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.
I completely agree with you about the quality of Inception. The movie was filled with the perfect amount of action and emotion. The concept of time as a subjective experience is an attribute of this movie, and modernism in general, that I find interesting. I can completely relate to the feeling of stretched time while dreaming. Whenever I wake up from a super detailed dream, I always feel like more time has passed than 8 hours (or however long I sleep that night). Sometimes my dreams go on for what feels like months, and then I wake up and remember all the new cool aspects of my life that were real 5 minutes ago never really happened. This is an idea that truly embodies the human condition; time does not feel the same for every single person, and can feel different in different situations. An hour spent at work and an hour spent doing something I like feel MUCH different. It's crazy how slow time passes when the human brain wants time to pass the quickest.
ReplyDeleteAs someone else who had never seen Inception before this week, I have to agree with you. It really was as great a movie as everyone says. But I think the fact that Modernist attributes like perspectivism and the abstract use of time actually took a little away from the movie. Maybe it would have been better if we had gone in not knowing those attributes, but it felt to me like Nolan tried too hard to make them obvious, which took me out of the film a little bit as I would recognize these attributes and remember that I'm watching a movie.
ReplyDeleteI found this movie to be more interesting when we watched it in class than when I first watched it. Knowing about the modernistic attributes that are clearly displayed throughout the movie allowed it to be much easier to understand what is going on, and it let me go deeper into the meaning of the movie. My favorite aspect was how the landscapes were used in symbolic and metaphorical ways, such as the fortress that the team needs to invade in order to find the secret that is locked in fischer's mind.
ReplyDeleteOur views seem to be very similar on this movie. I remember the hype for this movie but I'm glad I held off to see it while looking for modernism. I did however not realize how much impressionism was used in this film. It sort of passed over me but we do get a great feeling of how all the characters feel about their very intense situations. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. Also like how regular your blog theme is.
ReplyDelete