MMMception

Obviously, CMG is not a movie review site. Sometimes I desperately wish it was. Not often, but sometimes. Sometimes I find ways of twisting my obsessed thoughts about a film I enjoyed into a (reaching) piece of music crit. I’m about to do that again:

So I guess it wasn’t enough that Marion Cotillard, who plays Mal in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, also played Edith Piaf in the heavy biopic La Vie en Rose. Or that the lyrics to “Non, je ne regrette rien” read like the character arcs of the protagonists of both Nolan’s Memento and Inception. No. Here we have the two most signature and wonderfully dissonant notes in the film’s soundtrack explained as a distortion of the Piaf song that’s used as a cue for the characters in Inception to prepare for “the kick” into a different level of their collective consciousness—within the shared dream, the movie. The silver screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Videodrome, thou art paraphrased.

Never mind that Inception asks some of the same questions about reality that Cronenberg and sci-fi in general have been asking for years. While it poses some interesting tangential answers, such as in Cobb’s brief assertion of moral conscience serving as a basis for a foundation of truth, it’s ultimately the film’s subtly reflexive mettle that elevates its central philosophical hook into something worth numerous looks.

Inception, like Nolan’s other best films, Memento and The Dark Knight, functions perfectly well on a surface level as giddy genre exercise (action heist flick, psychological mystery/thriller, and comic book movie, respectively) and like The Dark Knight there’s a virtuosic flair to all the technical aspects that’s kinda breathtaking. This aesthetic adeptness supports the backbone of a resonant contextual depth, as evidenced by that Youtube clip above. Let’s call that shit an MMM (Meta Musical Motif), the understated brilliance of which I haven’t encountered in a mainstream movie in, like, ever (and also happens to be just one piece of an overarching sound design that uses recurrent cues like the ticking of a watch to weave a tapestry that’s downright hypnotizing). And the function of this MMM within the film’s world and outside of it, over it, are so apparent when you watch the movie with that Youtube clip playing in your head, you’ll kick yourself for somehow missing it the first time. That’s what I was doing on my third viewing, anyhow.

I mean, it’s almost effortless how meta Inception really is. Like, the way it uses conventional film grammar to underline the surprising mechanics of its dream-movie state in Ariadne’s introduction to shared dreaming, to being in a movie. Leonardo pointed to 8 1/2 and a few critics threw Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York out there when discussing this film while most of their peers kept saying “James Bond meets The Matrix,” and while all of that’s true I think Inception kind of makes The Matrix look like child’s play on a conceptual level, re-affirms that Synecdoche was joyless and forced, and uses James Bond as just another element in Christopher Nolan’s fever-dream love-letter to so many different types of cinema. Inception nonchalantly but intricately sums up dude’s oeuvre and influences to date. I think of Mirror envisioned as a thoroughly modern blockbuster; to follow up Clay Purdom, Inception can be taken a million different ways, some being “architecture/urban design (with a nice contrast being made in men’s fashion); videogame design, particularly as it relates to architecture; the nature of the creation of the art (I see you, Tarkovsky).”

Which is something Clay posted in response to a FB link I did to an article by CHUD’s Devin Faraci. And while I don’t agree with Faraci’s opinion that Inception is meant to have an “accepted” interpretation, the way he delves into the filmmaker-like roles played by the characters of Inception really opens up a whole new dimension to the film. Which leads us to the conclusion that this concept of “inception,” as Clay said, is really about the creation of art. Convincing artists, the film posits, are architects of impossible mazes that direct our subconscious to feed catharsis into the ambiguous spaces the architecture provides. When this happens in the film with the in-movie audience that is Cillian Murphy’s Fischer Jr. (who, it should be noted, has been let in on that he’s dreaming [that is, watching a movie]), that warped MMM that’s been piping here and there throughout the two-hour course of intense action suddenly resolves into an emotional, shuddering chord. This is also something that Clay noticed. Clay and I love this movie.

Here’s where I make this blog entry kind of CMG-relevant. Inception is like Frog Eyes’ Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph. In that they both are sprawling works with visceral breadth like a sun-stoked horizon and presentation that’s a loving punch in the face, immaculate constellations whirling about our eyes, but for all that audacity, that forwardness, that bombast, their inner thematic workings are labyrinthine, devilishly nuanced, and almost inscrutable. The corridors’ contours are lit only by the gleam of the mystery at the center of the maze, a multi-faceted sort of revelation that no one, not even the artist, can completely reach but the presence of which is not just reflected but felt thrumming through the walls. In Inception a spinning top leads us onward. In Paul’s Tomb it’s the glowing visage of Donna, a name that’s always on Mercer’s lips. In both scenarios the existence of hope becomes dependent on our ability to doubt, to question, and vice versa. Considering these two pieces is a journey that doesn’t seem to end, that constantly opens up new levels of discussion and ponderance, but if you want to you can just kick back to some awesome guitar sounds/the kid from Third Rock kicking ass amidst gravitational glitches and paradoxical staircases.

While my love for Big Boi’s Sir Lucious knows only the bounds dropped upon it by those Vonnegutt douches, Paul’s Tomb remains (and likely will remain) my favorite album of the year for a similar reason that Inception is (and likely will remain) my favorite movie of the year: they both possess an integrated self-awareness that does nothing to intrude, to bully or shout or cheapen, but simply enriches beyond words everything that already exists within the fabric and construct of an already satisfying and exciting work. In Inception the Piaf song chopped ‘n screwed is the most direct, concise example. In Paul’s Tomb it’s probably the moment where Mercer flips his own Blackout Beach script into the line “I see my life isn’t made of rain.” Very few records do this. Very few movies do this. This is meta made trill.