Dear Everybody Ever –
I apologize for not having written in this blog sooner. Life has been happening at rapid-fire pace, about which I will write much later as I have much news, but first, I have this Important Public Service Announcement.
Everybody has to go see Inception right now. Possible spoilers ensue.
This was one of the most effective movies I have ever seen, possibly through a weird series of coincidences, but even without the particular-to-me circumstances, simply mind-blowing.
Putting aside acting, directing, producing, filming, basically everything that goes into making a movie a movie, this film has captured and conveyed a universal *idea* in a most Platonic and identifiable (and kind of creepy) way which makes the Matrix, when it was new and fresh and cool, seem like Richard Scarry. There’s no childish wielding of Ideas. The brush used to paint is both very specific and general enough to be a common experience.
The film deals with dreams … layers of dreams, in fact, and the subconscious mind encountered there in, and one’s ties back to reality. And love. And death. And eternity. And that weird falling sensation right before you wake up.
Although I keep stopping and starting my prose, allow me to do it again. Have you ever had that dream? That one dream that you wish you could have gone back to? You wish you could re-create it (having created it once), you wish you could share it. This is what most people picture when the word “dream” is said — something hazy and surreal in its Elysian qualities. Instead, I am reminded of a quote from C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The ship The Dawn Treader has sailed for twelve days, have reached a flat calm in the sea, and begin to row for land. As they draw closer, they discover it’s not land at all, but a very dark mist … in fact, an utter blackness. All hesitate upon the brink, but it is decided to go forth:
With a creak and a groan the Dawn Treader started to creep forward as the men began to row. Lucy, up in the fighting top, had a wonderful view of the exact moment at which they entered the darkness. The bows had already disappeared before the sunlight had left the stern. She saw it go. At one minute the gilded stern, the blue sea, and the sky, were all in broad daylight: next minute the sea and sky had vanished, the stern lantern – which had been hardly noticeable before – was the only thing to show where the ship ended. [...]
How long this voyage into the darkness lasted, nobody knew. Except for the creak of the rowlocks and the splash of the oars there was nothing to show that they were moving at all. [...]
Suddenly, from somewhere – no one’s sense of direction was very clear by now – there came a cry, either of some inhuman voice or else a voice of one in such extremity of terror that he had almost lost his humanity.
Caspian was still trying to speak – his mouth was too dry – when the shrill voice of Reepicheep, which sounded louder than usual in that silence, was heard.
“Who calls?” it piped. “If you are a foe we do not fear you, and if you are a friend your enemies shall be taught the fear of us.”
“Mercy!” cried the voice. “Mercy! Even if you are only one more dream, have mercy. Take me on board. Take me, even if you strike me dead. But in the name of all mercies do not fade away and leave me in this horrible land.”
“Where are you?” shouted Caspian. “Come aboard and welcome.”
There came another cry, whether of joy or terror, and then they knew that someone was swimming towards them.
“Stand by to heave him up, men,” said Caspian.
“Aye, aye, your Majesty,” said the sailors. Several crowded to the port bulwark with ropes and one, leaning far out over the side, held the torch. A wild, white face appeared in the blackness of the water, and then, after some scrambling and pulling, a dozen friendly hands had heaved the stranger on board.
Edmund thought he had never seen a wilder-looking man. Though he did not otherwise look very old, his hair was an untidy mop of white, his face was thin and drawn, and, for clothing, only a few wet rags hung about him. But what one mainly noticed were his eyes, which were so widely opened that he seemed to have no eyelids at all, and stared as if in an agony of pure fear. The moment his feet reached the deck he said:
“Fly! Fly! About with your ship and fly! Row, row, row for your lives away from this accursed shore.”
“Compose yourself,” said Reepicheep, “and tell us what the danger is. We are not used to flying.”
The stranger started horribly at the voice of the Mouse, which he had not noticed before.
“Nevertheless you will fly from here,” he gasped. “This is the Island where Dreams come true.”
