I Don't Exist

It's official. I don't exist.

After a series of events (some planned, some total surprises), I have been rendered less... uh, present, than your typical American twenty-something college student.

For better or worse, people of my generation exist more connectedly and in more places than people twenty years ago could have imagined. We have cell phones, Facebook, blogs, Twitter... not only can someone be reached wherever they are on the globe these days; they can get an update sent to their phone about what Nathan Fillion had for breakfast. In some respect, we are all a little bit more alive than prior generations, because we are practically omnipresent.

On the other hand, I realized over break that I had been caught up in media over-saturation and was probably the worse for it. That is more fully described in the previous post, but ultimately one of the steps I took was to delete my Facebook to make more time for individual pursuits. My initial plan was to dip my feet into a life without technology to further pursue my creative passions. I wound up tripping and falling in the deep end.

Within five hours of arriving back in Minnesota, I had deleted my Facebook. Within ten hours, my phone was dead and I couldn't find the charger. I realized that I had no money to buy a new charger (or food or gas, for that matter). I realized that I needed money to go on living, and so I was forced to accept new hours for the shuttle van (or more specifically, my old hours from last semester that had me working Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons), essentially losing my entire weekend.

On top of all of that, I am taking nonstop classes after chapel for the entire semester. I was also cast in the school play as one of the leads, so I have rehearsal for two and a half to three hours every night. That's about five hours of class every day followed by three hours of rehearsal, compounded with me having no phone, no Facebook, no money to do anything (including driving to and from campus more than once a day), and working on the weekend nights when all of my friends are doing things. I was driving shuttle nonstop to and from Arden last night when I realized I'd disappeared. To many people, I no longer exist. The only person truly aware that I am around most of the time is me, and even I'm not so sure of late.

There are good and bad sides to disappearing. The bad sides are kind of apparent (I think losing cell phone service is feared by my generation just slightly more than death), but the positives are numerous as well. I no longer wait around on the internet for someone to come on and suggest a direction for my life. I sit down and read a book or work on homework, which was kind of the goal of this whole experience. I've had trouble writing the last couple of days, but I'm sure it will pick up. I've definitely got loads of time to sit in the shuttle and think about it.

On top of this, I'm pretty sure I won't be dead for long. This is one of the exciting things about going into exile in the wilderness (I'm even growing the beard for it right now). Nobody ever goes into the wilderness, survives, and then return without something that's totally frigging awesome (or maybe people do, but we don't have record of them in history). For me, working on the play, senior project, and prepping for my trip to Nashville at the end of February should be motivation enough to get me through the doldrums of January and February. Those months suck no matter what happens anyway, so I guess it's not too much of a loss.

Strikes and Gutters

I don't usually like to write personal blogs, mostly out of some feeling that I probably should find the idea of personal blogging to be repulsive. Sure it's therapeutic, but then again, so are hard drugs and mercilessly beating helpless animals (or so I've been told... in regards to both examples). At the core of personal blogs is the idea that your little thoughts are worthy of widespread attention. A lot of talking goes on on the internet, but listening is in much shorter supply. It almost feels like a prayer offered up to social whoredom. I prefer to write movie reviews, offering my prayers to nerddom instead. That being said, journaling seems like a much less offensive (some might even say healthy) activity, and since nobody reads my blog anyway (especially without Facebook to link it to), I'm going to start typing up little updates.

I've been back at school for about a grand total of four days, and already my (hopefully) final semester at Northwestern is shaping up to be one of the most eventful. On Monday I auditioned for the school's forthcoming performance of The Boy's Next Door. This was going to be my final chance to audition for a main stage show. BND documents the exploits of four mentally handicapped men living in a group home, and the slow decline of their caretaker Jack. On Tuesday I was called back to audition for the role of Norman, one of the mentally retarded men who is addicted to doughnuts, protective of a set of keys that he keeps on his person at all times, and who is dating another mentally challenged woman named Sheila. I prepared for this role more thoroughly than normal, and I was officially cast yesterday. We've already had two rehearsals.

