Switching on a Light

In which`we never quite arrive yet here we are anyway-- movies and the world of the mind.

Materials:
Paprika, The Waking Life, and Inception. Spoilers for Inception.




The closest any movie has gotten to describing my own experience with dreams are six minutes of The Waking Life (which I've helpfully linked to up above the jump), in which a lucid dreaming guru gives his metric for what constitutes a dream or not. Until two weeks ago, that you can't change the light level in a dream was true for me as well.

One of the techniques for inducing lucid dreaming is to ask yourself every day whether you're dreaming or not. The technique works by shallowly ingraining a skepticism in reality as it's presented.

It used to be that if I couldn't flick a switch and the light come on (or if it did come on the light would be red), I was dreaming. But I jumped that hurdle in the effort to escape one of my classic dreams in which I'm being crushed into an ever smaller and darker place.

But The Waking Life segment in itself is not particularly dream-like, other than Linklater's fluid and shifting animation, and from here on dream movies can get some aspects of dreaming but not even closely approach the actual feel of a dream.

Paprika is my favorite of all of the dream movies I have seen (which, unfortunately, includes Dreamscape). It's beautiful, absurd, and strangely grounded by two smiling bartenders in a bar that seems to exist in no plane in particular. What Paprika does well is the smooth elision between ideas and places, moving with confidence and without hesitation between dreaming, reality, and hallucination. A dream is usually a confident experience, in a dream you know where you are and what's going on, even if those events would be strange to you otherwise. Paprika is liberal with both the awe and wonder and energy of dreams as well as with the horrible, perverse parts of dreams. It is also about escapism, and the movie hurdles through its worlds with boundless energy and enthusiasm, only pausing for a breath in a movie theater or that mysterious bar. But for all its imagination it never quite seems weird enough, scant criticism but criticism nonetheless. When it does get really weird the sense that the movie had managed to keep its grip on slips away, rendering the climatic set piece not nearly as satisfying as the quieter ending.

SPOILERS!
Inception lacks the visual imagination of Paprika, but as Nolan is an exacting storyteller this is a clear choice. Instead of the free-wheeling absurd dreams that Paprika draws upon, Inception plays out like those dreams where you wake up and go about your business all day before waking up and going about your business. (Fun fact! For three weeks during fourth grade I was convinced I was dreaming). The result is a world very Matrix-like in construction, fluid in some directions but not in others. Nolan wants you to keep asking that question that the guru says you need to ask: Is this a dream or not? Am I seeing smartly dressed Dom Cobb in this city and that with his smartly dressed dream con-men or not? From the first scene of Dom washed up upon the shore of something unknown to the last scene there's no clear answer to what is representative of reality or not. This constant questioning for about two and a half hours had a strange effect when I finally left the theater.

Inception has some really cool ideas, setting up a truly insane set piece stretched across several time scales, but Nolan is something of a watch-maker with his stories so the film never really gets to breathe or free up in its world. Eames is the most free of all Dom's team mates in dreaming, as he can change his appearance or will into existence some serious fire power, a trickster, and Ariadne (the weaver) bends the rules and the land to her power but suffers the consequences. But the rules by which the con-men work and the ways the dream worlds are constructed preclude Neo-like flying or shape-shifting, keeping each dream in the realm of just-not-quite rightness that makes you question whether you're actually in your living room or not.

I always feel disoriented when I walk out of theater, but this time the feeling was much more palpable. In the space of time we had been indoors storm clouds had gathered, and the sky filled with green-gray-yellow-purple clouds, the air was lightly breezy and warm. For a few minutes for me the clouds were the oncoming kick, as I waited to be woken up to something new.