Inception

I rarely go to a theater to see a movie. I usually just watch them in the comfort of my home through various audio/visual means. I could write a whole blog entry on the merits of home vs. theater movie viewing. Every now and then I am compelled to go to an actual movie theater to take in a film. Sometimes it’s on invite but today it was because word of mouth.

I went to see Inception a few days ago at the Metreon IMAX theater. In the last week or so it just kept coming up in conversations around me so I had to go see it. Inception has people talking. I spent an hour listening to Ali, the owner of the neighborhood coffee house, try to describe to me his impressions of the film without giving away the plot. My producer at my temp job said Inception is going to change the way people view films. Publications were hailing Christopher Nolan as the next Kubrick. I’ve seen his body of work and Momento by far is my favorite Nolan film. It had a well executed concept that if you really understood, could really be devastating in it’s comprehension. Nolan took us there by taking the narrative out the standard linear context, creating an experience similar to what protagonist Leonard Shelby struggles with in constructing a reality without the aid of memories, discombobulation and disconnection. With Inception, through the use of dreams, he again examines a concept similar to Momento…what is controlling or what are the controls of reality? What are the rules? What are the tools? What are the consequences when we try to play god with the natural order of things? How fragile or how durable is our identity? There are of course many subtexts to all these questions and Inception offers enough layers to illuminate the many ideas that spring from the well of metaphysics and philosophy. There’s a lot to chew on in this movie.

While watching Inception several films came to mind, most notably, The Matrix. Not only do the stories have many parallels, they also share many visual techniques and post fx work, like bullet time slow motion, shattering fragmenting glass and concrete, and squibs galore. Inception is being marketed as a “thinking person’s” film but it has a healthy dose of action sequences and just about as much gun play as The Matrix but not nearly as stylized. There were times when I found the action to be distracting because of the way the movie deals with real time which lead some of the action scenes to be really drawn out. In what is possibly the key scene of the movie, violence plays out in several dream sequences simultaneously but at different rates of time. What is seconds in waking reality is hours in a dream layer, which can be weeks in a deeper layer, which can be decades in the deepest layer. This is one of the subtexts that can really get your mind going while watching the movie. It is in this aspect that the film is reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey but unlike 2001, Inception doesn’t quite take you to the point of psychedelic revelation or even more literal revelation as you have in The Matrix when Neo takes the red pill and is “awakened” and discovers the truth of his reality. Inception is more open ended and it is not so much about revelations as it is self discovery.

Another theme explored is the origins of ideas and how they take root in our conscious and unconscious mind. Where as the dream layers deal with the Cartesian the idea theme is firmly rooted in Freud and the active and uncontrollable unconscious mind. Characters in the movie are able to be “architects” of dream worlds fully able to control and create at will but the beings populating these dream worlds spring from the subconscious so not only are they uncontrollable, they have to be bamboozled by the architects if specific outcomes are to be achieved.

Have you ever had an original idea? Has anybody ever had an original idea or do all ideas have external origins? Is the idea of God original? In the modern world marketing and advertising make heavy use of subliminal messaging planting the seeds of ideas in our heads that take root and prompt us to specific action. This was the foundation of John Carpenter’s underrated film They Live. I was just reading about the concept of “dog whistling” in journalism where rhetoric goes out over the media airwaves with certain coded language that is meant to effect a certain demographic. Some people believe that the assassination of abortion doctors are a result of “dog whistle” messages in the propaganda of anti-abortion groups. Some think the right wing anti-Obama movement is full of dog whistle messages which is why certain terms are used over and over again to describe him by his detractors. He’s a Muslim, he’s a socialist, he’s a Nazi, he’s a communist, and he needs to be gotten rid of. It’s as is they are saying someone needs to assassinate President Obama. Not quite the Manchurian Candidate but you get the picture.

This is a vital key to the plot of Inception, the planting of an idea in the subconscious mind through dreams to bring to fruition a desired result. This was also explored in an episode of the Outer Limits called The Inheritors. On a symbolic level it begs the question of mind control. Do we control our thoughts? Does “I think therefore I am” still apply? The rise of artificial intelligence has given us many challenges to the idea of consciousness, self awareness, identity, and life itself. It is at the heart of Bladerunner, the Terminator films, and The Matrix films except with Inception it is not about artificial intelligence, it is about our own organic and spiritual intelligence with emotion as the wild card.

We know we are conscious beings, so where do we go from there? For thousands of years humankind looked up at the stars and imagined the heavens while becoming masters of the earth. In 1969 humankind walked on the moon, we reached the next closest celestial body and walked upon it planting a flag of stars and stripes and claiming a giant leap for the race but in the context of this new frontier, this new environment, it was merely the first step of a newborn into a paradigm we weren't equipped to handle, infinite space. We are firmly rooted in the alpha and the omega. We take creating and sustaining life for granted while death has become our obsession and we fetishize mass destruction.

