Inessentials

I tried a little experiment this year. I wrote down (okay, typed out) every film I watched this year, the date I watched it, and assigned it a letter grade. Grading films like that is sadly reductive, but it was a first step toward externalizing and therefore crystallizing my reactions. (I filled in some of 2009 from memory and from my Netflix history.) I had hoped to write brief two- or three-sentences responses for each film, but I didn’t succeed there. Perhaps in 2011.

I’ve found the practice to be instructive in many ways, but most of all it has been fun. Now as we leave a movie theater, my wife wants to know what my grade is going to be, and I ask her grade. How dare I give True Grit a B, she tells me, since it was easily an A- at least. (Much like what happened to Kelli Marshall, I was talked into a B+.) One of the joys of watching film is the company of the people we watch it with, and most of my cinema experiences this year have been with my wife, whose taste fortunately overlaps a great deal with mine.

I watched 170 films in 2010, roughly one every two days. And if I counted correctly, I watched over 50 films with a 2010 release date. That means there are still a lot of films, including many critical favorites I didn’t see. No Dogtooth. No I Am Love. No Certified Copy. No Sweetgrass. But you can see grades for all the films I did watch here (sortable by release date).

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What’s the last thing the world needs? Another blog post about Christopher Nolan’s Inception, of course. Yet, nevertheless, I have succumbed to the need to purge these thoughts from my (conscious) mind and implant them in yours. Beware, moderate spoilers ahead. I see no way to talk about this film without assuming you have seen it. I try to talk about other films in a non-spoilery way.

Marge Simpson gets psychoanalyz

Most of the debate about Inception (beyond, “does it work?”) has dealt with Nolan’s views of dreaming and the subconscious. A lot of the criticism of the film has focused on Nolan’s rather chaste view of the subconscious and his failure to capture what dreams are like and their relevance to cinema. First, it’s notable that there’s no sex in anyone’s subconscious here. We have one very modest kiss, a couple slinky dresses, and that’s about it. This isn’t exactly the untamed wilderness of lust and desire that people (especially Freudians) associate with the subconscious. There is some violence, but no passion for violence; just violence that is necessary for the mission. Second, dreams make little sense once you’ve left the dream world, but Inception works so very hard to make sense that it’s clear you are supposed to leave the film thinking that it all works. Third, there are filmmakers who push us toward portraying the unease and bizarreness of dreams filmically (David Lynch being an obvious example), but Nolan simply misses all of this. Fourth, many have theorized that experiencing a film is like experiencing a dream, and that films can play to this aspect of our experience, but Nolan fails to do this. Most film edits are like the leaps our brains make while dreaming, for instance. And films can exploit this, perhaps most directly by drawing attention to themselves by employing dream imagery. Inception, it’s been argued, fails to do any of those things that would make it seem dream-like or draw attention to the film as a dream. (I’ve previously argued that Gone with the Wind used dream imagery in this way.)

I don’t mean to rebut these criticisms directly. What I want to say instead is that these criticisms have missed an important aspect of what Nolan is doing. Nolan is not exploring the subconscious and not exploring dreams per se, he is exploring the tension between control and chaos (a theme that runs through most of his work) and using dreaming and the subconscious to further his interest in how we learn to control the world around us (or in this case in us). Three points to consider: 1. Nolan is a controlling director. 2. Chaos and control is an important theme in Nolan’s films. 3. Inception is far more concerned with control over the subconscious/dreaming than with the subconscious/dreaming per se.

First, it is important to note that Christopher Nolan is a “controlling” director, by which I mean that he is a director who works out ahead of time all or nearly all of what will be filmed (scripting, storyboarding, etc.) and the filming comes last. (I know, I know, postproduction comes last, but that’s still been worked out ahead of time). These directors are interested in each detail of the frame, what goes where, and in every aspect of filmmaking because they want to control as many aspects of the production as possible to as fully realize their vision as possible. Other examples of this kind of director include Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Other directors are more open to filming moments as they occur to them (like Ingmar Bergman’s famous closing shot in The Seventh Seal), or leaving pieces of the film open to interpretation (like the blindfolding of the sheep in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel), or working without a script (like Wim Wenders attempted on Wings of Desire). These directors (at least some of the time or for some of the film) try to capture something that is happening in the moment, something that cannot be planned, something spontaneous. This is why it is so odd to see the spontaneous, captured-in-the-moment shot of the fly walking across the camera lens from Truffaut’s Jules and Jim show up Jeunet’s Amelie, since these two films are polar opposites in terms of the sort of control I am talking about. Of course all directors exert some control; we consider Truffaut an auteur, after all, which would be difficult if he had no control at all over his films! I’m just trying to point to two different tendencies among directors. Nolan is the craftsman control, the planner, the preparer. And that’s an important way in which he is engaged with controlling his films.

