Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

[tenia]

Though I believe he is out of the dream, as knives wrote : it depends what you want to believe.
I believe he is out of the dream because otherwise, all what preceded seems pointless, for instance.

[Roger Ryan]

...I believe he is out of the dream because otherwise, all what preceded seems pointless, for instance.

"Pointless" as in what our reality is already? Cobb wants to believe that there is something true and worthwhile beyond his own perception of what is real and what isn't. The fact that he even spins the totem in the final scene indicates that he doesn't trust his senses; that he doesn't bother to wait to see the results indicates that he has decided to believe in the reality of the moment. The audience may want a definitive answer (which is why there were several viewers at the screening I attended who groaned when the film cut-to-black), but none of us are able to step far enough out of our heads to understand a "reality" beyond our own perception of it. If the viewer believes Nolan is giving a nod to "mirror structuralism" (and I believe there is enough examples of this in the film to say he is), then the real question is why does the audience desire clearly fictional characters to exist outside the world of the movie? Not only is Cobb's world not real, but neither is Cobb.

[FerdinandGriffon]

the real question is why does the audience desire clearly fictional characters to exist outside the world of the movie? Not only is Cobb's world not real, but neither is Cobb.

Almost choked on my coffee. An extremely good question!

[Constable]

It's the 10th anniversary of Inception and I'm wondering, with 10 years' worth of time, how do folks around here feel about the film?

I haven't seen it since it came out and maybe I should, but I've been surprised by how famous the film became. It seems to have become, and I hate snobbery but, one of those brofilms. Like Fight Club and the new Blade Runner. Which doesn't mean that it isn't also a great film.

So, how do you regard it today?

[domino harvey]

I revisited it earlier this year and my guess a few pages back that it would eventually shake out to be a masterpiece proved true. I think it’s a rare blockbuster with lasting cultural import, real filmic bonafides, and a twisty narrative imbued with vibrant imagination. It will probably survive us all

[Nasir007]

I find it to be an entirely disposable and pointless film with extraordinarily poor construction and little imagination. I still have the distinct memory of literally the entire first half being a filmed manual - as it essentially non-stop espoused rules and instructions of the concept. I just personally find that extremely artificial. I find that if it takes this long to explain your premise, then it is a ridiculous premise not worth pursuing.

In terms of reputation, instead of brofilm I would use the term fanboy film which gets to the same concept - essentially films that were revered by IMDB. IMDB is completely impotent now in driving movie preferences and discussion but at its heyday, when it had some of the most active discussion boards on the internet, I daresay they were enormously influential, the IMDB Top 100 was a very influential list and in real life I routinely came across people who used that as a measure of quality or recommendations and Inception and just Nolan in general were just huge with young film-goers. I think that definitely helped with the fame and ubiquity of this film for a certain amount of time.

IMDB is largely powerless today in terms of driving film conversation. Which leads me to a tangential question - why on earth would anyone have so much influence and power to drive conversation voluntarily give it up? I know they had troll issues but they self-deleted their boards. Be that as it may, I definitely believe that after the demise of those boards, the influence of IMDB was curtailed and in general the fanboy film cult dissipated. (It has rared its ugly head again though mostly around franchises - Marvel and DC and GOT and the like.)

So in the final estimate, maybe the film has faded a little in public consciousness since its heyday.

[feihong]

I think I mostly agree with Nasir007. I didn't like the movie when I first saw it. The dreams portrayed in the film seemed totally alien from my own vivid experiences, but that's hardly the only thing alien about the movie. The plot is so demanding and tight it deprives me of any entree through which to enjoy the film. The characters are inadequate sketches subservient to the interminable details of the heist and its dream levels. I found very little to relate to on a human level; no motivations for these characters really seemed to track for very far. I thought Marion Cotillard gave one of the lesser imitations of a human I'd seen on screen, and even though DiCaprio is compulsively human-seeming in a lot of bad movies, the script did him no exceptional favors in that regard. The Cobb character going level upon level deep into dream to connect with his wife reminds me of David Thomson's comment on Solaris, noting that Kelvin traveling to the planet in his rocket was "a long way to go to for a story about a failed marriage and enough of a gimmick to evade any adequate study of how love failed."

