Inter-Inception

It appears as if my wife and I are the only two people on the face of the planet who hated Inception.  She walked out about an hour and change into it—immediately before the tedious exposition that made the rest of the film thuddingly predictable—and I followed shortly thereafter.  Spoilers follow under the fold.

As soon as the ersatz Ra's Al Ghul from Batman Begins got shot the film screamed its circularity.  Once the rules about dying in one dream level were explained, the mechanism of that circularity became obvious, as did the fact that the "cliffhanger" would consist of whether or not Cobb was really in the really real world or just in another dream.  Which is pot-logic; by which I mean, the sort of thing you say when you're listening to Floyd in your dorm and everyone has their own bowl and is abusing it.

"Man, but what if this was all, like, a dream?"

"I know, dude, but what if it's not even a person's?  What if we're all, like, in a dog's dream?"

"And the moment it wakes up to lick its balls?  We like cease to exist?"

"That is deep, dude."

"Totally."

It's an infuriatingly stupid conceit, and asking the audience to accept it in order to make a film work is insulting.*  I'll admit that film was finely composed: the plot circled back perfectly, i.e. the timing of the van versus the timing at the hotel versus the timing at the fortress and then Limbo.  Limbo.  What to say about that? 

The less more likely the better. 

Instead, I'll just note that psychological complexity in this film was figured like a wedding cake: "depth" literally entailed layers stacked one atop the other, such that the "deeper" one went, the "deeper" one was.  Which is deep, dude.  But the perfect circularity of the plot had another unintended consequence: the film felt like an exercise in empty formalism. 

I'm sorry, I misspoke: the film "felt" like nothing, because it generated sympathy for neither the characters nor the corporation at whose behest they toiled.  When Nolan did attempt to make viewers care about the characters, he did so in the most grossly manipulative of manners: he killed a wife and quasi-orphaned some children.  Only who cared?  They weren't people so much as necessary elements of his orderly plotting, without whom he couldn't have knocked over that first domino.  

"Dominoes" aren't the operative metaphor here, though.  Inception was the equivalent of watching a grandmaster play an uninspired game against the village idiot.  There's brilliance there, certainly, but it's pointless and wasted.

*My personal theory is that no one had the gumption to tell Nolan this because The Dark Knight was the highest grossing film of all time. 

Comments

[Mikhail Emelianov]

Or I am an educational genius! Ah? Ah?

Well, I didn't call anyone an idiot, those times in American educational system are over. I simply suggested that those who thought that the movie was "way cool, man" did not in fact do their assigned Descartes reading (1st meditation). I.e., we had a "I can see why someone who never thought about these things (aka "idiots") might enjoy the plot.

[The Modesto Kid]

It would be like if *The Odyssey* was about a child molester and wife beater trying to get home to his wife and children.

I have not seen Inception and don't plan to; but it seems to me like Mr. Blissett's premise has a lot of potential.

[SEK]

I'll respond to the other comments momentarily, but as Primer was mentioned, I thought I'd share the fact that its director uploaded it to Google Videos, so it's freely available to any and all. Now, on to the comments!

[SEK]

The most ironic element of this conversation is that people thought I was being too demonstrative when I'd convinced myself I'd bitten my tongue. My initial reaction to the film was that it designed to make idiots feel smart: it's nigh incomprehensible for the first forty-five minutes, then it all snaps very neatly into place in the most obvious of manners, thereby fooling the audience into believing they'd accomplished some feat of intellectual labor. As Emily pointed out, it was "over-sold" as a thinking man's action film. So, part of my reaction to the film is based on my expectations of Nolan, who's capable of so much better. As I noted at LGM, what was so profoundly disappointing was that coming off The Dark Knight, the highest grossing film of all time, and being on board to direct the sequel, Nolan had more leverage than he ever will again in his entire career … and he chose to use it to make Inception, which even its defenders insist is, at best, a caper film. That saddens me, if only in part because he used his Batman Begins cachet to do The Prestige, which was a solid piece, but also boiled down to a gimmick the viewer saw coming halfway through the film. (At least there, though, he created characters the audience could care about, so the entire weight of the film didn’t rely on the audience not figuring out the puzzle.)

The difference, to respond to JPool, between this film and Ocean's Eleven is that the latter has no pretension of being anything other than a heist film. Inception does, and that's where it fails most miserably: it's not a meditation on love and loss and dreaming unless the whole thing is a dream, which means that love and loss are most keenly felt when dreaming you're being bankrolled by one corporation to take down another. (Over at one of my old haunts, dana makes a case for it all being a dream, but that not mattering.)

However, after thirty minutes about labyrinths and non-Euclidean geometry, we never *see* that stuff in action.

Ding ding ding! Moreover, Ellen Paige's awfully named character is completely misused once they enter Cillian Murphy's head. The brilliant architect should be more than a cipher for someone to reconcile their guilt about a dead wife through.

The things they can do are cool, but they themselves are not very.

To hammer this home: why do they even need the chemist? If the British guy can make a preposterously large gun materialize, why not a sedative?

