This Is A Happy Ending

(Caution: contains spoilers for Toy Story 3, and The Shawshank Redemption.)

What can you say?

You know, right at this moment, that if you open your mouth it’ll break out into a sob. You can feel your lip going, trembling. You reach up to each eye, maybe a minute apart, to discreetly wipe ‘something’ from the corner.

You’d heard that there was a sad ending to this film, a very sad ending, from other people, from the Internet, but you didn’t think it would be quite like this. Not in a kids’ film. Not even in this kids’ film. And yet, you find yourself strangely-accepting, understanding that all things come to an end, even things as good as this. It is easier to accept this because the characters accept this. Still, if you weren’t in a packed cinema, you know you wouldn’t have held your mouth closed for so long, wouldn’t have wiped at your eyes. You have every reason to cry.

Because this film has been about a prison break, has been about that thing that most people dream about at some point or another – escape. A getaway from one bad situation back into a good one, or even just into one they hope will be better than the hole they’re in. About making it to some place that those in control assure them it is impossible to reach.

Furthermore, this film has been an escape in itself, from the very start and up to this current point right here – it is not set in reality as we inhabit it, and, so we think, its main protagonists are not human but toys, moulded plastic and machine-shaped wood, these materials themselves rendered in CGI. This has been the most fun you’ve had at the cinema in ages – in fact, you can barely remember when you laughed so hard in front of a big screen. Sure, there’ve been bits of danger, threats to that fun, but nothing quite like this.

Reality is intruding now and, just because you’re accepting it, understanding it, doesn’t quite mean you’re liking it. At all.

And so you think of another prison film, The Shawshank Redemption, more recognisably set in reality than that, even if that reality begins about 70 years in the past, and you think of a scene in that film, a scene holding an old man in a dim-lit room, about to step up onto a chair. That man is called Brooks, and he has, after around 50 years in jail, finally been released on parole. He has, however, been released into a world in which he no longer fits, in which he no longer seems to have a purpose or a place. Motor cars that were, before he went inside, rarities on the roads, are now everywhere, and the only job he can get is in a small supermarket, packing bags, something he finds increasingly difficult with his arthritic hands. In prison, he was in charge of the library, he was respected, had friends, and he also had a bird that he took care of, which he released shortly before he was let out. Not so out here. Back in the room, he steps up onto the chair, scratches his name into the wooden beam running across the centre of the ceiling. Watching, you know what is coming, and, as hard to accept as it may be, you nevertheless find yourself accepting, knowing that this is not how things should be, but seeing, like Brooks himself, no other way out.

Likewise, in Toy Story 3, what has led the toys to such a point is the feeling that they were no longer needed by their owner, Andy – that, even if he did still care, with his leaving for college, they will be obsolete regardless, at least in terms of what they hoped to remain and hoped to be beyond that in the future. And yet, in Toy Story 3, something else is at play too. Brooks’ tragic end almost feels inevitable because he seems to have lost all hope, whereas the toys’ inevitable end feels tragic because they still had hope, they still have, even at that point, each other.

Indeed, it is, outside of the prison connection, the struggle to maintain hope, that eternal intangible, which most directly links these two films, and, moreover, the way in which both films take the notion of hope seriously, without ironically undercutting it, without belittling or downplaying its importance to the way a great many people try to live. For most of its first half, Toy Story 3 plays the conflict between those who keep and those who lose hope for gentle comedy, making references to mistakes made in the past by certain characters. Shawshank, in expected contrast, deals with this in a far more visceral fashion, through the steady disintegration of the prisoners at the titular jailhouse as they pass their years there – in particular, the disintegration of Andy Dufresne. Ostensibly the film’s main character, we see him most through the eyes of Red, largely from a distance, physical and emotional, at first, and then as a close friend by the time Andy is planning his own escape. Through Red’s eyes we see remarkable changes within Andy, in the way he acts, the way he talks, the way the lines look on his face.

But there is a strange and unexpected mischief in that face too, at times, and you get the feeling that those times are what makes Red accept this ‘new fish’, what makes him become his friend. After all, most of these moments come when Andy reaches out to Red and asks for something (Red being the prison’s fixer, and all). And it is those things that hold the key to understanding the way that hope works, and how it can motivate people to extraordinary things, at least in these two films.

