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shadowkatBusy day. Went to a forum on Immigration Law - which I volunteered to write an article on for my social action/justice committee at my church. Complicated topic. And just finished watching the
[Not edited, because I have to go to bed now!]
Christopher Nolan film Inception - which continues to explore a topic near and dear to Mr. Nolan's heart -"what is real" and how we construct or handle reality inside our heads, from a purely noir perspective. Fascinating film - which I enjoyed far more than my flist apparently did. Two people (and friends that I've met in person and like a great deal -but from vastly different backgrounds and worlds) on my flist who seldom agree, both disliked this film somewhat intensely.
But, I admittedly like Christopher Nolan's films - of which I've seen nearly all of. And enjoy the noir genre more than most. All of Nolan's films take place in neo-noir or noir, from Memento to well Inception. Or rather all the one's I've seen have. They are also all psychological thrillers, often use the same actors repeatedly (much like Scorseses, Hitchcock and Lynch do), have complex narrative or puzzle-box structures, and are about reality or how we view reality. Also without exception - they are all extremely violent in places, have lots of action and chase scenes, and deal with the death of a woman or women that the lead character feels extraordinarily guilty for and is directly responsible. Making me wonder about Mr. Nolan. Although this may well be the Jungian view of the male handling his anima. Hitchock had similar issues. As does, for that matter, Mr. Whedon with his waif-like women who get raped repeatedly before fighting off the bad men and saving the day. If you analyze and critique film enough - you begin to well, wish you hadn't or feel very sorry for these guys' wives. Although I'm beginning to think some of this is ingrained in our culture to such an extent, that our films are projecting it. Film, books, tv shows, music, and art in general is after all just a projection of what our culture is, who we are, how we think as well as a commentary of it. It's a reflection in the mirror, a dream if you will. If we hate it - it's not the film or art that must be challenged, but rather why that film or art came into being - what is it in our culture, in ourselves that projects this? If the most successful films are violent ones? Why is that? Why is the collective subconscious telling these tales over and over again? What is the problem we want to solve?
What I like about Nolan's films is the puzzle box aspect, but also the layers. The flaw in his work, which is the same one that is unfortunately at the heart of every single one of the films I've seen to date, including the one's nominated for an Oscar and why I've grown weary of Whedon's work - is that the story at the core of that elaborate puzzle-box is pretty standard and not all that interesting. The dreams that he examines aren't well as interesting as the narrative and architecture of the dreams. It's similar to my complaint regarding Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton - whose narrative structure and architecture of their worlds are more fascinating than well the actual story or plot. The Social Network had the same problem - the intricately layered narrative structure blew me away, it too was a puzzle-box narrative (although Inception's was more interesting to me, not misogynistic, and far less sexist - and with more likable characters not to mention a far more interesting plot but that's just me), but lacked much at the center. It was of course about what was real and not real as well.
In fact - that seems to be a trend with the films nominated for Oscar this year or the one's I've seen to date at any rate. The concept of reality.
Inception - planting an idea in someone's head, the scariest idea of course is planting the concept that the dream is real but your reality is false. There's a great scene in the middle of the film where an old man tells Tom Cobb, the protagonist, that the dreamers who come to share dreams - come to wake up to their reality, for them the dream is real, and the reality a dream and who is he to say which is which, and does he even know any-more?
Black Swan - is a film told in the pov of a ballerina who has lost her grasp on reality. We the audience do not know what is real and what is not. Nor does the ballerina, who in her head is literally becoming the White and Black Swans in Swan Lake. It's a psychological horror tale of losing grasp with reality.
The Fighter - is a film about two brothers, one who is so swallowed in crack addiction that he too loses his grasp on reality. And his mother, the enabler, is in a dream-world as well. This is a more realistic take on the concept. Accepting Life as it is, as opposed to what you want it to be.
Toy Story 3 - also plays with reality. The toys fall under the spell of buying into another toy's concept (the big Teddy bear) of reality. And it takes Woody and his friends to break it and break free. This is admittedly a relatively minor point in the story.
True Grit - is about accepting things as they are. Gritty reality over romanticism. A common theme in the Coen Brothers films and the modern Western - which is the opposite of the classic Western which often romanticized the West. It too is more subtle.
