Let’s go one more time with Inception here. As I continue to feel the need to post thoughts about, it must not be that bad of a movie after all.
Another email from my friend, replying to what I posted last blog about Inception:
“When you say meta-layering of narratives, I am reading into that the notion that the purpose of the layering is to question what is real– which I thought was the follow-on to your brain in a vat discussion. I do not think that is the point of the layering going on here. I won’t deny the movie takes place on different “layers” of narrative, but exploring a dreamscape alongside a “real-time” narrative–whether that dreamscape is actually a dream, or is merely a hallucination or a memory, is in no way a postmodern device. This type of layering has been employed almost since the inception of the novel, and certainly since the advent of the modern novel.
I will readily concede that the ending of the movie involving the spinning dradle can be taken as a commentary on what “actually” was real. But I think that is a misinterpretation. The movie never seriously supposes that the dream world is actually the real world. The spinning dradle, for me, is a reformulation of what Marion Cotillard was saying– that the dream world made of memories / our subconscious is more important than reality. But Leo (and the movie) firmly rejected that notion when he chose to live in the present. Our memories, after all, pale in comparison to what is real. That is why I think this is very far from a brain in the vat movie.
You bring up a good point that the plot works against itself, which in your opinion obscures this dynamic I’m talking about. I don’t agree. But on that score I can’t convince you– it is a difference between enjoying the movie and not. For some reason you felt it was a joyless exercise, while I felt it was a fascinating representation of our dreamscape. I have always been interested in the video / spatial representation of dreams, and this was for me groundbreaking– far from a meaningless exercise.
Lastly, on the question of universality, I think you are being too specific. It is easy to say that a movie has not represented the way that we actually experience dreaming– it is a movie, after all. But the themes it employs, and many of the details about dreaming that it explores, are uncannily accurate. That is what makes it universal.”
And here we go one more time with my response:
“Just a couple of quick thoughts:
— I agree that layering/dreams in fiction and art aren’t unique to postmodernism. The Wood article that I quoted made the same point. I guess this relates to one’s conception of the relationship of postmodernism to what’s come before, but I think that postmodernism takes certain strands of modernism and, Emeril-style, kicks it up a notch. So previously, in novels and plays you’d have some really interesting layering going on, but it was better balanced against narrative and character. Art like Inception takes narrative flow but deconstructs it to the point that the deconstruction itself is the point and subsumes everything else under it (would this be a kind of formalist perspective?). I realize that this is an apples and oranges comparison, but The Sound and the Fury (coincidentally, a novel about memory and regret) is a flashback heavy, where are we, who’s talking now book, but all of those things, I feel, enhanced narrative, plot, and character whereas Inception’s trickiness detracted from the same.
— The point about Cotillard is interesting, but I’m not sure that it lines up with what Nolan was doing with the ending of Inception. Before I posted my first thoughts about the movie, I checked on metacritic.com to see what other people were saying about it, just to make sure that I wasn’t missing something. Very few of the reviews I scanned considered the movie’s conclusion to be a firm rejection of dreams/memory in favor of the real world—which doesn’t say that you’re necessarily wrong, but you’re in a very small minority here. (I saw Inception with a packed house, and once the screen went black after the last dradle shot, the audience groaned and shrieked; I interpret that noise to mean that the crowd felt like Nolan was giving them a final tease.) However, if your interpretation of the end is right, then I’d say that would dramatically change my view of the whole movie, and I’d like it a lot more. It seems that your Cotillard connection depends upon your particular view of the end.
— I see your point about perhaps being too narrow with the Action Movie dreams bit.”
So there we have it. That’s all she wrote about Inception. For those wondering about the identity of my mysterious email correspondent, it’s. . . a 300-pound gorilla! He’s just a big dumb animal, folks.