Inception (Archive)

18:10Josh Larsen:So right there, that's not just like, of course it works at the end because it's hers. It carries so much emotional weight because we've learned how it's tied to her directly. It's just not a tchotchke that Cobb has pulled out just so he can know if he's in a dream. And then think about that opening sequence. I think this is all set up from the beginning by Nolan. When Cobb uses Mal's chair as an anchor in that dream while rappelling from the window, that captures everything about them. how they're literally tied together in ways that are romantic, in ways that are dangerous. And then the action implies, you know, just the layers of their relationship that make us curious about it.

18:52Josh Larsen:And really the rest of the movie with everything else going on is peeling back that relationship, giving us the implications, what it means for Cobb within this mission that he's undergoing and comes absolutely to fruition in that final scene, which is not so much about whether he pulled off the job for Saito, but what it means for his relationship with his late wife. So I just, I thought it was, it was important to me in 2010 and revisiting it. I found it to be even more important now.

19:25Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. What it means for that relationship to me at the end was nothing. And I kind of alluded to this. What is the movie really leave you contemplating when it's over the other movies that we've seen the twist the other movies that i've appreciated more so far they make us rethink something about the movie sure about the characters and about the world but you think about memento and you think about prestige and inception here these are films that offer some of the same kind of philosophical dilemmas that we talked about back in our bonus content on patreon when we talked about the movie devs the the many worlds kind of theorizing different states of consciousness.

20:01Adam Kempenaar:And Inception's twist seems to me nothing more than exactly what it is. It's a suggestion and it's playful, but it doesn't invite any further reflection beyond, is Nolan messing with us? It doesn't hit me in another way.

20:17Josh Larsen:Because it's not existential or philosophical. It's emotional. It's exactly the thing that you say that you're lacking.

20:23Adam Kempenaar:I wanted it to be, but I didn't feel it. I never felt it.

20:25Josh Larsen:But it's because it's not about these larger questions. It's about one question. But it's because the movie's not. No, it's about one question. Can Cobb forgive himself for what he did with his wife? And so it's not about how many worlds are there. Oh my gosh, he spent half the film giving attention to it. But why so much screen time to their relationship?

20:46Adam Kempenaar:Because what he's really invested in and what overwhelms those sequences and what makes them feel like plot machinations is that what he really cares about is the fancy effects. Even if it's practical, even if I love Josh, how he pulls them off, it's all the time and attention he spends on that rather than making me believe in any way their relationship. Never at any point felt it.

21:11Josh Larsen:But then, Adam, why is Maul in one of the very first scenes of the film? For multiple reasons, as I described. And why is she figuratively with the spinning top, the very last image we see? I mean, this is, he's putting all the weight. I think part of the problem is that I agree. You're not left thinking about, well, how many worlds are there? What if we watch this movie backwards? What if time was a constant? I'm not saying that's what I wanted. But because what inception, why it's a progression for Nolan is because he's, he's taken all those things to get us through this entertaining and thought-provoking and mind-blowing ride.

21:52Josh Larsen:But at the end, he's wrestling us with a human emotional question. And am I going to be able to forgive myself is what Cobb is asking for what I've done. And am I going to choose to move forward? And then there are philosophical questions we could get into. I mean, I don't think they're missing.

22:08Adam Kempenaar:Josh, I get all of this intellectually. I understand that you're explaining to me the structure of the film and what Nolan wants us to feel, but there's a difference in actually feeling it. And I didn't. I mean, you can't say it's not there. He spends a lot of time on it. It wasn't there for me. I understand that he devotes a lot of time to it, but it's minuscule in relation to the time he devotes to the tedium of the action scenes and the attention that he devotes to those. I feel ultimately like it's an emotional crutch that feels more like he's trying to give the movie a weight and a heft and a certain romanticism even that just does not seem in keeping with Nolan's strengths, at least not based on the other films that we've seen so far and the films that I've appreciated more, which, like I said, it's not because they're giving me a mind-blowing twist about, wow, how did he pull that off?

22:58Adam Kempenaar:They're giving me a twist that makes me think about my world and how I relate to people. And that's what's fascinating when I have that personal connection to it. I'm just saying I never believed it here. I never did. And part of it is DiCaprio's performance, too. And I love DiCaprio. And I'm with you completely that every other supporting performer does a better job. And I think part of that is the explication and the exposition. I'm now going to be the one saying the criticism that everyone else says about Interstellar that I didn't feel at all the time that I haven't felt in the previous films.