In Nolan's films - the protagonist often uses dreams and illusions to control how others view reality. Much as filmmaker's do - the filmmaker shows us his dream. We the audience are swallowed inside it, watching the dream inside the filmmaker's head. Nolan's dreams tend to be nightmares, dark landscapes, with shadowy women, and violent men, with dark ambiguous pasts and moral compasses. Vigilante heros traversing a noir landscape. Often at the core of each film is a female character who is trying to save the hero from himself, and one that he has either killed or was indirectly responsible for her death - and haunts him - a semi-vengeful ghost of his own subconscious, or it is a relative of her's that is. We see this in his first film, which at times it feels like he keeps remaking just with different narrative structures and worlds - a recurring dream, with a new setting, new actor, and but the core tale similar. In Memento - the protagonist suffers from short term memory disorder, he can't remember what just happened. So we watch his story backwards, as he puzzles together what he did and why - at the end we realize he lost someone and the memory loss is the result of the guilt associated with it - the pain. (It's been a long time since I've seen Memento - so my memory of it is admittedly fuzzy, but it does haunt me.) Later in Batman Begins - Bruce Wayne is haunted by memories of a bat cave combined with his parents violent murder. The two combined - leave him with a fear of bats and falling - which he confronts and turns to his advantage - literally becoming what he fears. Dreams are used through-out to show the character's struggles with his own desires for vengeance and violence, leading to his creation of the vigilante the Dark Knight, and his nemesis - a shadowy reflection of himself. In The PRestige - the story is about two warring magicians who play with reality - an initial act goes awry and a woman drowns. So they both create a new illusion - that is about the disappearing and reappearing man. So real - that no one can figure out the trick. But it is a twisted trick, as are the magicians who do increasingly twisted and sadistic things to outwit their audience and one-up each other - creating a puzzle box - so it is no longer clear to either what is real. Then - The Dark Knight - where Batman faces the results of his image, it is no longer who he is, who the real Bruce Wayne is - the Batman or the rich playboy. Losing the girl - results in a good man that Bruce Wayne admired losing his sanity and becoming literally half and half. The Dark Knight much like Memento, The PRestige and now Inception is about the loss of sanity, losing oneself to one's own nightmare and dreams. The Joker - no longer has an identity outside of the Joker, he has lost himself to his own nightmares and is taking everyone else along for the ride.
I can't imagine Nolan's films being everyone's cup of tea. He's a dark film-maker, who likes to explore the same theme from multiple angles. Inception is not as good a film as The Prestige and Dark Knight are, in my opinion, it tends to have repetitive chase scenes, and the layered dreams are a bit confusing and more action packed than necessary. Prestige was a quieter and more thoughtful film as was Memento - two films that the Academy overlooked and weren't nominated. Much like Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock - the Academy often nominates the wrong films. Scorsese should have won for Taxi Driver as opposed to The Departed ( a derivative and rather dull movie in comparison), just as Nolan should have been nominated for either Memento or The Prestige - which were less successful films but more interesting overall.
That said, this is a much better film than I was lead to believe. The view of women didn't bug me in the same way it did in The Social Network - mostly because a)it works here and is expected, nor is it negative necessarily - we have the great Ellen Page in the middle evening things out, b) the film is noir and I sort of expect it - since noir film is typically a male centric genre. I had the same take by the way on The Black Swan - the ballerina hated herself and how women were viewed made sense based on the genre - horror/noir, the art-form (one of the most sexist out there and insanely painful for women), and the lead character's mental state. The narrative structure was superior in some respects to The Social Network and far more complex. Not to mention less confusing. Where the Social Network felt a bit "too" clever, wink/wink, nudge/nudge, Inception felt organic and delicate. Also Nolan did follow through on it. Even if his dreams are hardly entertaining.
