I went to see Inception last night. And learned a few things. I learned that I’m sick of sitting anywhere but high up and a bit further back since the screens are so engulfing huge panoramic now. I feel like I can’t even see what’s happening. You have to have bigger eyes, spaced further apart just to catch all the detail. And therefore, a bigger head. (Beware…we may “evolve” with this trend…mua ha ha…maybe those aliens are from a loop in a dream we dreamed back when we were more evolved and and and we’re stuck at the second dream within the dream and they’re trying to get us out and and and. I’m kidding….?) I learned that you don’t necessarily have to be sure what the hell is going on in the plot to get some gold from it. Sounds like life sometimes, eh? What else? I learned I can stand Leonardo Di Caprio in this role where otherwise not so much. The suggestion of beginnings and what’s “real” always gets my attention but this was a major twisting path covering all that can be lost or gained in illusion. Or…”reality.” I loved the subconscious “people” in these dreams. The projections. They speak deeply to the truth that when we change things in our worlds, we stir up all kinds of reaction around us until we make peace with the choices we’re making. This affirms my personal growth tenet that insists on serious downtime in growth phases, taking the time to become aware of what internal backlash is kicking up a storm so we can go into that storm and heal the conflict without wreaking havoc in our actual daily lives. I didn’t honor that rule soon enough and it caused me some pretty nasty injury a few years back. As I sat there watching the dream morph and the parts play out, it blew me away how deeply they reach into the truth. When we believe we deserve to be destroyed, misunderstood or otherwise accused for making pivotal changes in our lives (or not showing those changes soon enough to suit the understanding of others), we tend to reap that belief. But I have always had some pretty intense existence issues. This movie hit on some amazing layers, reminding me of the power of shamanic work in healing dreams, memories and other traumatic projection-imprinting events. I want to see it again just to remember some of the lines that struck gold.
It’s so important to be aware of those projections within, to consider the possibilities – even the worst ones – in order to cultivate that courage to implement change, to create in love. What cures the worst projections? Self-acceptance, forgiveness, release from a fixation on right/wrong without losing a sense of what’s important and a huge dose of weird courage. Speaking of…
It makes me think of a very strange moment with my sister, Elizabeth. She has Downs Syndrome and does fairly well these days unless someone disrupts her sense of reality with a wedding or an upside down salt shaker. But the last night she was here I joked (over her head) about her to mom, saying “watch out…she’s probably God’s emissary on a mission to show how we treat her. she’s going to have the most amazing reports on some of us. how we assumed so much. she probably understands everything we say and is restricted from showing it. I can hear her now with God ‘They were so full of it. Thinking I didn’t get it! And boy did I get a lot out of their guilt too!'” On that note, without previously showing any indication of having been slightly in tune with any of us (and having had her own conversation with an imaginary friend off and on there as we all talked with each other ’round my table), she looked up from her meal, straight at me with a grin, big bright eyes looking right into me and an emphatic “uh huh!” coming out of her chuckling mouth and then a pat on my shoulder. I was stunned. Looked away. Looked back at her. She was still grinning at me. Holy Shite. We all shuddered, eyes wide, total dead silence for a moment, then stepped back from our sense of things and pulled out the totems FAST.
Just when you’ve got it all figured out, the joke is what’s true…? Life is a trip…
J. Ruth Kelly 
This movie was amazing, I was loving every minute and idea. The Nolan brothers never sieze to amaze me. Here’s a convo I had on facebook with a friend about it, you may find it interesting:
——–
Friend: it’s a film about accepting reality, and what you can have, in the face of death. But it’s also pointlessly over-abstract at times. i don’t want to accept reality anyway. i want to push it.
Me: The moral of the movie is surely much more affluent than that, I don’t think Chris Nolan wanted a specific moral to come through — a movie with so many psychic layers will have no one moral. The ending was likewise open ended, you’re not s…ure whether the children are ‘actually’ there, or because he overcame his guilt, his memory was allowed to reconstruct his children’s faces and complete the picture of him going home. The whole movie, every single detail and ordeals he went through, his psychic ordeals, may have been nothing but the protagonist’s imagination, its attempt to fathom a way to overcome his guilt and let go of the thought and complex of feelings that he killed his wife — a wonderful and annoying way to end the movie itself. The whole reality anchor thing, that was beautiful and packed, really packed, philosophically! The anchor was no achor at all. That is something, really something, to try and understand from that movie. It was the volcanic core of the whole movie.
(Then my friend said something about letting go of guilt and coming back to reality to be with his kids — I don’t have the exact quote because I think he deleted it.)
There’s nothing that denies that you’re right too. That’s the point. There’s no one thing to follow, so there’s no reason why you are wrong. The movie was set up such that you are right, but not ended such that I am wrong. Understand…? The beginning and end contradict, and the middle, the movie itself, was designed and provided you with the appropritate tools (the ideas) to arrive at this contradiction and then read into it whatever you want. Because of this contradiction, and the fact that this contradiction was temporal (linear and progressional within the movie), it brought together a paradox, and you know paradoxes very well — it can be either/or without anything but the conviction of the viewer to say which it is. Chris needs to stop reading Kierkegaard, haha!
It’s just as likely that you’re right, and if that’s what you wish to read from the movie, then you’re definitely right. Who says the artist is right, and who says I got the artist’s intention right? I never met the guy (even though I want to, we’d have a lot to converse about over drinks). And maybe he himself doesn’t know what he wanted to intend. The artist is more often than not a liar of liars, a person with an exquisite skill at ‘creating masks’. The point is that the open-ended ending was designed for this purpose alone — to invoke a response in you such that you can read into it your own reality anchor, and strengthen it, or weaken it depending on your reasoning. Notice how in the movie when the protagonist found out people’s reality anchor, he was able to manipulate their reality, to effectuate an inception — he failed with his wife because she died and he used to his own ends (to get her out of the dream so that they can be with their children). But, he succeeded with Fischer, in that he used his anchor to make Fischer overcome his own guilt at not being good enough for daddy, and so another way you can read into this idea of the protagonist’s resolution of his own guilt — but, only just another way, not the only way, and by no means the right way.
It’s a head-mess of a movie, but loved the special effects for sure. And damn, Ellen Page is a wonderful actress (her petitness and clear facial expressions will take her far, very far in the industry), she’s got an orange future for sure, if she doesn’t mess her reputation up with some personal bullshit on her real life that leaks into in the media.
———–
thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. you’ve certainly taken it apart on some profound levels. i don’t pretend to know the intent of the artist, but i do appreciate how it resonates to my own sense of things. perspective is 9/10ths of the experience…
You are so right. This movie is going to have to be re-viewed. I love the suggestion of levels of dreams and it got me to thinking about all sorts of ralities going on at the same time. I payed too much attention to trying to figure it out at the beginning.The next time, I think I just want to enjoy it andlisten, like you said, above. I did not pay too much attention to the actors as actors and fell into what parts they played. I found it an incredible storyline on the importance of relationships.
relationships…yes. so many layers and possibilities. i had to give up on figuring out the tangle and just let the impressions wash through. sounds like life for me these days…