It made it seem like he had some particular artistic interest in the question of what circumstances might lead somebody to commit murder over and over again while being in some way emotionally dead to the act and and/or having no motive that gives them any reason to have a particular animus towards the victim.

Inception takes this to new heights: everyone who populates the dream are merely projections of the dreamer, and may therefore be shot and killed without compunction. It's a third-person shooter writ large, a world in which moral compunctions are irrelevant. Moreover, it's a paranoid world, in that it breeds paranoia: if those actors figure out that you're not a hollow projection, they turn on you, so you might as well kill them first.

That said, The Prestige is more about killing yourself, not so much about killing others, right? (I'm trying to say this while remaining spoiler-free.)

Scott, have you seen Primer? I would be very interested in hearing your reaction to that film.

I'm about to re-watch it, now that I know it's freely available. Give me a few days to write it up.

Didn't you also hate The Cell and The Fall? She liked those as something visually cool but you can't think about them too hard or else they will unravel. It sounded to me like this one might be similar?

I didn't hate The Cell, because as we discussed at that link, Tarsem Singh actually does absurdity well.

The best filmic representation of a dream, in my opinion, is still Lynch's Mulholland Drive, which actually takes the parallel between dreams and cinema seriously.

Agreed. But what's your theory about the film? You've told it to me twice now, but because of the nature of the film itself, it always slips out of my head.

[Mikhail Emelianov]

"the film was that it designed to make idiots feel smart"

Spot on. But it also seems that if that was the initial task, someone must've suggesting putting "stuff blowing up and shooting and shit, you know?" later, so it became a safe shoot-them-up with some pretense of intellectual context because, you know? they in some dude's head...

[SEK]

I didn't find it an excercize in "empty formalism" (and I've no idea what that would even mean in the context of film, though I would imagine something closer to Godfrey Reggio's work), I found it viscerally compelling.

What I mean is that it's a film concerned less with characters than the precision of its narrative. A highly formal film that isn't empty would be, for example, something by Hal Hartley, in which the characters are ciphers, but intentionally so. Or, to stick with Nolan, Memento.

[NickS]

That said, The Prestige is more about killing yourself, not so much about killing others, right?

Yes, it could be described as making a metaphor literal in the same way that "The Hunger Artist" makes literal "starving for attention." And yet, the character and the movie are so alienated from the death that it doesn't seem wrong to describe it as murder rather than suicide.

I wouldn't push that quite so hard if I hadn't seen memento and thought that one of the things that is distinctive (And, to my mind distasteful) about both of them is that when the final reveal happens you have this sudden moment when you realize that you have no idea how many bodies to expect. As it turns out the bodies are multiplied in The Prestige and not in Memento but that's a somewhat arbitrary choice. In both cases the framework would support any number of bodies.

I'm about to re-watch [Primer], now that I know it's freely available. Give me a few days to write it up.

Yay! I doubt I'm going to have time to re-watch it in the next few days, but I will try to do so. I remember thinking that there was a hole in the plot, but doubting that conclusion because it was so carefully made. I'd like to try to remember what it was that bothered me.

Lynch's Mulholland Drive

As long as I'm talking about films other than the subject of the post (which I haven't seen), I feel obligated to mention my favorite scene in that movie.

The moment that I cannot get out of my head is described here

If Mulholland Dr has an essence, it is captured in one particular scene. A singer, we are told her name is Rebekah Del Rio, ... [performs] a haunting, heart-rending rendition of Roy Orbison’s Crying in Spanish. A close-up of the singer’s face shows a single tear drop colorfully painted beneath her right eye. ... Suddenly the singer collapses while the recording, actually voiced by Rebekah del Rio, continues on.

The thing that makes that absolutely brilliant, I believe, is that in that moment, when we go from believing that she is performing, to being shown that she was lip-syncing, there is a cut. I first saw the movie on video, rather than in the theater, and at that moment I immediately re-wound it to watch the scene again (which I rarely do when watching videos). I am convinced that the actress was singing, rather than lip-syncing, and that the cut is used to create the illusion (or narrative, if you prefer) that the character isn't actually singing.

Perhaps I am more interested than most in the way that musical performances occur in film (another discussion) but I thought that, as a formal commentary on movies, you can't top a scene in which "movie magic" is used to create something that is less authentic than the performance that was recorded on film.

[Tagere]

When people asked whether I liked Inception, I told them seeing it is sort of like chugging a can of Coke on a hot summer day. Not very nourishing, but it can be really good, if you happen to like Coke. If you don't like Coke, however, ....

[SEK]

When people asked whether I liked Inception, I told them seeing it is sort of like chugging a can of Coke on a hot summer day. Not very nourishing, but it can be really good, if you happen to like Coke. If you don't like Coke, however, ....

This is a lovely metaphor, because I'm deathly allergic to Coke.

[p.t.smith]

Mikhail,

Nope, awful, awful teacher is still much more accurate than educational genius. Glad you're out there validating your own ego by handing over your thoughts and opinions to your students.