Also on Tuesday I heard back from the NRB (National Religious Broadcasters) where I had many projects pending for the collegiate broadcasting contest. This was more melancholy in that while I won two awards (best music video for Bluegrass Breakup and 2nd place for on air demo for my radio show Group Think), I also did not win anything for projects I was pretty invested in. I know you can't win em all, but there were a few instances where I was legitimately upset. NRB has never been my goal as a film student; in fact, many of my favorite projects I've made weren't even submitted because I assumed they had no place there. But it would have been nice, nonetheless.

Also this week, I've slowly been running out of money. I've been trying to keep up on gas and food, staying on campus for the entire day so as to limit my number of car trips and buying ramen in bulk to save on cheap meals. Even at this rate, if the hours at work don't pick up, I'm going to run out of money and be in some serious trouble.

That said, I'm not particularly nervous about this situation. It's a secret only to a small number of people that last semester at school almost destroyed me. Any pride that I had was pretty much systematically destroyed, mostly on purpose. I have trouble compromising. I have been very blessed over the course of my life with incredible opportunities most of the world would give anything to have. I've had loving, supportive parents, been given a top rate education (which I will even begrudgingly include Bondurant high school in). I've been blessed with a love for the arts, which has provided me with my direction in life, and with the discernment to find my own path in that field. I've always been characterized by several things, including unbridled optimism for that the future holds for me, love for all things creative, and an exceptional comprehension of concepts both artistic and literary..

Unfortunately, I (like pretty much everyone else who claims the monicker "human being") am characterized by just as many negative traits as positive ones. I suffer from tourettes, ADHD, various skin disorders, severe depression, asthma, and severe social anxiety, and have for most of my life. Basically, I sucked at sports, friends, organization, and every single other thing involved in being successful before you turn 18. And at that point, I had no idea what was wrong with me. I had no confidence in myself, and aside from artistic pursuits (which, once I rediscovered them, all bets were off in that arena) I had the confidence beaten out of me.

Needless to say, I carry some baggage with me. I’ve overcome a lot of it, and on a normal day a lot of the problems I’ve faced throughout my life don’t affect me at all. But if I’m not careful, something like those subconscious self-loathing whispers creep their way back into my mental dialog. This happened last semester. More than that, they took hold of me and controlled me.

I showed up at college to start last semester with the idea that I was going to live that semester more fully than I ever had. For the first time in my life, I was going to take my depression and my social anxiety and I was going to smash them. If I liked a girl, I was going to pursue her, and I was going to confidently assume she might like me back (as opposed to my previous assumption that she would run away screaming and find someone with a shotgun or a pitchfork). I ran into life headfirst with this assumption in toe. And the first woman who I even had a passing interest in, I had asked on a date within a week. We went on the date, she didn’t like me, and in normal world, it would have been over and everyone would have moved on. I wasn’t living in normal world. I was living in a world where 90% of my time was spent working on writing a play, running a radio show, prepping films for contests, writing reviews for the school paper, and working (homework really never factored into last semester til the very end). And so, I didn’t have time to really pursue a person or develop a friendship or do those complicated things you really need to do when dealing with a relationship. Instead, I sat in my tortured editing suite dungeons and reflected on why I sucked so much that I couldn’t overcome simple social anxiety.

The next development came soon in the semester. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I began to resent the things I was good at. I began to devalue my skills, because I considered them crutches to help me avoid the fact that I sucked. So I started spiting myself. I stopped investing in anything except hating myself. I sat for hours a day, sitting on Facebook, insisting to myself that that was all I was good for. I lost all joy that I found in writing, directing, and living. It was an unhealthy response, but it triggered a reaction.

Towards the end of that semester, I began pouring myself into directing my bathrobe drama. That woke me up. I hadn’t enjoyed doing something like that in over a year. I absolutely loved it. It was the highlight of my year. I realized this, and then as I left for break a short week later, I started doing some soul searching. I went down some wrong alleys over break (as one is apt to do at 4 in the morning pumped full of liters of Mountain Dew). I sent people messages and regretted them in the morning. I wrote scripts and short stories that never reached fruition. I checked out ten movies and watched one of them. I sat awake at night over and over again, doing little to nothing.