23:31Adam Kempenaar:And I did. I did hear for some reason. I mean, Matt Singer wrote about it recently. I saw his comments on Letterboxd. He said literally two full hours into the movie, DiCaprio is still explaining the rules of the dream world to Ellen Page. I do feel like it's gratuitous. And even more than that, it feels arbitrary. Once you start noticing those things, when you start asking a lot of those questions, then you're derailed from that central story that I agree with you is supposed to be the central story. That's supposed to be, pun intended here, I guess, or metaphor intended, the train tracks that holds this whole thing together.

24:03Adam Kempenaar:But once you start diverting from that path, you start noticing the holes in it. You start noticing the holes in how believable their relationship is. And I think that exposition is a key distraction here. Let me say this. If there's any actress that's up to the challenge and she almost pulls it off, it's certainly Marion Cotillard. And I love how Nolan does use point of view in those sequences so that we're aligned with Cobb when he's walking into those rooms with her. And when we arrive in a space where maybe he slash we shouldn't be and she's waiting there for us, that turn of hers to the camera we get a couple times, that's a really frightening jolt.

24:40Adam Kempenaar:Like a legitimately catches you off guard and makes you gasp a little bit like we've been caught, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. So I do really appreciate some of those aspects of it, without a doubt. But I think the evolution for me, Josh, ultimately isn't in Nolan's ability here to maybe tell a more emotional story. It's in the meta layer. It's that this feels like the culmination of his preoccupations in terms of using the language of cinema and wrapping that around the actual the content and the substance of these films, the way that people even communicate with each other and the way we as viewers experience their world is it's equivalent.

25:21Adam Kempenaar:It's like we're in that spiral, right, of this dream experience. We're unified with him in a way that I do think is an evolution for him. And we can talk about that a little bit more. That meta aspect of this film is what fascinates me. It's not the relationship.

25:36Josh Larsen:Yeah. And to speak to the expository thing you're talking about, because that was my main complaint about Interstellar, and I'm looking forward to seeing what I make of it the second time. I think there's a distinction here in that a lot of the information, from what I remember of interstellar. It was a lot of like, I don't know, was it a black hole or a supernova or something, whatever. It was like stuff we didn't really need to know for that story to progress. But the information we're given here is there's two things about it. For one thing, it is necessary. Some of it, it's talky. I agree.

26:05Josh Larsen:But some of it we do need to know just to get the ground rules. The other thing is, and this maybe is an argument against it, but whenever we're getting those ground rules, we're getting visual cues as well. So the Ellen Page training sequence, however you want to describe that, is the perfect example, right? While we're getting talked to, we're seeing this imagery of this city folding in on itself and all these other insane things happening. And so you could make the case maybe you didn't need both. But I think here where it's not based in necessarily reality to kind of, and it's this, this concept that we've never even understood before.

26:43Josh Larsen:It's not like we have a vague notion of outer space and just tell me we're going out far in outer space. I'm good. This is a sci-fi movie. That's all I need, right? This is different. We need a little bit of the architecture to use a word that applies to this film. So I do forgive it a little bit more for that. And the other thing is there are a lot of instances in this film where Nolan does not bother to do that at all. And again, I'm going back to the opening sequence where to make us understand how these worlds are connected, when Cobb has to wake up, they push him, his chair, right into the tub.

27:14Josh Larsen:And then we cut to a shot of the dream that Cobb is in and the water just comes, again, practical effect, right? The set just gets flooded with this water. And like that, without needing anyone to explain anything to us, we realize how the real world and the dream world are connected. So I guess for me, there is a lot of exposition in Inception, but it is almost always backed up by visual information as well, which makes it a little bit less tedious.

27:40Adam Kempenaar:I get that. And when we get to Interstellar, maybe we can compare notes and see if that truly is the distinction. It may be. But I do have to point out that it's information we do need to know is precisely what people like me said defending Interstellar at the time and would still say now about it and i think that is reflective of whether or not you are locked in to the relationships and to the way the movie is working on you on an emotional level and also an intellectual level if you're if you're on that journey as i was with interstellar then that exposition all feels really necessary to me just like it all feels necessary to you here because you were bought in to that mal dom relationship and wanting to wanting to see how that played out So I think you are you are in those circumstances willing to willing to forgive things a little bit more.

28:28Adam Kempenaar:And I certainly wouldn't point to those early sequences where that stuff is getting explained as a problem. It's more as we get the second, third, fourth time that someone says, yes, but things work like this in the dream world. And then someone says, but no, not this one. No, it's different. It actually works like this. Like that that just happens repeatedly in this film. And it did feel a bit gratuitous to me. Let me ask a quick question. Did you feel you were ahead of those things that you didn't need that information? No, it's arbitrary. It felt like the movie was making it up in the moment as opposed to it feeling like these established rules of the world that I could really buy into.

