anyone who's ever actually had a conversation about life, love or the weather knows, conversations, last longer than 2 or 3 minutes. People don't make grand, vague statements concealing hidden depth and purpose without the recipient of the comment asking about it i. e. "did you just make a reference to your past that the audience knows about, but you've been concealing from me and now you're hinting that you want to tell me but feel too embarrassed to do so? Well I guess I won't ask you about the past that clearly is having an effect on our present relationship so that the movie can go for a full 90 minutes and maintain suspense." Characters in stock romances or action films don't talk to each other, but make statements for the audience to assure to them that the plot is moving. Again, this is not a problem, it's just a lie that we've become so comfortable with we don't even acknowledge it exists. I don't object, because the world where that happens is a nice place to visit from time to time.

Looking for magic in poems or movies is part of the fun. Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" is a movie, about magic, that announces itself to be lies at the beginning, and uses that to confuse the viewer into accepting them. When I watched it for a second time, I was still so caught up in the tricks that without really noticing, I was sucked into the it and impressed with the magic even though I already knew 'the prestige.' Lies are misrepresentations for the background for nearly all of Hitchcock's work, and when watching his movies its hard to look away. The lies an author presents don't necessarily take us to nice places, but they take us to worlds where we want to spend time. Whether its the adrenaline that flows from a good suspense or a pitter-patter of a heart while Fred Astaire sings "The Way You Look Tonight" to Ginger Rogers with a head full of shampoo (it's actually whipped cream. Lies!)



The authors of these moments agree able to create the most wonderfully immersive places through clever lies, and when everything works, its magical. All that is required to visit is accepting a few falsities, and in return they offer feelings of joy, sadness and, for a moment, escape from the world.


P.S. I think Belle sums up much about why we need these stories here. "I want much more than this provincial life" indeed. The lie in this story is that there is more out there. Most of us will have to be content to create that more in a less tangible way than Belle.