Inception

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High concept films are in a bad way these days because they are in such high demand. Ever since “Jaws” ramped up to 11 the level of immersion and intensity a B-movie premise could deliver, studios have never dismissed a movie’s potential for Blockbusterdom based solely on a silly premise. The result is that every summer flick that comes out is filmed and marketed as just the most mind-blowing, intense experience you could possibly have even if the movie is stupid. Pirates, superheroes, wizards, aliens, any wackiness could be the next mega-hit and Hollywood will try anything once. Transformers was a numbskull idea, creatively speaking, but it worked well. Take some toys, make them big and realistic-looking and have them romp around several of the world’s urban centers. It’s as silly as Godzilla but the films are injections of pure id. Nobody has time to consider that there wasn’t much of a coherent story. The current Tentpole movie mindset is something akin to a roller-coaster ride: simple premise, heavy experience. It works especially well in tandem with ideas that are already embedded in our cultural consciousness (lately, this has meant all manner of Hasbro and Parker Bros. products. “Battleship” is currently in development). But what happens if you have a really high concept film? One that is just as harrowing as anything Michael Bay could create, but will just stretch your brain doing it. Everybody knows what a Transformer is. Oh, you don’t? Well, it’s a robot that turns into a car. That’s it. Transformers are a safe concept. But what about a dream within a dream? Isn’t this just the kind of artsy weirdness that studios try to avoid? There is nothing existential about a Transformer.

The public responded to Inception. Financially, the film kicked serious butt. Maybe not as serious as a Transformer would, but darn good for an original concept. This throws a bit of a wrench into the studio idea that American moviegoers are dumb. If the vast majority of us are such lowbrows, then how did Inception do so dang well?

(a) The Dark Knight paved the way for success off of Nolan’s name alone?
(b) Inception was a fresh, exhilarating thriller that was excellently executed and harrowing to watch.
(c) American moviegoers are not simpletons, but they are staunchly concrete, and Inception caters perfectly to that sensibility.

The correct answer is ‘all of the above’. This film was very exciting to watch. The action tightens and gains speed and claustrophobia with each successive dip into the recesses of the mind. You’ve probably heard enough about how great this movie is (because it is great), so I’m going to continue on why I do not think it was Nolan’s masterpiece, and how it falls just short of making high concept films actually matter, though it was one of the more valiant attempts.

Inception is a very complicated tale. From the get-go, Nolan is definitely aware that he has some ‘splaining to do, and ‘splain he does. In fact, it takes the entire film to successfully ‘splain what’s going on. No plot thread is left hanging and nothing is left out. Nolan works out his plot with all the deftness and skill of a mathematician, but there is nothing wondrous about a formula. The film has all the right components, a tragic love story, life-threatening peril, crazy action, good philosophical questions, but it’s all ticked off scene-by-scene. Structurally, the film holds its own weight, but there is little beauty to it. It is effective, but is nothing beyond the sum of its own parts.
However, this does work well when catering to a left-brained movie audience. The American public, I maintain, is not stupid, they are concrete. We will eat up a complicated film as long as it makes sense. Complexity is not what turns us off, it is anything left unexplained. We want everything laid out in front of us, connected all together in a sensible pattern. Compared to most films out there, Inception towers like a giant erector set, but all of its pieces fit together. Unfortunately, this is what cripples it from being a true masterpiece. The problem with the public is not that we don’t want to think, it’s that we don’t want to feel. Tentpole films that push us too far in an introspective direction tend not to work by the very fact that we come to the movies as observers wanting to see something interesting and intricate. We don’t ever want to turn the camera in on ourselves and consider who we are and what we are doing. It’s too uncomfortable, and we just don’t have time for all that metaphysical junk. Only a few high concept films have even attempted that project and they didn’t do to well, financially (Blade Runner is the perfect example).

Explaining a premise too much takes away from its “WTF factor”. For anyone who may not know, the “WTF factor” is usually the first few minutes of a high concept movie in which you have no idea what is going on, but whatever is going on is really really cool. Bewildering sequences draw you into the action with no explanation and makes you want to know what’s going on. Inception does kick off this way, but its structure is too similar to The Matrix to be novel and too imbalanced to be cathartic. You can build a dream world and do whatever you want in the dream world if you’re creative enough. There’s even a ‘training’ scene with Leo and Ellen Page that was indistinguishable from Morpheus and Neo’s digital walkabout. In The Matrix, the mystery is unraveled lovingly, teasing you bit by bit by peeling back layers of reality slowly throughout the first half of the film until it totally rams you with the blunt end of what’s really going on. Inception is like a how-to booklet. Characters tell us too much about the world instead of us seeing it for ourselves. This is not the way to create tension. Instead of telling us that you can ‘die’ in the dream under these conditions, or saying “we can’t do that because then this will happen blah blah blah”, make something happen. Show us the thing you’re talking about and leave us to wonder what just happened. Don’t tell us about it. I thought Nolan’s previous “between Batmans” effort The Prestige captured this mysterious spirit more effectively because it left quite a bit of its inner workings behind a curtain of inference and left us to wonder and piece things together for ourselves. The man could use a little J.J. Abrams in him, (the other established ‘high concept’ man out there) who is making, not deep, but good, hearty mainstream entertainment. Abrams always manages to revel in his cinematic world just enough to take us along for the ride but never so much so that we get overwhelmed and tired of the fiction (I’m talking to you, Lucas). Nolan, by contrast, just doesn’t seem to love his flights of fancy. Even The Dark Knight, for all its grandeur felt slightly soulless. His no-nonsense approach is welcome when dealing with a character like Batman, whose story we already know (a story that has been told a hundred times over), but limiting when it comes to all new characters and an original world. We have to fall in love (or in a kind of love) with the dreamworlds of Inception before we can even have the interest in them to discover their inner workings.

