Feeling Dreamy About "Inception"

Non-sequential Ideas about Inception I’d Like to Implant Directly into Your Subconscious While You Think You’re Dreaming

by Jon Zelazny

What the hell happened to Tom Berenger? Did you know he used to be a leading man back in the eighties? He peaked with Platoon (1986) and then I heard he hit the sauce and went downhill pretty quick. Then you’ve got Michael Caine. Seventy-seven years old, a king-hell boozehound for decades, and he looks fucking fantastic! Go figure.



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How can Dom meet Saito as an ancient man in the prologue if the operation that puts Saito in limbo hasn’t even happened yet? Does that mean the whole rest of the movie is a flashback? If so, then when we finally get back to Saito the ancient man at the end of the story, why does the scene unfold differently? Does that mean… ? Oh, forget it.

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I am totally crushin’ on Ellen Page. Impossibly adorable, smart, and spunky, she’s a ray of Juno sunshine that lights up Inception’s relentless bleakness. She’s also a ray of hope, because I knew whatever became of the rest of the characters, Ellen Page was absolutely going to survive. Killing Juno in this movie would be like strangling a live kitten onscreen. The audience would burn down the theaters and riot in the streets.

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I love these people who become rabidly passionate about things many other people find too convoluted, contradictory, or confusing, ala credit default swaps, superstring theory, or Scientology. If you don’t share their blinding devotion, they may turn smug, or even aggressive. “What? You didn’t “get” Inception? Dude, you weren’t paying attention! You really have to see it, like, three times. Actually, don’t bother; you’re obviously not smart enough to appreciate genius.” My first exposure to this school of film criticism was in 1982. “Man, Pink Floyd The Wall is seriously heavy shit! You know what your problem is? You have to see it stoned!”

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I am personally indebted to Christopher Nolan. In November 2008, I got a job at Warner Bros. Television, and the HR guy said I was getting three additional days of paid vacation. Why? The Dark Knight. Then at Christmas, we got a bonus on top of our one-week’s salary bonus: a DVD of The Dark Knight. I wasn’t interested in seeing it again, so we re-gifted it to somebody’s cousin or something.

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I liked Inception. It kept me on the edge of my seat. Not just because it was exciting, but because I was straining to hear the dialogue. I pondered it a lot this week… mostly about how I would recut it. My version would only be two hours long, with the long-ass prologue reduced to ten minutes, and 50% less snow fortress stuff. You might scoff at my arrogance. The picture’s raking it in; why change a thing? That’s true, but if I ran the WB circus, I wouldn’t be satisfied making $500 million when I know in my heart more editing would widen the movie’s appeal enough to bring in $1.1 billion.

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Can we please come together as cinemaniacs and admit part of the reason Heath Ledger is so great in The Dark Knight is because all the other characters are duller than dirt? How could anyone assemble a dream team cast like Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Eric Roberts, and then hamstring them with such vapid scenes and dialogue? Heath was mesmerizing. When he wasn’t on screen, I was bored.

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With his rigorously intelligent, highly organized, painterly visual style, Christopher Nolan is the new David Fincher, who was the next Ridley Scott, who was called the heir to Kubrick, who revered Ophuls and Welles, who adored Sternberg, who worshipped Murnau.

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Few people thus far have pointed out Inception’s similarities to David Cronenberg’s little-seen eXistenZ (1999). In this sci-fi bummer, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law plug a video game into their spinal chords and run around in a conspiracy-plot “game world” that has levels within levels within levels, some of which are difficult to discern from reality. Cronenberg probably had 10% of Nolan’s budget, so there’s no car chases, folding cityscapes, or zero gravity fistfights. On the other hand, Nolan doesn’t come up with a dream image even half as trippy as a guy pulling bones out of an alien reptile restaurant dish and instinctively snapping them together to make a pistol that fires human teeth.

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Can someone explain The Prestige (2006) to me? Not the whole movie, just that final twist in the very last minute. Loved David Bowie as Tesla. I would sit through just about anything if Bowie were in it, and Lord knows, I certainly have.