Second, the theme of chaos and control runs throughout Nolan’s films. I’ll mention just the two that I have watched most recently (which are also his two most well known and most loved films), Memento and The Dark Knight. Memento not only exhibits the sort of supreme directorial control that I talked about in the last point, it is also the story of a man struggling to gain control over himself and his world while he has the unusual condition that he cannot form new short-term memories. We watch in each scene (especially the black and white “forward” scenes) as he tattoos himself with important things to remember, as he makes notes to himself, and (in one crucial scene) controls his future action by manipulating these physical reminders. We slowly come to realize over the course of the film that the other characters are each trying to control the protagonist in unique ways, exploiting the ways in which he is not able to control himself. Memento is, among many other things, a battle for control.

I don’t see much need to harp on the ways that The Dark Knight continues this theme of control. The film (in some disappointingly direct exposition) states the theme of chaos and control quite clearly. The Joker represents chaos. He destroys and terrorizes for the joy of the chaos. Batman tries to bring order to the chaos, tries to help the police and district attorney’s office gain control over the city, because only with this control can there be peace. Batman, though, is a conflicted figure because he tries to bring control by operating outside the bounds of society. He uses his own sort of chaos to help bring control, and thus cannot be an accepted member of society. (This plays into the trope in Westerns that the gunslinger is necessary but cannot remain in the civilized society, captured most beautifully, I think, in Shane.) The Dark Knight is about the relentless struggle between chaos and control and the extent to which at least some of us must become chaotic in order to keep things in control.

Nolan is a “controlling” director and his films engage in the question of how we control the world and the struggle between control and chaos at an individual and societal level. Let’s turn now to the most important point: Inception is far less concerned with how we dream or what the subconscious is really like than it is with how we can control them. Most reviews I’ve read haven’t dealt with this. (Caryn James is one exception.)

The characters in the film are very interested in how much control they have, and how much they are willing that control over to the others. See, as one example, the exchange capture in this TV teaser, dubbed “Control.”

Being in control versus out of control runs throughout the film. It’s spoken of more frequently, I think, than even the question of whether we are dreaming or awake, partly because the question of whether we are dreaming or a wake only matters (in the film) insofar as it affects how much control we have over what happens and what steps we need to take to gain control. Totems are necessary to keep a (literal and figurative) grip on whether you are dreaming so that you can maintain control. Mal loses control over her life because of the inceived (?) idea that the world she experiences is not the real world. This idea matters because she loses her control over herself. When Ariadne enters the shared dream world for the first time, she realizes that knowing you are in a dream can give you control over that dream (visualized beautifully by the city of Paris folding in on itself).

The story of Inception is largely one of control as well. The son who will control his father’s empire. The competitor who wants to control the world’s energy supply. The competitor’s attempt to control the son. And, since this film is in its heart a heist movie, learning to control one’s opponent through sleight of hand (or sleight of dream, in this case) is central to pulling off the heist. From the second scene, where we see Cobb controlling Saito to break into the vault (which he does by noticing Saito’s uncontrolled reaction of glancing in the direction of the safe). When Saito realizes later that he was in a dream within a dream, he wrests control back from Cobb. We could easily run through the whole film talking about how characters struggle against one another for control, how they must cede control by entering into one another’s dreams (which is, after all, very similar to the way we cede control to a film when we enter that darkened theater), and how they must learn to control their dream states.

