The Awl's Maria Bustillos on Inception as a metaphor for cinema:
The easiest way to access this interpretation is to examine the character of Mal, the wife of Dom Cobb. She represents Cobb’s personal inspiration; the Greek kind of muse, not just the beautiful-girl kind. Young artists conceive a passion for their métier that is analogous to a love affair. “He’s wedded to his work,” people will say. The indescribable beauty of books, paintings or music that strikes us with such brilliance and force when we are young; we fall in love with that. Some fall in love to such a degree that nothing will suffice but that they too must become painters, writers, musicians.
via www.theawl.com
I was going to make the same point, but I figured I'd give my friends a week to see the film before I posted a spoiler (real fans watch, but even real fans have other things to do). Usually, the female protagonist's role is a go-to cipher to unlock a film's deeper meaning ("The muse will always be tempting him to indulge his own vision, rather than trying to reach outside himself for it."), but in this case there's a lot more.
When Ariadne and Cobb "ride" Cobb's nostalgia as an elevator, Nolan is evoking the editing process — the two of them are cutting across set and sequence, as well as setting the stage for Ariadne to unspool Cobb in the final "escape" sequence of the film. Nolan has absorbed critical hits for the exposition in these scenes, but because the exposition only illuminates the superficial text of the movie it offers an additional layer of misdirection. Cobb's team is also assembled as a film crew would be: the flawed but irreplaceable director, his long time partner and producer, the money man, the spoiled film star, the cinematographer, special effects engineer, and so on.
Armond White's criticism of the film ("Despicable Inception"), reads to me like he is still angry about Memento (So am I! So horrible, so socially regressive, &c!):
[h]is shapeless storytelling (going from Paris to Mumbai to nameless ski slopes, carelessly shifting tenses like a video game) throws audiences into artistic limbo — an “unconstructed dream space” like Toy Story 3—that leaves them bereft of art’s genuine purpose: a way of dealing with the real world.
Armond's criticism articulates what I think was the major flaw in Memento, but Inception is smarter, and far superior. (I still consider Armond White our greatest film contemporary film critic). I saw Inception a little early, with absolutely no idea what it was about (I hadn't even seen a trailer). But i did know that I hated Memento — on our first night out Adriana and I argued about it for most of the evening. I wouldn't go so far as to say Inception is brilliant, but it is fun and challenging.
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