BrokenProjector.com

The Things Made of Dreams

This review appears originally here.

A few minutes into the film, Cobb the world’s best Extractor travels to Mombasa to propose a job to Eames the Forger. He puts forward the mythical concept of ‘Inception’, long understood among Dream explorers to be an impossible task.

“It’s perfectly possible” Eames says, “Just bloody difficult”

These are the exact same words that took shape inside director Christopher Nolan’s mind back in 2002 when he first proposed the film to Warner Brothers, fresh off the making of his third film ‘Insomnia’. It took him eight years and two mega-budget Batman films to work himself up to being capable enough to make a film of this scale.

Back when the film was first announced, Nolan’s only revelation of the film’s plot was “A contemporary sci-fi actioner, set within the architecture of the mind”. As cryptic as the synopsis may sound, it is exactly what the film turned out to be. Nolan takes us back to the late nineties and the then trend of “plug-in” science fiction. Kids were watching “Super Human Samurai Cyber Squad” and “The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest” where characters would plug themselves up into computers and travel into virtual worlds. Then at the fag end of the decade we had a film that defied gravity in the coolest ways possible.

The Matrix made people understand the heights of hyper-reality that cinema can climb upto and opened up new possibilities. With the careful combination of technological advancements, age-old spiritual philosophy and the very basic study of human emotion, the film acquired a depth that was previously unseen in motion picture history. People sat around dinner tables arguing about the various interpretations of the film. After a certain period of time, it transcended being just a film and reached the dizzying heights of mythology. Cinema-goers never questioned their reality before.

Inception picks up from the benchmark set up by The Matrix films and builds up a few levels of its own. This time it seems the levels go below.

“The only way forwards is downwards” Cobb the Extractor remarks brilliantly in the middle of the film.

For the film, Nolan draws inspiration from the various arts. Architecture is a major part of the film. We see “Dream Architects” building environments for the others to “Populate” with their subconscious. There is a lot of reference to Paradoxical Architecture- everything from buildings that reach into the skies to “the Penrose Steps” to interiors that keep still while gravity gives way.

The music in the film also follows the breath-taking visuals. Hans Zimmer’s extraordinary score playfully borders on the Shepard scale, the ever-climbing scale that is recognized, to those who care to find it as the greatest musical Paradox. Another great art from which the film draws its roots from is the art of Theft. All the major characters in the film are skilled thieves and the concept of “extracting” ideas from people’s minds is perhaps the ultimate theft possible.

A large part of the film is self-referencing in nature. Even the way Nolan constructs the film is very similar to the way his characters perform Inception. Nathan Crowley and Wally Pfister can be called as the “Architects” who build the environment in which Nolan the “Mark” lets his great sub-conscious “populate” the space. The fantastic ensemble cast are the “projections” and the viewers become the “tourists” who move through the film and watch Nolan “extract” his own idea much like Cillian Murphy’s character Robert Fischer in the film.

But watching a Nolan film never works without applying one or more Cognitive Biases. The film takes great pains in establishing certain “rules” and then the characters and especially Cobb, go great lengths to defy them. Perhaps on closer inspection, one can find several loop holes and wet areas where the story actually contradicts itself. This only means Nolan has pulled off the ultimate cinematic-paradox. A closed-loop of a film that seems to be climbing infinitely but remains firmly in place and stable much like the Penrose steps or the Shepard scale.

The story is also self-referencing in the fact that it echoes elements from Nolan’s previous films. The fact that DiCaprio’s character is named “Cobb”, the same name used by Alex Haw’s character in Nolan’s neo-noir debut “Following” and the fact that both men are skilled thieves who set up their victims through pure, cunning intellect is testament. But Inception’s Dom Cobb also shares the guilt and emotional unreliability of Memento’s Leonard Shelby. Both men are tortured by the loss of their wives and the guilt that they could not save them. They’re both unreliable narrators and at the back of their minds they feel that they’ve played a part in the death of their wives.

The film’s narrative structure also explored a similar pattern that Nolan presented in “The Prestige”, a film which explored three levels of narrative- the first the objective layer of the film itself, the second being Alfred Borden reading Robert Angier’s diary and the third being Angier reading Borden’s diary within it. In a similar fashion, Inception takes place in the film’s narrative where the characters first enter Yusuf’s dream within which they enter Arthur’s dream in which they enter Eames’s dream and so on- laying the foundations for a fantastic paradoxical layer-cake.

As beautifully put in ‘The Prestige’, the audience want to be tricked and a large part of this involves an initiative from the audience themselves to put on a curtain of cognitive bias. Questions like “how does Leonard Shelby know he can’t make new memories?” or “why do everyone fall into Cobb’s limbo if they die in someone else’s shared dream?” do the film no good and Nolan sets up the audience to ignore them almost sub-consciously. This is another inception.

The big question now is “what does this mean for cinema?” Nolan has transcended the need to classify films into recognizable “genres” and set up a new ground for progressive, thought-inspired, debate-inducing cinema that simultaneously weaves through the fabrics of various arts. Early in the film, the Cobb character explains to his new protégé that in dreams, our brain “creates and perceives simultaneously”. Nolan takes that psychology class line and makes it his greatest gift to cinema- a film where the audience think they’ve perceived everything the first time around and then realize they can create more possible interpretations over the second-viewing.

And as I sat in the PVR Saket Audi 1 watching the last shot of Inception for the second consecutive midnight show, the audience held their breath. Cobb’s little totem kept spinning unnaturally and then started loosing its balance but seemed to recover itself and then when it started to feel like it might finally topple, Nolan cuts to black and the audience let out a loud, collective “Oh!”