None of those impressions changed upon later viewing. I found it once again tediously complex, with very little human interest, and little to do with dreams. Fight Club is an interesting "bro"-ey comparison, but I think in terms of placing the film in the context of its supposed cultural relevance, Sneakers is more apt to my measure. That was a stylish heist movie with trite character relationships, about computer hacking––which was at the time not yet even on the fringe of the average filmgoer's consciousness. Hacking has become ubiquitous, but Sneakers is no better or more important a movie for it. There may come a time soon when expert thieves are delving into the dreams of Jeff Bezos to unlock the key to Amazon and pry away control, but I don't think Inception will be made better by having identified that future threat. Neither film marks any advance for motion pictures in terms of style. The style of Inception is the style of every Chris Nolan film--we are close to the characters with the camera, but so far away from them at the same time. Always someone is explaining a puzzle to us, then explaining how they'll solve it, and then they're explaining how they've solved it after they've done so. The Nolan movies seem on the whole to be the kind of films the characters in Primer might appreciate and even go on to make. It's an evocation of a gray world in which human wants and needs are pushed far into the background, the better to study the technical details of construction. The comparisons from posts years ago with World on a Wire illuminates a lot of what Nolan is chronically lacking; the Fassbinder film––not even nearly one of his best––still has a clearer sense of humanity lost and found, and maybe lost again. It helps me to realize that Nolan has no interest in the humans he puts through his dramas. They are sales agents, lifting the hood of the car and telling you about the engine features, then taking you for a test drive on a controlled course, and that's the story structure of Inception. When Cotillard shows up, it's as if the sales agent's wife stormed into the dealership with a list of grievances––which is partly why it's hard to look at Cobb with any sort of sense of authority or interest by the end of Inception. But ultimately, Nolan is transfixed by the engine on the car, and by the efficiency of the whole presentation of the dealership. The customer experience will be just what it is, and I don't think he notices or cares how it deviates from the image of the whole, which remains in his mind. He seems to me a filmmaker who has not really grown beyond the era of The Dark Knight and The Prestige. I've said this on a page about The Dark Knight recently, but it is strange to me that Nolan has so purposefully staked out storytelling terrain on the edge of the irrational, when he is perhaps the filmmaker least apt to draw invention or meaning out of that subject matter. The experience of this film is so divorced from the feeling of the uncanny I experience in my own dreams. One could say that the film is really a complex heist movie, so I should cut the dreams some slack; but the dreams––what they hold and what they reveal––are still the subject of the film. If they feel wrong, it's still a problem; and they feel really wrong. I would have been a little happier, I think, if a filmmaker more in touch with visualizing the irrational had been in charge of this movie; a Terry Gilliam, perhaps (I mean, if it had to be him), or, better yet, Ildiko Enyedi, or Vera Chitylova. Someone who understands that dreams aren't a trap for bank account PIN numbers and trauma, but a revelation of deeply-seated human desires; desires which may chafe against the person we believe we might be. I could see a great movie on this subject by one of those filmmakers. But as it is? This movie sucks.

[therewillbeblus]

One of Nolan's greatest strengths (or weaknesses, depending on the viewer) is that he absolutely acknowledges the artificial nature of filmmaking in his movies and embraces the possibilities of the medium to elicit genuine emotion. Many of his detractors cannot overcome the "gimmicks" he uses, and that's fine, but he is not only aware of them but sees them as tools to draw out authentic reactions from the audience. That's what films do inherently, he just goes for broke. Part of the allure is that it's a blockbuster with intelligence and sentiment, flooding us with pure imagination and spectacle, so it's pulling at our cognitive and emotional strings, as well as physiological, all at once. It's not my favorite movie, or even close to it, but if an alien came to Earth and wanted to know what was so special about movies as a creative outlet, I'd probably throw on Inception.

