[Originally published and hosted at http://passionforcinema.com/.]
Christopher Nolan has been (since his initial college short-film Doodlebug), apart from all other things that he has been, a talented film maker endowed with the mastery to produce art which is open to endless interpretations and discussions. It has been his track record to amaze and at many places, outwit his audience with twist endings, blink-and-you-miss-it direction, and the consistency that even someone as great as Steven Spielberg cannot offer. His work is not comparable to what stuff like Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman produce, but more likely to, say, Stanley Kubrick’s body of work.
What comes as a latest (and disputably, the best) addition to this list is the Leonardo Dicaprio-starrer ‘Inception’. Within the opening minutes of the film, you can see the signature ‘Nolan’ style taking over: grand location, a hard-to-follow story, and a staggeringly original plot. Cutting without a moment’s delay to the chase, let me reach the central motive of my writing this piece.
Many film pundits have presented utterly outlandish explanations of the movie, which to the best of my knowledge, are merely results of over analysis. What I got out of the movie was not technical plot details and crooked metaphors, instead the basic, emotional message that the filmmaker has tried to voice. It is, at many places, a taunt to the smart-alecs who believe it is their responsibility to act as a mouthpiece for the whole human race. What I present in the following paragraphs is not a definitive, quintessential guide to unlocking the genius of Inception; it is not the final word. It is just a straightforward, personal explanation of what I gather out of the film’s proceedings. In an age where the critic is more ubiquitous than the audience, what I want to write is a non-critical, rather appreciative perspective of the film.
What comes as a latest (and disputably, the best) addition to this list is the Leonardo Dicaprio-starrer ‘Inception’. Within the opening minutes of the film, you can see the signature ‘Nolan’ style taking over: grand location, a hard-to-follow story, and a staggeringly original plot. Cutting without a moment’s delay to the chase, let me reach the central motive of my writing this piece.
Many film pundits have presented utterly outlandish explanations of the movie, which to the best of my knowledge, are merely results of over analysis. What I got out of the movie was not technical plot details and crooked metaphors, instead the basic, emotional message that the filmmaker has tried to voice. It is, at many places, a taunt to the smart-alecs who believe it is their responsibility to act as a mouthpiece for the whole human race. What I present in the following paragraphs is not a definitive, quintessential guide to unlocking the genius of Inception; it is not the final word. It is just a straightforward, personal explanation of what I gather out of the film’s proceedings. In an age where the critic is more ubiquitous than the audience, what I want to write is a non-critical, rather appreciative perspective of the film.
Nolan has always been fond of setting up and establishing an environment with his own set of rules in the two-and-a-half hours of the movie. Be it the bleak, sleety, chilly landscape of Alaska where the sun never sets in Insomnia, or be it the dark, brooding city of Gotham with lawlessness and corruption at an unending fist-fight with the heroic vigilantism of the ‘Masked Crusader’ in Batman Begins and Dark Knight, Nolan loves to set up boundaries and challenges for himself as a filmmaker. And so it is with Inception; you have an entirely imagined world of dreams and artificiality, what with its own sets of defining laws and precincts, limiting factors and demarcated boundaries of play. Nolan is a very angular artist, one who, instead of focusing more on the emotional and flawed aspects of humanity, wants to have rational and rule-bound storytelling, something at once unequivocal and yet open to several interpretations.
Whenever we think of dreams, what comes to our mind are vague recollections of vivid imagery, half-remembered and half-forgotten, but never as well-formed and constructed and detailed as portrayed in the film in reckoning. To see it in a structured, skeletal form is tad incredible, and this is where many critics believe Inception has failed: in its very basic assumption of seeing dreams as a taut, technical, rule-based dimension.
But then, my point is, to the kind of crafty, shrewd and thoroughly professional characters portrayed in the movie, whose very bread thrives on the interception and manipulation of dreams and dreamers, it cannot be afforded that dreams be set up without any rules. These men and women are trained, practiced fabricators and architects of dreams; they have set up these laws because without them, their very profession is at risk of being thwarted by a vague but powerful counter-thought. There is no margin for any kind of ambiguity in the kind of occupation they are engaged in, they need to have a preset network of defining conditions in their dream space. It can be compared to a bunch of real-life conmen who plan their con to the last detail, but the moment they get on with it, earth loses its gravity and they start floating in the air like balloons, all plans of a con thwarted. Hence, the dreams we dream are very different from the chiseled, mechanical dreams of the architects in Inception, and hence we cannot complain Nolan of portraying dreams unrealistically (pun intended).
