Inception, dreaming and is Cobb 'awake' [whatever that is] when the film ends ? (work in progress)

Inception, dreaming and is Cobb 'awake' [whatever that is] when the film ends ? (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 July

Inception, dreaming and is Cobb 'awake' [whatever that is] when the film ends ? (work in progress)

Ignoring the complexities of 'Borges and I' (and / or of translating it*), why am I sure that, when I just typed these words, no one else has ever written them ? :

'Dreamers and Rules (or, at least, as Cobb represents them to Ariadne)'

* A text is at : https://t.co/2z0pP1PaOM.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 19, 2023

Michael Caine, as a lecturer in an unspecified discipline at a French academy (which, however, we may rightly assume to be La Sorbonne), graces a scene close to the start of Inception [which, thanks to this word from the world of insurance, necessarily sounds like the start of the start], and then does not reappear until the closing ones.

From their conversation, we learn that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), whom he addresses as 'Dom', is his son-in-law and that he had once been one of his brighter students. (The credits tell us that Caine's character is called Miles, but we do not hear that name used.) Despite Cobb's seeming implication in the death of his daughter (Mal**, played by Marion Cotillard), Miles appears to have relatively few reservations about introducing Cobb to one of his current students, once he has first urged Cobb 'to come back to reality', and Cobb has argued both that, after what happened, he has to use what he was taught to do as he does (but cannot now be the architect of his own dream-deceptions), and, moreover, that the job that he is undertaking represents his only chance to be what Miles and Cobb want him to be able to be, a father to his children.

When Cobb asks for someone 'at least as good as' he was, Miles claims that Ariadne (Elliot Page) is 'better than' Cobb. (Apart from at the end of the film, where Miles meets Cobb at the airport, we see Caine do no more than effect an introduction to Ariadne. (If, that is, Cobb and co. have actually reached Arrivals...))


More to come...


























Appendix :

Clues to a re-watched film :

1) Dies irae

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 1, 2023

Clues to a re-watched film :

2) Non, je ne regrette rien

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 2, 2023

Clues to a re-watched film :

3) Cotillard

Any guesses ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 3, 2023

Clues to a re-watched film :

4) Arthur

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 5, 2023

Clues to a re-watched film :

5) 'Chambre'

Any guesses ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 6, 2023

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 August

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

Surely, all indications are that you should first have undertaken a theatrical ('tenth-anniversary') re-watch of Inception (2010) ? :

Meanwhile, David Lynch almost certainly did, both in The Lost Highway (1997), and then in Mulholland Drive (2001), what Nolan's aiming at here...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

I know :)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

I don't think I got any more "story" from it than from the trailer I've now seen about 14 times in the last 3 weeks.

— Fenchurch S Goldfish (@Fenny_Goldfish) August 26, 2020

And, as the three others in the screening may also may not have been told to expect it (but the couple seemed intent on talking through it anyway), I believe that I went off to get a drink and walked in on it partway through (thinking that the film had started early).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

Especially interesting, having re-watched Bound (1997) last night (on account of @cheshellen's talk 'How to be a femme fatale' on Monday evening), and the 'idea-seeding' of The Wachowskis

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

Which is Christopher Nolan going to be riffing on more :

Sliding Doors (1998) - or the Lynch of The Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001) ?

Meanwhile, #UCFF is using considerable stealth to implant the idea that Nolan should make 'a rom-com' :https://t.co/LZbUQBk5Wn https://t.co/lirgX9vpkc

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 28, 2020

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Christopher Nolan and the non-poetics of Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan and the non-poetics of Inception (2010)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 August

Christopher Nolan and the non-poetics of Inception (2010)

We need look no farther than Andrei Tarkovsky - in Solaris (1972), Mirror (Зеркало [Zerkalo]) (1975), Stalker (1979) - to be shown dazzling profundity in simplicity.

NB Spoilers in the Tweets immediately below !

Absent - even according to what *Cobb* says happened - sabotaging one's wife's happiness for one's own ?

Here, and in Interstellar (2014), there is (somewhat laboured) rumination on being a father who is no longer present to his child(ren)*.

* Boyhood (2014) does it better...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2020

But we were ever here before, with the Bernard Williams of 'The Makropulos Case : Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality'*, Leoš Janáček, and all their avators, reflected in and by Borges (https://t.co/H0mizrm3H6) :)

* Problems of the Self (CUP [https://t.co/pLwZJBgHMj]). pic.twitter.com/rLaxTeehOX

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2020

Dædalus proper :

In Inception (2010), dreams - and their putatively calculably different rates of passing (as premise) - are only ever a proxy for the effluxion of time, and, with it, the effacement or extinction of 'memory' [sc. memories] ~ Philip French

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 10, 2020

By contrast with Tarkovsky (whose films are alluded to under the title), one of the premises of Inception (2010) - stated when Cobb is telling Ariadne* why he needs her to design a certain type of maze (and, rather obviously, Cobb / Nolan is all along really referring as much to cinema) - is that its complexity serves to conceal the fact that a dream-world has been fabricated, not dreamt per se.

Nolan only ever means cinema when Cobb tells Ariadne that designing a maze can hide a dream :

A chance to see a tenth-anniversary screening of Inception (2010), which few took up (I was one in an audience of four), might not suggest that seeing the trailer will draw people in ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 22, 2020

Angel Song from 2011 Xmas Show https://t.co/CXixpTjNO6 via @YouTube

— ezio lunedei (@eziolunedei) November 20, 2020

[...]

Set-up : Contact (1997) ?

Planet 1 (Miller's) : Waves / surf

Planet 2 (Mann's) : Frozen / ice

Black hole (Gargantua) : Tesseract / bookcase

Planet 3 (Edmunds') : Habitable

+ Plans A and B

'Computer, map onto Inception (2010) and spot significant differences !' pic.twitter.com/CnC0nFvCGq

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 31, 2020

End-notes :

* Of all people, given the signification of her name !



Nota bene - Level -8
Appendix of spoilery stuff ! :

Wild how many thinkpieces still go over Inception, in particular the ending. It doesn’t matter if Cobb is in a dream at the end. What matters is that he walks away from the spinning top towards his kids - *he* doesn’t care whether he is or not. If there is a point, that’s it.

— Jim Ross 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🎞️ (@JimGR) February 17, 2021

Wild how many thinkpieces still go over Inception, in particular the ending. It doesn’t matter if Cobb is in a dream at the end. What matters is that he walks away from the spinning top towards his kids - *he* doesn’t care whether he is or not. If there is a point, that’s it.

— Jim Ross 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🎞️ (@JimGR) February 17, 2021

We don't even *know* where 'this spinner' came from, except that Cobb** - in explication to Ariadne (i.e. to us) of what it's for - baldly contradicts his own advice and tells her it was Mal's.

** And Cobb, as in cobweb, is a spinner of webs (probably rooted in Le Guin's Cob).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 17, 2021

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