Particularly, it is the pin-up posters he wants for his wall that are of primary importance. Indeed, one of the film’s most playful scenes comes when Andy walks into a screening of Gilda, notes all the prisoners enjoying the film even though they’ve seen it several times this month, and then taps Red on the shoulder and asks if he can get him the film’s star, Rita Hayworth. He is smiling as he asks this, and Red knows what he means, even as he feigns incredulity at being expected to bring this real-life movie star to Shawshank prison. Shortly afterwards, a large poster arrives, and Andy places it on his cell wall, across from his bed. He sits and stares at Gilda, Rita Hayworth in her prime, and, we get the feeling, he has already begun to dream.

This is not necessarily a salacious dream, however, more just another form of escape. You see, Rita represents not just the prime of A-list womanhood at the time, but also the good life in general. And, in more ways than one, she comes to represent his aspirations to travel once again beyond these prison walls. Of course, the dichotomy of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is a key factor of many prison narratives, but it's rare to find it explored with such nuance and tenderness as it is at times within both of these films, particularly Shawshank.

In Toy Story 3, in a neatly quirky spot of invention, Mrs Potato Head discovers that she can still see Andy’s room from within the confines the daycare centre where they find themselves trapped, because her lost eye is still there – through that, they can monitor the progression of his packing as he gets closer and closer to leaving to college, and they can also discover that their ending up in this daycare centre was a mistake. On a more usual level, the toys can see the streets, or at least the roofs of other houses, from within the walls of the centre, and that view gives them further hope and incentive to escape. Likewise, in Shawshank, some of the prisoners, Andy and Red included, are allowed out to do (supervised) work on community projects, allowing them to (re-)experience important glimmers of life beyond bars, and, in one of the film’s most indelible moments, to sit on a rooftop which they have been tarring and drink beer as the sun is on its way to setting, each and every one of them feeling like free men.

However, there is one piece of information from the outside that reaches Red and Andy Dufresne that changes both men’s views and hopes for life when they leave Shawshank penitentiary, and that is the last letter from Brooks, his suicide note. From that point onwards, Red notices Andy growing both more reckless in his sly disregard for prison authority, and more distant again, more withdrawn, and, upon hearing from a competitor that Andy asked for a length of rope, he fears the worst. When Andy doesn’t step outside his cell the following morning, those fears seem to have been confirmed. Because, you recall, just about the last time they spoke properly, Andy told Red that what it seemed to come down to on the ‘inside’ was that one either had to ‘get busy living, or get busy dying’, and Red, given Andy’s recent behaviour, has assumed that he has opted for the latter option. As the guards move in to check Andy’s cell, he thinks, much as you were thinking at that moment in Toy Story 3, that his good friend’s fate is sealed.

But, once inside the cell, the guards find it empty. Andy has, despite the odds, escaped. In doing so he becomes the ultimate pin-up for the inmates, the perfect image to keep them hoping through all their long days and longer nights. Indeed, when Red is finally released on parole, and ends up working at the same store as Brooks did before ending his life, and living in the same apartment, it is only the thought of Andy that keeps him going, that keeps him from stepping up onto the same old chair. And it is only the thought of Andy that makes him remember something else his friend once said to him, which leads to him breaking parole and setting out for a town in Mexico, where Andy should be waiting to take him on as a partner in his charter fishing business. That makes him take a chance on his finding happiness again, and believe in his personal right to do so. All in all, it is entirely wonderful, and fitting, that the last two words of Red's voiceover should be ‘I’ and ‘hope’.

The only way, then, that it would seem a more definite sense of escape than Andy’s and, perhaps more crucially, Red’s can be achieved is with characters who don’t seem to inhabit or be subject to the harsh laws that sometimes intrude unbidden upon human life, with characters like toys. Because toys, well, they’re what you put all your hopes in when you’re younger, achieving anything you make believe they possibly can, always helping good win through, giving you comfort and maybe letting you dream, even for the slightest of moments, that real life will one day be this exciting, this important, this fantastic and this fun. Of course, within the grand scheme of things, that is why they have to reach that terrifying point, why those harsh laws have to intrude in here as well.

It could be suggested that this peril they come to face resembles a final loss of innocence in the life of the owner, Andy, before he steps up into the ‘adult’ world, but, more than that, it seems to signal an impending loss of imagination as well, of fealty to one’s dreams. An abandonment of one’s hitherto deepest convictions and desires for self-improvement, in the face of external pressures, such as the encroaching ‘prison’ of social expectation and forced responsibility.