Coming to my last point, I found the ambiguity of the climactic sequence the USP of the film: the overcooked, feel-good track, the inspirational music (which is perhaps the best song in the soundtrack, ‘Time’) overlaying the perfect-frame close up of Leonardo Dicaprio as he regains consciousness in slow motion, the equivocal stance of the immigration agent, and finally the wobbly top, all make for the ideal finish. Where many interpreters (movie-coroners, I call them) believe that this overly-jovial final track is indicative of and furthers the idea that the movie is still being played out in a dream, I neither agree nor disagree on that point.
Whenever we think of dreams, what comes to our mind are vague recollections of vivid imagery, half-remembered and half-forgotten, but never as well-formed and constructed and detailed as portrayed in the film in reckoning. To see it in a structured, skeletal form is tad incredible, and this is where many critics believe Inception has failed: in its very basic assumption of seeing dreams as a taut, technical, rule-based dimension.
But then, my point is, to the kind of crafty, shrewd and thoroughly professional characters portrayed in the movie, whose very bread thrives on the interception and manipulation of dreams and dreamers, it cannot be afforded that dreams be set up without any rules. These men and women are trained, practiced fabricators and architects of dreams; they have set up these laws because without them, their very profession is at risk of being thwarted by a vague but powerful counter-thought. There is no margin for any kind of ambiguity in the kind of occupation they are engaged in, they need to have a preset network of defining conditions in their dream space. It can be compared to a bunch of real-life conmen who plan their con to the last detail, but the moment they get on with it, earth loses its gravity and they start floating in the air like balloons, all plans of a con thwarted. Hence, the dreams we dream are very different from the chiseled, mechanical dreams of the architects in Inception, and hence we cannot complain Nolan of portraying dreams unrealistically (pun intended).
Coming to my last point, I found the ambiguity of the climactic sequence the USP of the film: the overcooked, feel-good track, the inspirational music (which is perhaps the best song in the soundtrack, ‘Time’) overlaying the perfect-frame close up of Leonardo Dicaprio as he regains consciousness in slow motion, the equivocal stance of the immigration agent, and finally the wobbly top, all make for the ideal finish. Where many interpreters (movie-coroners, I call them) believe that this overly-jovial final track is indicative of and furthers the idea that the movie is still being played out in a dream, I neither agree nor disagree on that point.
On Wikipedia, Nolan is quoted saying that Cobb walking away from the top, indifferent of it collapsing or continuing its spin is the main thing, and not its actual fall or prolonged rotation. I believe the same so too; even if the top did keep spinning, it is of little consequence for Cobb. It is just like he’s given up on what’s illusion and what’s real, because what he has today is something he had always wished for (that is, his being united with his family), so it doesn’t really make a difference even if he were in a dream. It could be that he is dreaming all this up like the attic-full of old men Yousef takes him too, but Cobb is ignorant of everything, and still is very much in bliss.
In a way, Cobb no longer cares. And through this little trick, Nolan wants to tell us audience to give the analysis a rest and let the film be a film for its sake. He slips in this feathery rap-on-the-back-of-the-head for those very smart-alecs I talked of in the beginning, as if snubbing them off saying, ‘even Cobb’s happy with it being/not being a dream, why’re you guys so damn prying?’
Then again, it’s just my opinion. All said and done, Inception is Christopher Nolan’s stand-out masterpiece, one which had been long overdue after the flawless Memento. I salute and immensely revere this auteur of a film-maker who keeps a level head and churns out one great film after another, each better than the last.
In a way, Cobb no longer cares. And through this little trick, Nolan wants to tell us audience to give the analysis a rest and let the film be a film for its sake. He slips in this feathery rap-on-the-back-of-the-head for those very smart-alecs I talked of in the beginning, as if snubbing them off saying, ‘even Cobb’s happy with it being/not being a dream, why’re you guys so damn prying?’
Then again, it’s just my opinion. All said and done, Inception is Christopher Nolan’s stand-out masterpiece, one which had been long overdue after the flawless Memento. I salute and immensely revere this auteur of a film-maker who keeps a level head and churns out one great film after another, each better than the last.
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