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Has anyone else noticed Leonardo DiCaprio channeling Jack Nicholson the last couple years? He doesn’t do it a lot, but every once in a while—like when he discusses his past with Juno in Inception—I catch him mimicking Jack’s inflections. I have a theory why he does it. While Nicholson is best known for his hammy Crazy Jack persona, he’s also remarkably convincing when he play a realistic, regular guy, as in The Last Detail (1973), The Border (1982), or About Schmidt (2004). In contrast, I think Leo frets a great deal about how to do normalcy. I think he worries that “not doing much” is too close to “not doing enough to keep the audience interested.” Co-starring with Nicholson in The Departed (2006), I think he came away very impressed by the old lion’s mastery at making non-histrionic moments just as compelling as the ones where he opens up the throttle. Leo works hard at being a good actor, but he’s still more of a star to me, in the sense that he rarely disappears into his roles, particularly the ones that require him to suggest working class roots. Nothing in Leo’s natural presence, voice, or behavior indicates any specific American geographic, social, ethnic, or class background to me. He’s a blank slate, which is probably why I thought he was so great as a fifties company man in Revolutionary Road (2008). Anyway, go rent Shutter Island, and see if you can spot him Jack-ing off. Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy.

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To me, Insomnia (2002) was "Twin Peaks" without the humor or sexy girls. I have terrible insomnia, so I was looking forward to a thriller built around a condition that can make your life absolute hell. I don’t know much about Nolan’s personal life, but I can tell you one thing about him after seeing this movie: he’s never had insomnia.

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Imagine you’re a Warner Bros. story analyst in 2009, and your boss assigns you to read the new draft of Inception because he wants “fresh eyes” on the project. Most scripts run about a hundred pages; Inception has over 160. You start reading, and within five pages you’re very confused. You go back and start over. You kind of get it this time, but kind of not really, so you resolve to read it straight through and try to enjoy the ride.

Two hours later—an eternity in screenplay reading time—you finish it. That Inception is an unholy, sprawling, indecipherable mess on the page goes without saying, but you have to be verrry careful: Christopher Nolan just made the biggest blockbuster in the studio’s history. By tradition, he more than deserves to have the studio bankroll whatever passion project he wants to do, even if it’s two hours of a green awning flapping in the wind. Of course The Green Awning would only cost a few million; Inception will cost 400 times that. But that’s not your problem. Your problem is writing up the first official studio opinion on Golden Boy’s opus.

Before you can even think about how to critique his script, you have to write a synopsis: a two-page summary that explains the movie’s basic through line, something any executive in the company can quickly skim to get the gist of what it’s all about. You go to work. Summarizing the first ten pages alone takes you half a single-spaced page. This is going to be a bitch. And you don’t dare cut any corners: your telling of the story better reflect Nolan’s like a fucking hall of mirrors. Two hours later, you finish. Your summary runs four single-spaced pages, but at least it’s about 88% accurate. You don’t know what half the plot points mean, or how they all fit together, but everything’s there for the WB chain of command to chew over. In comparison, your one-page critique is fairly easy to write. You of course RECOMMEND the project, and then gently salt it with a few run-of-the-mill development phrases nobody in town would object to: “characters could be more defined and likable,” “dream state rules should be clarified,” “structure could be streamlined without much difficulty,” “overall length can be trimmed.” Happy with your work—particularly that kick-ass summary—you turn it in.

Your boss calls the next day. “Hey, great coverage! But you need to do another pass on that synopsis.”
“But I worked really hard on that. Every beat is there, I swear.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“I agree.”
“So what’s the story? These guys go into people’s dreams, they fuck with their heads, and the lead guy is bent out of shape about his wife. That’s about as much as I can figure out. I mean, is she dead, or alive, or what?”
“No, she’s dead. He just dreams about her. And then she’s really dead. I think.”
“Yeah, whatever. Look, I’m pretty sure Nolan knows what he’s doing, but you make it sound like gibberish! You need to rewrite this, pronto. Forget all the little spinning tops for now and just tell the goddamn story! Pretend I want to explain it to my wife. Which is true. I do want to explain it to my wife.”

You go back to the salt mines, and manage to whittle your synopsis down to three pages, but it’s still a pretty hard slog of a read. Your boss accepts it, begrudgingly, and then some version of the phone call imagined above is repeated on up through the next six layers of studio bureaucracy. In the end, nobody who reads the coverage knows how Inception works, and they soon discover that reading the actual script is no help either. Old timer friends of the WB chieftains point out that nobody could make head or tail out of George Lucas’s original script for Star Wars either. It was stone cold incomprehensible… but look what the guy did! That’s how it is with these geniuses.

In the end, Christopher Nolan is simply trusted to make it rain. Everybody crosses their fingers and prays. Miraculously, their prayers are answered, and the rains come. God is Good, and everybody in the WB chain of command gets to keep their job. Including you.

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It was nice seeing Lukas Haas. Remember him? The adorable Amish kid in Witness (1985)? IMDb says he’s been working steadily, but I think the last time I saw him was in Mars Attacks! (1996). Keep on truckin’, Lukas!