My official stance on the movie is that it was diverting but judging Inception within Christopher Nolan's oeuvre, I'd rank this around The Prestige or Insomnia. In stories that create their own worlds from scratch, if they create their physics and rules arbitrarily, then viewers will arbitrarily find rules to question as inauthentic or inorganic, as I did with the Limbo idea which seems like an inelegant exception to and cheap way of creating tension out of the "You just wake up if you die in a dream" rule.
That said, some of the film's detractors complain about how its overly crisp depiction of dreamworlds doesn't resemble real-life dreams, a complaint that I find fairly weak because Inception is only ostensibly and superficially about dreams -- at its heart, it's about watching film.
The line I'm drawing from dream to film spectatorship isn't that radical of a leap in the context of psychoanalytic film theory, which is founded on Lacan's post-structural take on Freud. Dreams are obviously within the realm of psychoanalysis, but psychoanalytic film theory puts its critical stamp by arguing that watching film is particularly akin to dreaming. This argument begins on a basic level -- film and dreams typically occur in a darkened space that suppresses most of the subject's senses as it envelopes them in audio/video stimulation -- before it heads off into the esoteric stuff (see the mirror stage, suturing), which I'll leave alone for the real critics (and because as far as Lacan goes, I'm petty bourgeois).
However, the main point I want to bring to emphasize is that in psychoanalytic theory (in both its literary (read: Freudian) and film strains), the entire text is the unconscious dream. If the text is the unconscious, then the individual characters within the text aren't the subjects of the dream, they're simply projections, if you will, of the text's unconscious desire -- which is echoed in the "people" that populate the dreamscapes in Inception and are called, you guessed it, projections. (Apologies if I'm mangling Lacan, my excuse is that it's hard, I didn't do the reading, and slept through the lectures.)
Keeping all of this in mind, "Is the whole movie a dream?" isn't the question to ask -- rather, we ought to ask, "Is the whole movie a movie?" in which case we know the answer (if we want to get cute, maybe we could say it's a dream with a movie -- within a movie). As a result, complaining about the staircases (that it's "pointless," or because they only work "if you're not actually on the staircase" is beside the point. It's not for the sake of the characters that the staircase is there; the it's for the sake of the film viewer to laying bare the dream-like, involuted Möbius loop of film-watching and indeed all of narrative itself.
To leave theory aside for the moment, another reason why I find the "it's not like real dreams" complaint to be trifling criticism is because real dreams are boring and incoherent. They might seem engrossing while or immediately after dreaming, but when you scrutinize them dramaturgically, they lose their engrossing qualities because they probably were never there. It's the Stoner's Paradox -- what someone finds captivating when they're not sober or conscious often turns out be unremarkable when they're sober or conscious. (Also, the blogger's complaint that Inception is almost entirely composed of montages? That seemed to serve the Soviet montagists fine.)
But that particular blog is based in the UK, and I recall that Lacan isn't terribly en vogue there (or anywhere besides America -- USA! USA!).
As to the question we shouldn't ask -- "Is the whole thing a dream?" -- I would say yes, since all the shots we see of Cobb's kids are all shown with in the same "memory effect" style, and that includes when Cobb is reunited with them.
Showing posts with label Why I'm Better Than You. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Why I'm Better Than You. Show all posts
Monday, August 02, 2010
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Oops, They did it again
Or, Why hating Britney plays right into the hands of Them
When people -- critics and casual observers alike -- denounce Britney or any other pop starlet, they approach the given pop tart from an auterist perspective, which in all such cases is mistaken. In more pejorative terms, yes, she's fake, but for every teenybopper who thoroughly enjoys Britney-qua-Britney, there are just as many critics who aim their vitriol at a whole lot of nothing, which is what "Britney Spears" is. Or to look at her another way, she's a lot of everything, way more than what a single human could be, and thus, merely a victim of the cultural phenomenon that springs forth from her very image.
