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.