Is this the best dream-centric film I've seen? Hardly. I haven't seen Solaris - which I've heard may well be the best of the bunch - the foreign version not the remake. But Paperhouse - where we go inside a girl's dreams during her sickness and she is inside a paper house that she drew is perhaps amongst the best I've seen and the most horrifying. There's also the insanely imaginative Mirror-Mask by Neil Gaiman, Coraline by Gaiman, and LAbrynthe by Jim Hensen Company. Not to mention the cheesy Dennis Quaid flick Dreamscape from the 1980s. Not to mention Total Recall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And those are just the live action ones - I left out the brilliant film Paprika about technology that allows people to record and watch their dreams and how it goes astray. But Inception may well be the most interesting when it comes to narrative structure and psychological construct - and innovative. The dreams aren't interesting as they are in these other films, in fact they may not feel like dreams at all to the audience, but rather a long extended action film or heist film inside the mind. But the idea that someone could create their structure or an architect the world of dreams, and what dreams are and what reality is - is interesting to me. I found the ideas he came up with on the science-fiction level fascinating - they gave me ideas, particularly one regarding another book I keep playing around with in my head. Nolan, see, wasn't interested in depicting dreams being different than reality, but instead - what if we can't tell the difference? And what if someone invades them? And what if someone can build a maze and insert that inside our dreams? The dream world that Tom Cobb plays in is no different than the real world he inhabits to the degree that his ability to tell the difference is becoming increasingly difficult. Add to this what if we can insert an idea inside someone else's head? A deadly idea at that - an idea that their dream is real? And what if they or we get so lost in our dream that it lasts forever? That time in the dream-world is different than what time is in the real one? Those are interesting ideas. Granted not perfectly executed. But not horribly either.
It's late and I'm probably rambling. Don't know why you put up with me. ;-) What I want to end with...is I think, and this is hard to put into words particularly at one am in the morning - but
how we view film or art and whether we love it, hate it, or are indifferent, has a lot to do with how we choose to view it or what we focus on while viewing it. If for instance you focused on what the dreams were - these violent chase scenes and shoot-them ups, you were most likely bored and did not think much of the film. On the other hand, if you focused on the narrative structure, the puzzle box aspect, and theme regarding reality and dreams, and what inception is - you may have been fascinated and enthralled. It's all in what you the viewer choose to bring to the proceedings that makes all the difference, and it is why one person will hate a film and another will love it so much they nominate it for an Academy Award. It's what makes life interesting, I think, and people unpredictable and undefinable - that variation in taste which can change on a dime, based purely on what we are thinking or what interests us at the time we perceive the art. How we perceive our reality is up to us, to an extent, but as Nolan shows in his films - not always, outside forces can manipulate how we perceive reality as well - not always with our knowledge.
[Not edited, because I have to go to bed now!]
Christopher Nolan film Inception - which continues to explore a topic near and dear to Mr. Nolan's heart -"what is real" and how we construct or handle reality inside our heads, from a purely noir perspective. Fascinating film - which I enjoyed far more than my flist apparently did. Two people (and friends that I've met in person and like a great deal -but from vastly different backgrounds and worlds) on my flist who seldom agree, both disliked this film somewhat intensely.
But, I admittedly like Christopher Nolan's films - of which I've seen nearly all of. And enjoy the noir genre more than most. All of Nolan's films take place in neo-noir or noir, from Memento to well Inception. Or rather all the one's I've seen have. They are also all psychological thrillers, often use the same actors repeatedly (much like Scorseses, Hitchcock and Lynch do), have complex narrative or puzzle-box structures, and are about reality or how we view reality. Also without exception - they are all extremely violent in places, have lots of action and chase scenes, and deal with the death of a woman or women that the lead character feels extraordinarily guilty for and is directly responsible. Making me wonder about Mr. Nolan. Although this may well be the Jungian view of the male handling his anima. Hitchock had similar issues. As does, for that matter, Mr. Whedon with his waif-like women who get raped repeatedly before fighting off the bad men and saving the day. If you analyze and critique film enough - you begin to well, wish you hadn't or feel very sorry for these guys' wives. Although I'm beginning to think some of this is ingrained in our culture to such an extent, that our films are projecting it. Film, books, tv shows, music, and art in general is after all just a projection of what our culture is, who we are, how we think as well as a commentary of it. It's a reflection in the mirror, a dream if you will. If we hate it - it's not the film or art that must be challenged, but rather why that film or art came into being - what is it in our culture, in ourselves that projects this? If the most successful films are violent ones? Why is that? Why is the collective subconscious telling these tales over and over again? What is the problem we want to solve?