“That’s the island I’ve been looking for this long time,” said one of the sailors. “I reckoned I’d find I was married to Nancy if we landed here.”
“And I’d find Tom alive again,” said another.
“Fools!” said the man, stamping his foot with rage. “That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I’d better have been drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams -dreams, do you understand, come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”
There was about half a minute’s silence and then, with a great clatter of armour, the whole crew were tumbling down the main hatch as quick as they could and flinging themselves on the oars to row as they had never rowed before; and Drinian was swinging round the tiller, and the boatswain was giving out the quickest stroke that had ever been heard at sea. For it had taken everyone just that halfminute to remember certain dreams they had had – dreams that make you afraid of going to sleep again – and to realize what it would mean to land on a country where dreams come true.
To my mind, this is one of the most chilling passages in literature. Without outlining the specifics, we know exactly why this is terrifying, and due to personal experience.
This is what the protagonist of Inception cannot avoid, in the deep recesses of his subconscious .
The idea behind the movie is simple: because our minds are weakest in sleep, dreams can be “shared”, even infiltrated by people who have the right talent. In a process known as “extraction”, these people suggest to the subject the existence of something locked away, whatever it may be. The subject’s mind interprets this, in his dream, as a stronghold of some sort (a vault, a safe, etc), which the Extractor can then … extract, basically robbing the mind of the subject of its secrets. The opposite of this is Inception — a process by which an idea is suggested to the subject. This is near impossible to do, because if not handled correctly the subject realizes the idea is not his own and reject it. An idea successfully implanted, however, almost works too well. It can grow and work on a person to a point where it changes who they are. (And you’ve had similar dreams — that’s that one really awesome dream you sometimes think about, or that thing you dreamt about that one time with that feeling in it that you can’t quite shake.) The most effective Inception grows into a major decision that crosses from the subconscious *into* the conscious world and results in a decision that one would not otherwise make.
Sometimes we’ve even had those dream where we wonder where we got that idea; something that you swear your mind was otherwise incapable of. Where do those come from?
This movie takes those ideas about dreams that you just KNOW, combines them with the dream-within-a-dream phenomenon that happens rarely but is the stuff of some of the best Star Trek episodes, that falling sensation that you swear has some significance (“If I don’t wake up before I hit the ground, do I die?”), the role of memory and subconscious in dreams, and the Cartesian “How do I know that this is not reality and not just another dream?” that the Matrix handled so clumsily. In fact the latter is handled so well, it’s hardly mentioned, but it’s at the forefront of the viewer’s mind.
There are unanswered questions, there are odd perceptions, but mostly the movie is a maze for the mind. Ariadne, the so-called “architect” of the dream world (named after the daughter of King Minos in Greek mythology who helped Theseus escape the labyrinth and defeat the minotaur), opens up world after world, each more fascinating than the last for the sheer fact of its reality within its godlike creation. I read a review or two that has complained that the director, with the infinite backdrop of the subconscious mind, didn’t do more with it. It’s true that the settings are sort of mundane. But those are the most real dreams. When you have surreal dreams, it’s so much easier to recognize the random elements that put it together. For instance, here (from gchat archives) is a dream I had about a month before my wedding:
First of all, [this dream] was taking place in this church that was also a courtroom. Next door there was a small, old, country church that was being used for a storehouse. While we were gathering people together, there was a big fight going on. The Ensign (my husband) was fighting someone and I went to help him but the dude started running away and the Ensign went after someone else to fight. So I corner the guy and I start to choke him, when I suddenly realize he’s John McCain. I ask him, “Wait, why are we fighting?” He says, “I don’t know”, so I run to the narthex of the church and yell, “Hey! Stop fighting. Everyone on my side of the family sit on the right, and everyone on the Ensign’s side of the family sit on the left.” So they did and everyone stopped fighting. Then, we went into the church/courtroom, and for some reason I also had to marry my friend Monica K (who, in reality and in my dream, is already married). This was for some nominal, civil reason — like extending my citizenship to her, or something. The original idea was that that would occur after the *real* marriage to the Ensign, but she shows up in a wedding dress, and I was all like shoot shoot shoot, what do I do, we’re not having two processions and I’m not doing this twice; despite the fact that I’m wearing the groomsmen’s attire, which makes me upset because I’m supposed to be putting on MY dress. The musicians started to play the entrance hymn, but instead of a choir it’s just an organ and a soloist, which was all wrong. In fact, there was a LOT wrong since we hadn’t had a rehearsal, and I wound up directing everybody (during which time I was somehow wearing my dress). And then I woke up.
