WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. Several plot elements and pieces of the ending are revealed. If you haven't seen the movie, view it before reading on.
Are "today's blockbuster movies" only about special effects, explosions -- in a word: Spectacle -- and devoid of Thought and Meaning, as some critics would have us think?
And, do "today's blockbusters" use shoddy plot devices to "manipulate" our emotions in cheap ways, or do they take their audiences seriously ? Let us take the current film Inception as a test case.
Although the answers to these questions will largely be up to each viewer, let us actually try to justify our analysis in some way by borrowing some criteria from the 4th century BCE Greek philosopher Aristotle, an avid drama-goer in his own right.
How does one determine the relative merits of a "drama"? (Inception would roughly fit this description) Aristotle determined several principles for the drama, or tragedy. We will touch on a few, summarized in SparkNotes online:
(1) Mimesis. This is defined as representation of things from the real world. Inception is admittedly imaginative with its supposed art of dream-architecture and shared dreaming through a machine. But the basic concept of dreams, and dreams within dreams, are of course borrowed from our "real world." More importantly, the idea of the relationship between a father and his son (the Fischers), including acceptance or rejection, or the father's blessing or curse upon son, is as basic as it gets. We also have the concepts of criminality and false allegations (Cobb), suicide (Mal), and the guilt a lover feels for the loss of his beloved (Cobb).
(2) Seriousness. Anyone who has seen the film knows that it deals with serious, life or death issues. We have just mentioned suicide and the false allegation of murder. We also have our basic idea of reality called into question.
(3) Telling a full story of an appropriate length. Our film would meet this criterion on several different levels! What we have here are stories within stories, each of appropriate length with respect to each other, each dream having a compounded amount of time compared to the previous one.
(4) Tragedy contains rhythm and harmony. Inception has several time cycles running simultaneously, in overlapping dreams. The "kicks" (waking up the dreamers) provide a common reference point among the several dream layers, arguably a form of rhythm. The "longest falling van ever," as a friend of mine called it, provides a kind of rhthym for the film as the deeper dream levels unfold.
(5) Tragedy is performed rather than narrated. This is certainly the case. Cobb's memories of Mal, for example, are locked away in a seven-story dream building. We "see" them through performance: Cobb and Ariadne go there and interact with the deceased but quite active Mal. We are not "told" about anything in detail. In fact, what we are told in dialogue ("There's something I need to tell you about Inception," Cobb says) only arouses our curiosity to see more in performance.
(6) Tragedy arouses feelings of pity and fear, and then purges these feelings through catharsis. This is the most important criterion for Aristotle, and could stand alone as a definition of tragedy. Our movie does this on several levels. First we have the relationship between young Fischer and his father. We pity the son for not living up to his father's greatness. We fear for his life as he faces foes (Mal) from other characters' subconscious.
We pity Cobb in his loss of Mal. We see him faced with the awful choice of returing to reality without the one he loves, or following the mirage of his dead wife into a fantasy world where he runs the risk of "dying as an old man, alone and full of regrets."
The movie is self-conscious in its use of Catharsis as a plot device; the character Eames is the voice of this, proposing to the protagonists the plan of changing young Fischer's mind through a catharsis and reunion with his father Maurice.
So we have shown six ways in which Inception meets the criteria for tragedy from the Poetics. Hopefully this gives us some right to say that Inception has substance.
The film centers around "one essential idea, that the world around us is not real." As the possibly evil "shade" Mal riddles: "You are on a train, a train that will take you far, far away. You are not sure you know where the train will take you, but it doesn't matter. Why?" Cobb answers her riddle: "Because you are with the one you love."
By the ending we have no idea where the train is taking us. Based on the fate of the spinning top, we might either have been in a dream world the whole time, or Mr. Cobb may have successfully returned home. The film thus lacks the "deus ex machina" device that more cut-and-dry dramas may use to lay all questions to rest. This argues against the "cheapness" of the film, leaving it to the viewer to sort through possibilities. Hats off to Mr. Nolan for a beautiful film.
Sources:
Author not mentioned
Spark Notes, philosophy, Aristotle, Poetics
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/aristotle/section11.rhtml
Author not mentioned
"Inception" movie page
Internet Movie Database
There are no comments yet