Christopher Nolan, we're on to you

Christopher Nolan’s movies are always overpraised upon their release, not necessarily because they’re unworthy, but because he is very good at flattering his audience. If mainstream commercial directors pander to stupid viewers, then Christopher Nolan panders to intelligent viewers.

This is an excellent tactic because the intelligent are often insecure — they should be, being vastly outnumbered by the stupid, like the uninfected survivors in a zombie plague — and need to be assured that their IQs are higher than average. Nolan’s movies are laden with philosophical, scientific, psychological, literary references scattered about like red flags for the smart viewer. 

Consider the ferry sequence in The Dark Knight, when the passengers have to make a choice. Suddenly the viewer is transported back to freshman year in college and he raises his hand screaming, “I get it! I know the answer! Me! Me!” (Even nerdier: “It’s game theory! I know that!”) Only he must do it quietly, or he will look insane. At that moment his college tuition is justified: he feels like the smartest person in the room, and this makes him vulnerable to Nolan. He is prone to admire the movie less for its qualities than for the ego boost.

Granted, many movies are packed with references, but you do not have to identify them to enjoy the movie. They may occur to you afterwards and you can say, “Oh, that’s clever.” Nolan movies are more like clubs in which you have just been confirmed as a member. “I get Christopher Nolan’s movies, I’m so clever.” There’s a self-congratulatory aspect to them, and I speak as one who saw The Dark Knight four or five times.

Which brings us to Christopher Nolan’s latest project, Inception. It has a fairly straightforward premise: a crew engaged in corporate espionage steals ideas directly out of the subject’s mind while the subject is dreaming. This involves going into a shared dream state with the quarry and pulling off the heist, which proceeds like all movie heists except that they’re supposed to be sleeping. 

The crew is led by Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio, who is doing head trips this year, Shutter Island being the previous trip), a wanted fugitive who only wants to go home to the US. They are hired by the industrialist Saito (Ken Watanabe) to perform a variation on their usual service: instead of extracting an idea, they will plant one. The quarry is Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the son of Saito’s competitor. The basic plot is easy enough to follow.

It’s in the execution that Nolan gets to mess with your head. In the movie, a character explains that inception — planting an idea — is complicated because people can trace how an idea came to them. You can’t just plunk down the idea and the subject will assume it’s his own — there must be a traceable process. 

This, I imagine, is the inception of Inception. Nolan starts with the visuals: a quiet street slowly flying apart, a city folding in on itself, people walking up the wall and on the ceiling, people “dying” and waking up, the strange loops of M.C. Escher in which you ascend and descent the stairs and somehow end up where you started. What could contain all these images? Dreams!

Dreams have their own logic, which seems like no logic at all. In dreams the laws of regular life are suspended, including gravity and time. To complicate matters there are dreams within dreams, false memories, guilt complexes, and all the fun stuff we learned in Psych 11. 

The dream at the center of Inception is constructed like an Escher vortex — all levels cross each other so you don’t know if the dreamer contains the architecture that contains the dream, or the dream contains the dreamer. It is the stuff of headaches and nerd-fests, and your enjoyment of the movie depends on how nerdy you are. For instance my cinema nerd friend views Inception as Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad with CGI, particularly the romantic angle and the obsession with architecture. For the non-nerds, there is the awful, relentless score by Hans Zimmer to tell them how to feel about the ideas they do not understand. 

Is it even possible to break into someone’s mind? In theory, yes. Last year we read in the New York Times that scientists could erase certain memories in the brain by injecting a drug that interfered with PKMzeta molecules. PKMzeta molecules guard the connections between the brain cells that contain the details of a specific memory. Apparently the brain retains memories by maintaining efficient communications between these brain cells. Mess with the PKMzeta and the memory is forgotten.

This year Discovery News reported that a group of researchers could identify a person’s thought patterns using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). They could tell from the subject’s brain activity which memory was being retrieved. Their study suggests that memories leave traces in the brain which can be identified even after many reactivations. An earlier study found that MRI scans could determine what images people were looking at.

Dreams, of course, are weirder and more fun, and Inception is a haven of order and rationality compared to many dreams we’ve had. It’s a marvelous concept, having Leo inside your head, along with that lovely Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, and Marion Cotillard whose beauty hits you like a physical slap. If only it weren’t so...efficient. Dreams are the one place in which we can be happily bonkers; does Christopher Nolan have to regiment them, too?

Still I recommend that you watch Inception if only for the gorgeous images shot by Wally Pfister, and that includes the actors, who have seldom looked better. Enjoy the headtrip and remember: it’s not an exam, it’s entertainment.