Inception

We all knew that Christopher Nolan was working on another project with Leonardo Di Caprio heading an impressive ‘star’ cast. But any details about the film were deliberately and skillfully kept secret. A very smart marketing campaign to drum up intrigue and excitement for the release of the film. Although given Nolan’s reputation, the intrigue and excitement are certainly always there with or without intelligent marketing campaigns. The little information that has been printed, starts with a preface to warn readers to stop reading ‘now’, if they don’t want any of the secrets given away or an innocent experience spoiled. So I feel obliged to give the same caveat, although the film’s own website gives you an intricate experience of the film and I think it will be difficult to avoid hearing about it after its official release on July 16th. So, read on!

Nolan is notorious for the revival of the Batman films, although this is far from his filmmaking roots of Super 8 filmmaking at the age of seven. Nolan’s first interests lay in experimenting with film’s formal potentials for creating subjectivities through non-linear editing. His first feature was little known Following (1996) that explored issues he would return to in his second and highly acclaimed Memento (2000) where a reconstruction of the world is occurring for the characters and the audience, as two narrative threads play out interchangeably, in reverse order. Nolan’s ambition propelled him into Hollywood, where he took up a dying franchise in the Batman films and revived it with Batman Begins (2005) and Dark Knight (2008). This latest film is a convergence of the two styles and a return to Nolan’s early preoccupations.

But this time, it is not linearity that is contested, this time we have multiple, simultaneous states of consciousness to navigate, protect and violate. And this time, the technical capabilities have evolved to from the pioneer days of the Matrix (1999), to offer Nolan an ability to choreograph elegant and almost balletic sequences.

Inception offers us a collective dreaming, where ideas are planted and stolen. These ‘events’ are highly orchestrated, as is the entire production of the film. Nolan and Di Caprio’s team simultaneously ‘build’ more and more complex worlds for us to inhabit, the complexity and unraveling happening logically enough to drag us along with them. It is a mathematician’s mind that has created this multi-dimensional prism. In the world of the audience and in all the worlds on the screen, we all find ourselves dreaming our way in and out of our fantasies and fears.

And you actually can put yourself in the movie with a green screen and video game, downloadable from their website. The video game is consciously used in the film as a parallel to what happens in dream-states, and again a parallel with the film-experience. There is a level of willing participation and entrapment that defines all of these experiences. The extent to which we ‘believe’ or are truly affected by these worlds varies, but they are often very visceral and ‘real’ states of being. Nolan uses this to implicate all of us in an engagement with multiple realities and sparks a Cartesian questioning into the nature of ‘being’.

There are other opportunities for philosophical meanderings about responsibility, guilt and redemption, about what and how we memorialize, about the agency of ‘ideas’ and the strength of individual will and conviction against ideas that appear to be ‘truths’, about the search for your own ‘truth’ which inevitably lies at the doorstep of your own ‘home’.

These ideas are weaved in elegantly amongst the bullets exchanged between our main protagonists and their ‘enemies’ without identity, they literally have no face. I wonder about the need to perpetuate this notion of the ‘enemy’. The characters find themselves in various states of warfare at all levels of consciousness. It serves to fulfill the ‘action’ part of what they want to pitch as a huge blockbuster, but it also sustains this fear of the ‘other’ and the need to protect ourselves from them, to eradicate them. The other premise is that money can buy everything. But in Nolan’s scenario at least, only the good guys that only kill in dreams can buy their innocence back.

If you are after a more ‘real’ experience beyond the realities Inception can offer you, you might be interested in The Lucidity Institute Inc. They run workshops in Hawaii where you wear special goggles that take you into a state of sleep, called ‘Lucid Dreaming’ where you are between the conscious and unconscious state. So you can somewhat navigate your dreams and remember the secrets told to you upon emerging from your sleep. One participant claims that a dolphin came to her during one of these episodes and told her the meaning of life.

This is exactly the premise of Nolan’s film. Except that he suggests a trip to Hawaii is not altogether necessary. Perhaps we are all living in our own versions of our dreams, our fantasies and fears.

INCEPTION

Magnus Nolan ... James (20 months)