To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

A film lecturer I had, David Boyd (Hitchcock guru), once said in a lecture that perhaps Puck's final speech of A Midsummer Night's Dream may have more in common with cinema than theatre:

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend."

I finally watched Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) last night and I have to say I was a little disappointed. An interesting premise, sure. Stunning visuals, yes. A tragic love story. Of course.

But whether I took too much of my friends' criticisms into this movie, or they were totally valid, I didn't find Inception as mind-blowingly awesome as I expected. I think perhaps it feels as though the filmmakers were scared to let the film unfold and decided to try and explain everything. Not saying I could do better, but it felt like a lot of exposition. And it was incredibly long. Or felt it. Maybe I actually fell asleep during the film and the time passed more quickly. That said, it's an important film for so many reasons, not least of all that it is an interesting look at the way in which the dream is such a recurring topic in film.

So this could easily be a properly researched, critical analysis of the idea of the dream in cinema, but I'm lazy. Give me a break, ok? I have important Facebooking to do. And to be honest, if I put that into Google Scholar, it will probably find me hundreds of better stuff than I could produce in my current state of sorry affairs.

Some interesting things to note about film and its relationship to the dream:

Many have likened the experience of viewing a film to that of a dream. Let's look at it - you're in a darkened room, you're in a resting state, everything is quiet and people (I mean me) get really cranky if that quiet is disturbed, and your mind is processing complex thoughts and images while in this resting state. I was asking a friend why the cinema was so fucking cold and she said, 'it's probably so people don't get too comfortable and fall asleep.' Interesting. But then again, the emergence of Gold Class (recliners, food, alcohol) have suggested that the experience of watching a film is supposed to be getting more and more comfortable. That's probably more a strategy to counteract people preferring to watch films at home than making the venue more conducive to a dreaming state. At the least, it's worth mentioning perhaps an unconscious understanding that watching a film and faling asleep have more in common than people think.

The Surrealist art movement on one hand strove to recreate the absurdity of the dream and this idea is reflected in the films of Salvador Dali and Louis Bunuel - most notably their collaboration, Un Chien Andalou (1929).

Characters recur throughout the film, in different ways. Time skips forward, then jumps backward. People move from one room into a beach. There is some seriously odd moments (a character drags through a piano attached to dead asses and two Catholic priests). Explaining the film is like explaining a dream. Ever recounted the plot of a film and found that it sounded really weird? Things that you accepted as logical while you were watching it suddenly seem ridiculous when you describe them. Characters appear, then disappear, some you recognise, some you don't.

So, for those of you who've been under a rock like me, the plot of Inception is thus: Through the use of advanced technology, Dom Cobb is able to engineer and enter people's dreams in order to extract vital information. He's also a fugitive, trying to avert extradition to the US. While on a job, he is given a proposal that could earn him his freedom and the chance to see his children again; engage in Inception, wipe out a businessman's competition and go home. Inception is the planting of an idea in another's mind using dreams to enter the person's subconscious. Tom has been able to do it once before, and now he must attempt to do it again.

The title doesn't just refer to the plot; it refers to what the filmmaker's are trying to do to the audience. Within the film, Cobb and his team need to do set up a very complex structure in order to enable the idea to be planted. They need to design and create a world in which it is possible for the idea to seem logical. They need to populate that world with characters to establish the relationships necessary to cement that world. And they need to fight off attacks of suspicion and disbelief. Sound familiar? Not only that, but in order to be successful, the dream requires three levels. Three acts, three levels, geddit, geddit, geddit?

The idea that Cobb and Co. must plant is the idea that the heir to a major corporation should dissolve the company rather than take it over. To do this, the team uses his relationship with his father and exploits it.

The idea that Nolan and Co. are attempting to plant is much more than an idea but a question; how do we know that we are not in a constate state of dreaming? They construct a film with three acts (well, one could argue that it's all first act), an overall world in which the viewer can accept the concept that other people can enter your subconscious through your dreams and that going too deep can cause you to question your reality, and uses predominantly the characters of Cobb, his wife and Ariadne, the young dream architect, and their relationships, exploiting the tragic nature of the relationship between Cobb and his wife to further attempt to take the viewer too deeply into the world and question reality.