The other thing that bothers me is Nolan’s idea of dreams. Leo delivers a brilliant line that sums up his entire approach to his dream sequences: “Dreams feel real while you’re in them. It’s only after you wake up that you notice something was strange.” It’s a compelling idea. We’re so used to dream sequences in films just being random images thrown at the screen, midgets riding by on unicycles and the like. Nolan’s technique is far more subtle. Ellen Page sums it up a little more ham-handedly later on: “You’d think dreams would be all about the visuals, but it’s really all about the feel.” That’s true, and it’s a good idea. It disconnects the viewers from the action when something weird gets thrown at them. The moment a midget on a unicycle rides by, it’s obvious artifice and we’re disconnected from the scene. It’s an admirable task to create a dream sequence that it feels like you’re actually in, rather than just looking at weirdness. But still, I’ve never had a dream that’s even remotely close to any of the dreams depicted. The main problem is the logic. Nolan’s dreams just make too much sense and everybody seems to be perfectly aware that they’re in them. This kind of devalues their quality as dreams. A dream isn’t a fantasy world you make up in your head, it’s a romp through your sub-conscious, a parade of all the nameless feelings and desires that we keep regulated in waking life. Dreams are full of feeling and symbol. My dreams are always illogical but that doesn’t make them feel any less real or make them any less important. I’d cite David Lynch and Michel Gondry as directors that have pulled off the dream sequence remarkably well by purposefully bending logic to create that ‘feely space’ that dreams have. Just because an experience isn’t totally left-brained doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel ‘real’. We humans have a an emotional component to us that defies rationality, and, to us, it’s just as ‘real’ as anything else. But to Nolan, ‘real’ means logical. The love story in this film just wasn’t misty enough, the tragedy is seen but not felt. The drama plays out before a camera lens, not in one’s mind, not in the heart and certainly not like it would in a dream. Nolan just uses dreams like the Wachowskis used computers, to create a space for his characters to play in. On his account, dreams are just virtual reality, and this is a bit too shallow for my tastes. He brings up a few good concepts. I loved the idea that your dream gets stranger the more your attention is drawn to its strangeness. But this facet was left unexplored and didn’t really factor into the plot too much. It would’ve been really cool if the characters were actually affected more by their dreams, like if you’re the dreamer, you can’t know your in the dream or you’ll wake up, so if you’re in someone else’s dream you’d have to keep the dreamer oblivious and then turn around and convince him he’s dreaming. That would’ve been cool, right? Just an idea.

This lack of feeling could be due to Nolan’s disdain for camp, but though this film is anything but cheesy, it tends to come across as overly self-conscious. Everything and everyone is just a little too slick and cool. Contrast this with Blade Runner, a symbol-heavy movie with oodles of commentary on our present age and exploration into the human soul. Ridley Scott, though takes the time to let the atmosphere of his future-world hang heavy over the audience, filling us with foreboding and intensity. We feel the truth before it is spoken. “Quite an experience living in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” By the time Rutger Hauer says this at the end of the film, we’ve been under Scott’s paranoid spell for so long that we believe what is being said. Nolan’s mood was a bit too spartan to reach that level of profundity, but this is not to say the film’s questions are irrelevant. Inception is about a different kind of paranoia, that of the mind. Am I who I think I am? Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing? are questions that are particularly timely in our age, and in that respect I think the film is very important. There is a sense in which the modern man, like Leo, is always just beyond his own reach. One has to go deeper and deeper through layers and layers of awareness to actually get to the bottom of who one really is and be sure that your life is what it’s supposed to be, to really find your home. It’s like turning a mirror in on itself. You can chase your own reflection for eternity, but you’ll only end up wasting yourself. You’ll end up an old man lost in an endless limbo with nothing but your paranoia. Then there’s the interesting theory on ‘pure creation’ as a paradoxical loop. It puts forth the idea that creativity is just self-reference between different planes of consciousness and meaning and purpose are just memories of other selves. A compelling (if depressing) idea.

Ultimately, Inception is as darned close as anybody’s come in recent years to a return to Kubrickian high concept that uses a fantastical premise to communicate messages that we earthlings need to hear and truths that we need to experience. Unfortunately, Nolan became too preoccupied making sure his ship could float that he sacrificed any ambitions of his work really soaring into the clouds of true profundity. Nolan has big ideas and even bigger concepts. Here’s hoping he’ll trust his own creations a bit more next time around and give us a real trip through our minds that will engage our souls as well.