Right off the bat, you should know I’m not a Chris Nolan fan. Never have been. His movies are overwrought trash with titillating plots that are hackneyed tripe for anyone with more than a third grade education. And as with all of his more “cerebral” movies, this one doesn’t really hold together. But I notice that when one of his movies breaks down, defies logic, or is just plain stupid, people are quick to call it “mind-bending,” “complex” or just, like, whoa! One only has to look at Memento – and now Inception – to see this phenomenon in effect. And please don’t get me started on The Dark Knight – I haven’t seen such a blatant piece of fascist propaganda since watching old WW II era cartoons. (Ducktators, anyone?)
So, Inception….hmmmmm.
I wish this movie had been able to implant a good time. I’ll leave aside for the moment the central premise of the movie that an idea is contagious. Not a terribly interesting or original thesis. Instead what interests me is this insistence on the ambiguity of reality. Perhaps my frustration with this approach rests not with Inception, but with the nearly endless stream of movies that navigate this territory: Existenz, Matrix, Waking Life, Dark City, and on and on and on. It becomes boring after awhile and predictable. Add to that a Philosophy professor’s natural irritation at third-rate treatments of philosophical insights that have been around since before Plato and I get crabby and unhappy while sitting through this movie. Sure, it was visually appealing. Yes, I like the idea of mind-thieves. And I am becoming a big fan of Leonardo DiCaprio after The Departed.
But ever since people began singing “Row, Row, Row your Boat” we’ve been wondering if life is but a dream. That’s not new. This movie sucked.
Despite all the reviews calling this movie complicated, complex, and mind-bending, it’s not terribly difficult to puzzle out. Through the overlaps, miscues, logical weirdness, and embedded character of the film, there are only a few possibilities for this movie and all of them have been thought of before and presented in movies before.
(1) Cobb’s consistent reality where he is kept from his kids by nebulous gov’t agents bent on his capture is in fact reality, and all else is a dream. (Matrix did it.)
(2) Cobb’s consistent reality is not in fact reality, but an embedded dream from which he does not know how to wake. This is Mal’s interpretation. (Mulholland Drive did it. And waaaay better.)
(3) All persistent reality is simply a deeply embedded dream architecture, and either (a) there is an ultimately real stratum from which all other dreams descend, or (b) we are so deeply embedded in a dream architecture that we cannot imagine what “reality” might really be like. (Existenz did it.)
Determining which one Nolan had in mind is a fool’s game. He had none of them in mind, just a nebulous conception that reality might be a kind of dream, maybe. (More “row, row, row your boat” ontology…) Every attempt at resolution is adamantly, intentionally frustrated. While this results in proclamations that the movie is “deep” and “complex,” it ought to result in the recognition that this is a conceptually confused and muddy film. A few examples…
(a) The all-important wobbling top. Useless. We are to understand that a totem protects the extractors because only they are aware of its unique properties. This way, you know that you are in your own dream and not someone else’s dream. The reasoning is that were you placed in someone else’s dream and made to think you are awake, you would detect the deception since they could not replicate your unique totem. (I can’t help but wonder why the mark, so well-trained against dream theft, was not taught to employ this device. It seems he would have caught the deception immediately, but ok…) It also determines whether you might be awake or dreaming, for the top does not fall when spun in a dream, but does when spun in reality. It would seem we have an excellent way to resolve this issue, then. If the top falls, it’s reality. If not, it’s a dream. But not so…
The idea for totems was Mal’s, not Cobb’s. Moreover, it’s Mal’s totem, not Cobb’s. Problem number one, since she would be the one person able to precisely replicate this particular totem. But this totem is at the heart of the original inception. She locked it away (presumably because it was a reminder she was dreaming, which is odd since people don’t naturally have the ability to create whole cities with their mind, but you know, whatever), and he set it to spinning endlessly. So who determined that endless spinning was a marker of a dream? Mal or Cobb? Did he make it spin endlessly (easy for mental city builders, right?) and convince her of what it must mean, or did it already have that significance and he simply manipulated it? Who knows? Who cares? But it renders the top and its spinning useless.
(b) Cobb’s recollections show him and Mal growing old wandering around their city in limbo land, but they’re young when they put their head on the train tracks at the “end” of this period of time. Gee, what a poser. What does it mean? Does it mean that Cobb is confused and dreaming? Is he just delirious and odd? I don’t care.
(c) And not to spin a dead top, but if this were her totem, then once they woke he would only have to get her to spin the damn top to feel better about things. “Honey, is life a lie? Is this real? Are we dreaming?” “Look, Mal! The top falls when you spin it! It’s real. Life is not a dream. Eat your toast.” Easy mode, people.
Personally, I like the idea that none of it is real. Call it the “scorched earth” approach to disambiguating reality (but then if none of it is real, is THAT real? Whoa, right? All of this hard-core philosophizing makes me want a burrito. This is why Nolan’s movies are stupid.) There are, though, appealing options to imagining that reality is simply a deeply embedded dream architecture. This dislocates decisive senses of “realness” and provides an opening for reconsidering the anchors that tie us to our sense of truth and givenness. Also, as far as the movie is concerned, I think it might be interesting to consider reality as a “closed loop.” Recall that Ariadne is told that the most effective dream levels are those that maintain a closed loop, returning the subject at the end to the place they were at the beginning. And in a rare piece of good filmmaking, this is reinforced with the imaged reference to Escher’s infinite staircase.
In the end, though, I’m just not moved by the approach that throws reality into flux. Hell, a good museum does that for me. I recognize that there has always been a self-referential element to movies that makes reality-flux an interesting idea. After all, in a medium that is (apparently) tied to representing what is “real,” there is going to be a strong artistic impulse to use that very medium as a way of questioning the reality to which it is tied.
Good on yer.
But how about a more interesting thesis? How about a movie that interrogates our need to locate and define a “real”? How about a movie that questions our need for “truth”? Any college student who has taken an Intro to Philosophy class knows that reality is subject to doubt. But have we no more interesting ways of questioning that reality than to wonder, constantly and unimaginatively, if we’re all really just dreaming?
I certainly hope so. Until then, I guess I’ll just row, row, row my boat.
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