Zeitgeist and Inception

  • Have you been watch­ing motion pic­tures recently and said, “Why can’t we have MORE spe­cial effects, MORE dark, apoc­a­lyp­tic imagery, MORE vio­lence and non-stop motion?” Well then! “Incep­tion” is the movie for you. More to the point, if you watched the Matrix series and thought, “Well, it’s an inter­est­ing alter­nate real­ity, but for good­ness sake, can’t they make it MORE com­pli­cated and give me LESS infor­ma­tion about how it works?” then “Incep­tion” is really the movie for you.

    If you haven’t done any of that, you’re like me, which is why I didn’t care much for this movie. All the same, it’s worth see­ing, I think. Because the culture-makers of the world’s cul­ture are describ­ing their pain and their cri­sis. It makes for com­pelling view­ing, even as it breaks your heart.

    BTW, here’s a trailer of the movie, in case you haven’t seen it already. (My favorite spe­cial effect is at :43-:45.)

    Let’s start with the basics. The plot: Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a kind of cor­po­rate spy of the brain. He exploits a secret tech­nol­ogy that allows him to break into people’s dreams in order to extract cor­po­rate secrets and sell them. With a team of fel­low dream-invaders, he can manip­u­late peo­ple in their dreams, and he hopes to be able to plant an idea (that’s the “incep­tion” in case you were won­der­ing). That whisker-thin premise serves as a spring­board to make the movie’s real­ity a con­stantly shift­ing set of rules that break and re-form almost at will. The writ­ers threw a ele­ment of unre­lent­ing dan­ger in by say­ing that a person’s sub­con­scious takes action against dream-invaders like white cells attack­ing a dis­ease, and that allows every scene to include chases, shoot­ings and explo­sions. And so the whole thing starts to feel like a hol­i­day in a psychotic’s head.

    And I don’t want to over­think things when I say that there’s a metames­sage going on here. I know that a drive to make more action and show more imag­i­na­tion plays a part. But it’s the some­what pan­icky feel of the thing that was speak­ing to me. Besides the rock­et­ing pac­ing, there’s a com­plete lack of any­thing rock-solid and trust­wor­thy. The cre­atives here are show­ing a rest­less­ness and anx­i­ety that I think they’re bor­row­ing from the cur­rent head­lines, and it’s feed­ing an obsession.

    The peo­ple who make movies, by and large, aren’t big fans of the Chris­t­ian nar­ra­tive. They are very big fans of the human­ist, mate­ri­al­ist nar­ra­tive. (No God or gods, except our­selves. No life after death, no mys­ter­ies, noth­ing to see except what we can ratio­nally sort out and expe­ri­ence through the five senses.)

    The prob­lem is, it’s not work­ing the way it was sup­posed to. When more and more peo­ple got their heads out of the clouds and started agree­ing with them (as more and more peo­ple have been doing), things were sup­posed to get bet­ter and bet­ter. Instead, the whole notion of a god­less uni­verse has been kind of unrav­el­ing before their very eyes. Right about now, they des­per­ately need to open up an escape hatch some­where. The prob­lem is, they can’t find one in any of the places they love best — not in fan­tasy, not in tech­nol­ogy, not in politics.

    But by golly, you can use the impres­sive tools we have at our dis­posal to flip every­thing we’ve ever known upside down and inside out, ques­tion­ing every phys­i­cal bound­ary, zip­ping past every men­tal bar­rier as if all of Cre­ation were one big Chi­nese puz­zle box we need to solve.

    So, do we solve it? Ulti­mately, no, in my opin­ion. Movies like this are always bound to fail. They write a check that they can’t cash. What is the way out? How can you awaken from the dream of this unreal “real world?” Ortho­dox Chris­tians know the answer so well that it seems like a trick ques­tion. But an entire gen­er­a­tion raised to believe only in human­ism — or only in their own ego — is appar­ently in the dark more than ever. And it’s not a nice dark.

    Like I said, it kind of breaks your heart.


    Related posts:

    1. Dreams give wings to fools
    2. Your pas­sion­ate heart
    3. The destruc­tion of hearths
    4. A touch of Miers zeitgeist
    5. “The Russ­ian Priest”: On our rela­tion­ship to the state

    August 9th, 2010 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 08.09.2010

    OK you talked me into see­ing it.

  • Grace

    Wahoo! I should get a 10% kick­back on the ticket sale.

    Here’s one addi­tional thing to know about the pac­ing, which I would’ve found help­ful if I had known: It’s aimed at the video-game-playing gen­er­a­tion, which means that vir­tu­ally no time is spent explain­ing how things work. The result for those who DIDN’T grow up play­ing Half-Life and such is that you feel like you were thrown into the mid­dle of the movie. But appar­ently, the kids love it.

  • s-p

    OK, I saw it. The “anti-gravity” tricks were cool. Other than that, actu­ally kind of well… tedious. How many dif­fer­ent ways can you try to turn real­ity inside out? It seemed like it became a quest to make think­ing (or not think­ing) more com­pli­cated than it is. In the end it seems to get it right: it was all about him and what’s in his own head, which is the nar­cis­sis­tic dis­ease of the human race. sigh.

  • Grace

    I *know*, right?? You’d be amazed, but the Gen-X crowd is los­ing their minds over this movie. I thought if you didn’t have spe­cial effects and non-stop vio­lence, you wouldn’t have even had a movie in all this.

    So I guess no 10% kick­back. :-(

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required