[Finch]

This is the film that finally made me gave up on Christopher Nolan for good (after disliking Memento, Insomnia, all three Batmans and The Prestige). Even accepting the premise that dreams can be or are like this at face value, this is, ten or however many years on, still the most tedious, unimaginative film about dreams I've had the misfortune to watch. Ellen Page is one of the finest actresses around and this film turns her into a walking video game tutorial. The action is still poorly choreographed if you don't count the admittedly impressive non-gravity sequence. I've never watched another Nolan film, old and new alike, since, and I don't feel like I've been poorer for it.

[therewillbeblus]

When I hear people refer to this film as "unimaginative" it sounds like someone is informing me that pasta is a fruit. This work is, in its essence, one's wild imagination externalized onto celluloid, but these opinions really just highlight how divisive Nolan is- you're either on his wavelength or not and this film will probably not be enough to change that attitude

[Nasir007]

I think I mostly agree with Nasir007. I didn't like the movie when I first saw it. The dreams portrayed in the film seemed totally alien from my own vivid experiences, but that's hardly the only thing alien about the movie. The plot is so demanding and tight it deprives me of any entree through which to enjoy the film. The characters are inadequate sketches subservient to the interminable details of the heist and its dream levels. I found very little to relate to on a human level; no motivations for these characters really seemed to track for very far. I thought Marion Cotillard gave one of the lesser imitations of a human I'd seen on screen, and even though DiCaprio is compulsively human-seeming in a lot of bad movies, the script did him no exceptional favors in that regard. The Cobb character going level upon level deep into dream to connect with his wife reminds me of David Thomson's comment on Solaris, noting that Kelvin traveling to the planet in his rocket was "a long way to go to for a story about a failed marriage and enough of a gimmick to evade any adequate study of how love failed."

None of those impressions changed upon later viewing. I found it once again tediously complex, with very little human interest, and little to do with dreams. Fight Club is an interesting "bro"-ey comparison, but I think in terms of placing the film in the context of its supposed cultural relevance, Sneakers is more apt to my measure. That was a stylish heist movie with trite character relationships, about computer hacking––which was at the time not yet even on the fringe of the average filmgoer's consciousness. Hacking has become ubiquitous, but Sneakers is no better or more important a movie for it. There may come a time soon when expert thieves are delving into the dreams of Jeff Bezos to unlock the key to Amazon and pry away control, but I don't think Inception will be made better by having identified that future threat. Neither film marks any advance for motion pictures in terms of style. The style of Inception is the style of every Chris Nolan film--we are close to the characters with the camera, but so far away from them at the same time. Always someone is explaining a puzzle to us, then explaining how they'll solve it, and then they're explaining how they've solved it after they've done so. The Nolan movies seem on the whole to be the kind of films the characters in Primer might appreciate and even go on to make. It's an evocation of a gray world in which human wants and needs are pushed far into the background, the better to study the technical details of construction. The comparisons from posts years ago with World on a Wire illuminates a lot of what Nolan is chronically lacking; the Fassbinder film––not even nearly one of his best––still has a clearer sense of humanity lost and found, and maybe lost again. It helps me to realize that Nolan has no interest in the humans he puts through his dramas. They are sales agents, lifting the hood of the car and telling you about the engine features, then taking you for a test drive on a controlled course, and that's the story structure of Inception. When Cotillard shows up, it's as if the sales agent's wife stormed into the dealership with a list of grievances––which is partly why it's hard to look at Cobb with any sort of sense of authority or interest by the end of Inception. But ultimately, Nolan is transfixed by the engine on the car, and by the efficiency of the whole presentation of the dealership. The customer experience will be just what it is, and I don't think he notices or cares how it deviates from the image of the whole, which remains in his mind. He seems to me a filmmaker who has not really grown beyond the era of The Dark Knight and The Prestige. I've said this on a page about The Dark Knight recently, but it is strange to me that Nolan has so purposefully staked out storytelling terrain on the edge of the irrational, when he is perhaps the filmmaker least apt to draw invention or meaning out of that subject matter. The experience of this film is so divorced from the feeling of the uncanny I experience in my own dreams. One could say that the film is really a complex heist movie, so I should cut the dreams some slack; but the dreams––what they hold and what they reveal––are still the subject of the film. If they feel wrong, it's still a problem; and they feel really wrong. I would have been a little happier, I think, if a filmmaker more in touch with visualizing the irrational had been in charge of this movie; a Terry Gilliam, perhaps (I mean, if it had to be him), or, better yet, Ildiko Enyedi, or Vera Chitylova. Someone who understands that dreams aren't a trap for bank account PIN numbers and trauma, but a revelation of deeply-seated human desires; desires which may chafe against the person we believe we might be. I could see a great movie on this subject by one of those filmmakers. But as it is? This movie sucks.