Watching that scene, it becomes clear that you are crying, or almost crying, because you once reached a similar point in life, whether you took the time to notice then or not, and you, quite possibly, ceded something to those pressures. You’re on the verge of weeping because you didn’t see any way around that loss at the time and you felt forced into accepting it, whether you wanted to or not. Perhaps you couldn’t sleep some nights in the past because you couldn’t find the escape you wanted, so desperately, to find, even given all your hope. Perhaps you still can’t sleep some nights now for that same reason, whether you’d ever admit that to anyone or not. And you want to cry now because that same thing is happening to someone else – real or fictional, it doesn’t matter here, because the travesty being represented is the same.

And that’s why, when it comes down it, these toys were here in the first place, the reason Pixar brought them to life. To act, firstly, as avatars for our best-planned adventures, and then to remind us that we really do care about our deepest hopes and aspirations, however childlike the society around us may conspire to tell us that they are. That we have to do so, in order to fully care about and do right by ourselves.

When their inevitable doom is, brilliantly, avoided, therefore, it doesn’t feel like a cop-out, like Pixar have pulled their punches right at the moment they most needed to hold their nerve. It feels good. It feels bloody amazing. You can feel your lips stop trembling and break out into a grin. You still don’t know what to say, but it doesn’t matter, because, somehow, a kids’ film about toys being trapped in a daycare centre has restored a little bit of your hope, has let you know that maybe it’s alright for you to just go right ahead and restore more on your own.

But what really makes this experience exceptional is that is doesn’t stop there, that it can't, because there is the acceptance that, now ‘reality’ has intruded once, it can’t magically go away, not fully. Something is still coming to an end. Andy is still going to college, and he still can’t take his toys with him. So, following a slyly beautiful communication from Woody to his precious owner, the toys end up being taken over to the house of a family friend, and given over to her young daughter, Bonnie. And, thusly, does the film, and the series, achieve its peak, emotionally and ideologically. We see, as we watch that closing scene of Andy introducing all his toys to Bonnie, those toys (especially Woody) having their Pinocchio-moment, finally becoming a real boy. We see, as Andy plays with them one last time, that it has always been about him and his dreams, really. In the way that maybe your own toys were always more about your dreams than they ever were about whatever TV series they came from, whatever factory they were made in, whatever they looked like to anybody else when you were playing with them. And, whilst he does give the toys away in order to help someone else dream a little more truly, the finest moment comes as he waves goodbye before driving off towards college, and he lets out a short breath, one of those that might just make it out when you’re trying not to cry. He realises, as do we, that, just because the physical embodiments of those dreams are moving on, it doesn’t mean that the things he’s learnt from them have to go away, doesn’t mean that he has to give up on the way he really wants to be within himself. And, if he gets stuck, he’s always got the photograph of his younger self with them all, just as a sign of something well-worth hoping for.

If, then, there’s one thing that all characters learn by the end of Toy Story 3, it’s that (slightly contrary to conventional wisdom) most of the time you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s nearly gone - at which point, of course, you can still try and do something about it. Correspondingly, there is the suggestion that if you still don’t know by that time then you probably didn’t deserve whatever it was to start with. The beauty of Toy Story 3, just as with The Shawshank Redemption, is that the heroes know. They know the value of their friends, they know the value of themselves, and of their dreams and of the things that move them; and they also know that, even if you have to let go of something, you should always try and let go well. Indeed, that’s precisely why they’re heroes.

Betting On Wild Horses

I am wearing my alone beard. By which I mean that, to crueller, less wine-tired eyes than mine, it may well look as though a dried-out husk of roadkill has been pasted to my chin. As though my face has been the subject of some cosmic practical joke to which I have not yet wised-up.

I have, however, wised-up. It’s just that this morning I didn’t care enough to shave.

Hence, perhaps, my aloneness.

But Henry Chinaski! I mean, that Henry Chinaski…geez, what a guy! He has a likeshaped beard – at times scruffier, at times neater than mine – and yet he winds up with Laura! And Laura, well, let me tell you about Laura…

No, perhaps I should come back to her later – if I start off on that topic now, I’m liable to get distracted and not make the point I’m trying to make. Best to stick with Henry for the time being. He’s sometimes called Hank – one of those not-certain-how-it-came-about name-shortenings – but I think I’ll stick to Henry Chinaski here.