The last week of break I found what I consider genuine insight. It came after a development. I was mad at myself. I’d just had a conversation with the person I had a crush on online, and I made myself seem crazy. I was crazy, but I didn’t want her to do that. I thought long and hard to myself, and I addressed the fact that my self-respect did not exist. I did not respect myself, because I didn’t think that I’d earned it.

That day, I got on the treadmill in my basement. I hadn’t run in ages. I have asthma, as previously discussed, and I was out of shape ta boot. I determined that in spite of anything, I was going to run two miles. I was going to run them as fast as I’ve ever run two miles, and I was going to do it to earn some self-respect back. I started running. Within two laps (which my treadmill measures by) I was out of breath, exhausted, and my back hurt like hell. I stopped at a mile, completely exhausted. I walked away, explaining to myself why I could never have made it two miles. Within two hours, I was back downstairs on the treadmill again. I deteriorated at about the same rate, but I was mad this time. Instead of stopping, I turned the speed up. Whenever I knew I had to give up, I turned the speed up on the treadmill. Either I was going to finish running, or I was going to die. As long as the latter wasn’t likely, I was going to finish. When the two miles was done, I felt absolutely awful (I ran my record mile on both miles). I went and collapsed on my bed and fell asleep for the night.

When I woke up, I had an epiphany. I didn’t have anything to prove to myself. That two miles had proven nothing. It didn’t make me feel any better about myself. But I did want to run again. I felt absolutely awesome because I’d worked off some of that angst energy. I felt the best I had in months. Running wasn’t about proving something to myself or changing the world. It’s just a good habit that improves the quality of life. I’ve run regularly since that day. I wanted to write again too, not to pen some masterpiece or to prove to a woman that I was a genius, but simply because I love writing and find meaning in it. That night, I wrote and completed a script, and I’ve written regularly since that day. I deleted my Facebook, and spent the time working on reading books and watching films I didn’t have time for. I’ve forced myself to live by principles I admire by trying to be nicer, and I’m looking for a charity to get involved in. How much of that is going to last? I’d be happy if I stuck with about a quarter of it.

In truth, none of us is really worth all that much. And these trench runs to save myself weren’t getting me anywhere. I’ve determined that I’m not out this semester to break anything or to find the love of anyone or to overcome anything. I’m here to live. I’m here to do what I love. There is no accomplishment attached. I want to make a silent expressionist arthouse sci-fi movie. It’s tough, impractical, and, like, nobody is going to like it. But I’ve always wanted to make one and this is going to be my last chance to do so. So I’ve got a big list of silent movies I want to watch while I work on the script. Here’s hoping it all works out.

Bringing the Blog Back

So, it has been a while since I last wrote here. Somehow over the summer, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I fell out of love with writing.

Writing has always been relaxing for me. Practically every single other activity, from socializing to video games to sports to even watching movies, has felt to me somewhat of a chore. In order to escape the chore of living day to day, I wrote. I wrote movie reviews, political commentaries, short stories, scripts (some things I had no business commenting on)... I've tried my hand at just about everything over the years. It used to be that I would write something every day for years on end without even making a precedent out of it. Some of my friends will remember the absurd amount of Facebook notes I would write, down to even writing fan fictions for inside joke short stories. People wondered why I wasted so much time on these meaningless projects that none but a handful of my closest friends ever viewed. The writing wasn't for the audience. It was the way that I dealt with the world.

I'm not sure when it happened, but one day a couple years ago I suddenly realized writing felt like a chore to me. All of a sudden, the day to day minutia of life didn't seem so worthy of my commentary, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I doubted whether my commentary was worthy of my time. Writing became more about the audience than it did about me, and as a result I realized that nobody really needed to know what I thought about the 2008 NBA Finals and how they related to the French New Wave (though, to be fair, who wouldn't want to read that article?). Also, I began to focus more on the quality of my articles, afraid that something I would post would somehow reflect poorly on me. Quality control is not a bad thing, don't get me wrong, but it made the process more stressful, which in turn made it less about therapy and more about what everything else in life is all about.

