Inception

Inception – Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) is a huge, amazing spectacle that aspires to be all films ever made. Ten years ago, there was a TV commercial in which a weary traveler checking into a dismal roadside motel is told that the place’s cable carries “every movie ever made.” The traveler is astounded, even alarmed. “How is that possible?” he asks the sullen-looking girl behind the desk. Inception, which is exhausting, seems to show the way – dream-logic crushes all experience together, layering film memories like the ruins of Troy and everything (or most everything with some crucial exceptions) is here: we have a decrepit, decomposing world, collapsing like an abandoned theater set and populated by specters of specters– this comes from Synecdoche, New York. Elements of Tarkovsky’s dream-films inhabit the film as recurring images – it is the theme of the persistence of obsession and the search for a home in Solaris and Mirror. There is a variant on Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, a memory literally locked in a rich man’s vault at his deathbed in the center of labyrinth. Rainy urban vistas derive from Bladerunner . And the many action sequences channel films as various as The Matrix, The Eiger Sanction, and the downhill ski chase from On his Majesty’s Secret Service (mashed together with spooky dream-skiing from Hitchcock’s Spellbound – we even get a few bars of Hitchcock movie music for that sequence.) But, in the last analysis, its interesting to note that the whole spectacle of son et lumiere reverts to the very dawn of cinema itself. As Inception lumbers to its climax (or multiple climaxes), the picture reminded me of nothing more than another film beginning with the egotistical “I” – Griffiths’s 1916 Intolerance. Inception ends with four levels of dream (possibly five) all synchronized to simultaneous, cross-cut climaxes. This is very similar to Griffith bringing his four narrations to a simultaneous orgasmic climax – the bride races a train to save her husband from execution in the electric chair, the Medes destroy Ninevah, Christ is crucified, and the Catholics massacre Huguenots. The four strands of Intolerance unite into a single huge climax; similarly, the four spectacular dreams within dreams all roar to a climax at the same time. Only film can do something like this, and, although it is a folly, Inception cuts close to the core of the medium. Astounded as I was, a disquieting thought occurred to me. Late Capitalism has so colonized the mind that it seems to have denuded a crucial part of the subconscious. What is in the dark underwold of dreams? Freud and Jung and the poets have suggested that dreams harbor the dead with their insistent, sepulchral demands, sexual desire, the gods. What does Nolan find within his vast labyrinth of dreams? It turns out to be all about money, industrial espionage, corporate skullduggery, business’ battling for dominance. And, even more sinister, the title of the film is Inception – that is, the movie is not really about what may be found in dreams, but what can be inserted into them: the desire for Diet Coke or a specific kind of beer, a car, an insurance policy sold by a perky, funny woman, the Kardashians. A poet once watched some beautiful birds that seemed agitated, fluttering wildly at one another. “What are they doing?” he asked a naturalist. “Squabbling over potato chips someone spilled,” the naturalist said.