One initially strange thing about Inception is how un-dreamlike the dreams in the film are. It’s tempting to see the Nolan of Inception as a reverse Hitchcock – where Hitchcock took De Chirico-like dream topographies and remotivated them as thriller spaces, Nolan takes standard action flick sequences and repackages them as dreams.
Not caring whether we are lying to ourselves may be the price for happiness – or at least the price one pays for release from excruciating mental anguish. In this respect, Dormer in Insomnia (2002) could be the anti-Cobb. His inability to sleep – which naturally also means an inability to dream – correlates with the breakdown of his capacity to tell himself a comforting story about who he is. After the shooting of his partner, Dormer’s identity collapses into a terrifying epistemological void, a black box that cannot be opened. He simply doesn’t know whether or not he intended to kill his partner (just as Borden in The Prestige cannot remember which knot he tied on the night that Angier’s wife died in a bungled escapology act.)
Mark Fisher, The Lost Unconscious: Christopher Nolan’s Inception, collected in ghosts of my life, initially published in Film Quarterly
[Spoilers for Insomnia ahoy.]
Tenet is a goofy film. You have to be a really intellectual auteur to be allowed to work on such silly timey wimey stuff. It’s like something you might have conceived leaning way back on a swivel chair and chewing on a pen and not studying for midterms. The same could be said about Inception which apparently Nolan did dream up in a dorm room.
But if Inception was explicitly about dreams, it’s Tenet that really felt like a dream to me. The internal logic of the whole thing gets so bizarre and esoteric–and doled out in such handfuls–you might as well call it a dream sequence and let it play out on its own terms. I can’t say I didn’t have a good time. But that’s the thing: as the Fisher quote implies and others have outright stated, it’s as if Nolan’s unconscious itself has been colonized by this James Bond stuff. I mean I’ve had dreams too that were all breakneck action and slick suits and hackneyed tropes (‘The Protagonist?’ Why don’t you just call her ‘the Damsel,’ too?) But you kinda wish the era’s foremost Kubrick/Hitchcock/insert name analogue would do you one better.
Audiences seem to lose interest with keeping track with his mindfuck escapades too, though the man himself seems comically in denial about this. Maybe it’s the world stakes escalating to pandemic proportions or maybe the Corona Year did us a good one in weaning us off blockbuster communion at the multiplex. Maybe, in other words, self-involved spectacle is finally beside the point. I’ve defended Dunkirk and I forget what the time gimmickry was all about in that one.
And to stay in that lane for a moment, what does Nolan have to say about time, anyway? The time/subjectivity themes are a time-honored tradition stretching back to the origins of cinema and beyond–famously, they are discussed by Tarkovsky in Sculpting in Time. But where the Russian master slowed down time to make spiritual moments sink in, Nolan’s films are increasingly about time running out, running mad in fact, if manically precise in his ultra-tight editing and pulsating soundtracks (right, I’m not saying I’m entirely against it.) For all its involutions and convolutions Nolan Time is apace with the modern experience: there’s always a bus to catch.
A few months ago I rewatched Insomnia, Nolan’s most overlooked film, methinks, which he made because he secretly hankered to have Pacino reprise Hanna from Heat, methinks. Dormer is Hanna down to the overworn suit-and-tie and the gum, the cocaine eyes. Big-time Heat nerd Nolan has Pacino conjure him anew for the coda, in which the bloodhound cop has ran out of good days and the piper’s purse jangles within earshot. (God I love Pacino. I don’t wanna wake in a world without him.)
What struck me was that in Insomnia I could find every major theme from Nolan’s films all the way to The Dark Knight and Inception. Nolan casts his Pacino into a psychological inferno where the hero/bastard struggles to make arrears with the Devil, having made sacrfices of truth for justice not unlike those Bruce would make, though he would throw himself into the bargain too. Though Dormer longs for sweet darkness, he grows insomniac and haggard in the furthest timezones, sick of his own legend in a peculiar (and perpetual) twilight hour wherein eternal night has been supplanted by the hellish half-light of an insufficiently darkened hotel room. It’s a love letter as well as a critique (like this post, come to think of it).
“You don’t get to pick when you tell the truth. The truth is beyond that.” Hanna is told that by a taunting Robin Williams, cast geniously against type as a writer/murderer explicitly talking about writing himself as innocent in the interrogation room, in a way incepting his innocence in the minds of Hanna’s colleagues. Truth in Insomnia strikes me as absolute: “a jury never met a child murderer before,” Hanna tells the woman he chooses as his confessor, “but l have.” Yet he asks her for absolution: “Why don’t you tell me what you think? Here. Now. ln this room. You and me. Please.” The answer comes as quotidian as it is devastating: “I guess it’s about what you thought was right at the time. Then, what you’re willing to live with.” True and right are two separate quantities, and there is no resolution. In Insomnia‘s moral universe, justice makes is so time becomes a story we tell a jury, a college of our peers, ourselves, wanting to be fooled. When Hanna shuffles off, having arguably seen himself in the bloody pool where his co-dependent quarry floats dead–graphic personal hell stuff–he can do no better than pass on the tragedy to young hope Hillary Swank. “Don’t lose your way,” are his last words and the movie’s, but can it ever be that simple?
My Insomnia rewatch isn’t as fresh as I would have liked to deep-dive the shit out of this, much less my last watch of the other films. I’ve added a lengthy second quote from the Fisher essay out of embarassment while I pull lines out of a subtitle file. But I’ve gone that far on that little. What’s a word for a film that reverberates like that? Profound?
Whatever it is, it’s the opposite of ‘goofy.’
the Budafoki amended 