The last week has reminded me how much I love to write. I've completed my final draft of my bathrobe drama, written several movie reviews, and jumpstarted multiple film and radio projects, many of which I am the primary writer of. And for the first time in ages, I don't feel conflicted when I write. I've found a way to care about quality but also find the same pure joy that I once felt when I wrote.

In short, I am rehabilitating this blog as an outlet for my new (hopefully) continuous self-expression. The idea of journaling still has little appeal to me, for whatever reason (maybe I just do all of this for the attention), but I really don't care if nobody reads my blog. In here will (again, hopefully) be my sincere commentary on whatever I feel like writing about at the time. I might post script or short story excerpts and new ideas for projects. I'm kind of hoping to keep a running blog of my first ever experience as a theater director. Regardless of what it is, if you want to know what is going on with me, this will be the place to look for it.

The Abbreviated Last 90.5 Years in Cinema (According to Me)

I have always been one for making lists. I am a list-addict. As a matter of fact, I've had to go on a twelve step program to get away from them because I was having trouble finishing movies because I want to get them on my list more quickly. I had the art of the list down perfectly. Rather than try to list my 100 Favorite Movies from favorite to 100th favorite, descending in a neat order in between, when I hit the thirties, forties, and fifties, I started playing around with directors, eras, title lengths, actors, poster colors, and whatnot, to make the most aesthetically pleasing lists ever assembled. I am a list-making fiend.

And so now, I proudly present the worst movie list I have ever put together. There are no well thought out write-ups here. There's not even a whole ton of criteria. I just took every year of cinema from 1920-2010 (90.5 years. Sounds like a radio station promotion) and picked my favorite film I'd seen from every year. The intitial purpose in creating this list was to see if there was any gaps. Sure, I've seen twenty films from 1927, but what the heck did I watch from 1973? To my relief, I've seen at least one good movie from every year. Of course, when you're suddenly forced to cut Casablanca and Duck Soup and include Vacation and American Graffiti (remember our talk about 1973?) you begin to question why the heck you are compiling such an abomination. But it was a fun little exercise. Quick too. As I made these selections (some of them like choosing which half of your child you want to retain most) I dreamed up some little commentaries on each of the individual years. But then I realized that if I spent a paragraph praising 1959 and 1962, I'd have to write something about... well, 1973 (American Graffiti!). So here's the list. Maybe I will tackle a few of my favorite movie years on this blog later. There were two years where I just couldn't choose. It wasn't the quality of the films per se (I allowed Casablanca to be beaten by Shadow of a Doubt because they were similar enough that I could compare their virtues head to head). No, there were two instances where such unique artists clashed, representing monumentally different movements and moments in cinema that I simply could not, in good conscience, pick one.

Warning, if you really want to save yourself for my 2010 end of the year list, there might be a spoiler below.

1920

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

1921

The Goat

1922

Nosferatu

1923

Our Hospitality

1924

Sherlock Jr.

1925

Seven Chances

1926

Faust

1927

The General

Sunrise

1928

Steamboat Bill Jr.