This is the perfect encapsulation of my own feelings regrading Inception and Nolan in general. These dreams are corporate videos. Everyone in business suits in concrete buildings or what have you. Even my 2 second dream while dosing off in a boring work meeting would be more lurid, more perverse, more messy.

Where is the humanity in all this? Characters in Nolan films are automatons. What are their desires, their dreams, their hopes, what makes them tick? Probably java code. The most reductive articulation of Nolan's worldview - I think one of the characters' inner most desire is in a safe. Jesus Christ how painfully literal that is. Dreams are Finnegans Wake. Not a mid-tier sexless Bond film.

And I will now talk about the one formal signature that Nolan truly has (besides establishing shots) that I absolutely loathe - cross-cutting.

I don't remember the extent of cross-cutting in TDK but from this film onwards, all his films are just cut to ribbons with an ear splitting Zimmer drone laid on top.

The extent to which Nolan relies on cross-cutting is insane. It drove me to distraction for instance in Dunkirk. It shows his fundamental paucity as a filmmaker. He cannot for his life construct a scene that has internal tension and stakes by itself. He only derives suspense or tension by cross cutting. And that's a huge weakness. A great filmmaker can create tension in a single shot, forget even a scene.

But just in general I dislike overused cross cutting but the kind that Nolan uses makes his film nearly incoherent.

[Mr Sausage]

When I hear people refer to this film as "unimaginative" it sounds like someone is informing me that pasta is a fruit. This work is, in its essence, one's wild imagination externalized onto celluloid, but these opinions really just highlight how divisive Nolan is- you're either on his wavelength or not and this film will probably not be enough to change that attitude

Many of the negative attitudes seem freighted with preconceptions about dreams, none properly explained beyond a gesture at the remembered experience. Which is strange, because aside from the film not being about dreams but constructed realities (it's a VR movie), dreams by and large aren't terribly imaginative or interesting. How often does someone's description of their dream from the night before match the interest of your average book or movie, when it holds any interest at all? Mostly what you get is an incoherent jumble with plenty of emotional importance to the teller, you can sense that, or to yourself when you're telling it, but the rest is so shifting and motiveless it tends to fall through your fingers like sand even while being told.

Dreams are only interesting when they're given significance by a narrative--literary, filmic, psychoanalytic, whatever. And while they may be intense emotional experiences at the time, there isn't much of substance there, not like with art or frankly even hallucinations. I've heard enough people say they've seen the face of god in a film, a piece of music, or a drug trip. Mostly people relate their dreams as something curious, or vague justifications for narratives they've already formed about their choices.

So Inception failed to be as intense an experience as one of your dreams. But it's not one of your dreams; it's a film. You've looked at a painting of a chair and said it's not very nice to sit on.

[tenia]

Many of the negative attitudes seem freighted with preconceptions about dreams, none properly explained beyond a gesture at the remembered experience. So Inception failed to be as intense an experience as one of your dreams. But it's not one of your dreams; it's a film. You've looked at a painting of a chair and said it's not very nice to sit on.

