INCEPTION REVIEW
Despite a pretty strong positive critical reaction to the movie Inception, I’ve noticed in the reviews a slight undercurrent of negativity. These anti-Inception sentiments are typically not from the reviewers that let readers know which movies are a ‘great way to beat the heat this summer.’ Rather, the critics that disparage Inception are the kind that attempt to immediately determine how new movies will fit into the overall canon of Cinematic History. And some are saying that this movie is vying for a spot and should be denied.
Paradoxically, the two major criticisms that I’ve heard about Inception are that it is either too smart or that it is not smart enough. Those in the “too smart” camp usually were not confused by the movie themselves. Rather, they think that such high-mindedness has no place in a blockbuster for general audiences, that its complexity is over-reaching the genre. But Inception is killing at the box office, which is literally all the genre of blockbuster is meant to accomplish. So if people aren’t getting it or are bothered by its intricacy, then they are—at the very least—afraid to say so for fear of seeming dumb. Besides, as Chuck Klosterman said at a recent reading, Lost really taught us as viewers to take several levels of reality as a given.
Then there are the critics that think Inception lacks the artistic impact and philosophical complexity of a Great Film. A. O. Scott (who regularly writes brilliant reviews of movies I’m convinced he’s not bothered to watch) acknowledged that Inception was a pleasant diversion, but said it should not be considered alongside great movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Which, in a way, it is sort of a compliment to compare any movie to such masterpieces. But what Mr. Scott assumes is that Inception is another movie about the universal questions of technology, identity, and subjective reality. And in that, I believe, he is wrong.
Christopher Nolan began writing the screenplay for Inception ten years ago, which was around the time he made Insomnia. This was his second major release and it grossed over $100 million, as has every movie he’s made since. And Inception is the first film that Nolan has made entirely from his own material: he based Memento on a short story by his brother, he didn’t write Insomnia, he adapted The Prestige from a novel, and the Batman movies are (I believe) based on real-life events.
Because the movie is ostensibly about dreams and reality, it is tempting to view it as a commentary on our universal experience. However, Inception to me seems more of a personal meditation by Nolan on his own professional life. For the past decade, he has been creating fantasy worlds and attempting to induce catharsis, while working for a vaguely evil corporate interest (Time Warner Studios). When Nolan sets out to create a film, he must “assemble a team” of filmmakers. They craft a story with situations of sufficient complexity so that the audience gets lost and forgets the existence of the artifice.
In fact, if you view the structured dreams in Inception as a direct metaphor for Hollywood movie making, then the whole thing gets really post-modern really fast. Cobb’s (DiCaprio’s) assembled team sits down halfway through the first act and basically writes how the second and third acts will unfold. They design the sets and the story to implant an idea in the mind of the “mark” (or the movie-watcher). But there’s a problem. Cobb (or Nolan) can’t keep his personal issues out of the narrative, even though they threaten the whole project. It should be noted that Nolan is married to his producer, Emma Thomas. The emotional and financial stakes within the movie are high, just as they are when Nolan sets out to make a film that uses artistic methods to bring in millions of dollars in ticket and DVD sales.
Adding to the meta-cinematics, Inception is full of visual homages to great films such as Citizen Kane (the billowing curtain) and Royal Wedding (where Fred Astaire dances around a revolving hotel room). Once again, reviewers who think Inception only pretends to have artistic depth point to these moments as proof of its lack of authenticity. But that’s like dismissing The Wasteland for being derivative. It just shows you missed the point. As someone who has only adapted the work of others, Nolan has Cobb say that true inspiration is almost impossible, while stealing ideas is easy.
Inception also has visual references to less-great films, such as the ski-fighting sequence that directly recalls The World Is Not Enough. It seems too easy to dismiss these familiar scenes as unimaginative. At the risk of overstating my point, the mountainside is a constructed reality that the “mark” (viewer) must accept. So it makes sense that it a familiar stock image. Besides, at this the point, the mark knows that it is a dream. The reality becomes more ridiculous as the movie-watcher becomes complicit in suspending his disbelief. From this angle of analysis, I feel like I could pretty extensively get into how everything within the movie is a symbol for what is happening outside the movie. But that would be annoying and academic, so I won’t.
It’s hardly my intention to convince people to like Inception, I more just feel like it’s fundamentally misunderstood. I think Nolan struggles to put a message into his blockbusters, to provide insight instead of just profits. Although he does not always succeed, Inception is at least a reflection on the difficulty.
But there is one more final layer: I do not think Nolan wrote an autobiographical element into this movie on purpose. In an interview, he said, “I don’t actually tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing…I tend to examine my own process of, in this case dreaming and in Momento’s case memory, and try and analyze how that works and how that might be changed or manipulated.”
Who knows how honest he’s being, but this statement seems to show a writer who does not have post-modern awareness, he creates more naturalistically. When Nolan looked inside himself to find what he thought of dreaming, he found movies. Nolan could not help but explore the problems that arise when you impose your dreams on other people in exchange for vast sums of money. Because those are his problems, and this is the first movie that is truly his own.
