MADness—the Blog

I sat next to a couple, both probably in their young twenties.  Apparently he’d seen the film before, and she had not.  Early on I heard him say, “See that?  They just cut from a dream to reality.”  A minute or two later he was nearly out of seat, pointing to the screen.  “No, that’s reality.  The other one was a dream too.”  He slumped back in his seat.  “It’s so confusing.”

He was right about the last part.  It would take repeated viewings, probably more than two, to sort out the levels of dreams in Christopher Nolan’s Inception.  Nolan has a talent for visuals, a thirst for action, and a taste for puzzles, but he seems to lack the knack for putting together a story in a coherent narrative.  It may be the Nolan has it all worked out, the thousand pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit without a single hole in the picture, and after watching the whole thing twenty-four times, anyone can see it.  Though I doubt it.  After one time through, I’m left with a bunch of fragments and I’m not sure why I should care to watch again to find out if the fragments fit or not.  I don’t mind storytellers playing with structure—I’m a puzzle guy who likes that kind of stuff—but I like character too, and I need to feel some emotional resonance with who’s in the story especially if you’re asking me to do mental gymnastics to make sense of the narrative.

Inception appears to be a big hit with critics and at the box office.  It will probably be the summer’s biggest hit not a sequel.  I may be in the minority, and despite some brilliant effects and other imaginative touches, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.

Movies are dreamlike, dreams don’t always make sense, and I’ve seen enough Lynch and Kubrick to let a filmmaker take me to places where I’ll accept what I don’t fully comprehend.  But Nolan is operating on a different level.  He’s not offering anything profound.  He’s playing a trick called stump the audience.  You watch a scene, you think it’s reality, but it’s just a dream, or a dream within a dream.  It’s dreams all the way down.  And when he takes us back to reality in the end, all you can do is shrug.  Whatever you say, Christopher.