I'm not sure. There have been many other elements that led to negative elements, and feihong and Nasir detailed them : most of the characters seem emotionless robots (which is damaging for a movie heavily relying on emotions), how this can prevent viewers to get attached to what's happening to them and yields instead a too-clinical-for-its-own-good atmosphere, and also about how it can be extremely tiresome to go and watch a movie that spent almost its entire marketing but also a good chunk of its runtime to throw what should be a stimulating high-concept to us only to have it taking us by the hand all the time and constantly explain it, to the point it even designed an entire character only to this purpose because I suppose you're too dumb for this movie (imagine Kubrick's 2001 written like this).

And this is going on for sooooooooo long. Satoshi Kon's Paprika, on an extremely similar base, packed much more in 90 min than Inception in 2h28. In some ways, it's as if Nolan wanted to write about wild dreams and mad love but doesn't know about to deal on-screen with the wildness and the madness (and possibly the love). You're then stuck with a corridor movie that doesn't leave any space for interpretation, and characters written in the stiffiest manner, despite the movie constantly trying to sell you the opposite. That's what Paprika succeeded but Inception didn't : Nolan uses the most rule-abounding fashion for something as open as this basis. It's a corridor game that keeps telling you it's using an open world engine... but still is a corridor game.

Once you've taken that out, a non-negligible of the movie falls apart because Inception tries so hard not to be just a heist movie : it builds a lot on characters, emotions, relationships, but you're then left with some kind of empty high concept movie that looks fun and entertaining in places, but is full of tunnels of dialogues, dumbing down of stuff you've already been explained or have already understood, and action scenes that aren't that well shot and edited (as often with Nolan).

All work and no fun make these movies duller than they should.

Maybe Inception would simply work better (for me at least) as a simple lean early Melville-like movie : take all the psychological "film noir" "femme fatale" stuff out, keeps it straight (circovonluted sci-fi like) heist movie and be done with it. And absolutely get rid of Ariadne.

[colinr0380]

I think that ten years on Inception is... [comment will be continued and eventually completed in the years 2030, 2100 and 2120]

[Mr Sausage]

I'm not sure. There have been many other elements that led to negative elements, and feihong and Nasir detailed them

Well obviously any criticism that doesn't make a comparison to the author's dreams is excluded from this. Like, I wasn't saying it's the secret content of every single criticism or something.

And yet...you have piled some preconceptions on the film that've led you astray. You say "It's a corridor game that keeps telling you it's using an open world engine... but still is a corridor game." But this is a film in which the central visual motif is: a maze. And here you are claiming it keeps telling us it's 'open world' when it pointedly claims the opposite. On a basic level you have not understood this film. Your criticism is objectively false--the film tells us no such thing. Not only is this is not an open, free-wheeling, anarchic film, it's a film that reminds you on several levels that it is closed and designed. The film is full of mazes, constructed realities, actors playing parts and working as designers, the language and grammar of heist movies--of movies themselves! Its most famous image is a city folding back on itself. Artifice, design, and control is a central theme and subject of the film. It no more pretends to be open than does The Game, a film it shares some preoccupations with, such as reflexivity. How you arrived at such a basic mistake is, I think, again, due to the ostensible subject matter: dreams. You brought some assumptions about dreams to the film and then confused those assumption with the intentions of the filmmakers. So you compared the film with one by Satoshi Kon, with which it shares very little, and not something more appropriate like a film by Fincher because you did assume Inception was about the nature of dreams as you as others see it and not the nature of constructed realities.

(Also, the video game language you're using is confusing and inappropriate for the subject. A film cannot be 'open world' in any sense that a video game can be because the viewer cannot control where they go or what they see. Mostly your use of the terms is confusing and I had to translate them into more appropriate terms in my head).