It is this concern with control, I think, that makes Inception feel like a film that is all ego and superego, and no id. The film is not about the chaos, not about the uncontrolled, except for where it overwhelms us. Like Leonard in Memento or Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Dark Knight, Cobb has learned to control himself amidst the chaos of his own mind. Even his own subconscious is ordered: he takes an elevator to visit his memories/fantasies, which is a rather silly but sort of neat technique to define and control what seems uncontrollable. Just as Nolan attempts to exert a masterful level of control over his films, his characters are struggling to control their own minds and their immediate surroundings. And far less than in The Dark Knight, the characters of Inception do control the chaos. The chaos is never gone, but it can be controlled. Leonard will never control his memory condition, only learn to control what he can with it. Bruce Wayne must always become out-of-controlled society Batman to maintain control-within-society. But Cobb can go furthest in actually controlling himself.

One of the great mistakes of the film, I think, is the closing shot, because it leaves people talking about only that last scene, which is really one of the film’s most sophomoric elements. “Am I dreaming?” is not a question that is very well addressed by the film, so to leave the film on that question is disappointing. The characters are too busy running through the machinations of the clever plot to do any real work on answering that question. That’s not the sort of question that can be addressed by a zero-gravity fight scene or an imagining of one’s subconscious as a James Bond film. The question of how much control we have over ourselves is a question that can be addressed by the story, and that may be the only intellectually engaging question the film can handle. (The film is far better as a heist film than as a philosophical meditation on the subconscious or dreams.) It’s a question that is well suited to Nolan as a director, because his style and the themes he has been exploring for a decade have all been pushing toward this question of control. So a finely tuned, enormously complex, carefully explained heist plot is the right sort of film to address the question of control, but not the question of “what are dreams?” or “am I dreaming?”

A shared experience, carefully crafted to be as believable as possible, occasionally drawing attention to itself as a dream, always steeped in the images and formulas of genre that involves a remarkable level of control – yes, it’s both the world of Nolan’s Inception and our experience of it.

For the last three months or so, I’ve been dealing with an eye condition that makes my right eye blurry, very sensitive to light, and occasionally painful. The treatment for it includes (temporarily) making the eye even blurrier and keeping it dilated all the time. It’s a condition I have had before, and one that I will probably have periodically for the rest of my life. The treatment takes months, but it quickly becomes such a regular part of my routine that I hardly think about it. Because one of eyes is always dilated and out of focus, it changes the way that I interact with technology, so I thought it might be worth sharing some of these altered interactions.

I wrote all this for two reasons. One, I wanted to chronicle (for my own benefit) what it is like when I have this problem, so I can deal with it better in the future. Second, I thought it would be helpful to point out the ways in which I experienced technology differently because of a relatively small difference in my physical condition from most of the technology-consuming public. As ever, I am trying to reflect on who I am and how I engage with the world around me, although this time I’m less interested in the content of what I view than the physical conditions in which I view it. So bear with this unusual (and probably boring) post.

Tom Cruise in shades, from Top Gun

There are basically three things I have changed to deal with the problematic eye.

1. I avoid bright lights. This doesn’t just mean not going outdoors when it’s sunny. It also means keeping the lights off at home, even at night (where the glow of the TV is often the only light source).
2. When I am near bright lights, I wear sunglasses. This includes almost situations when I am outside the house.
3. I wear an eyepatch. Yes, an eyepatch. Even in low light settings, it can be a strain on my eye to be near any light (even the backlit glow of a computer screen). Add to this the fact that my problem eye is always out of focus, and suddenly using an eyepatch can be a very helpful way of seeing things more clearly.

These three changes have an impact on how I engage with various technologies that depend heavily on eyesight. I don’t have a smart phone and I don’t use my iPod for watching video, so I’ll leave those aside.

