Neither Nor

I’m as big a stan for Inception as there is, so of course I came up with my own explanations for people’s complaints about the film (or I unintentionally found ways to rephrase other people’s defenses).  One of the bigger hang-ups seems to be that this film about dreams and the logic of dreams (hey, look who just realized that “dream logic” is an oxymoron) isn’t very dreamlike.  Of course, the easiest defense for that is to look at what the film is about.  It’s (among other things) the story of a successful con.  In order for any con to be successful, the mark has to believe the bill of goods he or she is being sold.  The mark is being asked to take a “leap of faith” (to steal a repeating verbal motif from the film), and cannot be allowed to doubt it while the con is on.  To that end, it only makes sense that Cobb and his team are going to create dreamscapes that are going to ring true to their mark; to indulge in the sort of visual flights of fancy that movie-goers expect from movies about dreams would break the spell and spoil the con.

Along those same lines (and a point that’s been brought up many times in discussing Inception), filmmaking is also a type of con.  The people making a film are tasked with creating a world that the viewing audience can accept as the real thing.  Any blatant derivation from reality, any false note, and the viewer is yanked right out of the movie world, and its falseness is laid bare.  However, if a filmmaker can provide just enough details to serve as a solid framework, then the viewer can fill in the assumed gaps and add the flesh and blood to that skeleton. A gun is fired; cut to a person falling backward with blood on their chest.  A person is talking on the phone; cut to another person on the phone, responding to the previous shot’s dialogue. When done right (and lord knows there are enough examples of films screwing this seemingly basic pooch), the viewer instinctively connect these moments, providing the bridging material that’s assumed but never explicitly provided.  It’s the same principle that powers the notion of the unseen scare being more powerful than what’s actually shown to the viewer, and it’s a principle that some directors use as a bit of misdirection (the only example coming to my mind is the climax of Silence of the Lambs, where an FBI raid of the killer’s supposed house is cross-cut with Agent Starling actually ringing the killer’s doorbell) (19 year old spoiler alert, FYI).

To the end of maintaining some sense of verisimilitude, Nolan keeps things very simple.  Aside from a few fantastical flourishes — during those scenes where Ariadne is learning the do’s and don’ts of dream architecture, and Mol & Dom’s sojourn in limbo — the only unrealistic filmic indulgence Nolan allows himself is slow-motion.  There are those moments where an event in Dream A causes an unnatural effect in Dream B, but those effects are rooted in real-world physics (assuming a hotel hallway can actually spin like a lock tumbler, of course); there’s a tangible quality to most of the FX on display.  That’s most apparent during the film’s introductory scene, with Saito’s dream home crumbling all around the dreamers before it finally succumbs to a flood. Even the “transformation” of Eames into Peter Browning is handled in a subtle, unspectacular way, with multiple reflections of Tom Hardy becoming those of Tom Berenger over the course of various cuts away from his “makeup” table, or a graceful pan where Berenger’s face disappears behind Cillian Murphy to emerge as Hardy’s on the other side.

There is no showy camera work or directorial flourishes on display; if anything, that’s what might be most distracting about the “dream world,” more than anything lacking in the fantastical visuals department.  Nolan employs nothing but simple basic cuts between each scene; no pan wipes or lap dissolves or fades to black, excepting the quick cut to a black screen at the film’s end.  There’s a sort of brute elegance in this technique that actually reinforces the film’s dream-like nature (“dream-like” in a mundane, non-cliche sense, anyway).  After all, whether it’s due to exposure to the rules and technical aspects of cinema infecting how dreams are realized or vice versa, dreams can be said to occur in a quick-cutting deceptively non-disjointed fashion.  Except the glue to connect seemingly disparate scenes in dreams is more fluid and all-encompassing and (of course) illogical outside of the dream world.  More information is assumed in dreams than in real life, which allows us to take in stride a dream that involves (for example) Mickey Mouse driving an oil tanker sideways down a childhood street.

But the way I see it, passive dreaming (the sort of Mickey Mouse stuff I just described) is a different animal than active dreaming (which is what I’m deciding to call the stuff Cobb Co. specialize in) (unless the movie actually uses this term).  In passive dreaming, the driver is the subconscious, letting shit happen as shit sees fit, real-world straight-line reasoning be damned.  In order for Cobb’s heists to work, he needs to put the mark into a fenced-in area and then hand-hold the mark to get to the desired prize; the straight line needs to exist.  At least, that’s the way Cobb does things. Given that control, or lack thereof — of Cobb’s circumstance when it comes to the aftermath of the Cobol job, of what his actions with Mol ultimately lead to, about the nature of dreaming itself — is one of the movie’s main hobby horses, it seems appropriately ironic that Nolan exercises the clinical control over his “dream” that Cobb fails to exhibit in his own.

PS - I’d imagine if the movie studios have their way & they sucker Nolan (or some other filmmaker) into creating a sequel, one way to potentially avoid rehashing the original would be to have a heist (or some excursion) happen in a system where control can’t be enforced, where the disorientation comes not from trying to understand the rules (& how to work around them when situations require), but in trying to deal with a seemingly rule-free environment.  Though that could lead to some hoary CGI-laden sub-Matrix hoonja doonja that’d make Revolutions look like Citizen Kane.  (Look at me dissuade myself from writing fanfic; I’m so proud.)