We have evolved as linear beings and perhaps we have gone as far as we can go with linear thinking and a linear reality. For all of our technological progress we are still beings ruled by superstition and propaganda living in absurdity as if it was bath water. We don’t even believe what our eyes tell us. It is arguable that we prefer dogma and propaganda over being responsible for developing our thoughts and actions, which ultimately is free will. Consciously we want to feel that we are in control and that we make choices in life but unconsciously perhaps we desire to be controlled, to be told what do and how to live, to conform to some kind of standard. Is it not the point of all of our major institutions? Education, religion, family, the workplace, consumerism, finance, politics, and the military are hardly bastions of free will. What is demanded is our obedience. Dissent is tolerated but it’s not exactly a virtue. Tradition is revered while radicalism is viewed with suspicion and distrust.

In Inception, the act of inception, at its basest form, is fraud. It is having an idea that is thought to be self generated, and thus owned, actually be a third party implant. It is fitting for our times to have the vehicle for the plot be corporate espionage, an acknowledgment of where corporations stand today, at the center of our universe in the modern world. They are shaping the world more than any other singular force, much more so than governments, armies, and the collective people. It is so ubiquitous the movie doesn’t even bother telling us if it is taking place in the present or the very near future. With a wink and a nod the movie tells us it’s already here (corporate control), like it or not, present or near future, it has arrived.

In Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1971 book, Lathe of Heaven, protagonist George Orr is an everyman who discover’s malevolently that his dreams can literally change reality. For Orr this extraordinary ability is not a gift but a curse. He can’t control it. He submits himself to psychiatric care where his therapist, Dr. Haber, discovers his powers and tries to use George to create the perfect world, but in trying to create a liberal utopia through manipulating George’s dreams Dr. Haber destroys himself while inflicting much harm on the world. The doctor was using inception on his patient, becoming the harbinger of unseen and deadly consequences. Psychiatric institutions, universities, and the government were dominant in the world of the Lathe of Heaven. Corporations were barely mentioned. My how times have changed. Leonardo Di Caprio plays the protagonist in Inception, yet in many ways he is like Dr. Haber in Lathe of Heaven. Initially he tried to use inception in a benevolent way and it ended up costing him everything, but as in every hero quest, and this is a hero quest, he must return to the belly of the beast, to the scene of the crime, to confront, who else, but himself.

Therein lies the inherent danger of inception. In manipulation of systems there are always side effects and unintended consequences and then there is the danger of abuse and addiction. If you get in too deep you may not be able to get out. As you watch the film you get drawn in, deeper and deeper, trying to keep the pieces together, and at times you are not sure if you are watching reality or another dream layer. The movies final action, literally, leaves it (the answer) on the table in a brilliant display of ambiguity. In our brave new world of technological socializing and virtual environments people line up overnight for the latest hand held device. Once you get a taste there is no going back, gotta have the best and the latest device. In my day the only thing we ever lined up for overnight were concert tickets. We had a different agenda.

The last movie comparison I want to make is with the Wizard of Oz, another film of dreams and alternate realities. We live in the age of the Conspiracy Theory. There is a certain paranoia that exists that says do not trust anything in this age of corporatism. The New Order is out to get you. Just as Dorothy and her crew of misfits travel Oz looking for the way home, so does Cobb (Di Dcaprio) and his crew of misfits, traveling in multidimensional dream worlds, trying to get back to reality. Dorothy finds the man behind the curtain, unveiling the Great Conspiracy, will Cobb do the same? You’ll have to see the movie to find out, no bean spilling going on here but I do feel we live in times that find many of us looking for the man behind the curtain, to uncover the great conspiracy. Dorothy returns from her dream and all is as it should be. We return from the dream world in Inception and we aren’t certain of anything, which is the perfect metaphor for these times we live in, uncertainty.

I found Inception to be a very intriguing movie when it focused on it’s concepts and it’s opened endedness but often the movie veers off into straight action shoot em up territory. It is a large budgeted Hollywood film so I really can’t sit here and begrudge that. For my own personal taste I would have like to seen more time given to the esoteric of the dream state and less time spent on people shooting and blowing shit up but that’s me. Action and violence aren’t the heart of this film, emotion is, not just any emotion but intimate emotion that is the result of familial bonding as shown through a husband/wife marriage relationship and a father/son relationship. The two most driven people in the movie are the ones driven by their memory of people lost to them. Corporate theft may be the catalyst for the plot narrative but it’s emotional issues that motivate the characters in the movie. Why all the subterfuge?

Before the movie began I met a young guy who was a triathlete and he had ridden his bike to the Metreon from South San Francisco. He was new to the the Bay Area from St. Louis. I asked him what kind of lock he had and he told me it was a cable lock. I warned him that his bike was in danger of getting stolen if all he had was a cable lock. I took the bus to the movies instead of riding my bike because I didn’t want to lock it outside. He went out to check on it before the movie and it was still there but when we walked out into the daytime light after the movie his bike was gone. Someone had stolen it. I felt bad for the guy but I did try to tell him that San Francisco was a different reality. There are written rules as well as unwritten rules, he just learned one the hard way.