That one is easy — a lot of wedding stress, a lot of stress about both families coming together, about the unknowns of the rehearsal, of getting everything to go right, of all the things that COULD go wrong, and the fact that I was taking advice from Monica at the time, yet thinking to myself, “But I don’t want to have her wedding, I want my wedding to be mine.” And the fact that the Ensign and I, for the purposes of the Navy, had contemplated civil marriage prior to the real wedding. (Oh, and that the Ensign, since he was far away from me at the time, could only help me with some things, but I had to do a lot without him.) AND the fact that I am mad at John McCain STILL for losing the election. However, all that doesn’t even come close to convincing me that I was REALLY THERE. It’s all too easy to write off.
BUT those dreams where I dream about waking up and going to work (or school), or conversations with people, or reliving memories … or those nightmares about spiritual realities that actually could happen … there is a reason why one feels like pinching oneself upon waking.
Another review writes:
Not only do Cobb [the protagonist] and company need to be well versed in weaponry, combat and driving, but they also have to know their target’s psychological profile inside and out. The team needs to gather intelligence about Fischer [their target]’s relationship with his father and godfather, his fears and his anxieties, in order to use these against him in his dreams. Fischer’s biggest issue is that he believes his father is disappointed with him; Cobb and company use this to their advantage and, in order to get his guard down, literally ask Fischer to tell them about his father.
(source)
Cobb etc accomplish this (as implied earlier) by deliberately creating dreams within dreams, in a rather complex (sometimes head-scratching) manner: since there are a few “layers” of dreams, the dreams are being shared by a few different people. Ultimately they are all in the target’s dream, but within that dream they are in another guy’s dream, etc. At the heart of the operation is Cobb, and the farther into the maze they go, the farther into Cobb’s subconscious, until a moment when they are face-to-face with one of the most mysterious and therefore terrifying elements of the film (undisclosed — although for those who are familiar with the Silent Hill videogame franchise, it’s not unlike the feeling one gets towards the end of Silent Hill 2). THIS is where we see Cobb’s own “Island where Dreams come true”.
But what blows my mind is that, at the end of the movie, Inception has done exactly that. To. Its. Audience. Inception is itself the inception the director works to create. When the movie is over, you feel as if it has been a dream, and you wonder if you’re back to reality. Inception is very nearly exactly what it does.
When was a last time a film could boast that?
This review has been a bit subjective and mushy, as I’m less out to praise the film’s artistic qualities (which are certainly present), but mostly to communicate why it Blew My Freaking Mind.
The next part of this is … a series of stupid coincidences:
- Dreams crossing into reality: Not two days ago, I had an absolutely terrifying nightmare. (Not surprising: I have nightmares when the seasons change). I could not shake the feeling of fear for hours after I woke in the middle of the night. I even woke myself by calling out something. Although it’s possible to mumble oneself awake, I spoke something very clearly, comprehensibly, and something which made sense both in the dream at the time and upon waking. Basically, one element of this nightmare became totally real in the waking world, even though it was just something as harmless as a word. Even then, a word is more real than, say, an act (when you lash out in a dream and wake yourself up, it’s very rarely the same action with the same effect in real life that it is and has in your dream).