1929

The Passion of Joan of Arc

1930

All Quiet on the Western Front

1931

City Lights

1932

Vampyr

1933

M

1934

It Happened One Night

1935

The 39 Steps

1936

Modern Times

1937

Make Way for Tomorrow

1938

The Lady Vanishes

1939

Rules of the Game

1940

His Girl Friday

1941

Citizen Kane

1942

Cat People

1943

Shadow of a Doubt

1944

Double Indemnity

1945

Ivan the Terrible Part 1

1946

It’s a Wonderful Life

1947

Out of the Past

1948

Rope

1949

White Heat

1950

Sunset Boulevard

1951

Rashomon

1952

Ikiru

1953

Tokyo Story

1954

Rear Window

1955

Night of the Hunter

1956

Rififi

1957

Bridge on the River Kwai

1958

Vertigo

1959

Rio Bravo

1960

Psycho

1961

Yojimbo

1962

Lawrence of Arabia

1963

8 1/2

1964

Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

1965

Alphaville

1966

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

1967

Bonnie and Clyde

1968

2001: A Space Odyssey

1969

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

1970

Patton

1971

The French Connection

1972

The Godfather

1973

American Graffiti

1974

The Godfather Part II

1975

Dog Day Afternoon

1976

All the President’s Men

1977

Star Wars

1978

Dawn of the Dead

1979

Alien

1980

The Empire Strikes Back

1981

Raiders of the Lost Ark

1982

Blade Runner

1983

Vacation

1984

The Terminator

1985

Blood Simple

Ran

1986

An American Tail

1987

The Evil Dead 2

1988

Die Hard

1989

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

1990

Miller’s Crossing

1991

Beauty and the Beast

1992

Unforgiven

1993

Army of Darkness

1994

The Hudsucker Proxy

1995

Toy Story

1996

Fargo

1997

LA Confidential

1998

The Truman Show

1999

Being John Malkovich

2000

Unbreakable

2001

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

2002

The Two Towers

2003

The Return of the King

2004

Shaun of the Dead

2005

Serenity

2006

The Prestige

2007

No Country for Old Men

2008

Wall-E

2009

Where the Wild Things Are

2010

Toy Story 3

Inception

SPOILERS BELOW. LOTS OF THEM. LIKE, I RUIN THE WHOLE MOVIE.

DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN IT.

There is a moment in Inception where Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) asks Ariadne (Ellen Page) to “make a maze in two minutes that takes more than a minute to solve.” This is meant to test her abilities as an architect of a dream puzzle that will ultimately have to fool somebody so fully that they will believe it to be the real world. Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing Inception. By Cobb’s standard for a good puzzle, it should take us five years to figure it out. As most of the seasoned filmgoers who went to see the movie this weekend have pointed out, it really doesn’t appear that hard to figure Inception out. In fact, I’ve had lots of friends tell me that they didn’t even think they owed the movie a second viewing, because they got the extent of it the first time through. It seems to be a traditional blockbuster, dressed up with an uncannily intelligent script. However, I (the critic of a movie that is all about what is real, or more succinctly, not real) would like to point out that that’s just what they want you to think.

The title Inception refers a process by which a skilled team of dream engineers enters the mind of a subject and tries to get that subject to accept an idea. More specifically, the engineers stage what is essentially an environmental improv in dream form, to sell the target on some notion that they will carry with them into the real world. It’s a tough gig. More than one person declares, “But that’s impossible!” It is not impossible however. As a matter of fact (and though you may not realize it) it is happening to you as you watch the film.

Inception essentially is film. Movies are streamlined dreams, carefully constructed to pull us into an impressionable state, so that once our guard is down we will accept their ideas. Inception (the movie) studies the value of those ideas as they apply to the real world once we leave the dream. It’s not a new idea. My favorite film, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., does essentially the same thing, and was a great key for me to start unlocking Nolan’s puzzle. You see, Inception has a lot of ideas of its own. The movie is about Dom Cobb, a dream engineer who has been on the run since he was framed by his wife for her own murder (and seriously, if you’re still reading at this point without seeing the film, you’re already going to have less fun, but get out before it gets any worse). The movie appears to follow the traditional hero’s journey, in which Cobb must go on a quest to overcome his demons. At first he believes he is facing his greatest challenge to return to his family, but ultimately he understands that he is really fighting to find inner peace and overcome his guilt.

That’s the first layer of the deception that the movie is taking us on. Like the heist in the film, the movie establishes its first layer as the real world before it takes us deeper. We might be able to recall that we are sitting comfortably in cushy seats (like the target, Robert Fischer Jr. [Cillian Murphy] might have been able to do), but we’re more than ready to accept a world where gun fights and street chases take place on a regular basis. This willingness to latch onto the absurd in movies is linked to the willingness to accept the absurd in dreams. There’s a certain amount we are willing to take for granted right at the get go, and the movie takes full advantage of it. For instance, we accept film cutting as a common technique. However, traditional film cutting is also the way the movie displays its dream inconsistencies. Where is the cutting traditional film and where is it a dream? You might think you know, but that is only because you accept the movie’s traditional story, because it is the kind of story that all movies have. Even when the movie is putting all of the answers right in front of your face, telling you to look deeper, 90% of the audience will not expect anything out of the ordinary until the film’s final moments. Even after the movie is over, most of the audience will reduce the movie to one simple question (is the film’s ending a dream or reality)?