Anyway, the first time I met him, probably, he was drinking rotgut wine, or talking about drinking rotgut wine. Or thinking about it. Or on the verge of a fight out the back of a bar, smelling of it, breathing its flavour back up.

Yeah, that was it. I think.

Well, a bar was involved, somewhere, somehow. You see, bars are integral to Henry. He’s practically been built of them, by them. In return - the decent thing to do - he props up any he can find. He’s not picky, this Henry, not in the usual way. At least not when it comes to a drink. Or a fight.

But he is picky, very picky, when it comes to words. Oh, he can fool you into thinking that he isn’t, of course, because he really doesn’t seem to be. And it’s not as if he goes around all the time worshipping those words just for the sake of them being words either. No, what Henry does is respect what words can mean – he’s really very particular about meanings, very understanding of them and their importance to the human world. This is why he’s always eager and proud to announce to people that he’s a writer, that his greatest aspiration is to be one professionally. Words, he tells me, are ‘necessary things’ and he simply wants to make the most of their being necessary. He wants to ‘work’ them because they are there and they have to be worked and he is good at that. Oh, he might be able to fool some people into thinking that he isn’t, but he is. They have, out of their necessity, become natural to him. He was, as a documentary (which I still haven’t seen) suggested in it’s title, born into them.

Yeah, they made a documentary about Henry! Of course, there they call him something else. They call him Charles Bukowski. But Henry’s what he’s called in other films, and in books – yeah, in books too! – so let’s stick with Henry for now.

Having said all that, though, I may as well carry on and tell you that one of the times I met Henry, earlier tonight, it was in a film based on one of those books, Factotum. As always with Henry, it was a great way to pass through midnight into that part of morning just before that other part of morning when I’m getting ready to go to sleep. That latter time, naturally, being now.

Now, on this meeting, this specific but slightly booze-haze vague meeting, I sat by (yet was always included) as he drank rotgut (yes, that was this time not the first!), as he talked about how a poem is a city, as he won at the races, as he punched out a man at those selfsame races. As he met Jan – oh, yeah, I forgot to mention Jan. I went slightly less green over her, but each to their own – and went to bars with her, moved in and brought rotgut home to her. And I was sitting by too when he met Laura…

But wait – I should probably tell you about the first time I met Henry before getting into all that. Tell you about it properly.

You see, I met him semi-accidentally one night, one morning, in a film called Barfly (now, don’t get me wrong, I’d known Charles for some time – not long enough, but certainly enough to know I’d be better off if I knew him for longer. But that night was the first time I met Henry). He looked different then, younger and older at the same time, or in different light – in daylight and nightlight and twilight and barlight – but he sounded and acted pretty much the same as he did this evening. He gave off the same scent in my mind. Tripped the selfsame wires. But he didn’t quite look angry when he was swinging for the barman, and he didn’t quite look peaceful when the barman laid him flat out cold.

He just looked thirsty. Permanently thirsty, permanently getting thirstier, like a man stranded out at sea and disobeying all the rules about the water, water everywhere. Only not quite like that at all. More just thirsty for more experience about which it will be necessary to write, for more life that he can try to understand or just make more beautiful when he lays it out cold on the page. It doesn’t look peaceful, of course, but it does look beautiful.

So does he, in his way, despite the trimmed-roadkill mess of his beard, despite the way he’s half-blurred-out by alcohol most of the time. Despite the way he walks, arms wide away from his torso as though they’re always on standby to heft his bags and belongings for place to place, from old room to new old room, back slightly hunched from working on his writing over desks and over bottles. Flat-footed – never been much of an athlete, Henry – pounding the pavement and tiles of the barroom bathroom floors like his fingers pound typewriter keys, like they always mean to be going somewhere, even if they’ve got no fixed place in mind. Mainly, though, the first time I met him he just looked like he knew himself. He sounded that way too.

