INCEPTION

“Fuck Icarus” —Leonardo DiCaprio

BP’s capped the oil spill, theater five has new seats, Friday night’s hopping, as Jenny said when she saw the preview, “That’s exactly the movie I want to see.” But Amy has managed to take in none of its extensive marketing, she’s been photographing nudes lately and I suppose she’s after the advantage of seeing this movie undressed, too. Stoned, we go straight for Twizzlers, and I eat mine slow as a winch pulling up, turn-by-turn, a rope thrown down to the cliffs below.

Where are we? Washed up on the beach, in medias res. Seeking the ideas embedded in dreams, our heroes are psychoanalysts for whom, however—because they operate from within—the manifest content is equal to the latent content. They need not interpret, but do need to jump levels and hold together, detail by detail, a reality that longs to explode. A top that spins forever, those beautiful roofs of Baron Haussman’s Paris bearing down from the sky. All meta-talk and story meetings—“If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.” Is this an intellectual-property fable, a cautionary tale about whose idea is whose? On one level, yes, even as on another it longs to unleash the avalanche that Kafka knew one needed to blast one’s frozen insides apart.

The movie argues two things: First, it would take an entire team of crack experts, working round the clock, to convince you that your father is proud of you. And second, if you want to get with that cute Architecture grad student you’re going to need to let go the memory of your crazy, dissociated wife (Cotillard). “Who would want to be stuck in a dream for ten years?”—and it goes by in an hour, to boot. If Juno plays Ariadne, the labyrinth specialist, does that make Leo Theseus, the lover who leaves, the hero who visited the underworld, like Odysseus, to meet the dead? “You’re just a shade.” We think we know better, and call those departed friends and lovers who visit us in the dark “projections.” As in Shutter Island, guilt is the tenor; as in Nightmare on Elm Street, the question is, Are we awake or asleep? Great question, to which one should reply, well, what’s at stake? Are jump-cuts flashes of consequence, or is each a psychotic break? And what is the nature of a sun that would smite Icarus’s joy upon the hour he flies free of fear’s maze?