Head Trip

Inception is an old-fashioned head-trip. The Leonardo DiCaprio character is an extractor and implanter of ideas who is haunted by the suicide of his own wife. Parenthetically, one wonders if the story doesn’t owe something to another futuristic work—Tarkovsky’s Solaris (based on the Stanislav Lem novel), in which the central character is also haunted by the death of his wife. In the case of Inception, the wife’s presence is an unholy reminder of the idea of the unreality the De Caprio character had so successfully and tragically implanted in her. But the greatest question about Inception is how and why the film has become such a major hit. Unlike a lot of blockbusters, Inception is not easy to understand, and its varying themes, running the gamut from corporate espionage to questions of solipsism, dream structure and dream life, are not exactly the stuff of commercial film. Hitchcock’s Spellbound has some wonderful dream sequences, which were in fact storyboarded by Salvador Dali, but Inception offers more than just simple fragments and off-the-cuff musings. The understanding and manipulation of dreams is the palette from which the narrative is fashioned, though it might be argued that the attention to dream structure is superficial, owing, in the end, more to video games than to concerns with the relationship between sleeping and waking consciousness. But the film is fundamentally unsettling in the way it paints the mind’s vulnerability to suggestion. The original John Frankenheimer version of The Manchurian Candidate had a similar effect. However, cold war politics and torture effectively grounded it, creating a reassuring feeling of causality. Are audiences relating to Inception director Christopher Nolan’s vision of a purely subjective universe, in which the world outside the self partakes of little, if any, verifiable reality?

Annals of Consciousness: Solaris

Consciousness, whether in an ocean or a brain, does not necessarily reveal truth. Conversely, truth can be too much for consciousness to bear. Solaris, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s l972 film based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem, is about a consciousness that reposes in a sea of water on a distant planet. There’s a wonderful scene early in the film that portrays the inside of the mind as series of highways, with cars like neurons running between synapses. The movie oscillates between the inside of whatever consciousness might be, to the phenomenon we might casually call reality.  The philosophical landscape and conundrums of the movie are endless and preachy, but the main character Kris Kelvin’s grief over the suicide of his wife, and the notion of the Faustian bargain by which she is able to return to life, if only in factitious form, along with the recurring theme of the father/son relationship (Kris’s mission may mean that he will never see his father again), provide the emotional underpinnings for a movie that ends up separating the body and the mind. The imagery of Hamlet runs throughout the film. For instance, Gribarus, one of the scientists on the space station who commits suicide, wants to be returned to earth so he can be buried in the ground with the worms and dirt, a fate reminiscent of poor Yorick.  Man’s ultimate condition is that of degenerate matter rather than soaring thought. “Love is a feeling we can experience, but never explain,” Kris says at one point.  Solaris isn’t so much science fiction as a dramatization of the plight of the dualist thinker. “We don’t need other worlds,” says Snout, one of the scientists on the space station circling the planet Solaris. “We need a mirror.”