What I like about Nolan's films is the puzzle box aspect, but also the layers. The flaw in his work, which is the same one that is unfortunately at the heart of every single one of the films I've seen to date, including the one's nominated for an Oscar and why I've grown weary of Whedon's work - is that the story at the core of that elaborate puzzle-box is pretty standard and not all that interesting. The dreams that he examines aren't well as interesting as the narrative and architecture of the dreams. It's similar to my complaint regarding Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton - whose narrative structure and architecture of their worlds are more fascinating than well the actual story or plot. The Social Network had the same problem - the intricately layered narrative structure blew me away, it too was a puzzle-box narrative (although Inception's was more interesting to me, not misogynistic, and far less sexist - and with more likable characters not to mention a far more interesting plot but that's just me), but lacked much at the center. It was of course about what was real and not real as well.
In fact - that seems to be a trend with the films nominated for Oscar this year or the one's I've seen to date at any rate. The concept of reality.
Inception - planting an idea in someone's head, the scariest idea of course is planting the concept that the dream is real but your reality is false. There's a great scene in the middle of the film where an old man tells Tom Cobb, the protagonist, that the dreamers who come to share dreams - come to wake up to their reality, for them the dream is real, and the reality a dream and who is he to say which is which, and does he even know any-more?
Black Swan - is a film told in the pov of a ballerina who has lost her grasp on reality. We the audience do not know what is real and what is not. Nor does the ballerina, who in her head is literally becoming the White and Black Swans in Swan Lake. It's a psychological horror tale of losing grasp with reality.
The Fighter - is a film about two brothers, one who is so swallowed in crack addiction that he too loses his grasp on reality. And his mother, the enabler, is in a dream-world as well. This is a more realistic take on the concept. Accepting Life as it is, as opposed to what you want it to be.
Toy Story 3 - also plays with reality. The toys fall under the spell of buying into another toy's concept (the big Teddy bear) of reality. And it takes Woody and his friends to break it and break free. This is admittedly a relatively minor point in the story.
True Grit - is about accepting things as they are. Gritty reality over romanticism. A common theme in the Coen Brothers films and the modern Western - which is the opposite of the classic Western which often romanticized the West. It too is more subtle.
In Nolan's films - the protagonist often uses dreams and illusions to control how others view reality. Much as filmmaker's do - the filmmaker shows us his dream. We the audience are swallowed inside it, watching the dream inside the filmmaker's head. Nolan's dreams tend to be nightmares, dark landscapes, with shadowy women, and violent men, with dark ambiguous pasts and moral compasses. Vigilante heros traversing a noir landscape. Often at the core of each film is a female character who is trying to save the hero from himself, and one that he has either killed or was indirectly responsible for her death - and haunts him - a semi-vengeful ghost of his own subconscious, or it is a relative of her's that is. We see this in his first film, which at times it feels like he keeps remaking just with different narrative structures and worlds - a recurring dream, with a new setting, new actor, and but the core tale similar. In Memento - the protagonist suffers from short term memory disorder, he can't remember what just happened. So we watch his story backwards, as he puzzles together what he did and why - at the end we realize he lost someone and the memory loss is the result of the guilt associated with it - the pain. (It's been a long time since I've seen Memento - so my memory of it is admittedly fuzzy, but it does haunt me.) Later in Batman Begins - Bruce Wayne is haunted by memories of a bat cave combined with his parents violent murder. The two combined - leave him with a fear of bats and falling - which he confronts and turns to his advantage - literally becoming what he fears. Dreams are used through-out to show the character's struggles with his own desires for vengeance and violence, leading to his creation of the vigilante the Dark Knight, and his nemesis - a shadowy reflection of himself. In The PRestige - the story is about two warring magicians who play with reality - an initial act goes awry and a woman drowns. So they both create a new illusion - that is about the disappearing and reappearing man. So real - that no one can figure out the trick. But it is a twisted trick, as are the magicians who do increasingly twisted and sadistic things to outwit their audience and one-up each other - creating a puzzle box - so it is no longer clear to either what is real. Then - The Dark Knight - where Batman faces the results of his image, it is no longer who he is, who the real Bruce Wayne is - the Batman or the rich playboy. Losing the girl - results in a good man that Bruce Wayne admired losing his sanity and becoming literally half and half. The Dark Knight much like Memento, The PRestige and now Inception is about the loss of sanity, losing oneself to one's own nightmare and dreams. The Joker - no longer has an identity outside of the Joker, he has lost himself to his own nightmares and is taking everyone else along for the ride.