29:02Adam Kempenaar:It felt like it was convenient for the mechanics of the plot that in that moment he could just make up and do whatever he wanted in that particular instance.

29:10Josh Larsen:Yeah, I guess for me, one of the thrills of this movie is how, again, going back to the brazen opening where Inception, a normal filmmaker would start Inception by putting us in a dream. Like, oh, we're in a dream and these characters infiltrate dreams. And now I'm going to let you get your mind around that. Then I will move. This is what I love about Nolan is he trusts pop audiences, right? He's like, then I'll move you into the dream within a dream. No, this movie starts, that's what I was saying, with a dream within a dream. So already things are complicated. So I feel like it's not arbitrary because the escalation in this film is so thrilling.

29:47Josh Larsen:It's like, we're what now? We're where now? And I am not going to begrudge, because I'll just say it, like, I was grateful for a little reorientation along the way, because then I could appreciate where I was a little bit more. I didn't need the map exactly laid out for me, but I needed a little bit of that sense of why things were different at this level where these characters had never been before or most of them to keep up with them. So I guess that's why it worked for me.

30:14Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I'm going to go back to the meta aspect of the film because it is, as I said, what intrigues me the most, the correlations, and I've talked about this before on the show, but the correlations between Cobb as a filmmaker slash artist in the role that he is serving as this kind of producer slash director of these dream sequences, right? And his crew and their correlation to various movie crew roles that are pretty obvious and the talk of true inspiration that's happening as they are creating some of these worlds together. And there's that great moment during that first run through the dream world with Ariadne where she says, why are they looking at me?

30:54Adam Kempenaar:The projections start to turn on her, right? And he explains that it's because you're changing things. My subconscious feels that someone else is creating the world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections converge And he says that they feel the foreign nature of the dreamer and they attack it like an infection. And I think that is such a perfect explanation of the idea. And ultimately, my experience with this film, Josh, what I'm trying to kind of articulate, and it's any viewer's experience when they are no longer able to suspend disbelief in the way that they want to and should with with any film.

31:29Adam Kempenaar:and that's once you become aware that you're watching someone else's creation that you start to see the creator which can be thrilling in its own ways too don't get me wrong but you are inherently pulled out of that world and sometimes that can make you really angry and i love that description and i love cob and seeing him as a stand-in for nolan i know that that's been documented elsewhere in terms of even dicaprio's appearance is similar to nolan in some ways but he's this director who has amassed this crew and they've all put their faith in him right we have this sequence where he reveals something that he hadn't told all of them before and they realize what's really at stake and that this is really dire and it's like it would be almost like my second Herzog reference here on the show it would be almost like you go into the jungle with Herzog and you're trusting him completely and then all of a sudden you're under attack and everyone has malaria and you're going, how did I get here?

32:26Adam Kempenaar:Right. So in this case, though, you have a director in Cobb where the very project he's embarking on is one that requires him as an artist to mine his subconscious, which is what any director, what any real artist ultimately does have to do. But what can happen then is those bad things can emerge, those malls. Right. And that's no surprise that they they call her that they can emerge. And maybe you can make them disappear. Maybe you can't. And maybe they cause so much torment and havoc that they destroy the whole process and the whole project. And I thought that was so fascinating that that corollary here where maybe, you know, this crew and the cast and the audience, even we've all made a deal with the director.

33:07Adam Kempenaar:We've all struck this bargain and we hope that he's going to hold up. The filmmaker is going to hold up his end of the bargain. But maybe you're so compromised and maybe you're so corrupted that you can't, you know. And when we get that line, too, where he explains to her that you can never recreate places from your memory, always imagine new places. I can hear Nolan, on one hand, reproaching personal filmmakers who don't create worlds on the scale that he does, who don't use the same imagination that he does, who basically just try to regurgitate their own lives and experiences onto the screen.

33:36Adam Kempenaar:Or maybe it's more simple than that, and it's just a warning. It's this kind of personal warning where he's saying, this is what happens. This is what can happen. the perils of telling personal stories of mining your subconscious too deeply. If you go too deep, it can all unravel on you.

33:52Josh Larsen:Yeah. See, this is the sort of meta stuff. This is why I thought you were going to come around on Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. This is I know. And I did. It's all the stuff.

34:00Adam Kempenaar:And it's why I still like Inception, Josh. It's why I still like Inception as well as because of the craft that you've touched on in so many ways. But it's it's not enough. It's not enough to compensate for what I felt was a, as I said, weak foundation here for that relationship.