It was the same tonight. His look, his sound. As near as dammit, anyway. I could understand why he had women fighting over him, bareknuckle, in Barfly, and I could see how he wound up with Laura, for a time, in Factotum. And Laura…

Well, Laura’s one of a kind, one in a million… but the thing is, well, sometimes you get the feeling that it’s the millions that truly concern Henry Chinaski. That he can’t help thinking of them in all their multitudes and pondering their daily grinds, even as he goes about and talks about and writes about his own. What he had with Laura, well, even she had to know it wouldn’t hang about too long, because how you keep someone like Henry from looking out the window of tall office blocks that he’s cleaning and seeing the city and thinking about how that city is a poem and vice versa, how ‘a poem is a city asking a clock why,

a poem is a city burning,

a poem is a city under guns

its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,

a poem is a city where God rides naked

through the streets like Lady Godiva,

where dogs bark at night, and chase away

the flag; a poem is a city of poets,

most of them quite similar

and envious and bitter…

a poem is this city now, 50 miles from nowhere,

9:09 in the morning,

the taste of liquor and cigarettes,

no police, no lovers, walking the streets’ and perhaps it sounds mean, but perhaps it isn’t, to say that Laura might not have been the point here, that maybe it’s really more about the things she made him write.

Because Henry, Henry knows very much that you have to live, that you have to go out and be there and live, but that you have to react to your life as well, that you only really know yourself when you do that, when you say what you most want to say and let out the thoughts that you most want to think. And, also, that if you somehow do what you most want to do, and live how you most want to live, then perhaps you should write about it sometimes, just so you remember than you have and that you can.

And Henry, or Hank, or Charles, whatever you want to call him, he does something to me, he makes me want to look at things more, and look for things, and find the rhythm in the way the world goes by, in the sound of the hooves of the days as they run away like wild horses over the hills. He makes me want to look at myself sometimes and not hide from what I see, and not lie about it either, and instead, if I'm dissatisfied, ask myself what I can find that will change that, that will make the satisfaction come.

He makes me think that maybe I’ll shave in the morning. Makes me think that maybe I’ll find me a poem.

That dream was like a film I saw

(Caution: contains spoilers. Sort of.)

Inception is a great film for two key reasons. One: it attempts to investigate some of the deepest parts of the human subconscious, those relating to the nature of one’s dreams. Two: it fulfils this goal less during the film than during the audience’s period of reflection in the film’s aftermath. Indeed, it is of principle importance that it does not reach any definitive conclusions during its runtime, that it does not offer any concrete answers. That, even if you know how everything has happened within the narrative, you still don’t know how everything has happened.

Now, to say that it is great, really great, is not necessarily to say that Inception is as brilliant or nuanced in its understanding of human nature, or of the emotional connections people form and break and form again as some recent films have been, such as DiCaprio’s other big-budget effort this year, Shutter Island. Nor is it to suggest that it gets everything right. However, I would argue that, in a similar way to Citizen Kane, its chief faults, if one wishes to term them that, are in its flawlessness, are in its rigid adherence to an intricately mechanical sense of construction.

Kane, of course, is still regarded my many as the finest film ever made (not that I am claiming that of Inception, but bear with me), and yet it is, for most of its running time, emotionally distant. Or perhaps a better way to say it is that it is not a particularly warm film. The ending should leave a smile on one’s face, I think, but one stemming more from understanding rather than from happiness (perhaps in the same way as Inception’s should). Welles’ film is, however, incredibly knowledgeable about emotions, and interrogates and analyses them in a manner almost without equal in any film I’ve seen. It is expertly composed in order to fully convey its findings, and to ask its questions on human nature, without ruining or drawing away from the narrative arc. It is perfect in a supremely clinical way, and yet the viewer does not become fully aware of how completely well-fitted its parts are until it is over, because its characterisation is, both despite and because of the aforementioned distance, so evocative and compelling as to render proper thinking-time within the film near-impossible.

Both films are, then, atomic-clockwork masterpieces, long-in-the-planning overtures rather than perfect pop songs played out in 3 minutes flat and written in not much longer. If they were paintings or prints they would be by M.C. Escher rather than by Van Gogh.

Indeed, the mention of Escher in relation to Inception is, by anyone familiar with his works, inevitable. The mathematical theorems and impossible figures so vividly present in that work are echoed and re-presented within Nolan’s film, from the two not-fully-there staircases, to the vast spectacle of Paris folding in upon itself and running rightways-up on several different intersecting plains at once. Moreover, however, the Escher comparison is fitting when relating to the entirety of the dreamspaces within the film – many of Escher’s greatest pictures seem otherworldly somehow, and yet all are, upon consideration, mathematically precise. These are not Dali’s surreal visions, at once realistic and yet also wild and untrammelled by the harsh constraints of worldly reality. Escher’s are visions which are always grounded within that reality and yet exploit it, calculatingly, almost academically. Much as, it could be argued, Nolan’s are within Inception.