[tenia]

Maybe we all did the same "basic mistake", but I didn't so much compared Inception with Paprika because of this than because others did so before me and found food for thoughts in regards of Inception and Paprika's shared thematics and visuals.

I get your point about how Inception might actually be very "business-like", closed, designed, constructed, but it still felt to me that the movie was telling me it was more complex than this and more open to interpretations. Hence my use of the VG language : there are corridor-movies (maybe "on rails" would have been a better term) where "what you see is all there is" (like The Game indeed), in opposition to freer "Open World" movies where the viewer has space to wander in multiple interpretations and make his own mind (even if you, of course, don't control the movie).
I felt Inception was telling me "there's more to it than this", but was disappointed not to find where or what. Maybe this is, more than any other, my actual basic mistake.

This being written, not making this "basic mistake" won't change my issues with how the characters mostly feel like robots (though maybe your explanations about how they're all playing parts anyway might be an answer for that, but it'd still clash with the Mal-Cobb relationship that needs passion and deep emotions to work - see later) or how the movie's constant need to explain its every rule and mechanic can be perceived by the viewer as under-estimating its abilities to understand the movie by itself (which was my case, and felt very tiring and comtemptuous) (and I fear for Tenet in this regard, which isn't helped by its current marketing ploy - but I know, it's marketing), will it ?

For instance, take the core-relationship between Mal and Cobb, which is supposed to be film noir femme fatale passion stuff, but instead feel blank and generic and emotionless, which is perfectly summed up in this one : "Cobb's memories of his lost love and shattered family are the kind of stock images you find in a brand new wallet: pretty wife strolling a sunny beach; adorable kids frolicking in a backyard, hair backlit with a Miller Time glow. Even the "traumatic" stuff is familiar from daytime soap opera cliffhangers." This is the kind of things that felt, to me, as preventing me to engage with the movie on this level, and it felt as a level required to appreciate the movie.


I guess I should have stuck to this part of my post, since this exchange is sadly again skipping these preoccupations.

[Brian C]

This being written, not making this "basic mistake" won't change my issues with how the characters mostly feel like robots (though maybe your explanations about how they're all playing parts anyway might be an answer for that, but it'd still clash with the Mal-Cobb relationship that needs passion and deep emotions to work - see later) or how the movie's constant need to explain its every rule and mechanic can be negatively perceived by the viewer (as under-estimating its abilities to understand the movie by itself). Re-reading reviews about the movie, there's also the core-relationship between Mal and Cobb, which is supposed to be film noir femme fatale passion stuff, but instead feel blank and generic and emotionless, which is perfectly summed up in this one : "Cobb's memories of his lost love and shattered family are the kind of stock images you find in a brand new wallet: pretty wife strolling a sunny beach; adorable kids frolicking in a backyard, hair backlit with a Miller Time glow. Even the "traumatic" stuff is familiar from daytime soap opera cliffhangers."

Why does the Mal-Cobb relationship "need passion and deep emotions to work"? I don't think that's what the film is trying to present to us - what we're seeing isn't a "relationship" at all, but an obsession on Cobb's part, borne out of grief and regret, entirely in his own mind. This is my big issue, too, with feihong's claim earlier, where he says that "Marion Cotillard gave one of the lesser imitations of a human I'd seen on screen" - but she's not a human at all, she's a manifestation of all of Cobb's emotional baggage. Calling her performance a "lesser imitation of a human" frankly seems like exactly what the film was going for!

It's frankly strange to me that one of the big knocks against the film is that it overexplains every little detail - and yet so many people seem to miss this key point: Mal is not a real person. She's not meant to show a full range of human behavior, since she's literally a figment of Cobb's twisted psyche and exists only in his memory, filtered through his extremely subjective, obsessive, grief-ridden perspective.

Now I suppose viewers can differ on how affecting this is, that's a matter of judgment. But talking about Mal as if she's an actual character misses the mark to me. She's more like a virus in the software, just given a human form; an anthropomorphized plot point, explicitly and by design.