The performer whom we saw slogging around on the VMAs is not a single individual; she's a simulacrum of a person, a simulacrum that consists of a matrix of music producers, sound engineers, stylists, makeup artists, and trainers, and most importantly of all, her handlers and marketers who orchestrate her public persona. The actual person (if such a person exists, and I have to admit to anti-essentialist po-mo prejudices against the notion of the Self -- more on this later) who goes along with the body known as "Britney Spears" probably has some limited amount of creative input into her official artistic persona -- and almost certainly autonomously influences her tabloid persona to a large degree -- but in the overwhelming glare of paparazzi and 24/7 gossip coverage, no businessperson with a lick of acumen would let an erratic and coddled girl-child call more than the occasional shot, merely out of courtesy, to sustain a profitable career.
That said, I don't think the "real" Britney at this point is much more than a young cash cow who's been exploited to the point of acting out in a spectacularly public flameout. So directing any ire at her for whatever crime against taste, that's exactly what her handlers want -- she takes the heat while she helps them rake in the dosh while keeping her squarely in the center of public consciousness. Don't like her music? She doesn't write it. Don't like that she's all image -- and a highly sexualized and fetishized one -- and no "substance" (whatever "substance" is)? Even if the vapid pop tart image is a front for some Machiavellian image-making, a just-out-of-her-teens ex-Mousketeer probably isn't savvy or self-confident enough to come up with the idea. Don't like the fact that despite her lack of musicianship, she continues to be a big seller? She's not buying up her own records, and it's not like she's backwards-masking subliminal messages into her music to get the young girls and middle-aged perverts to lay out the cash for In the Zone or to Yvan Eht Nioj. The real perpetrators of "Britney Spears'" crimes against taste are off to the side, counting their money and laughing, because they're the truest beneficiaries of the "any news is good news" maxim. The real Brit is just a Southern girl getting ground up in the engine of commerce and anti-celebrity worship.
Indie rating: Britney Spears - "Toxic"
When people -- critics and casual observers alike -- denounce Britney or any other pop starlet, they approach the given pop tart from an auterist perspective, which in all such cases is mistaken. In more pejorative terms, yes, she's fake, but for every teenybopper who thoroughly enjoys Britney-qua-Britney, there are just as many critics who aim their vitriol at a whole lot of nothing, which is what "Britney Spears" is. Or to look at her another way, she's a lot of everything, way more than what a single human could be, and thus, merely a victim of the cultural phenomenon that springs forth from her very image.
The performer whom we saw slogging around on the VMAs is not a single individual; she's a simulacrum of a person, a simulacrum that consists of a matrix of music producers, sound engineers, stylists, makeup artists, and trainers, and most importantly of all, her handlers and marketers who orchestrate her public persona. The actual person (if such a person exists, and I have to admit to anti-essentialist po-mo prejudices against the notion of the Self -- more on this later) who goes along with the body known as "Britney Spears" probably has some limited amount of creative input into her official artistic persona -- and almost certainly autonomously influences her tabloid persona to a large degree -- but in the overwhelming glare of paparazzi and 24/7 gossip coverage, no businessperson with a lick of acumen would let an erratic and coddled girl-child call more than the occasional shot, merely out of courtesy, to sustain a profitable career.
That said, I don't think the "real" Britney at this point is much more than a young cash cow who's been exploited to the point of acting out in a spectacularly public flameout. So directing any ire at her for whatever crime against taste, that's exactly what her handlers want -- she takes the heat while she helps them rake in the dosh while keeping her squarely in the center of public consciousness. Don't like her music? She doesn't write it. Don't like that she's all image -- and a highly sexualized and fetishized one -- and no "substance" (whatever "substance" is)? Even if the vapid pop tart image is a front for some Machiavellian image-making, a just-out-of-her-teens ex-Mousketeer probably isn't savvy or self-confident enough to come up with the idea. Don't like the fact that despite her lack of musicianship, she continues to be a big seller? She's not buying up her own records, and it's not like she's backwards-masking subliminal messages into her music to get the young girls and middle-aged perverts to lay out the cash for In the Zone or to Yvan Eht Nioj. The real perpetrators of "Britney Spears'" crimes against taste are off to the side, counting their money and laughing, because they're the truest beneficiaries of the "any news is good news" maxim. The real Brit is just a Southern girl getting ground up in the engine of commerce and anti-celebrity worship.
Indie rating: Britney Spears - "Toxic"
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