Inception (again)

Still the best movie ever made, but I think I am calm enough now after a second viewing to write down a few things about it. I am also sort of desperate for something to write about, so the following is somewhat rambly and incomplete.

One of the more interesting aspects of the film, for me, is its reflexivity. This is admittedly a bit boring on the surface. Yes, the dream is like a film, and the architect is like a director, the dreamer is the audience, and so on. Such connections are easy enough to make (though others maybe not so much - what is the analog for the forger? the chemist?), but once they are made, some interesting things crop up.

Key to Inception is the dream within the dream (within the dream). If the film represents a dream, then a film within the film could be a film watched by the characters in the film. However, in Inception, the characters are the same in each nested dream. So for this analog to be carried out, the viewers of the film would be characters in the film, who would also be characters in a film within the film. Clearly this is not possible (unless the audience is composed solely of actors), but a central component of filmmaking involves causing the audience to empathize with the characters in the film. The audience member, in effect, "becomes" a character in the film for the duration of it. In this sense the viewer is in the film, and shares the experience with other audience members.

The compression of time is also central to the mechanics of dreams in the film. A dreamer can experience more in a dream in a certain amount of time than a waking person. Similarly, a film (usually) shows more events than would actually fit in its running time. But the audience does not actually experience this longer amount of time, only parts of it. The film, then, is more like a dream upon waking, when the time compression is removed and only bits and pieces of the dream are remembered.

And, depending on your memory, after leaving the theater, bits of the film are just as hard to remember as a dream. Only the emotions - and whatever conclusions you may have drawn from them - remain.