The second layer of deception that the movie employs is its themes. Within Inception, there are clear themes about truth, grieving, and the danger of ideas. But from the wider perspective, all of this is actually a pretty interesting discussion on the nature of film. Like Inception, films put the audience in situations that are lies. No film, not even a documentary, is truth, because there is some form of manipulation to give it to us in a desirable form. However, once those ideas take hold, they go with us into the real world. We can choose to accept or reject them, but once they take hold, there’s no telling what their negative impact might be in a world where they do not fit. Dom went into his wife Mal’s (Marion Cotillard) mind to convince her that the world she was living in in limbo was not real. That was the truth. But the idea that he sold her was one that would ultimately kill her. On the other hand, Fischer’s deception during the heist is totally a lie. We all know his father never loved him. That’s one of the surest things in the movie. But the idea that he takes away from envisioning a scenario in which his father did love him was ultimately a positive one. A positive lie had a good effect. It all reminds me of The Dark Knight, where two major lies (Alfred’s withholding of Rachel Dawes’ letter to Bruce and the coverup of Harvey Dent’s crimes) turn out to be the salvation of Gotham City. If you accept that these ideas are limited to a movie that is unintentionally committing the same sins it is decrying, then you don’t know Nolan.

I know I had sort of a theme going with the layers of deception, but I’m going to break off it for a second. I had a whole ton of good, funny material to point out the film’s flaws. But really, who am I to say that anything in the film is a flaw and not a clue to unraveling the puzzle? Maybe the entire movie works perfectly when viewed the way Nolan intends it to be and not filled with our own expectations of what a movie should be, as Fischer does with the dream created for him. Seriously, Nolan has made it very public that he spent ten years writing this movie. Do you think he would leave any flaws after all that cleaning up? Do you think the mind that has written Memento and The Dark Knight would settle for a movie as shallow as some people have claimed Inception to be, especially after all that work? Some people complain about the lack of character development and the heavy amount of exposition the movie employed. These things bothered me a lot too when I first saw the film. But like the dream henchmen in Fischer’s subconscious, aren’t all of these characters just projections of the dreamer, Nolan’s, mind anyway? Couldn’t the heavy exposition be just like the one technique the film employs, in which Cobb pretends to lead Fischer through the mystery, handing him all of the answers, all of which are actually lies or at best, stretched truths? One review I read for MTV claimed that the film’s use of metaphorical names (Ariadne was a Greek goddess who helped Theseus defeat the minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth) was useless. That is, unless it is a clue to understanding that the external world is all part of a dream, these names extensions of archetypes that would be playing around in someone’s subconscious. Greek mythology has often been considered one of the most primally archetypical forms of storytelling, and as each character verbally expressed their desires and functions in the story, I couldn’t help but feel that there was something beneath the surface. When characters with names from Greek myths are verbally stating the function of their corresponding archetype, coming from a voice that is supposed to represent a full character... do you see where the discussion starts here? One could perhaps argue that regardless of purpose, expositional dialog makes for a slow moviegoing experience. Well, Nolan has an incredible cast carrying his exposition, and I'm not sure how a person could get bored at this movie, regardless.

