[spoilers ahead]
I’m a bit late to the party on Inception, which dominated my twitter feed a week or so ago. The consensus from the assortment of academics, bloggers, and film journalists that I follow was that the movie was both visually stunning and intellectually intriguing, a largely successful combination of the popcorn film and the “mindfuck” genre. My response was a bit more tepid, though. I arrived at the theater not expecting to like the film, as I’ve grown a bit weary of what has been lately termed the “puzzle film.” My skepticism proved warranted in the film’s first half-hour or so, which, to my mind, played like a well-polished but second-rate James Bond flick. However, once the world-making sequences began, my guard was down and I was enraptured. These sequences align nicely with my own interest in realism, specifically the notion that the tie that binds everyone from Bazin to Benjamin, Deleuze and Barthes is the irrational that subtends the rational, that the sublime threatens at any moment to rupture the world as we experience it. Watching Ellen Page and Leonardo DiCaprio sit at an ostensibly real cafe that begins to dismantle before their eyes was thus quite a treat for me. The ideas floating about the film—of which there are plenty—are indeed mesmerizing, and Christopher Nolan manages for nearly 2 hours to keep all these plates spinning. However, by the time we arrive at the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream (in Siberia, I suppose?), I’d ceased to care about the narrative of the film. It was here that my rapt attention gave way to intermittent glances at my watch.
What intrigues me most, though, is that commercial audiences are apparently finding the film quite palatable. We’ve seen successful puzzle films in the past—Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive, and Nolan’s own Memento come immediately to mind—but those examples were niche films, confined largely to the art houses, or late-night cult or DVD screenings. The only other mindfuck movie that I can think of that has achieved such box office success was another recent DiCaprio vehicle, Shutter Island, of which Inception might be said to be an unintended companion piece. The classical Hollywood model of Bordwell/Thompson/Staiger is one organized around narrative clarity, of “excessive obviousness” that ensures that no spectator might get lost within the story. In that regard, Inception seems to me a curious case in which popular audiences are more than willing to suspend their demands for narrative signposting and go along with the flow, so to speak.
That isn’t to say that Inception isn’t without expositional tethering. Ellen Page, a most charming performer, manages to be compelling despite serving little purpose in the film beyond asking questions of the other characters, questions that, no doubt, the audience is asking as well. Moreover, Nolan’s conceit of having each dream occurring within a different temporality is an ingenious one: the image of the van falling from a bridge that we repeatedly return to is a remarkably vivid reminder of this complex temporal arrangement, a shrewd variation on the sands of the hourglass. (This temporal structure, as one sharp spectator has pointed out in a YouTube video, is echoed in the film’s score.)
Despite these very clever cues and devices that are designed to keep us grounded, I came away with only a loose sense of what actually occurred within the film. This happened, and then this happened, but the why—that crucial Hollywood link of cause and effect—remains rather murky. Clearly, the puzzle film genre welcomes repeat viewings, which may, of course, add to a film’s bottom line; perhaps, then, the real genius of the film is that it has built-in repeat business. And yet, might it be that we’ve reached a point where narratives don’t necessarily have to make sense so much as progress? Within each of the dreaming nesting dolls, there is a reiteration of the stakes of layering another dream as well as change of setting. Hence, as long as we continue to move towards designated plot points (dream #2, dream #3, the “kick”), it doesn’t really matter if we remember why its happening. It is as if the narrative reassures us that indeed we are making progress and will soon arrive at catharsis.
The snowy dream sequence is the one where the plot became the most unintelligible for me, for both the “good guys” and the “bad guys” were dressed in an almost identical garb. Of course, this indiscernibility might have been Nolan’s aim, one last evocation of the slipperiness of dreams. But therein lies the rub: the film doesn’t, as many have said, operate according to “dream logic,” for the worlds we see are designed by an architect, each move within worlds initiated by the manipulators themselves; I wouldn’t expect logical coherence from a film that actually were to function as dreams do, such as, say, Mulholland Drive, Un Chien Andalou, or Waking Life (still my favorite dream flick). After only one screening of the film, my hunch is that more rigorous viewings will not reveal the film to be more “transparent,” but rather bare it be more illogical and incoherent, as this parody video suggests. Perhaps the Byzantine structure of Inception serves to obscure the holes in its premises, like a magician that draws attention to one hand while conducting the deception with the other.