[tenia]

The distorsion might be coming from Mal being Cobb's projection of his obsession, but his projection and his objection are still based on a past true and real relationship with a real person, and you still need to feel how deeply attached and in love Cobb was with her to relate to this obsession. The virus was a real person before !

But there isn't much in the movie to help understanding/feeling why Cobb is so obsessed and can't let go, even when it narrates their "real life" backstory in a simpler fashion. Their characters felt estranged from each other even in scenes when they shouldn't. At best, this makes Mal look like a former roommate he used to hang out with from time to time, or something distant like that, and it was hard for me to relate about why Cobb ended up so obsessed with someone he had such weak feelings, and not relating to that meant putting aside a non-negligible part of the movie's narrative drive.

Nolan said he chose Cotillard because "she can be strong and vulnerable and hopeful and heartbreaking all in the same moment" but actually, the heartbreaking part is missing not so much because of her acting but because of the writing, and that's a key part to me. There should be something heartbreaking to make us understand why Cobb got so obsessed, but I didn't find them.

[knives]

Spoilers,

SpoilerShow

if anyone killed themselves in front of you that would create a lasting impact.

[tenia]

SpoilerShow

Of course, but I suppose it might impact me differently if the person was a complete stranger or the love of my life and the mother of my children.

[domino harvey]

SpoilerShow

Can’t wait for the enlightened naysayers in this thread to weigh in that they wouldn’t be effected by the love of their life killing themselves and framing them for it in order to goad their own suicide all because of what they did. Guess I’m just a sheep for finding that highly disturbing and emotionally effecting, an extreme symbolic example of the damage and harm we do to others when we act “in their best interest”— DiCaprio started it by incepting the idea and Cotillard paid it back with her exit.

The only thing worse than Nolan fanboys are anti-Nolan fanboys in love with repeating the same tired talking points

[tenia]

Dom :

SpoilerShow

You of course possibly can't know this, but I had a girlfriend in high school I was quite in love with and with whom I had an on-and-off relationship for 3 years. She tried to kill herself (though she didn't succeed). I wasn't the main reason, but was told I was part of them. This was 15 years ago, and it of course devastated me and mostly made me feel utterly useless and powerless.
But then, she recovered very quickly, stopped seeing the toxic persons she was hanging with, I moved away, she moved away, and we lost touch a few years later. I have no idea what she's at now, except when she posts stuff on FB. She seems fine and happy, but I haven't interacted with her since at least 10 years, though I still think about her from time to time.

On a different topic but similar theme : when I was a teenager, I used to watch zombie movies and other gory stuff like that at breakfast time and would be eating my cereals in front of those at 8am without skipping a heartbeat, but one day, I cut my hand a bit deeply and fainted almost instantly.

Now : You're not a sheep for finding this scene devastating, but this is still a movie that still needs to organically builds emotion so that it pays off effectively. I simply found it didn't while you did, and thus, all this left me quite cold, just like many other movies did, whether I was supposed to feel joy about a happy event or sadness about a tragic one. There's not much more to it. I responded more to, say, the events in The Dark Knight, because they felt more effectively built and powerfully resounding to me, while I didn't care much about the ones in, say, La fille prodigue because they didn't.

That's just how things are. Does that make me the heartless person you're depicting ? Are we down to La rafle's director's statement that whoever didn't cry in front of the movie was "lacking the compassion's gene" ?


On a more general point, it's quite usual and predictable that this kind of topic revival will lead to a re-hash of what was said at the time : people who liked it and still like it are going to say so, and those who don't and still don't too. C'est la vie, though I guess these are part of the discussions I should refrain from participating.

[domino harvey]

My implication is not that you or anyone else not buying the film’s presentation of the relationship is heartless as that you claim to want something from the film that is in the film, so there’s a disconnect for me. To me arguments like this or the more common “Those aren’t MY dreams!!!” seems to me like someone watching Fast and Furious and saying there aren’t enough cars in it because there aren’t any of the specific models they prefer.