- The Island of your Dreams/The Island where Dreams come true: the fear of the unknown tied up with the benevolent wishing for the good is the heart of what Lewis is getting at in the earlier passage. If only we could always have those hazy, lovely dreams; if only we could share them forever with someone. This thinking features prominently in the Heart of the movie’s Problem, underneath many layers. The idea is sweet (I think most of us have seen this Calvin and Hobbes comic), but crossing the line between dreams and reality is profoundly Dangerous.
- Most of these actors had recently been at the forefront of my mind…like within the past week: one character was the Chairman in Memoirs of a Geisha, a movie I’ve been thinking a lot about since moving to Japan; the movie Juno made a very low impact on me, and I thought of it for like the second time ever just earlier today, for a completely unrelated reason. I was just watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 10 Things I Hate About You which was on TV. I recently spilled a lot of brain energy on Love Me if You Dare (aka Jeux d’enfants), a weird French film I watched about two months ago, starring Marion Cotillard. And any time Michael Caine shows up, there’s some connection with my father (who loves Michael Caine).
This collection of persons and coincidences is the sort of thing that one usually pieces together … in a dream.
I was unsettled by the end of the movie. I was looking for my “totem”, or what the movie defines as an item known exclusively to me, that no one else would know about, and that I could handle in order to convince me that I was not lost in someone else’s dream. I thought long and hard about what this could be as I walked home. Fortunately I made something recently. Even my husband hasn’t handled it (if someone else handles it, it defeats the purpose). I haven’t checked to see if it’s still there.
I should do that now.
Update
After waking up from a dream (yes, it’s unsettling to have a vivid dream after a movie about vivid dreams), I have come up with a list of More Things That Make This Movie Effective:
-The sense of dread: Whenever Dom sees a certain image from his memory, there is an incredible sense of dread, like something is about to happen, or that you are frightened to see their faces. Why should this be? You KNOW they’re children. But still, as in dreams, sometimes you have to, in a dream, Open That One Door or something, but you have a tremendous sense of dread about it without knowing exactly why. This is built very well into the movie.
-The last scene affects your view of the entire movie.
-Time: Ever had that weird sensation that you’ve lived a lifetime in a dream? Or that time is everything and nothing? I once had a dream that I lived an entire lifetime in one dream, and I still woke up and felt that way. In it, some kid who was my friend died. I remember what shirt he was wearing and I STILL look around for him. This is similar to the “flute” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (one of the best episodes made). This is also used in the movie. This is not to say that the movie plods along and seems to take forever (indeed, I questioned the beginning of the movie’s pacing — which starts in media res — but in the end I find it is excellent).
-The names are all significant: for example: Dom Cobb, a man caught in a *web* of dreams, who claims to be the master of them. Dom, from the Latin dominus, meaning lord or master, also a title given to Benedictines, now meaning nothing but once also signifying great learning. Ariadne, as mentioned above. Mal, meaning “bad” or “evil”, is the subconscious in Dom’s mind against whom he struggles. Fischer — I suspect this is a reference to the Medieval “Fisher king”, or the wounded king who holds The Key in Arthurian legend. Arthur is a clear connection, but Yusuf, Saito, Browning, Eames, and Dom’s children Philippa (the name which tipped me off that Something Is Going On Here … strangely enough. It should have been Ariadne.) and James I still have to think about, but it’s undoubtedly there.
-The quality of the movie, being so dreamlike, makes you question your own reality: Everything in the movie can be questioned. See #2. This affects everything… is Dom dreaming? You know that sense that only YOU have all the answers, but they come slowly, in bits and pieces? Or in a dream where everything depends on you, as the protagonist? You do a lot of things that are highly unlikely but seem to work, so you go with it. Things are slightly off. The characters’ names. The ages of his children at the end. Who is awake? Who is asleep?
This review might be alternately titled “Lauren has weird dreams and so does Chris Nolan”, but if he has somehow tapped into my subconscious, I suspect I am not alone. Perhaps we are all sharing someone’s dream. AND THAT’S THE INCEPTION.
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