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“IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR HEAD WHEN ALL ABOUT YOU / ARE LOSING THEIRS AND BLAMING IT ON YOU . . .” Rudyard Kipling’s legendary line of poetry might serve as a description for the complex goings-on in this modern masterpiece by consummate craftsman and visionary artist Christopher Nolan. Courtesy: Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros.
CREDITS
Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures/Syncopy; Christopher Nolan, dir., scr.; Nolan, Emma Thomas, pro.; Hans Zimmer, mus.; Wally Pfister, cin.; Lee Smith, ed.; Guy Hendrix Dyas, prod. design.; Brad Ricker, Jason Knox-Johnston, art dir.; Jeffrey Kurland, costumes; Sam Page, digital set design; Chris Corbould, F/X; Pete Bebb/Double Negative, visual effects; 148 min.; Color; 2.35:1.
CAST
Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb); Marion Cotillard (Mal); Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur); Ellen Page (Ariadne); Tom Hardy (Eames); Ken Watanabe (Saito); Dileep Rao (Yusuf); Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer); Tom Berenger (Browning); Michael Caine (Miles); Pete Postlethwaite (Maurice Fischer); Lukas Haas (Nash); Tai-Li Lee (Tadashi).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
Take a leap of faith with me.
MAL TO COBB
BACKGROUND
Born in England, Christopher Nolan (1970–) grew up in London and Chicago. He stands at the forefront of contemporary filmmakers who have shown that the sort of extreme editing techniques, thematic tropes, and surreal imagery that once limited a film to the avant-garde cult cinema market could be used to make mainstream movies. In so doing, he and other proponents of the commercial-arthouse hybrid have dazzled critics with the intellectual complexity of their work. At the same time, their projects feature the expected components of action and violence that have lured an ever-enlarging audience for science fiction at its most satisfying.
A film buff in his youth (and manager of his university film society), Nolan draws from a wide array of influences—from The Twilight Zone (particularly episodes that deal with dreaming-as-reality) to high-tone novels such as Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (7 vols., 1913–1927) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)—to weave ideology and technique into a cinematic tapestry that is unquestionably his own. Though not precisely sci-fi, Memento (2000) dealt with the crucial issue of time as a subjective experience. Batman Begins (2005) removed most comic book conventions from the Dark Knight, providing a Hamlet-like youth in search of truth about the world and himself, only to discover the elusiveness of his goal. Nolan’s Inception, his masterpiece to date, is, in his words, “a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind.”
THE PLOT
A thief of the future, Dom Cobb makes a living by slipping into the minds of others for a hefty price. He steals ideas, which he turns over to the heads of major corporations who hire him to perform such mind-bending espionage. Cobb, though, cannot get beyond his near-total recall of a past life he shared with a deeply disturbed wife, Mal, and their two girls. Worse, Cobb holds himself responsible for Mal’s literal leap of faith into space, a vertigo-inspiring event that caused him to retreat ever deeper into dreams. Such constructions—part memory, part fantasy—allow Cobb to experience an idealized version of the reality that eluded him in actuality. Then comes his last, greatest assignment: enter a man’s mind not to take but to give. He is to plant an idea in his target’s brain at the bequest of Saito, a mystery man. Saito insists that, following such an inception, Cobb will be able to go home again, recapturing part of what he lost.
THE FILM
Nolan pitched Inception to Warner Bros. executives as a follow-up to Insomnia (2002). Eight years later, he completed the script to his satisfaction. Character names are all-important: the Fischer father-and-son duo, with their cold, calculated, clinical brand of intelligence, were modeled on chess champion Bobby Fischer. Ariadne, who provides the means for Cobb to escape the virtual labyrinth of another person’s mind (and his own alternative reality) references Ariadne of myth, who offers Theseus an escape from the original labyrinth. Mal means evil, often of a seductive nature.
Nolan has stated that he designed this film as a metaphor for the movies. Cobb is a director of dreams (and dreams within dreams); such legendary film historians as Parker Tyler (1904–1974) insisted that watching a movie is akin to dreaming in the daylight. Arthur is the producer, Ariadne handles production design, Eames is employed as the leading man, Saito runs the studio, and Fischer represents to Nolan the audience for their collaboration.
THEME
Inception deals with, among many other issues, the concept of a “lucid” dream: a person experiencing a dream becoming aware that it is indeed a dream, yet not necessarily able to end it or alter events that are in the process of occurring (or seeming to occur) in the dream. The stealing—or, in some cases, sharing—of dreams can be traced back in the popular arts at least to the first great psychological horror movie, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), then through the aforementioned Twilight Zone to the seminal Star Trek two-part episode “The Menagerie.”
TRIVIA
Issues of “context” and “framing,” as defined in Don’t Think of an Elephant! (2004) by George Lakoff, are included in the complex mix of ideas present here. Simply, the concept holds that if someone orders a person not to think about something, that is the only thing the listener can then think about.