On a more general point, it's quite usual and predictable that this kind of topic revival will lead to a re-hash of what was said at the time : people who liked it and still like it are going to say so, and those who don't and still don't too. C'est la vie, though I guess these are part of the discussions I should refrain from participating.

I mean, the question that prompted this asked for people’s reevaluations a decade later, so I appreciated a post like feihong’s even though he didn’t like the film and I don’t agree with his conclusions, because he gave it another shot and still didn’t like it. What more could anyone ask from a viewer? But you’re right, discussion for some films becomes like a debate on abortion or capital punishment, in that minds are already made up long in advance. Honestly, like the height of Tarantino obsession a few years back, if both sides cooled it a bit with their extreme rhetoric (Nolan is a genius! Nolan is a hack!), they’d probably get more accomplished

[therewillbeblus]

I plan to sit down with this again to revisit soon, but I always thought that the ending suggests a much more philosophically complex position than most people give it credit for

SpoilerShow

In choosing to join a subjective reality and leave any objective one behind, the narrative arrives at the highest level of unconditional acceptance, the surrender of our limitations to attend to what’s most important to us individually. The film has in part been about a man’s inability to confront and forgive himself for his imposition of will on his wife- specifically in forcing norms of an objective world rather than meeting her where she is at. The final choice to live with her, divorced of that tap on the shoulder to forge one’s happiness into a shared universe, is not a defeatist settlement but an achievement in the therapeutic process of ‘letting go.’ It’s embracing a form of ignorance, in accepting that life is comprised of inherent ignorance, and that our subjective realities should be met with gratitude and the most careful attention rather than shame or suppression enforced by the external world that matters much less than we pretend. As someone who believes in the supremacy of subjective realities and relativist meaning, this has always floored me with its emotional intensity.

The question of the totem is unimportant, yes, but only because even asking the question is rooted in the need for tangible objective realities, to prioritize the pull of that false need that drove DiCaprio to misery. The viewer who smiles at its meaninglessness is looking in the direction of celebration for the personal experience of subjectively ‘real’ emotion, instead of resigning to a preoccupation with a logic unable to grasp.

[Brian C]

The distorsion might be coming from Mal being Cobb's projection of his obsession, but his projection and his objection are still based on a past true and real relationship with a real person, and you still need to feel how deeply attached and in love Cobb was with her to relate to this obsession. The virus was a real person before !

But there isn't much in the movie to help understanding/feeling why Cobb is so obsessed and can't let go, even when it narrates their "real life" backstory in a simpler fashion. Their characters felt estranged from each other even in scenes when they shouldn't. At best, this makes Mal look like a former roommate he used to hang out with from time to time, or something distant like that, and it was hard for me to relate about why Cobb ended up so obsessed with someone he had such weak feelings, and not relating to that meant putting aside a non-negligible part of the movie's narrative drive.

I suppose this is where I continue to have problems with your analysis - yes, she was a real person, but what does that have to do with the Mal that we see on screen? How we remember someone is inevitably quite different than how they actually were. You still don't seem to be reckoning with the essential subjective nature of the character, and how the very fact that Cobb's projection of her is so emotionally twisted is what drives the entire narrative engine of the film.

The second paragraph here is very frustrating to me because, for all your complaints about how Nolan gives the viewer no freedom to bring their own interpretation, you seem to be insisting that the entire emotional landscape be spelled out for you in very rigid terms. And it's ironic, because the movie does spell all this out in very rigid terms, and yet you're insisting that it's not there, while simultaneously arguing that everything is exhaustingly overexplained.

Again, it's one thing if you just didn't find it compelling, and that's not my objection. But to say that it's not in the movie is bizarre to me. It's like saying North by Northwest is lame because Hitchcock doesn't give you enough of a reason to understand why Roger Thornhill would want to clear his name. I just don't know what you're really trying to say, I'm afraid.