1. Movie theaters. I simply refused to stop seeing films at the theater because of my eye. So I typically wear sunglass through the previews, when the house lights are still on, then switch to the eyepatch for some or all of the main show. Being in a dark theater isn’t too bad, depending on the brightness of the film. Since I’m especially sensitive to light, I’m particularly aware of the difference in how films are lit. Big Hollywood studio films like Knight & Day, for instance, are considerably brighter than moody indie flicks like Winter’s Bone. Not only is there a difference in lighting techniques (not least Winter Bone‘s greater reliance on natural light), but these choices result in how much light comes through the film strips themselves and therefore how much light reflects off the large white screen and back toward the viewer. Winter’s Bone is more consistent in its color palette and brightness (from outdoor to indoor and from daytime to nighttime scenes) than Knight & Day is from car chase to warehouse gun fight. Other than noticing this, my unequal eyes don’t make a great deal of difference when watching a movie at a theater. It is a bit harder to focus when not wearing the eyepatch, and I do have less depth perception when wearing the eyepatch. But, surprisingly, if I am sitting from the middle to back of the theater, having zero depth perception hasn’t made much of a difference in how I see the film. The closer I move to the front of the theater, though, the greater an impact it makes. In watching Inception, I sat near the front of a crowded theater, and I was losing too much by wearing the eyepatch. It may be that Inception keeps its background in focus more often, or I was more often drawn to the details of the dreamscapes, and thus I need both eyes to take in what is happening, but I suspect that most of the problem stemmed from sitting closer to the screen, where it is more difficult to take in the whole screen with one good eye.
2. 

   How 3-D glasses work from 3dglassesonline.com

   3-D movies. 3-D is completely lost on me because I can’t focus with one eye. So among the many reasons to be skeptical of this “new” technology is that it is (like many “advances”) going to leave some people unable to participate. Since my eye started acting up, I saw only one 3-D film in theaters, How to Train Your Dragon. Watching with only one eye focusing through the 3-D glasses and one not focusing very well is very comparable to watching without the 3-D glasses (based on my mid-movie experiment). Watching with an eyepatch under the 3-D glasses makes 3-D even flatter than traditional film. (I think this is often true of 3-D even with both eyes working, but it is always true if you’ve got one eye covered.) My wife hates 3-D because it gives her headaches to wear the 3-D glasses over her regular glasses, and I avoid it because it so rarely improves a film. (I gave Avatar a “B” when I saw it in theaters, but I suspect it would be no more than a “C” if viewed on other formats. But that is the exception.) (And, yes, I do believe it is legitimate to grade films differently based on the medium employed.) But trying to watch 3-D with one good eye reminds me of how technologies affect people differently depending on their bodily circumstances.

3. Live theater. Going to watch a play is nearly impossible, since I can’t see the stage from the cheap seats (the only ones I can afford). Distance viewing is very difficult, and it is extremely frustrating to be unable to see what is happening on stage. Even if I can handle the lights, which is already a strain, the frustration over watching blurry shapes move around leads me to avoid traditionally staged plays. There is a small black-box theater that I love, that perhaps I could handle because I would be close enough to the action, but I haven’t tried it.


Daryl Hannah, sporting the eyepatch

4. Computers. I keep my laptop’s brightness as low as it can go while still being brighter than the ambient lighting. And, frankly, my MacBook just doesn’t get dim enough for my comfort. I still usually wear an eyepatch, since looking at a computer screen through dark sunglasses is nearly impossible. That increases the strain on my good eye, so I need to relax it more often (close it or focus on something far away for a short while). The one thing that is really noticeable, though, is how difficult it is to watch embedded videos. Nearly all video websites, from Hulu to Youtube to almost every blog on the planet, has a white (or similarly light-colored) background. Videos, however, are typically dark, or at least darker than their surroundings when viewed on a computer. Watching streaming videos on-line is thus one of the most difficult things for me to do. I can lose a lot of quality by taking (some) videos to full-screen; otherwise, it’s a game of trade-offs between making the video bright enough to see and making the surrounding page too bright.
5. Television. My very accommodating wife lets me keep the lights off in our house when we are watching TV, and (with that adjustment) television is the easiest technology for me to engage in right now (at least for the size of our television and its distance away). Apart from the difficulty I have reading subtitles with my poor distance vision right now, television is the most accessible technology for me, in part because it is the most easily adaptable. I have control over the ambient lighting (unlike a movie theater or the area surrounding an on-line video), I have control over the brightness of the television set (unlike a movie theater), and I have control over starting and stopping it so as to give me eyes a rest.
6. Books. Books are perhaps the most difficult to parse. The eyepatch makes it very possible to read a book, but focusing at a reasonable distance puts a large strain on my one good eye, so it is difficult to read for any length of time. This is especially true as day turns to night, and my eye has been worked hard all day. So while reading is quite easy to do (an advantage over almost every other viewable technology), it is very difficult to read for long periods of time. Speaking of which, back to the dissertation…

The dilated eye