How many times have we woken up in the morning, the last vestiges of sleep slipping away and thought, “I had the most bizarre dream last night,” then, scrambled to write it down or at least tried to explain it to somebody?
The vast and elusive realm of dreams has long been a seductive source for storytellers: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass immediately come to mind. So does Maya Deren’s pivotal experimental film, Meshes of the Afternoon, her use of symbolic imagery eerily setting the scene for the human subconscious. Dream-inspired narratives often attempt to reflect their progenitor’s puzzling depths, and throughout the ages they have left a legacy of wonderful and strange creations.
The latest puzzler to come out of this genre is Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which has been the center of whirling debate and dissection. Nolan demonstrated his ability to straddle the line between Hollywood and good taste in his last production, The Dark Knight (2008), so when Inception finally came out after months of saturated marketing, it took the talk to a new level. Phrases like “mind-blowing,” “the new Kubrick,” and “highly anticipated” were casually tossed about, people were passionately divided, questions of whether Nolan has overestimated his audience’s intelligence were plumbed, and everybody had a theory of their own to contribute. For the troglodytes out there: Inception is set within various levels of the human subconscious, where the reliably furrowed Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, who heads a team of idea traffickers who enter subjects’ dreams and engage in espionage. Here, they pull one last job where instead of the usual heist, they reverse the process by implanting an idea in their subject (Cillian Murphy) in order to change his mind without him knowing it.
The plot is intricately careening, the beautiful and decorated cast doesn’t hurt, and Hans Zimmer’s music is a crucial complement, leaving teeth marks on the back of our hands as we try not to blink. But did Inception live up to its reputation? Did Nolan’s ideas about the human psyche go over our heads? What — aside from the arid state of current summer blockbusters — really drew throngs to the theater?
It is evident from Nolan’s past projects, such as The Prestige (2006) and Memento (2000) that he knows spectacle and how to use it well. This rather fits as a setting for Inception since spectacle is much of what dreams are, and he isn’t afraid to use technology to further the escapism of this world. There is no doubt that this film comprises what will one day be considered some of the most iconic and memorable scenes on the silver screen: Paris folding over, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s gravity-defying hotel fight sequence, and the crashing precipices of Limbo, which in the film is the deepest level of the subconscious. The inventiveness of how the team go about their con is clever, and they look sleek in covetable three-piece suits and goddess gowns. Alpine warring has never looked so cool.
But under the glossy exterior, the relatively flat character development is indicative of the film’s limitations on the whole. Unlike Deren and Carroll’s worlds, where the uncanny flows freely, it seems that in Inception, Nolan is trying to command the rules in what is essentially a chaotic place. He discards reality when it suits his narration, but it feels too easily explained away. Interesting sentences like “you never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you?” are scattered throughout the film, saving breath in the packed storyline but running the risk of sounding like imposed logic. Physics-breaching gymnastics look sensational as a backdrop to the constant action, but it is more gratuitous entertainment than a genuine exploration of the subliminal. The state of Limbo is the most expressive with its improvisational landscape, but it left the audience wanting a lot more. To answer the hype, people went home with more debates about plot points than existential issues to discuss. But is it necessarily a bad thing that Inception is more an Ocean’s Eleven set in a highly original situation than a probing philosophical thriller? Again, what makes Inception a worthwhile cinematic experience?
That is a hard question to answer, considering the diversity and number of opinions on the subject. What solidified Inception for me was (a requisite spoiler warning) the end of the film: when Cobb’s spinning top looks as if it could topple and potentially change our perception of the entire story, it cuts to black. The entire theater gasped, riveted together by the spectacle, and it felt like we were waking up from a crazy dream before it properly ended. And that unifying moment for me is the reason why we go to the movie theater at all.