This does not, in the long run, mean that those visions are any less impressive, or less effective, but it does mean that the audience is constantly aware, albeit unobtrusively, that what they are watching has been shaped specifically for them to watch. Escher, at possibly his most ambitious, created two pieces entitled ‘Metamorphosis I’ and 'Metamorphosis II', and the latter of these consists of a progression from one highly detailed tessellation into another into another, etc – the links between these objects, and the thoughts and feelings they stimulate, are not mathematical, but the construction of them is, (c)overtly so. With the exception of one segment – that dealing with a lighthouse (his own addition) on a coastline in Italy, which (in an odd parallel to Dali’s love of his childhood views) he fell in love with when he lived and worked there for a time in his youth. The startling break from the expected progression is present only briefly before returning to the tightly-planned order by way of fusing that lighthouse into a chessboard replete with similar-sized pieces, but it is present.

Likewise, Inception is at its most complex and intriguing, for me, when the memories of its chief protagonist, Cobb (DiCaprio), seem to bleed into the meticulously constructed dreamscapes, perturbing the logic of those constructions, challenging their true role and purpose. Now, at this point, I could well delve into a deep analysis of just what exactly each such rising memory indicates and tells the audience about the story and the characters on the whole – I have after all, been bouncing ideas related to that about my head and off the thoughts and words of others ever since I saw the film – but I do not wish to do that here. This is because what concerns me primarily at this juncture are more the mechanisms by which such memories are set in motion.

As I said earlier, during the film, there is not so much time for complicated analysis of what is occurring – that comes afterwards – and yet there is ample time for complex and multi-faceted reactions to the events and practical demonstrations of ideas unfolding upon the screen. Of course, this is how the human mind works, on a basic level, with regards to present happenings (what follows is not a detailed scientific explanation, but a simple description of how the process seems to me - if any more learned person than I could outfit this piece with more accurate, less guess-worky explanation, please feel free to suggest one). It is fed a picture of what is happening and it reads that for signs of what the picture means, picking up even the vaguest association stimulated by certain facets of the image, in the midst of concrete facts that it can ascertain from the surroundings (i.e. the road is wet here; there is a wall over there; Marion Cotillard looks amazing). It performs basic practical analysis of the given situation, reacts to impulses regarding what may happen next, based on what has happened previously – a fixed physical memory of the world is key to this process. If something in that image is replicated from something it has encountered before, or reminiscent of something, it will recognise it, and certain ideas associated with the prior encounter will be, potentially, brought to the surface, and interact with fresh ideas about what this new encounter means.

Within the film, we see this in action most fully upon Cobb’s face any time an irregularity occurs (his wife’s reappearances, the intrusion of a freight train into a traffic-packed street, etc.) – these are things he and his team must react to even as he considers their direct relevance to him. However, the film throws a remarkably ingenious complication into this process, by having these irregularities occur within a dream. When he sees his wife, it is not as though he is seeing a vague doppelganger of her walk into the same restaurant where he happens to be taking his evening meal. In the dreamscapes, the only way in which she can enter is as, it is explained, a projection from his subconscious. Ditto for the curiously off-the-rails train. Therefore, his mind is forced into running in circles when it reacts to these irregularities. He reacts to the reappearance of his wife in the present, but then, when his brain delves into the mass of associations related with her appearance in that present, it reaches the reason why she has reappeared. And yet, within the dream, she is arguably as real as any other person or object. Following this, there arises a very problematic question – is he seeing only what he’s thinking about seeing, or is he seeing what is actually there? Is his view dictated by his responses to it, or are his responses dictated by the view?

Now, obviously, I am getting more into the territory of (over-)analysis that comes when the film has finished, when I am no longer viewing it as it unfolds, within my own present. That being the case, I’m going to pull back slightly and jump out into looking at that question from the point of view of myself as a member of the audience, in relation to one section of the film in particular.

