Inception (USA, 2010, Christopher Nolan)

Ben said:

Captain Picards' hollow deck meets Mr. Spock's 3D chess game on the cutting room floor of The Matrix.

I suppose how you feel about Inception depends on whether you compare it to Nolan's Batman movies, which I have not seen, or his brilliant breakout film, Memento, which I have seen more than once. Perhaps both of these comparisons are misguided and Inception should be evaluated in the company of other big budget, head-trippy futuristic fare, with or without sci-fi trappings; Minority Report, Vanilla Sky, Total Recall, Brazil, and no doubt lots of other stuff I've never seen. Be this as it may, I am inclined to compare Inception to Memento because the former so plainly presents itself as a thinking man's action thriller, with a complex psychological premise we are expected to find as engaging as the one around which Nolan constructed Memento.

It would be easy merely to dismiss Inception's failure on this score as being the result of it saddling its complex psychological premise with way too much action thriller baggage. Clearly, the intense drama achieved by the low-budget, street life, daylight Noir of Memento is not even approximated by the capital-intensive, fantasy land, CGI overload of Inception. But the real problem with Inception has to do with its complex psychological premise in the first place.

In the first place, it's truly not complex at all. Set aside all the mumbo-jumbo tech talk about how there are concentric rings of the unconscious that can be induced, invaded and controlled by others from without. What remains is the most banal, coffee-table Freudian stuff. So much smoke and mirrors about how to manipulate the inner workings of the mind through the power of suggestion, only to trot out and ride the tried and true hobbyhorse of a father figure fixation. Jesus, why not simply put the billionaire victim in intensive (and expensive) psychotherapy, let him take forever to get over daddy, and take over his inherited company while he's preoccupied on the couch.

In the second place, the psychological premise is way too complex. On this score, the demands of the action thriller really are at fault. In order to establish the changing situations that facilitate the variety of thrilling action, the Byzantine architecture of the head-trippy plot takes on ever more inconsistent proportions that must be justified by ad hoc explanations in the dialogue. The constitutional articles of the psychological premise are continually undergoing congressional amendment. Just when being murdered in a dream is the mechanism for waking up in reality, this ceases to be the case and an entirely different mechanism is introduced. Just when there is definitely a mechanism of some sort - any sort - to ensure waking up in reality, this ceases to be the case and an entirely different and deeper ring of the unconscious is introduced, from which it may be impossible escape. The tolerance of the audience is over-taxed. And in the opinion of this taxpayer, the whole conceptual government deserves to be voted out of office. The incessant explanation of the psychological architecture saddles the action just as much as the action saddles the psychology; i.e., the supposedly thrilling action ain't that thrilling.


In the third place, and most of all, the psychological premise of Inception is based on an utterly false model of the human mind. The unconscious is not OFF while we are awake and ON while we are asleep. Any type of so-called "depth psychology" (as distinct from any sort of behaviorism) begins with the notion that there is an UN-conscious that is so because it is SUB-conscious. A depth psychology may make much of the workings of the unconscious while we dream during sleep. But any such particular emphasis is on behalf of and not at the expense of grasping the workings of the unconscious in general, including while we are awake. The interpretation of dreams may be considered the most immediate way to encounter the unconscious, but the contradictory relations between it and the conscious mind are more readily apparent when the mind is, in fact, conscious. And the whole point about the simultaneous running of our necessarily irrational subterranean wheels and our potentially rational surface wheels is that these two sets of gears are not working in tandem, to put it mildly.

Inception
treats the unconscious as even more than working in tandem with the conscious. The film presents the unconscious as nothing other than a replication of the conscious, a mechanical template that adheres to the same rational rules of motion, freaky-deaky surreal special effects notwithstanding. With this in place, an infinite number of templates may be cast in the service of the plot, but the result is a bogus technologization of the mind that reduces it to the levels of a video game.

This is most unfortunate. The psychological premise of Inception is tremendously ambitious. The film attempts to explore collectively experienced dream-states or socially inter-penetrative mental constructions. It goes about this in a manner that is significantly less psychologically materialist than the still dramatically far-fetched exploration of anterograde amnesia without retrograde amnesia in Memento. Nevertheless, Inception does not have even the most modest reliance on quick-fix metaphysics or wacky spiritualism. The whole business is conducted under the influence of external brain stimulation, both physio-chemical and socio-communicative. It's all mumbo-jumbo tech talk, of course, but I listened raptly to every word until it became so much shell-game speech without a pea of psychological substance.


