07.24.10 Inception and the Idea Virus
As a popcorn movie, Inception is very flawed indeed. It's hard to follow, even willfully oblique at times. There are long stretches of sci-fi talk, and longer stretches with almost no dialogue. The characters are intriguing but thinly developed — the viewer never gets a clear idea of why they do the things they do or care about the things they care about.
That said, I'm totally fascinated by this movie. I saw it on opening weekend and will probably see it again before the end of what is sure to be a long theatrical run. Every bit as much as the launch of the iPhone or the death of Michael Jackson, Inception stirred within me the feeling of watching cultural history unfold in real time.
Why does it work, despite all its difficulties? The answer is in the trailer (in fact, it's one of the only intelligible things about the trailer — you can't talk about this movie for long without spoiling the plot). "What's the most resilient parasite?" asks the disemodied voice of Leonardo DiCaprio. Before we have time to guess, he answers himself: "An idea."
That catch phrase is glib and far from novel, but Inception might be the first time anyone's built such an expansive work of art on it — especially one with such broad mass-market appeal. It should be frustrating that the things that are missing from the movie are the things you most want explained — the whole complicated taxonomy of dream exploration, which physical laws carry over from the real world and which don't, how Leo got into the dream caper business to begin with. But the feeling those information gaps inspire isn't frustration — it's curiosity. Better yet, it's an itch — one that only somebody with the same curiosities can scratch for you.
This is why when Donnie Darko came out, the world was divided into people who didn't get it and people who completely lived and breathed it. You couldn't begin to understand Richard Kelly's weird suburban time-travel drama without doing a bunch of extracurricular work. That meant buying the DVD and watching the special features; it meant going to the website, which eschewed the usual cast bios and press photos for a creepy choose-your-own-adventure game that raised more questions than it answered. More than anything, it meant finding other people who shared your curiosity and dissecting the story over and over again.
Movies like Inception and Donnie Darko are guided by a principle that will likely guide most of the art people care about for years to come: buried within the art is the implulse to spread it. It's like Twitter, or like fax machines when they were first invented — the more popular it is, the better it works.
IF AND ONLY IF YOU HAVE SEEN THE FILM, I encourage you to check out this amazing interview with Dileep Rao, the actor who plays Yusuf the chemist. It's a conversation you'd sooner expect to hear in a college dorm room than in New York magazine, and it lays out some of the rules of dreaming without spoiling the magic. Needless to say, I'm dying to keep this conversation going; email me if Inception or something like it has given you the curiosity itch.
SPOILERS AHEAD:
Inception's Dileep Rao Answers All Your Questions about Inception (NY Mag)
UPDATE: NY Mag has also published a very thoughtful essay that gives an alternative reading of Inception's frame story. Again, if you haven't seen the movie, do yourself the favor before reading this.
;)