I can't imagine Nolan's films being everyone's cup of tea. He's a dark film-maker, who likes to explore the same theme from multiple angles. Inception is not as good a film as The Prestige and Dark Knight are, in my opinion, it tends to have repetitive chase scenes, and the layered dreams are a bit confusing and more action packed than necessary. Prestige was a quieter and more thoughtful film as was Memento - two films that the Academy overlooked and weren't nominated. Much like Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock - the Academy often nominates the wrong films. Scorsese should have won for Taxi Driver as opposed to The Departed ( a derivative and rather dull movie in comparison), just as Nolan should have been nominated for either Memento or The Prestige - which were less successful films but more interesting overall.
That said, this is a much better film than I was lead to believe. The view of women didn't bug me in the same way it did in The Social Network - mostly because a)it works here and is expected, nor is it negative necessarily - we have the great Ellen Page in the middle evening things out, b) the film is noir and I sort of expect it - since noir film is typically a male centric genre. I had the same take by the way on The Black Swan - the ballerina hated herself and how women were viewed made sense based on the genre - horror/noir, the art-form (one of the most sexist out there and insanely painful for women), and the lead character's mental state. The narrative structure was superior in some respects to The Social Network and far more complex. Not to mention less confusing. Where the Social Network felt a bit "too" clever, wink/wink, nudge/nudge, Inception felt organic and delicate. Also Nolan did follow through on it. Even if his dreams are hardly entertaining.
Is this the best dream-centric film I've seen? Hardly. I haven't seen Solaris - which I've heard may well be the best of the bunch - the foreign version not the remake. But Paperhouse - where we go inside a girl's dreams during her sickness and she is inside a paper house that she drew is perhaps amongst the best I've seen and the most horrifying. There's also the insanely imaginative Mirror-Mask by Neil Gaiman, Coraline by Gaiman, and LAbrynthe by Jim Hensen Company. Not to mention the cheesy Dennis Quaid flick Dreamscape from the 1980s. Not to mention Total Recall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And those are just the live action ones - I left out the brilliant film Paprika about technology that allows people to record and watch their dreams and how it goes astray. But Inception may well be the most interesting when it comes to narrative structure and psychological construct - and innovative. The dreams aren't interesting as they are in these other films, in fact they may not feel like dreams at all to the audience, but rather a long extended action film or heist film inside the mind. But the idea that someone could create their structure or an architect the world of dreams, and what dreams are and what reality is - is interesting to me. I found the ideas he came up with on the science-fiction level fascinating - they gave me ideas, particularly one regarding another book I keep playing around with in my head. Nolan, see, wasn't interested in depicting dreams being different than reality, but instead - what if we can't tell the difference? And what if someone invades them? And what if someone can build a maze and insert that inside our dreams? The dream world that Tom Cobb plays in is no different than the real world he inhabits to the degree that his ability to tell the difference is becoming increasingly difficult. Add to this what if we can insert an idea inside someone else's head? A deadly idea at that - an idea that their dream is real? And what if they or we get so lost in our dream that it lasts forever? That time in the dream-world is different than what time is in the real one? Those are interesting ideas. Granted not perfectly executed. But not horribly either.
It's late and I'm probably rambling. Don't know why you put up with me. ;-) What I want to end with...is I think, and this is hard to put into words particularly at one am in the morning - but
how we view film or art and whether we love it, hate it, or are indifferent, has a lot to do with how we choose to view it or what we focus on while viewing it. If for instance you focused on what the dreams were - these violent chase scenes and shoot-them ups, you were most likely bored and did not think much of the film. On the other hand, if you focused on the narrative structure, the puzzle box aspect, and theme regarding reality and dreams, and what inception is - you may have been fascinated and enthralled. It's all in what you the viewer choose to bring to the proceedings that makes all the difference, and it is why one person will hate a film and another will love it so much they nominate it for an Academy Award. It's what makes life interesting, I think, and people unpredictable and undefinable - that variation in taste which can change on a dime, based purely on what we are thinking or what interests us at the time we perceive the art. How we perceive our reality is up to us, to an extent, but as Nolan shows in his films - not always, outside forces can manipulate how we perceive reality as well - not always with our knowledge.
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Date: 2011-02-27 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 11:13 pm (UTC)