34:16Josh Larsen:So the other thing that I really liked about it, I've been talking about this culmination, but the other film that, you know, again, I'm going to give Interstellar a fair shot. Some people say it's their favorite, so it could jump up really high. But the other film in contention for that top slot for me from Nolan is Dunkirk. And I love how the time games here in Inception point ahead to Dunkirk. Now, you can also say that they point back to Memento, right? Which is probably, is that still your favorite, would you say at this point? It's still my number one. Yeah, your number one.

34:46Adam Kempenaar:Real quick, they point ahead, just ahead to Interstellar, too, in the key sequence here where 10 seconds for one person is three minutes to another, is 60 minutes to another. That's the key emotional sequence of Interstellar.

34:58Josh Larsen:Yeah, that's exactly where I was going. I mean, that is another instance where, and just trying to think back to it, like, I don't know how much, we do get exposition. We get that exact line, right? They lay out the timing for it so that we know. But again, I would argue it was necessary. And then once we've got that information, how much more important is it when we see that the van is falling in slow motion from that bridge for what? Like 10 minutes or whatever of screen time? I mean, it's just brilliant how that is laid out, how it's envisioned, how it's executed, and how so much of it. I know there is computer-generated imagery in this movie.

35:39Josh Larsen:I don't want to overblow that. But how much of it is done as practically as possible and made us to feel like this is all happening in the real world. So, yeah, just another through line of the plane of time, which, again, we mentioned in following. It was right there from the start, right? It wasn't purely chronological. is somehow here becomes to this culmination of the crucial element of the climactic sequence here. So I absolutely love that.

36:07Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I loved it before, too. Back in 2010, I remember that I was so mesmerized by the cutting between the van and the hotel and that Bond villain snow layer and the skiing. There's really actually not that much skiing that happens in that sequence even.

36:21Josh Larsen:But here's the problem with that is, and I agree with you, it's not that it's terrible. I mean, I don't think, I still don't think here action is Nolan's strong suit. Like a lot of those fight scenes in the snow sequence are not great. The problem is what's happening in the van is so fascinating. And then what's happening in the hotel sequence is even more mind blowing. And then you get to a ski slope, right? It's just like we're expecting him to ratchet up to a new level of really a physics is what we're expecting. and instead we get back to James Bond. So there's a sense of deflation there that I completely agree with.

37:00Josh Larsen:And I think it also falls into an element of this movie that, you know, there's too much gunplay. This movie does not - There's way too much. Does not need gunplay and there's way too much of it.

37:10Adam Kempenaar:There really is. I'll go back to the word tedious. That's how it felt to me. And that sequence you're talking about, we do spend, of course, the most time in that particular portion of the levels, in that snow layer. So if you aren't caught up in that, then you really wish you were getting back even more often to one of those other sequences. And even worse, if your brain has been infiltrated by Sam the Nolan nitpicker, again, we had no conversation about this ahead of time, but I apparently morphed into him watching this film. this time josh i'm thinking about the mechanics of it i'm thinking about the timing that they set up and how the way it plays out doesn't match the time they establish at all and i'm thinking about how they're all such badasses all of a sudden and did they get military training are they are they doing in dreams what they can't do in real life and then if so why are they grounded like like i'm asking all of those questions and again when you're asking all of those questions then then you're distracted you're turning in and you're projecting on the filmmaker and you're getting angry.

38:09Adam Kempenaar:And I was getting angry watching this film because of that.

38:12Josh Larsen:I think if you're asking those questions, I don't know if you should be allowed to watch the movie, actually. Those just aren't the questions. Well, that was my experience. Let me say also, the one thing, the reason why it's not a total loss, the snow sequence, is because, and this goes back to the emotional resonance, something key happens there, which I think is important. And this is where Cillian Murphy, as the CEO's son, the heir, right? The the billionaire's heir that this whole job is about finds he's being diluted. He's being duped. Don't get me wrong. But when he goes into that room, that like 2001 style of room with his, the projection of his dead father, his dying father and opens the safe and sees in that safe, the pinwheel, which is the same pinwheel that's in the photograph of him as a child with his son that he keeps trying to put by his dying father's bedside.

39:02Josh Larsen:And the father doesn't notice. like these are all emotional elements that have been laid throughout the film i don't care if this guy still gets to be a billionaire i don't care if he breaks up his companies but in that moment i cared if he felt some sort of resolution with his father and that impressed me that i actually cared because it really had no bearing on the rest of the movie but it showed me that the emotional work had been done in the performances by Killian Murphy in the previous scenes that Nolan had embedded to establish the relationship. And it's almost like, I mean, to go bring it back to the meta thing you're talking about, Adam, how often does Tom Hardy's Eames talk about what we got to get to is the relationship?