In the film, Cobb is successful. The team manages to plant the idea of dissolving the company and Cobb goes home to his children a free man. Or does he? You see, in the world of Inception, the players need personal cues, what they call a Totem, to tell them when they are dreaming, and at the film's end the viewer gets a personal cue to Cobb's state of mind. But does the viewer have any such totem?

When Cobb is first explaining the project to Ariadne, he explains that dreams always begin in the middle of the action, and asks her to explain how they got to their current location. She can't and he reveals they are dreaming.

I read an article for a Communication Studies course (turns something fun into something ridiculously boring and hence is the worst discipline in the world, ever) that argued that due to film's temporal relations (the action, no matter when the film was made, is always current, always in the present), the film must begin In Media Res, which translates roughly into In The Middle of Things. Cobb could just as easily be talking about film.

Nolan's Inception attempt is incredibly complex and clever, but does it actually work? By the film's last level, do we actually care? It's not the first time a team like this has attempted Inception on the filmgoing public. Films like The Matrix, The 13th Floor, Existenz, and Waking Life all construct a world in which the idea that reality is a questionable notion. And to be honest, they all do it better.

Existenz in particular is most successful at asking us to think about the blurred lines between the 'real world' and the world of the subconscious. Though it's premise is different, referring to video games rather than dreams, it offers an interesting parallel. It was made in the late 90s, but it's especially timely today in a world in which video games and video game users are constantly intertwined with the advent of the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox Kinect. There are striking parallels in the two films; in Inception, the characters are linked to a console that allows them to stay asleep for a fixed period of time, and can be done as a group. In each level of the dreams, the technology still exists in varying forms. In Existenz, a group can be connected to one console and in each level of the game, the technology to enter a game exists. Dying in both the game (Existenz) and in the dream (Inception) causes the player or dreamer to leave the world of the game or the dream and can produce a diminished ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

As I said, I think Existenz does it better, with the film's structure perfectly mirroring the structure of each level of the game. The final moments are more chilling and to me, open the film up to more debate than the final moments of Inception. The final line, "Hey, tell me the truth... are we still in the game?" is shocking because the characters in the world are asking the exact same question as the viewer, and probably at the same time.

Another film that also does this fairly well is Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001). Using an animation technique called rotoscoping (painting over frames of film to give a sense of accurate movement), the film recreates the shifting temporal and spatial relations of the dream to reflect the need to establish a difference between dreams and reality, but also to suggest the following idea: if time in the dream world is different, seemingly eternal, what if what we conceive of as the afterlife is merely our subconscious shutting down and using the last of our brain function to enter a dream-like state? It's certainly a compelling one.

And let's not forget the first attempt at this kind of inception, of the questioning of dreaming and reality was not done using film. It was one dude freaking himself out one night. For Rene Descartes to get to 'I Think, Therefore I am,' he had to think, 'how can I tell that I'm in the world? How can I know for sure that I am always in a dream?' He decided that if an idea can be doubted, it can be rejected in order to use them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge. If we can realise that thought exists, and accept a concrete form of reality, then we can be certain that we are not stuck in a dream. Or crazy.

Having a double major in Film Studies and Philosophy (I know what you're thinking; EMPLOYABLE), and having taken a course called Philosophy and Film, it seems that a lot of fundamental philosophical concepts are constantly examined and explored. It seems that the question of who we are and what we are will remain an everchanging philosophical concept and if it's the role of the arts to reflect these questions, then it seems Inception will not be the last film to address Descartes' ideas.

It seems to me that sometimes the Cinema is the last refuge of the philosopher. Is Nolan a filmmaker or philosopher, you might ask? I say, can't he be both?

Oh, and if you are actually interested in reading about films that explore fundamental philosophical concepts, read Philosophy Goes To The Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy by Chris Falzon.

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