How to Improve ‘Inception’: Some Enthusiastic Ideas From CC2K

Written by: The CinCitizens

Tony Lazlo:

Lance, you went directly to my biggest annoyance with this movie. We can all agree that the “it was all a dream” ending is one of the biggest cop-outs in all of storytelling, but in a movie like Inception, it’s just the opposite. We go in with the expectation that the initial reality presented to us will be inverted or otherwise inaccurate. We go into a movie like this hoping for our expectations to be subverted, hoping to get hoodwinked, hoping to get out-thought.

But we didn’t, and like you said, it didn’t appear that Nolan had any interest in doing so, and because of that, the movie’s final image – the twirling top – felt tacked-on and obnoxious. Yes, it raises the question that the entire movie was a dream, but who cares? I’m venturing into highly subjective territory here, but a twist – when done well – should enhance and enrich the entire movie that precedes it. We live in an era with a lot of twist-endings, and by looking at a few, we can see how effective they are at satisfying this test. The Usual Suspects ends with a twist that adds some rewatch value to a decent movie, while Fight Club opts for an end-of-second-act twist that lets audiences reflect on what came before while they navigate a hectic third act. The Sixth Sense hits us with a twist that instantly transforms it into a completely different movie on further inspection.

It’s entirely possible that I’m expecting too much of Nolan. To be sure, I find the rules of the dreamworld in Inception to be pretty fascinating, despite their imperfections, and maybe he intended to do nothing more than to explore the world he created according to the rules he made up. But I’m not so sure.

During a key scene near the end of Inception, DiCaprio’s wife suggests that he is in a dream himself. In a rush of dialogue, she points out how weird it is that he’s a pawn in a larger game played by mysterious, shadowy corporations, among other things. The scene was fine, I guess, but I couldn’t help but think of another movie that toys with the idea of a dreamworld, Total Recall. Midway through Paul Verhoeven’s action classic, a corporate representative confronts our hero with the possibility that he may be dreaming, going so far as to cite specific evidence from earlier in the film:

Dr. Edgemar:
What about the girl? Brunette, athletic, sleazy and demure just as you specified, is that a coincidence?

Douglas Quaid:
No she’s real. I dreamt about her before I even went to Recall.

Dr. Edgemar:
Mr. Quaid, can you hear yourself? She’s real because you dreamt her.

Am I arguing that Total Recall is a better movie than Inception? Nope. But that one scene in Total Recall pings my brain’s mind-bendy pleasure centers with greater skill than anything in Inception.

To be fair, there are plenty of theories about what “really” happened in Inception floating around online. Writer Hal Phillips makes a game effort to add a layer of intrigue to Nolan’s movie, but to what end does it serve us to kludge this layer of interpretation onto such a literal-minded movie? Perhaps on a second viewing, considering the possibility that Cobb dreamed the whole thing will improve the experience.

Here’s why I doubt it:

In the case of all the twists I mentioned above – all of them – the final twist instantly made me think back over the movie I had just seen to look for clues or to otherwise interpret scenes in light of the revelation. I felt no such impulse at the end of Inception. The movie simply was what is was. That doesn’t mean I’m right, and I suspect there will be many who will contest my arguments by saying I’m being too literal-minded, but all the same, that’s what I felt.

As long as I’m on this point, I wanted to quote another, far more skilled, movie critic: Jim Emerson of the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com. Emerson gets right to the heart of Inception’s literal-mindedness:

In an “Inception” dream, when something happens, it stays happened and the dream-narrative continues in a straight temporal line from there. Cause-and-effect is still in effect. Sure, there are video-game-like “levels,” but all the same organizing principles still apply from one to another. There’s a rainy traffic jam world (and the usual Nolan action sequence in which the audience can’t tell where anything is in relation to anything else, although the characters in the scene can), a hotel supposedly inspired by M.C. Escher but actually more by “Royal Wedding” (and Kubrick’s “2001”), a James Bond “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” snow fortress… Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) even has an elevator to take you from one level to another in his subconsciousness. It’s all so neatly organized! In other words, not dreamlike at all. Just disappointingly flat, sterile, cold, rational. If a filmmaker is going to dream, the challenge is to dream big, to show us things in ways we haven’t seen before, not to simply regurgitate indifferently executed cliches from action pictures and heist movies: car chases, kidnappings, gunfights, interrogations, elevators, ski chases (“Help!”), burglaries and vaults that simply open up when you reach them. (OK, I don’t remember seing that last one before.)

Moving on: Lance, I wanted to revisit our earlier discussion about Inception’s lack of sexuality. I hadn’t given it much thought until I started reading through some of the responses to this movie, and upon further reflection, it occurs to me that the absence of smolder makes the movie feel awfully sad. The biggest sexual thrill is a chaste peck that any grade-schooler could experience. It infuses the whole proceedings with a Peter-Pan-like sense of quaint ignorance.

In closing, I want to echo an earlier sentiment of yours, Lance: All told, we’ve generated several thousand words of discussion about this movie. That’s a good thing. Despite its flaws, Nolan came up with a fascinating premise and constructed a complicated narrative that delivers on many, many levels. That’s a good thing, and moreover, it is actively a good thing that Nolan has the Batman franchise under the heel of his boot. It lets him offer up fascinating thought experiments – a quality that all his movies possess, I submit. Even The Dark Knight qualifies as a thought experiment: What would Batman and the Joker look like in the real world?

Inception is another such thought experiment, fascinating and flawed. And that’s a good thing.