I could blog about Inception all day — I think it’s a great movie, really I do, although it has a couple of fundamental flaws*.
This, though, blew my mind:
As the Onion Av Club points out:
The further the heroes dive into a person’s subconscious-into a dream within a dream within a dream, and so on-the more slowed-down time becomes. So if composer Hans Zimmer is playing us a super-slowed-down version of “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” then the implication is that we’re still submerged deep within the dream, far from the kick that will wake us up.
Whoa.
________
* The biggest problem is the flagrant breaking of Chekhov’s rule about guns in the first act having to go off by the third act. We get a huge, amazing set piece with Ariadne showing how architects can bend the dream cityscape to their will, but they never ever really use that ability — which could have come in handy during the whole third act.
Bookmark on Delicious- Digg this post
- Recommend on Facebook
- Share on Posterous
- share via Reddit
- Share with Stumblers
- Tweet about it
3 comments
Grant Hamilton says:
28 July 2010 at 3:28 pm (UTC -5)
The New York Times has an interview with Zimmer talking about the soundtrack. Lots of good info, if you’re a bit of a music nerd:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/hans-zimmer-extracts-the-secrets-of-the-inception-score/
“Just for the game of it,” Mr. Zimmer said, “all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track. So I could slip into half-time; I could slip into a third of a time. Anything could go anywhere. At any moment I could drop into a different level of time.”
Trent says:
29 July 2010 at 11:26 am (UTC -5)
I agree with your criticism, sort of, but I think there’s an explanation. We are told by Cobb fairly early in the movie that dream levels are very unstable and that manipulating the dream may alert the subject that it’s a dream. Even though Fischer knows that the third level is a dream, I don’t think Ariadne would take that risk.
I think that’s Nolan’s strength, too: he has these ideas that are eyeballs-deep in fantasy, but it’s balanced with his investment in logical plots. I think he teases us a bit with the idea that worlds can be manipulated in real-time (er, dream-time?), but I like that he doesn’t overuse it. It’s a theatrical trick (and a metaphor for them) that doesn’t lose its “trickery” because Nolan doesn’t need to constantly use it to keep us interested.
Nolan, of course, — far smarter than most film intellectuals give him credit for — is well aware of this tenuous relationship between the cinema and its viewers. The movie is a narrative about narrative structure, and I’m pretty confident that everything Nolan does he does for a purpose. I see no reason to believe that transgressing Chekhov’s rule is any different.
MPot says:
31 July 2010 at 8:23 pm (UTC -5)
I think Nolan’s strength is that he feels free to use our awareness of such rules to manipulate us into expecting one thing, then he gives us another. I was very pleased with the bait-and-switch, myself.