That the chosen section concerns Cobb demonstrating the construction of dreams/dream labyrinths to Ariadne, is fitting, I think, because this really seems to me to be at the heart of the film’s most challenging (and potentially maddening) ideas. This is the sequence in which Ariadne bends Paris into the Escher-referencing dimension-breaching shape mentioned-above, but it is two things she does to her reconstruction of the city after that which interested (and drew a reaction from) me the most, at least up to that point in the film. Firstly, the two of them jump from one market-lined street to a passage underneath a bridge, and this bridge was, like the Escher imagery, something visually in the film that really sparked a deep-set connection within me. Before I venture further into that, however, it is interesting to note that, within the film again, this is the point where the issue of a(n enforced) division between memory and dreams is first properly raised – it is even more interesting to note that it is Cobb giving the lecture on the issue to Ariadne on how including architecture from memory can trigger further subconscious projections which may compromise the integrity of the dream, as she has brought the bridge into play due to the fact that she walks under it each day in order to get to college.

That bridge was not only from her memory, however. It was from mine, as a filmgoer, and perhaps from those of other filmgoers as well (and obviously those of people who actually do walk under it each day, but that would complicate the point). Because it seemed to me to be the same stretch of rail-bridge that Marlon Brando walks under at the start of Last Tango in Paris. Even if I’m wrong about that, it is a similar bridge, and, regardless, the ideas related to my feelings on that film and its characters were already rushing back into me head – my subconscious was bringing its own projections into play with everything occurring on the screen. Indeed, as soon as Cobb’s wife, Mal, reappears briefly later in that scene, I began to link and look for parallels in their relationship and the relationship(s) at the centre of Bertolucci’s film, particularly in their evocations of grief. I started to see these links everywhere, even as I was taking in the film’s happenings on a separate, clearer level. Most tellingly, perhaps, I noted the way that Cobb tried to keep Mal locked within a sort of prison of memories within his mind, in the same way that first, Brando’s Paul tells Jeanne, the younger woman with whom he has embarked upon an affair, that they are only to see each other within the sparse apartment where they first meet; and second that Paul’s dead wife is confined, within the timeline of the narrative, to lying surrounded by flowers on her old bed, and presented so viciously with Paul’s memories of her and their time together.

Backing up a little to that scene beneath the bridge again, however, I was presented with a reminder of another film, a few moments after the first, when Ariadne begins to push mirrors she has installed between the stanchions of the bridge into a position that allows them both to stand and see themselves reflected at either side into infinity. This is an optical illusion which will have had its genesis, and many other uses, I’m sure, in various stage shows and other films with which I am unfamiliar, but the one that it brought to my mind was, fittingly enough, Citizen Kane. In that film, the illusion occurs when Kane is shambling along the halls of his deserted mansion, Xanadu, and is only onscreen for a couple of seconds, but it was clearly, for me, an indelible sight. Feeding this back into Nolan’s film, I began to see this scene in terms of loneliness, and now, enhanced by retrospective distance, in terms of how the ability to control and dictate the happenings of much of one’s own environs cannot necessarily breach or solve or even cure those problems that cause such loneliness to fall upon a person.

Here, of course, one might reasonably ask a similar question to the one I asked earlier of Cobb, i.e. whether I was putting ideas into the film or the film was putting ideas into me. Whether I was seeing what I wanted to see in order to make the film more than it is.

But, in many ways, that is a moot point. After all, that is what our minds are always doing, isn’t it? Filtering given information through the backlog of what we already know about the world, the accumulated mass of what we’ve already experienced, and thenceforth trying to find some sense and/or beauty to it. Indeed, one of the peculiar triumphs of Inception, I think, is that it actively encourages such a thing, rather than encouraging an escape and avoidance of oneself as many films do (not that I am by any means against escapism). It accepts all feelings and responses as valid, (particularly regarding the ending) in a way that stands out from a lot of the things I've seen recently. So, when a reviewer says that certain scenes remind him of Bond films, or, in the same article, says that it lacks ‘genuine heart’ such criticisms perhaps come from the unexpected nature of this acceptance – perhaps the reviewer sees them as faults because he has not expected his reactions and input, and yes, even ‘heart’ to be as integral as Nolan allows it to be. Whether one smiles with joy or understanding upon the film’s closing is, arguably, down to what each viewer has chosen to personally invest in the tale, and in the character of Cobb – whether they have seen him as a kind of everyman, or just as an isolated, unlinked projection from someone else’s mind.