[Mikhail Emelianov]

"by handing over your thoughts and opinions to your students"?

Are you serious? You're joking, right? How else am I suppose to teach without "handing over my thoughts and opinions to my students"? Long periods of dictations from the assigned textbook? By prolonged and engaged group hugs? If you cared to ask, you would have learned that they did express their opinions and all. You make me sound like an indoctrinator of some sort. I'm sure I'm a better teacher than you are a diviner of human hearts and comments.

[Stephen]

But what's your theory about the film? You've told it to me twice now, but because of the nature of the film itself, it always slips out of my head.

It's not a very original theory, alas. The most common reading of the film is that the first 2/3 of Mulholland Drive are an elaborate wish-fulfillment dream on the part of the Naomi Watts character (Betty in the dream, Diane in waking life). The last third is the waking reality to which the dream obliquely refers. What I find so fascinating about the film is the trick that Lynch plays on us: the dream part of the film feels more real to us than the waking part, largely because it is structured according to film conventions (a crime film with Betty as the plucky amateur detective). Those conventions start to break down when the traumatic content of the dream (the fact that Diane has paid a hitman to kill her lover) threatens to disrupt the dream fantasy. At these moments, Lynch highlights the artifice of his own film - as in the scene that Nicks refers to. All of this is totally appropriate given that Diane is an aspiring actress.

[Anon]

"You make me sound like an indoctrinator of some sort."

P.T. did no damage to the way you sound.... frankly, P.T. was polite...

How can I put this less politely...? Oh, I have it.... You just sound like an ass.

[JPool]

Wow, that is some arrogant critical condescension.

I agree with dana, pretty much entirely, and of course she says what I would like to have said much better than I could. I take her point not to be that it doesn't matter if the entire film is a dream (to make it explicit, Cobb's totem is shown earlier proving to himself that he's awake), but that the ending suggests that it might not matter if life is a dream, that the relevant question is whether the dream is working for you or not.

I certainly don't think it's a perfect film, and, like any fantastic scenario, if you push on any of the conceits too hard it will collapse in on itself. I do think it that manages to be a thrill ride that's not only a visually and narratively complex thrill ride, but is also about some deeper and more haunting questions. But apparently that's because I'm an idiot.

[Mikhail Emelianov]

Can you give an example of this "deeper and more haunting question" that this movie apparently raised?

Anon, calling someone an awful teacher based on a humorous remark is very polite indeed, I wasn't thinking straight. My apologies.

[JPool]

Mikhail,
Try reading dana's post.

[Mikhail Emelianov]

I did, actually. Assuming that I didn't, makes you sounds like an ass (for a definition of "sounding like an ass," see above).

[JPool]

Then why were you asking?

No, I'm pretty sure I know who the ass is in this conversation.

[tomemos]

"I simply suggested that those who thought that the movie was "way cool, man" did not in fact do their assigned Descartes reading (1st meditation). I.e., we had a "I can see why someone who never thought about these things (aka "idiots") might enjoy the plot."

Mikhail, I can't tell whether you're sincere in claiming not to know why people find what you said obnoxious, or not. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are.

Briefly:

1. Reducing all of the enjoyment one could get out of the film to "way cool, man" is insulting and condescending.

2. Saying that one could not sincerely hold a particular opinion on a film without reading a particular work of philosophy is insulting and condescending.

3. Saying that only those who had "never thought about these things" could enjoy the plot is particularly insulting and condescending, whether or not one uses the word "idiot."

To be clear, there's nothing condescending about saying, "I hated this film, and I have no idea how anyone could get enjoyment out of it." But to explain confidently that people only enjoyed it on a superficial level, and that they wouldn't have liked it or found it interesting unless they had your knowledge and scholarship, is simply obnoxious. It suggests that you see your interlocutors as amusingly ignorant children, which is a shoddy enough position for a teacher to take with undergrads but an indefensible one for an adult talking with adults.

[Mikhail Emelianov]

Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. I did hate the movie, I brought it up in class to see if it could generate some discussion vis-a-vis dream vs. reality argument Descartes makes in the 1st meditation. It worked. There were as many opinions in the class as there are here - I asked how such disparity could be explained, even more discussion followed. Yes, I did pose the question provocatively (and used the word "idiots"), but it only helped generate more discussion. Anyone who ever tried to make students talk about a philosophical topic would understand that it was a pretty good class. Nowhere do I suggest that I am somehow smarter and more scholarly and therefore I hated the movie while "idiots" liked it because they are not as sophisticated as I am. But, I did call attention (in class) to the fact that if one is entirely unfamiliar with the issue of "dream vs. reality" it only shows that they haven't read for class. I can add that (outside of class) anyone finding the very posing of the question - is it all a dream? - an interesting and innovative way of looking at reality, i.e. anyone who has never heard of this particular angle of questioning realness of reality, is an uneducated country bumpkin and I don't care if it's condescending to call such a person an idiot.

I haven't commented here for a while, so I suppose I misremembered and assumed that this was a place for more or less a variety of comments-responses, including "silly banter" type that I opened with.