Inception: Drawing Demons

Martin Schongauer, Anthony the Great plagued by demons, 1480sI wanted to respond briefly to Pete's excellent review of Inception.

   

I just finished watching Inception, and I wanted to get these thoughts on the film out quickly before I forget them (like a dream).  First of all, I think the film tells too much instead of showing or allowing the viewer to draw his own conclusions or fill in the gaps in his own understanding of the story and its world.  While it surely required some degree of imaginative power to conceive the world of the film, watching Inception for me was a fairly unimaginative experience, somewhere between walking to the nearest convenience store and listening to music on my iPod.

  

That's not to say my mind didn't wander pleasurably throughout the film, just that processing endless amounts of exposition left little room for speculation. (There is a reason science fiction is often called speculative fiction.)  As an aspiring neurologist, I found the subject matter particularly thought-provoking.  It was the story that was really bare-bones.  I prefer the vague weirdness of say THX 1138 to the logical funeral pyre of Inception.  The way the story was told reminded me a lot of the kinds of television shows made for twelve-year-old boys, where so-and-so character has this ability and so-and-so character can do this but can't do this.  I imagine Dragon Ball Z served as the main inspiration for the Inception writing team.  

  

As such, Inception is just part of a greater trend within our culture towards Simple Simon cinematic experience based upon layer and layer of nerd-knowledge scaffolding.  As Pete says in his review, Inception is a stale heist film in disguise.  Its warm critical reception draws on the fact that critics were so distracted by the film's smoke-and-mirrors that they failed to see what was right in front of their faces (a trend): that with enough money, anybody over age eleven could have made this movie.  

  

It's like the old Chinese story about dogs and demons: the Emperor desires to prove his artistic skill to his people so as not to be seen as only a boring tyrant.  He asks his advisors whether he should draw dogs or demons, and they reply that he should draw demons because no one has ever seen one and therefore they cannot criticize him.  People are too familiar with dogs and they would see right through the Emperor's mediocre attempts. 

 

As I get older, I find I have an ever-increasing general aversion to fantasy films on the grounds that they are shockingly easy to produce given enough money.  Given the kind of money a Christopher Nolan film commands, Inception seems especially half-assed.  The stories children come up with when playing are far more rich and interesting.  

  

For those who've seen the film, given Inception's story arc, my previous assessment may seem eerily ironic, in which case I commend Christopher Nolan for being the greatest genius the world has ever known, but I highly doubt Mr. Nolan intended to create a mediocre film for the sake of irony.