memories and dreams (Waltz with Bashir and Inception)
“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.”
— Jeremy Irons
(note: this was written before having read any one else’s email/posts about Inception, so as to not blur/influence my initial thoughts, so this is probably missing many things other people have already discussed. this doesn’t really have any big spoilers but you might avoid reading the Inception part if you haven’t seen the film yet and are going to.)
memories, dreams and reality – how distinguishable are they? i have fairly vivid dreams almost every night, and also a lot of memories i’m not sure are real, so this topic is of high interest to me personally. the function of dreams has been studied at every angle from spiritual to physiological, and the psychological process of creating memories has been well studied and recorded. memories and dreams have been the subject of art and films for as long as can be traced, as these realms are difficult to understand, and seem to contain keys to human consciousness. recently i read that recent experiments with sleep deprivation and “dream withdrawal” showed that if a person is deprived of dreams they begin to show psychotic tendencies while awake, and therefore maybe the function of dreams is to allow for a time of quiet insanity and that maybe it is not sleep that is necessary for well-being, but dreams (sorry, cannot find citation).
I. 2 weekends ago we watched Waltz with Bashir (available on Netflix) – a mostly-true film about participants in the 1982 Lebanon War and the horrible civilian massacre that occurred (warning: i was unprepared for the actual real footage of this event shown at the end of the film). the mission of the main character is to determine which of his memories of such a chaotic and traumatic period as a solider are true. the film is done in absolutely gorgeous animation, which supports the dreamlike quality.
i found this film not only educational (i myself had no idea what happened in that war, as i was an American and only 6, but i remember Beirut being a city name i heard on the news quite often during that time), but brilliant in that it captures not only the confusion that soldiers feel in chaotic wartime (forgetting all training/orders and acting only in self-defense, mass hysteria, trauma), but also the crux of the question of what memories are and how they are created. all but one of the characters in the film is a real person, and each of them, through the series of interviews, questions who/what/where/why/how. if 2 people are in the same place at the same time, but each remembers it differently, how does anyone ever know what really happened? i highly recommend Waltz with Bashir not only for its beauty and history, but for the bravery to question traumatic political events that collectively have a million different memories contributing to the public understanding.
II. watching Inception last weekend [SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING HERE], i have to say i was unimpressed by its lack of creativity and i got bored. my brain just kept returning to every other film on the relative subjects of the intersection of dreams, memories and consciousness manipulation i’ve ever seen (Waking Life, Scanner Darkly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dream a Little Dream, and the director Nolan’s previous film, Memento), and most of all, the classic Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. the idea of the film was simple but the execution was overly complicated, and somewhere around the “third level” snow scene i was completely bored and wondering why we were being taken through all that ridiculousness. for other people that was probably a very entertaining part of the film, but i’m not someone entertained by shootouts and explosions and special effects, so it all seemed incredibly superfluous and that last 1/3 of the film just dragged on forever for me. that, and the whole embedded love story, there to give personal weight to the intentions of the main character and provide another plotline (and possibly a whole subplot of her participation not brought to light in the film), seemed entirely unnecessary to what otherwise would have been a fairly straightforward idea: we plant an idea in a dream, and make the dream complex enough for the dreamer to believe it was their own, and s/he wakes up and changes life course. however, the big question on that premise, for me, was this: has a dream ever made you actually change YOUR life?
the final question laid in front of the viewer in the final second of the film was just so OBVIOUS – was it ALL a dream? if so, whose dream was it? – that i am not even interested in addressing it, because i think 1. the point is that you will never know, and 2. the script doesn’t seem mature enough to actually have a tight resolution to that even if you watched the movie 100 more times looking for “clues” (here’s a link though if you want to).
the psychological aspects of the film are of more interest to me than the film itself, and while i understand they are all intertwined, the substory of the wife going mad after spending 50 years in a dream and not believing “reality” (i guess i should put that in quotes) was much more intriguing to me than the main plot, looping back to the idea of what it means to remember, and what our consciousness decides our story has been, and how.
i am more intrigued by the ranting homeless people i see screaming at bus stops or cases of extreme savants and schizophrenia: science-fiction unnecessary, there are humans on this planet at this very moment who are living in an entirely different world than we are. those of us who consider ourselves “sane” are only such because our brains have set up layers of filters for the infinite amount of sensory data it receives. what if those filters were to disappear? many suggest that perhaps this is what manifests in our dreams.
i know i am going very wide with this, but i have very little use for fiction unless i can relate it to and question real life (i guess that makes me a “plausibilist”). i am not big on fantasy, and i have little suspension of disbelief when it comes to films. so i spent most of the time watching Inception thinking about all of these other things, and caring less about the plot and the characters. is that what the film was supposed to do? if so it did its job, but i could have done without the blockbuster bits (i much prefer Linklater’s style).
(btw if you haven’t seen Ellen Page in Hard Candy, i highly recommend that deeply twisted film.)
.::.
now that i’ve written that, here’s some good bits of what other people have written about Inception:
New Yorker: The Guilty Tripper:
Nolan tips his hand regarding his view of the cinema, and of the dream-world he’s constituting within it, by means of the name of the young heir being “incepted”: Robert Fischer, i.e., Bobby Fischer. The film is constructed with the coherent hermeticism of chess: Nolan lays down rules of dream-manipulation that are finite, clear, and complex, guiding a personal, intimate, inchoate realm into discernible patterns. The film’s chess-like precision and self-containment that accounts for much of the adolescent passion the movie arouses. Its remarkably complex conceits yield a remarkably callow film, in which motives are as simple and highlighted as if sketched in a scriptwriting class, and the near-futuristic society that’s depicted with a vast armamentarium of physical and computer effects is narrowed to a B-movie thinness.
AGREED!
Wired.com – The Neuroscience of Inception:
The literary critic Frank Kermode famously argued that all successful works of art have the ability to inspire multiple interpretations. We read the classics, he said, because we believe they say more than the author meant. In other words, it is the ambiguity of art - this ability to inspire arguments and blog posts – that makes it so interesting.
…From the perspective of your brain, dreaming and movie-watching are strangely parallel experiences. In fact, one could argue that sitting in a darkened theater and staring at a thriller is the closest one can get to REM sleep with open eyes…
But it’s also worth pointing out which brain areas didn’t “tick together” in the movie theater. The most notable of these “non-synchronous” regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we’re engaged in intense “sensorimotor processing” – and nothing is more intense for the senses than a big moving image and Dolby surround sound – we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such “inactivation” allows us to lose ourself in the movie…
…What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. It’s a process in which your senses are hyperactive and yet your self-awareness is strangely diminished. Now here’s where things get interesting, at least for this interpretation of Inception. When we fall asleep, the brain undergoes a similar pattern of global activity, as the prefrontal cortex goes quiet and the visual cortex becomes even more active than usual. But this isn’t the usual excitement of reality: this activity is semirandom and unpredictable, unbound by the constraints of sensation.
hm, i guess my brain doesn’t ever do that in films, which is why i sit there thinking about everything else.
Anyway, the differing speed of the passage of time is just a part of the larger conceit, which is that not only can Leonardo et al. invade dreams, but that by descending into ever-deeper states of unconsciousness, they can concoct dreams-within-dreams. Even as action/scifi fare this is pretty thin gruel, and since Nolan insists on cluttering the goings-on with pages and pages of expository dialogue full of crackpot ontology and two-joint epistemological impoderables, the whole edifice reeks faintly of the ridiculous. In his silly but entertaining Existenz, which had the misfortune to come out opposite The Matrix, Croneberg managed with much greater ease and humor to trip the lysergical-acidic borders of multiple mind-states and alternate consciousness. In Inception, dreams sit neatly within dreams like Matryoshka dolls, everything just-so, ascent and descent symbolized by Leonardo DiCaprio’s rickety dream-elevator (no, really), which, obviously, plies a linear path from top to bottom. By the way, this constant mentioning of other movies is intentional. Inception is the most derivative film ever made, so shameless in its cribbing that you’d think it were meant as pastiche, except for its relentless, monotonous self-seriousness.
AH! ok. good. i’m not the only one.
update: updated to add that, in general, i consider a movie a “good movie” if i have any desire to see it again, and a “really good movie” if i think it was either really important/moving and/or i’d watch it many times over. i would watch Waltz with Bashir again, because i’m sure i missed some things the first time, i thought it was important and moving, and i thought that was a really good movie. i don’t have a desire or need to see Inception again, therefore i don’t think it was very good.
update 2 to add this link which pretty much sums up what i was trying to say: 10 things that stop Inception from being as good as it thinks it is
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