Examining Modern Attributes in Inception

Today, our class finished watching Inception, a movie written and directed by Christopher Nolan who has become one of my favorite directors as of late with his Batman movies. This movie stars Leo DiCaprio and Ellen Page and is touted as one of the best written action movies in recent memories. I had actually never seen the movie before this class and had mostly ignored the hype when it had come out which helped to keep my expectations level when watching and analyzing the movie. The movie itself, in terms of acting and quality of action scenes, was stunning and made it easy for me to focus in on some of the modernist attributes I was assigned to search for within the film.

The first attribute that stood out to me almost immediately was the use of impressionism. A great part of this movie operates around the idea of shifting perspectives, finding out what other characters and even what the characters themselves think and know about certain situations, people and ideas. A great example of this would be when we are first learning about the dream world and how projections of the dreamers sub-conscious would act together with the will of that persons mind to expel outside forces, yet also to accept ideas if the dreamer can believe that they thought of the idea themselves.

Also, another modernist attribute that pops up a great deal in this movie is that of using and creating landscapes in symbolic and metaphoric ways. Usually in literature, this means that names of places are usually assigned due to metaphorical relation with the reality that is that place. In the movie, this is taken a step further as the dreamer is able to create their own world and populate it with whatever they want, and many times those places hold metaphorical meaning in relation to events and happenings in that persons real life. I found this to be expemplifed with a persons need to "lock away dark secrets" Which in reality means to keep them to yourself but in the dream means to literally lock away your ideas, like in a prison or a safe.

The final modernist attribute that jumped out at me during the movie was the use of time in a more abstract sense. In modernist literature, authors began to use time differently then it had always been defined; as a constant, scalar quantity. Authors began to give time depth and meaning by allowing for time to seemingly stretch and shrink as well as allow for movement through time both backwards and forwards. Time in inception is especially important because in a dream, time moves much slower in relativity to the real world which allowed for crazy extensions of time to allow for Leo and his gang to complete the task at hand. Time is also given even greater depth with the introduction of limbo, where times relativity to the outside world is basically nonexistent.

A Novice Examines Modernist Literature

Modernist literature is not exactly high on my list of categories to browse through at the local Barnes and Noble. Perhaps it was previous experiences with English class literature that turned me sour but I was never one to read fiction that was written before the 1950's, and even then I found myself struggling to make it through such classics as To Kill A Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye. In fact, one of the only stories I have ever read in English class and gone back to reread on my own time was Hatchet which ended up becoming one of my favorite books to date. There was something about the precise descriptions and details of Brian's every action as he fought for survival that kept me enthralled through the whole story.

As I started the assigned summer reading this year I was pleasantly surprised. Unlike the extreme mundane description of average English life that last years summer reading portrayed that bored me too tears, I found books with exciting plots with dark twists and turns that really kept me interested. However, the real beauty I found in these books was the  amount of detail of the world around the characters as the story progressed, especially in Tender is the Night. Post World War 1 Europe was a dismal continent which I learned much about last year in History class, but was never fully interested in until I read this book. I don't think I really understood how much impact the  first World War had on the psyche and culture of Europe until I was reading about Dick and Nicole traveling and experiencing it. I was also very interested in how each detail in stories like the three we read can be interpreted in so many different ways. It was enthralling to think about things like whether Esther's feeling of being under a bell jar was due to being a social anomaly or whether it was because she felt everyone had their eyes on her at all time. In short, I am excited to keep reading these stories in and out of class as the year continues and seeing if this literature will have a positive effect on my learning experience.