And, when one considers that the comment about Bond films, specifically in relation to the snowbound ‘action sequence’, is by no-means an lone example of such a response, then a further consideration rises to the fore, in relation to both the characters within the film, and the perception of them as they relate to our society now. After all, one of the film’s main conceits is that the dreamscapes within it are ones that have been consciously created in order for subconscious ideas and issues to be stolen/implanted/explored. Ergo, does it not follow that the creators of the dreams could well have been influenced by ideas and scenic considerations placed in their heads by films they have seen, by images presumed present in their world that they have come into contact with, and which have been brought more fully into play by some stimuli elsewhere in their environment as they have been at work on the design? Outside of the film, I guess, the main point that such reviewers are trying to make is that these images have clearly been placed in Nolan’s head, and he is acting upon them, either consciously or subconsciously. But to accuse him of unoriginality, or of directing like Michael Bay(!), is to miss the essential truth that we are all composites, to admittedly varying degrees, of our experiences and influences – if we deny the impact of the things that influence us then there is no point to them, or to our ability to receive and react to them as influences (and, correspondingly, no point to reviewing anything, and even less to mentioning those influences ourselves in reviews).

Just as there exists the potential of a back-and-forth in the interplay between film and dream within Inception, therefore, there also exists that same potential outside of it. As mentioned earlier, it is clear that certain parts of my subconscious are somehow fused to things I have encountered in films and then linked, often by way of actual, physical experiences, to emotions and ideas. I imagine, and know in some instances, that a great many people feel the same. This may stretch from simply remembering how Saturday mornings used to feel when you were seven at the mention of some now practically-archaic cartoon, to the way in which you actually find yourself framing the world as you look upon it, tilting your head to a certain angle to experience a sight in a very particular and more personally-appealing way. Furthermore, in relation to the actual construction and compilation of films, Inception provided me with several interesting thoughts on just how the composition of dreams, at least in memories of them, have influenced that, and, potentially, the other way round. For example, when Cobb mentions to Ariadne something about the odd way that, in dreams, it is possible to go from one setting to another with absolutely no idea of how you travelled the distance in between, I was instantly jolted to think how often such a question may arise to the film-viewer, when confronted with an apparently unexplained scene-change (a thought I may have had before, but which is, for the time being, tied intrinsically to my reading of Inception). This then, probably not-unintentionally, serves to complicate the viewer’s perceptions of just which parts of Nolan’s film are intended as dream and which parts intended as reality.

However, some have pointed out that, whether due to the fact that they are intended as pre-planned dreams or not, because of their clarity, and, at-times, hard-to-differentiate-from-reality nature, they do not come across as particularly accurate evocations of a dreamlike state. They do not come across as being naturalistic. Perhaps this is because of the limits placed on the role of memory within them, perhaps simply because that did not fit with the aesthetic direction in which Nolan wanted to take the film. Perhaps not. It does not matter particularly why they aren’t naturalistic, only that they aren’t. But there are numerous other films that could be suggested to fit that demanding criteria, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Brazil, and to fit it well. Yet, even those cannot, by their nature as planned and edited pieces of film truly and completely evoke the dreamscapes we each encounter in our heads. They can, however, influence the way in which we remember our dreams and respond to those memories. We can more easily relate those filmic dreams to our own grand illusions. Indeed, if I were to have a dream tonight that includes flying, I do not think my first port of call in the afterthought period would be to Freudian analysis, but to those first fantastical dreams in Brazil.

Still, further to that, I know I have not only had dreams that included locations from films, but have also semi-consciously kickstarted such dreams, often in some attempt to remember or, perhaps, relive the film in question, only to find that other issues and images intersect and disrupt that process. Or, maybe more bizarrely, I have, whilst not fully awake, attempted to envision films in full having only seen their trailers, or posters, or heard of their premise and which actors they include, and the cuts and scenic jumps within those visions have come about from me, fitted in on subconscious impulses of just where it feels right that they should go... But, then, are these impulses not based on ideas that films have placed inside my head and made me believe are coming from my own mind?

Well, films and other sources.

And, indeed, Inception is a great film because it takes those other sources into account, in relation to its characters, its creators, and especially its audience. Like Citizen Kane, it consists of an impeccably-structured labyrinth, and yet leaves a different route through that labyrinth for each individual viewer – they are each likely, and entitled, to reach their own conclusion, whether positive or negative, with regards to the film’s happenings. You don't have to like it, but you should appreciate it, I think, because it’s one of those too-rare films which knows, and accepts, that ‘inception’ is never just a one-way street.