Intercepting Inception

I like to tell people that I got my master's degree in American Literature, which is technically not true. I got a master's degree in literature and the emphasis I had was on American literature--and within that emphasis I read a lot of more postmodern and contemporary American fiction. Towards the end of that degree, I decided that my sensibility had undergone a subtle change that seems to me now as part of a maturation process. Whereas towards the end of my undergraduate work and into my graduate work I was highly influenced by postmodern theory, fiction, and play, I soon noticed that I craved the soulful, the faithful, and the sincere. Maybe it coincided with my discovery of Arvo Part and Marilynne Robinson, or maybe real value is the inevitable next thought (and antidote) after reality is questioned. Whatever it was, I started to crave fiction that was no longer trying to construct irony upon irony, play upon play, word puzzles and puns as meaning. The difference between reading Danielewski's House of Leaves and Robinson's Gilead, which I read simultaneously, was like the difference between Escher and Rembrandt: one looks into the craft of thinking, the other looked into the nature of being. I prefer the nature of being, perhaps because it wonders about the soul and all that.

The difference between Escher and Rembrandt is like the difference between the film Inception and Where the Wild Things Are. I bring up Escher on purpose because I am pretty sure Christopher Nolan read both Richard Hofstatder's Godel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop as he was writing Inception. His pictures of the mind imitate Hofstater's anecdotes, only Nolan's are much neater, and considerably less believable. Nolan likes clean compositions, and the metaphorical images of a person's concsciousness should be anything but. Perhaps this was part of the reason his movie just didn't move me. He doesn't explore the human, he explores a highly structured image of experience without experience itself, and ultimately it seems inauthentic. I felt a similar way about The Dark Knight. Both movies are wonderful experiences, and great movies, but I get the feeling that those movies want to be more than great movies, and that is what leaves the bad taste in my mouth. They seem at once all too clever and self-satisfied to really approach human experience, and it bothers me to see them praised as major works of genius when they seem more like spectacular thought experiments.

This is not to say that Inception is not a lot of fun; it is, just as Danielewski's fiction, soduko, and riddles are fun. But they are unmeaningful as artistic objects. I saw Inception last night, and I slept well after a very enjoyable evening at the cinema, but I slept well nonetheless, suggesting that the game in the movie did not posit reflection in the way that, say, Up in the Air or The Hurt Locker did. So go see it, but don't believe the hype. There is much more to art than a few puzzles and hidden meanings, something it seems a lot of moviegoers willingly neglect from time to time.