THE SOFT REALITY AND THE DREAMS HEWN IN STONE

The title of this post is one of my favorite quotes of all time. It's from The Flounder by Gunter Grass. I read this book decades ago, I'm not even sure if I finished it (it's a very compelling but very odd novel) but that quote has stayed with me all this time. Dreams are powerful things and I've always enjoyed fiction that play with that idea, and the extended notion of reality, exactly what that is, and how fragile it sometimes can be.

It's why I've always been such a big fan of Philip K Dick, rotten movie adaptions (Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, Imposter, Paycheck et al) aside. His great theme, whether the story be placed on Mars or in a future earth just over there, was the idea of reality almost on a Platonic level: Yes I see the chair but if you don't see the chair, is there something wrong with you, or is the chair not there at all.

It was why I enjoyed the Matrix, at least the first movie, this notion that the reality you thought you were living was just one fed to you. Like a movie itself. It's a lovely bit of Pirandello: You're watching a movie, which you know isn't real, but I need you to feel it's real enough so you can accept that it's a movie about a reality that isn't real either ...
A term for this is "suspension of disbelief" I need you to accept something, something rather fantastic, like Germany and Japan really didn't lose WW II (Dick's The Man in the High Castle) or that everything you know is just a computer program. Or that an evil man died but was so evil, had so shattered the lives of his victims that he could live on .. in their dreams
Or that people can go into your dreams. They can enter your dreams, but become a part of them, so that you are unaware they are there, so that you have no idea your dream has been compromised and while they are there, they are able to rifle through your subconscious and all it's contents like a thief going through a vault ... And that is exactly what happens in the movie Inception
Yes, this a review of the movie and it would be difficult to discuss the movie without talking about the plot and the characters and since this is still a current movie in theatres, here is your BIG ASSED SPOILER ALERT ...
Inception was written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) and starring Leondardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page and Ken Watanabe. If The Matrix was a lovely little bit of Pirandello, Inception is a big assed, four wheel drive, supercharged Hemi half ton Pirandello. It's a movie about dreams, about people going into dreams, and the dreamer sometimes even know people can come into dreams, but the dream thieves know this too so they need to build dreams within the dreams to fool the dreamer, to the point where you may know you're in a dream, but which dream is it ...
Inception is an almost perfect example of suspension of disbelief. If you can accept the conceit that it's possible to go into another person's dreams, everything that follows is so cleverly constructed, that disbelief is quickly put into your rear view mirror. Nolan has written a remarkable script here just for its attention to detail and its own lovely circular logic.

We all have dreams, all of us, it's one of the things that unite us. We may not all understand our dreams or even try to understand them (that's me with my hand up in the corner) but we've all experienced them. And there are some universal truths about dreams themselves: Like how time is fractured inside a dream, how it's difficult to remember how a dream begins, and how you can suddenly wake up from a dream, with this dizzying sense that you had almost just fallen .. Inception works all these truths into its story and it helps to make the incredible events a bit easier to accept.

The movie is, of course, a special effects machine. Hell, you can do anything in dreams. Yet the effects follow the same steely thread of logic that Nolan has woven through the story. A young woman folds a city over on to itself, a man gets into a fist fight in zero gravity in a hotel corridor on Earth, buildings disintegrate before our eyes .. But all of it makes sense. All of it is set up by the story and we understand why it is all happening.

The movie is two and half hours long but it moves, I found myself glued to the screen for every moment. There are some incredible action sequences (an assault on a winter citadel was very Bond like) but they are mostly "realistic" and not reality-bending as in The Matrix. The point here, is, things inside the dream must seem logical so as to not alert the dreamer than his mind has been compromised

But Inception is more than just a high stakes action movie or a very cleverly constructed script. There is a human element, a very human story, at the heart of Inception and it's driven by DiCaprio, who's performance throughout seems totally spot on.
I will refrain from going into more detail about the story. You really should see it for yourself, there were moments where a detail was revealed that was set up by a plot point earlier in the movie where you could almost literally feel a light bulb switching on over your head ... but then again that light could have been the cell phone of all the idiots who were texting during the movie ... But that's a rant for another time, and another post.

Leave it be said Collette and I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. I understand people have seen the film twice to "figure it out". We both had no difficulty following the plot .. but then, thanks to Philip Dick and Neo and even Freddy, I've been on this dream path for quite some time ...

"All we see and seem, is but a dream within a dream" Edgar Allan Poe