As far as Leo product goes, I much preferred Shutter Island.
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David Byrnes' American Utopia (Spike Lee, 2020, USA)

Ben Livant says:

James Brown meets the Blue Man Group as conducted by the love child of Mr. Spock and a king's jester.

I suppose the best way to praise this live music/dance/theatre performance-cinema is to state that it is legitimate to compare it to Stop Making Sense.  It's not as good, of course, but it is still goddamn great!

And the excellence is not just due to nostalgia.  Or if nostalgia is a prominent factor, it is not restricted to our generation's fans of Talking Heads.  It pertains far and wide to pre-pandemic days, when this show was a hit on Broadway, with people still able to congregate in the building and bounce together in the aisles, not at all six feet apart.

Gunda (USA/Russia, 2020, Viktor Kosakovskiy)

Ben Livant:

[1]  Farm noir.  Definitely on the level, though, ground level Bub, no Dutch angle about it  The cows were too cowed to corroborate the crime, but the trip to the prison paid off anyway because one of the rosters crowed.  That's what happens, sister!  Hobble a cock and he'll squawk.  That's the price for leaving him only one leg to walk.   Guy's just lucky that murder most foul wasn't murder most fowl.

New Order (Mexico, 2020, Michel Franco)

Ben Livant:

Given our conversation beforehand, I misunderstood the scale of the situation.  I thought the dramatic setting was strictly within the confines of a single private dwelling.  After you told me that the servants rebel, I confirmed my (incorrect) understanding that the focus was within "the feudal manor;" again, on a solitary estate.

Black Bear (USA, Lawrence Michael Levine, 2020)

Ben Livant begins:

A bit of a head scratcher.  I mean, in a very sweeping sort of way, I can take away that the exercise is a study in personal falsehood in the circumstance of professional (Part 2) or wannabe professional (Part 1) artistic creativity.  You know, fabricating fiction as a vocation comes with its own occupational hazards.

Family Obligations (Kenneth R. Frank, USA, 2019)

Variations on a theme: You can ghost your friends, but you can't disappear your family. Alternatively:

Everywhere you go, there they are. Family. Can't live with them, can't stuff them in a sack and throw them

in a river. Despite some technical struggles, Kenneth R.

Chameleon (Marcus Mizelle, USA, 2019)

Drawing on the conventions of crime/thriller genre, and deploying enough nifty plot shifts to keep the audience on its toes, Chameleon keeps us guessing until the final frame. In spite of its shoestring budget, the film has top end production values, and compelling performances from each of its leads. Chameleon is a fine piece of entertainment.

Trauma Therapy (Tyler Graham Pavey, USA, 2019)

Trauma Therapy is a purported thriller wherein four people of various levels of dysfunction agree to spend a weekend with oh so cutely-named Tovin Maven, a self-help maven, in a remote cabin deep in the nameless woods.

Anya (Okada and Taylor, USA, 2019)

On its surface, Anya is about that most topical of contemporary issues, genetic modification. Often films that engage that "ripped from the headlines" scenario have a sensationalist bent, as they are as much exploiting the issue as they are illuminating it.

Thankfully, Anya is not one of those films.  Rather, Anya is a thoughtful and nuanced exploration of a complex and provocative contemporary issue.

Sunday Girl (USA, Peter Ambrosio, 2019)

At once familiar and refreshingly adept, Sunday Girl is a self-aware and clever examination of a day in the life of a young woman trying to get her romantic life back in order.

Natasha is at an important crossroads in her life. She is dating five men, but decides she wants to commit to only one, George (Brandon Stacy) so she embarks upon a one day mission to break up with the other four.

Human Capital (Marc Meyers, USA, 2019)

Mainstream films in America often struggle when it comes to portraying class divides, not because it is hard to do so, but because those in charge of getting films seen are loath to honestly examine how for most people the American dream is a total nightmare. They have determined that social truths that run counter to the Horatio Alger mythology are a real downer and won't put butts in the seats.
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