Some people have complained about the film’s lack of dream logic. I myself have made public the opinion that Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman could have written a more engaging, more complex, more colorful script. While I still think those two could have infused a little more humor into what was an oppressively serious film, I would now say I consider Nolan their equal. You see, utilizing any more than the most basic dream logic would have defeated the whole point of the film. The film is not about dreams at all. Just like forged images were the sole territory of dreaming until the dawn of cinema, in this fantasy universe these dream thieves have turned dreams themselves into streamlined efforts by making them all about corporate protection. These dreams are controlled environments, their secrets fully unlocked so that they can be manipulated to deceive or protect for various reasons. Most of the these reason are not personal, but are rather of a political nature. In other words, in this universe, dreams are movies. They are fully immersive movies, but they are movies nonetheless. Maybe they’re video games, since people can interact in them. But nonetheless, since the whimsical nature of true dreaming is not controllable, it has been eliminated.

Why do we go to the movies? Do we go to experience new ideas? Maybe. Do we go to find catharsis? Certainly. Do we go to be challenged? Not as much as we used to. Christopher Nolan has created a movie that does all of these things, and speaks to their quality at the same time. You can leave the movie engaged in a discussion about what lies are healthy and what truths are dangerous, which can lead us all around the realm of philosophy, politics, and religion. The film’s widest audience will leave with a slightly enhanced version of the same experience they always get at the movies, following the hero’s journey to see a character overcome their inner demons in a unique, exciting, and interesting way. You can enjoy Nolan’s action and knack for creating a sense of awe on the screen through images like the gravity bending hallway fight and the Parisian city folding in on itself (Seriously, the last hour of this thing is one of the most tense things ever filmed). And for the first time in a long time, the mystery of a major movie is actually a challenge to unravel. When the movie cuts to black, the top either spinning eternally or just about to topple, it leaves us wondering whether the movie’s ending is a dream. But if it is a dream, where did it break into a dream? There’s one place that would seem likely, but there are four or five places where the entire film could clearly have broken into a dream. Film buffs will have a blast trying to uncover them. Through making a movie that feeds itself on every level, Nolan has created the perfect summer film. It will work for the film buffs (at least the ones who can set aside their pride and dig beneath the surface) as well as the cinematically uninitiated. Even the simplest of audiences will have to leave the movie wondering why the complexity made it more engaging. They will talk about it with their friends, and maybe come to a more complete understanding of the potential power of film. This could be the salvation of the summer movie. Already there are loads of theories available for what Inception really means. At first I rejected all of this theorizing, assuming that Nolan’s message with his ending was that it doesn’t matter whether the movie is a dream or not. All films are dreams, so who cares whether the movie confirms or denies that its fictional world is real? But that eliminates a lot of the fun. Maybe Nolan left the truth in the film and maybe he didn't (I think maybe the script might be a set of penrose stairs like the ones used to loop the dream worlds). There are layers and layers and layers and layers in this movie, crossing over every single scene, possibly every shot (it certainly will be analyzed to that extent). Shots relate to other shots in odd ways. And it all feeds back to the question of what is real. Unlike similar movies like The Matrix, Nolan may have actually crafted a movie worthy of the scrutiny fans put such works under. Maybe that was his intention when he spent all these years writing it. Maybe not. It's an impressive feat nonetheless (like a mainstream Primer).

Comparisons have been made between Nolan and figures as influential as Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Tarkovsky. This has probably caused much of the critical backlash that has dropped the film’s tomatometer into the low eighties (critics would have you believe its just a little bit better than Despicable Me). And true, when you look at Nolan in light of those filmmakers (all of whom were interested in things far different than he is) Inception falls apart (also, too much mention of Kubrick and Hitchcock can be very dangerous. For those not sure of what I mean, look at the critical treatment of M. Night Shyamalan post-The Sixth Sense). Only when you view Inception solely as a Christopher Nolan film will you realize that it is a complex maze of ideas, deceptions, and emotions. He’s charting his own path into the stratosphere, and I think one day Inception may be considered his unappreciated masterpiece. I am always trying to find places in modern film where the critics got it wrong. After all, Hitchcock and Keaton were both pretty much critically maligned in their day. True art is ahead of its time, and should take a while for us to adjust to. While some will call Inception an experience devoid of heart and lacking in true humanity, it might just have a more tested heart than the gushy films that are its peers. Leastways, I think it is a mystery film to end all mystery films, where even the most seasoned viewers may get lost, never to return.