Reviewed: Inception

Hi all,

I finally got around to seeing Inception with my good friend Tori two nights ago, and I was duly impressed.  Detailed, good-looking, convincing.  Mainstream reviews have tended to label the film "ingenious but emotionless" - cerebral at the expense of emotional - and I would dispute that verdict for two reasons.
[In a nod to its subject matter, this post will be not only psuedointellectual but long.]

First, the film may be ingeniously conceived, but it is not in fact so complicated that deciphering it requires the viewer's full attention.  From the very first sequence the idea of "dreams within dreams"is steadily thematized; the viewer really doesn't have much trouble figuring out what's going on once the film delves into those nested dreams.  It's hard to follow all the little details as you pick up on Inception's conceit, but not hard to figure out the conceit itself.  Inception is a somewhat cerebral movie, but it's no intellectual heavyweight: Dan Brown rather than David Foster Wallace. (That sounds like slander, I know, but I'm not criticizing Inception itself, just the idea that figuring it out is an all-consuming process that comes at the expense of emotion.)

Yes, secondly, I found the emotional impact very real.  The idea of an idea as a "virus," near impossible to eradicate, rings true in my experience - for that reason I have no problem believing that Mel would be unable to shake off the "hermeneutic of suspicion" that Cobb first incepted into her.  My problem is with that first, plot-shaping inception: how are we as viewers to swallow the idea that Mel wouldn't doubt the "reality" of her world after descending to dream-limbo through a labyrinth of other dreams?  Even if limbo is convincing and near-eternal, Cobb still gets what's up - I have a hard time believing that Mel would be stupid enough to require the idea to be incepted in the first place.  At any rate, her suicide is the logical continuation of the emergence from limbo, and Cobb's guilt and sadness came across to me as very real.  Likewise his joy at seeing his kids at the film's end.

In fact, the last shot of the film was (for the most part) received by the audience at the showing we attended as a big "F*** you!", a sort of cinematic middle finger on Nolan's part.  I disagree with that as well: although it's initially frustrating not to see whether the spinning top falls over, Nolan (I argue) is formally recreating for us what Cobb did a minute earlier: turning away from the "hermeneutic of suspicion" - spinning the top and watching it, questioning reality - and embracing the present reality of emotion.  That's our final impression of the film: a rejection of the doubt that consumed Mel for, instead, the doubt-free pleasure of human contact.  Nolan (perhaps) wanted to make a claim that the "reality" of the now doesn't matter: it just is.  Therefore Cobb's inattention to the spinning top mirror is meant to mirror the audience's acceptance of the happy ending over our own hermeneutic of suspicion, a doubt which we as viewers are forced to share with Inception's protagonists from the very beginning.  ("Are we dreaming?" = "are we watching a dream?")  The idea of the ending as a conscious claim rather than a big joke supports my personal impression that the emotional impact of the film more than stood up to its ostensible "cerebral-ity."

Oh, and by the way, Nolan did one thing very, very well.  I've been marveling for years at our own fallible memory: none of us remember where we came from.  We're told a story of our birth, shown pictures of a baby that shares our name but that at its youngest we cannot recognize at all, and at some point the story we're told corresponds (or at least overlaps) with those first hazy memories of our infancy.  But fundamentally not one of us can recall "how we got here," i.e. how we came into being.  Not even close.  It's weird.  Nolan's ingenious move was making that condition a symptom of being in a dream, no doubt leading to a lot of "A-ha!" moments in post-film discussions. "Oh sh** man, maybe life really is a dream," etc.  Good one, Nolan, extending the audience's own suspicion (and film's rhetorical power) until well after Inception ends.  Here I am writing about it, two days after the fact.

Lastly, two influences on (or intertexts within" Inception stand out for me.  First, was anyone else reminded of the Kurtz scenes in Apocalypse Now when Cobb met the elderly Saito at the beginning of the movie?  The soaked yellow lighting, the surreal mood, the trembling voice of the old, tormented figure asking the weakened stranger if (in Inception) "you've come to kill me" or if (in AN) "you're an assassin?" (@4:30 for comparison, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9oBiD7-kAM).  Even the bowl or rice Cobb's eating echoes a similar shot of Willard's recuperation.  The whole thing felt like an homage to Apocalypse Now.  (Rightfully so: the entire Kurtz sequence does an infinitely better job of recreating the creeping uncanny ambience of a dream than Inception's visually slick but non-dream-like CG effects.)  The second intertext deserves real credit, I think: Borges' short story "The Circular Ruins," about a man who sets out to dream another man into existence.  I'd be shocked if Nolan didn't read it while conceiving his film.  "The Circular Ruins" is part of Borges' Ficciones, which is an exquisite collection. (Material for a later post!)

Alright, that's all that's on my mind having to do with Inception.  Hope you enjoyed it.  Take care all,

-Dave