39:47Josh Larsen:It doesn't matter. To make this heist work, this is the meta thing for me, okay? To make the heist work, we've got to connect on a human emotional level with this billionaire son. Who cares about secrets, mechanics, all this other stuff? That's the same thing with Inception. If this movie is going to work, and obviously it didn't for you, it's going to have to also function on emotional human level. And I think there is so much attention given to that. It's something Nolan knew. It's something he cast the right actors for. It's something he wrote the right scenes for. And it follows through for me all the way to the end.

40:24Josh Larsen:And I think it comes back really to the spinning top. It does matter if the top falls or not, because the goal of the movie, the goal of this team, the goal of Cobb, it's only achieved if he genuinely, authentically, consciously forgives himself. And so for me, the top's got to fall. It's got to fall to have that emotional resolution. Now, Nolan may be playing games by not showing us. That's the trickster in him, right? But I don't know. I think it just has that sort of oomph for me at the end of this movie. And I'm curious, I don't know where you are on the whole did the top fall or not thing.

40:58Josh Larsen:You probably say it doesn't matter. You don't care.

41:01Adam Kempenaar:I just legitimately don't care. Wow. That's the problem. Wow. Like, I really don't. I really don't. Like, it will not occupy another moment in my brain after we stop this review. So there's no doubt, as we're closing this up and had a very different experience with this film, clearly, that he knows it. That meta commentary is there. That's Nolan, again, engaging with his audience the same way the magicians and the prestige are openly talking about filmmaking and the process of creating art while they're talking about their lives and talking about the choices they make at the end of that film. And so when he says that, you're right, he has Eames expressed that.

41:40Adam Kempenaar:I think he's being very knowing and winking in what the endeavor of this film is. But as with every artistic endeavor, the intellectual process that goes into it and what you want to achieve and what you do or what you execute and how the audience reacts to it, those are often very different things. Now, one last meta touch that I like speaking to all of this and openly using the language of cinema, putting those words in the voices of these characters. At one point in the explanation to, I think, Ariadne again, he explains that when you dream, your mind functions more quickly, so time seems to pass more slowly.

42:19Adam Kempenaar:and all I could think about is Nolan winking at us a little bit because how do you shoot something in slow motion on film you don't slow the camera down right you speed it up it's achieved because it's a faster frame rate you you project that faster frame rate normally and when you do that it seems slower so that's that's him again I would say potentially subconsciously putting those types of words and ideas into these characters mouths, but maybe very consciously trying to have them speak in the language of movies.

42:53Josh Larsen:All right. So to end on a positive note for both of us, do you have a favorite sequence from it? Because as I mentioned, it's like, it's a series of escalations. I kept feeling like, oh, it can't get better than this. It can't get better than this. But I don't know if I can decide. I mean, I kind of part of me almost likes that opening sequence, even though on some level it's the simplest. But again, having not revisited it since 2010, just the thrill of understanding what we're in for at that opening might make it my favorite. The whole, you know, until basically they're woken up in that that apartment building.

43:27Josh Larsen:I just love.

43:29Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I think I would probably go with that, too, because I do think that's that's ultimately the most effective part of the film, though I do still very much appreciate that sequence we touched on with Ellen Page when he's he's surprising her and more than anything the power that she feels when she has the the control over her surroundings yeah that's that's really thrilling to watch genuinely but also confounding and troubling in a lot of ways and you see you see with that power comes all the damage that you can potentially do so that's another sequence that really stands out for me you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.

44:09Adam Kempenaar:That was our July 2020 conversation about Inception, part of our Christopher Nolan oeuvre review. You can get complete access to the Film Spotting Archive going all the way back to 2005 as a Film Spotting family member, plus many other benefits. Learn more at filmspottingfamily.com. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

44:46Adam Kempenaar:FilmSpotting is listener supported. Join the FilmSpotting family at FilmSpottingFamily.com and get access to ad-free episodes, monthly bonus shows, our weekly newsletter, and for the first time, all in one place, the entire FilmSpotting archive going back to 2005. That's FilmSpottingFamily.com. Panoply.

45:34Josh Larsen:Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

45:43Adam Kempenaar:But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him.

45:46Josh Larsen:If I could press a button and rewind it, all I would.

45:49Adam Kempenaar:That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here. This case has gone viral.

45:59Josh Larsen:The dating contract.

46:00Adam Kempenaar:Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.

46:04Josh Larsen:This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

46:06Adam Kempenaar:I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969. Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

46:44Adam Kempenaar:You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul. Honest conversations about identity, loss, purpose, peace, faith, and everything in between. celebrities, thinkers, everyday people some have answers most are still figuring it out and if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story this show is for you listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts