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Jul. 22nd, 2010 03:26 amLoads of Inception spoilers:
The audio was garbled in our theater and I had to guess at a lot of the mumbly dialogue, especially that delivered by Sato and the kid from that space alien sitcom, so maybe the right reading was clearer to others, but...
...there's three things that could be happening, right?
1. The top thing is about to really fall, meaning all has transpired as shown. Happy ending.
2. The top thing, though wobbling, won't fall. He became lost in the raw dream limbo when his wife stabbed him, but has made it a sort of happy state for himself.
3. The top thing, though wobbling, won't fall, but he deliberately lost himself in the raw dream limbo after the death of his wife, and all these different levels we've seen represented (excepting certain flashbacks) have been happening in that dream. He's been desperately trying for auto-inception, but the idea he's been trying to plant is that the apparent reality around him is real. He can't believe he'll get his wife back, but can at least pretend he's with his children. The feeling that the memory doesn't do justice to the thing remembered, which makes him refuse to imagine his children's faces, is the worst enemy of his happiness. Everything he's coming up with is an elaborate excuse for allowing himself to not just create a world closer to his heart's desire, but believe in it. Since otherwise it's pretty worthless. He uses Sato to repeat leap of faith/better than dying alone but for regrets stuff at him, on the model of the train story he told his wife; he has Ariadne make a maze for himself - distracting him with mere plot, and many, many explosions, while the right phrases get repeated, and while the spectacle of Fischer being improved by a parallel operation allays his fears.
3. is the interesting one but has its problems: First, there are scenes without him in them - which I don't think ever happened in Memento. Second, though the film starts in medias res like we're told by the alien kid any given dream-moment does, it also cuts in bits of scenes from later on, e.g. the beach sequence with Sato, which is a narrative device aimed at the audience. So the jumbled middleness of the beginning doesn't represent his dream state, it's just the normal, time-honored story kind. The two could be mixed, sure, but that's annoying - my pet peeve about The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense would apply: the film default is that we're being given an objective record of a character's subjective experiences, what the featured character(s) thought was occurring, and though new rules can be established that can suspend this default assumption (like in Rashomon), a) in the case of the former, no pre-twist indication is given that this is a movie playing in the cop's head rather than the convict's memory (the default), and b) in the case of the latter manipulation of the timing of scenes' beginning and ending are not a fair representation of denial, even of a ghost's denial. Anyway, so if all kinds of things are being cut at us this artificiality either represents how the character is experiencing things or is something palpably aimed at feeding us information out of sequence - a genius could smoosh together both, I guess, but that's not what's happening if we're dealing with Possibility 3. There's an unfair mixture of devices.
Though I guess you could argue that if this is all a performance he's putting on for his own benefit he might be envisioning how getting all this to work might look before he's narrating himself through it. The first run-through of the beach/old Sato sequence is his imagining of how the mental play will look, the second is his performance/direction of the play, and if they're identical that's just because writing, directing and acting are all pretty much one in dreams. But I'd need some kind of indication that that was happening - though presumably the movie would advise a leap of faith in it. (You could also argue he's at least nearby for the scenes he isn't in - these could be things he's hearing while dreaming.)
There's also the related Usual Suspects problem of not knowing if any of the flashbacks are real, I guess. If he's just in raw dream the whole time, flashbacks included, for all we know he's just getting over his wife leaving him for a less frowny man. The suicide scene is as stylized, as movie-ish, as everything else in the movie, after all; and the movie itself teases that the 'reality' level of his life with all its international intrigue and narrow escapes from ubiquitous armed men is pretty implausible. But everything about the wife is of a piece with that. As is, of course, all this dream magic.
I'm not sure if I liked it. I did like the part about the zero gravity elevator.
The audio was garbled in our theater and I had to guess at a lot of the mumbly dialogue, especially that delivered by Sato and the kid from that space alien sitcom, so maybe the right reading was clearer to others, but...
...there's three things that could be happening, right?
1. The top thing is about to really fall, meaning all has transpired as shown. Happy ending.
2. The top thing, though wobbling, won't fall. He became lost in the raw dream limbo when his wife stabbed him, but has made it a sort of happy state for himself.
3. The top thing, though wobbling, won't fall, but he deliberately lost himself in the raw dream limbo after the death of his wife, and all these different levels we've seen represented (excepting certain flashbacks) have been happening in that dream. He's been desperately trying for auto-inception, but the idea he's been trying to plant is that the apparent reality around him is real. He can't believe he'll get his wife back, but can at least pretend he's with his children. The feeling that the memory doesn't do justice to the thing remembered, which makes him refuse to imagine his children's faces, is the worst enemy of his happiness. Everything he's coming up with is an elaborate excuse for allowing himself to not just create a world closer to his heart's desire, but believe in it. Since otherwise it's pretty worthless. He uses Sato to repeat leap of faith/better than dying alone but for regrets stuff at him, on the model of the train story he told his wife; he has Ariadne make a maze for himself - distracting him with mere plot, and many, many explosions, while the right phrases get repeated, and while the spectacle of Fischer being improved by a parallel operation allays his fears.
3. is the interesting one but has its problems: First, there are scenes without him in them - which I don't think ever happened in Memento. Second, though the film starts in medias res like we're told by the alien kid any given dream-moment does, it also cuts in bits of scenes from later on, e.g. the beach sequence with Sato, which is a narrative device aimed at the audience. So the jumbled middleness of the beginning doesn't represent his dream state, it's just the normal, time-honored story kind. The two could be mixed, sure, but that's annoying - my pet peeve about The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense would apply: the film default is that we're being given an objective record of a character's subjective experiences, what the featured character(s) thought was occurring, and though new rules can be established that can suspend this default assumption (like in Rashomon), a) in the case of the former, no pre-twist indication is given that this is a movie playing in the cop's head rather than the convict's memory (the default), and b) in the case of the latter manipulation of the timing of scenes' beginning and ending are not a fair representation of denial, even of a ghost's denial. Anyway, so if all kinds of things are being cut at us this artificiality either represents how the character is experiencing things or is something palpably aimed at feeding us information out of sequence - a genius could smoosh together both, I guess, but that's not what's happening if we're dealing with Possibility 3. There's an unfair mixture of devices.
Though I guess you could argue that if this is all a performance he's putting on for his own benefit he might be envisioning how getting all this to work might look before he's narrating himself through it. The first run-through of the beach/old Sato sequence is his imagining of how the mental play will look, the second is his performance/direction of the play, and if they're identical that's just because writing, directing and acting are all pretty much one in dreams. But I'd need some kind of indication that that was happening - though presumably the movie would advise a leap of faith in it. (You could also argue he's at least nearby for the scenes he isn't in - these could be things he's hearing while dreaming.)
There's also the related Usual Suspects problem of not knowing if any of the flashbacks are real, I guess. If he's just in raw dream the whole time, flashbacks included, for all we know he's just getting over his wife leaving him for a less frowny man. The suicide scene is as stylized, as movie-ish, as everything else in the movie, after all; and the movie itself teases that the 'reality' level of his life with all its international intrigue and narrow escapes from ubiquitous armed men is pretty implausible. But everything about the wife is of a piece with that. As is, of course, all this dream magic.
I'm not sure if I liked it. I did like the part about the zero gravity elevator.
