Anti-Œdipus, or Christopher Nolan and his Critics

"Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears." -- A.O. Scott, The New York Times.

In my humble opinion, Christopher Nolan has yet to make a bad film and I am certainly not alone in this sentiment. If you scan the IMDB film rankings, which is certainly not the greatest arbiter of taste but should gives us a pulse of internet film geeks, Nolan's films currently rank at #3 (Inception -- only losing to the top two based on overall votes), #12 (The Dark Knight), #29 (Memento), #72 (The Prestige), and #108 (Batman Begins). Only Following and Insomnia fall out of the top 250, but both have a respectable average rating in the 7s.

Although I didn't love Inception quite as much as the rest of my nerdy cohort - I still think either Memento or The Dark Knight is Nolan's best work - the line of criticism exemplified by the A.O. Scott quote that Inception's dreams weren't "dreamy" enough has bothered me. You can read a reiteration of that line in practically every critical review of the movie: from David Edelstein lambasting Nolan for being "too literal-minded, too caught up in ticktock logistics, to make a great, untethered dream movie" to Andrew O'hehir bemoaning that "there are no surreal images or nonsense dialogue, no illogical shifts of scene from the first-grade classroom to Mom's kitchen to a whorehouse."

It is okay to disagree about movies. This isn't a broadside against the incompetence of particular movie critics. And certainly a lot of fair criticism can be lobbed at Nolan: for one, he apparently has little interest in female characters (and a third Batman film is unlikely to change that). But to criticize Inception for not being Last Year in Marienbad or Un Chien Andalou is to fundamentally misunderstand the movie as well as Nolan's intensions. Worst still: it is simply bad criticism.

As paradoxical as it might sound, although Inception revolves around dreams, it is about dreaming only insofar as dreaming is one of our oldest ontological metaphors: how can I be certain what is real and what is not? Nolan is entirely uninterested in Freudian dream interpretation (for one, Freud would have a conniption over the word "subconscious" or the use of a spatial metaphor to represent the unconscious) or a cinematic representation of surrealist dreamscapes. There is no need for bizarre juxtapositions to help unravel ineffable secrets because the characters already know precisely what they need to for the purposes of the story (Cobb has not repressed anything: he knows what fuels his guilt). Furthermore, the dreams in Inception are specifically crafted to not feel like dreams -- nobody criticized the Matrix within the movie The Matrix for being too logical.

When critics excoriate Inception's representation of dreams, I think they are really chastising Nolan for his tightly wound screenplays. All of his movies are densely plotted with unfailingly high degrees of narrative complexity. Early on in each film, Nolan clearly establishes the rules of the game and then systematically explores the story from within that framework. To reframe A.O. Scott's criticism, Nolan's screenplays could be said to be "too literal, too logical, too rule-bound" to accurately portray a reality that is "a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears." Jokes, in particular, play a woefully under used role in Nolan's universe. The quips in the Batman franchise always seem forced in by some nervous producer thinking of the loss of revenue among teens. In particular, I am reminded of the scene in Memento in which Leonard accidentally kicks the door in on the wrong hotel room because he held the piece of paper with the room number on it upside-down. It is a scene unlike anything else I can think of in Nolan's work because it is random, entirely unnecessary -- and yes, oddly funny.

I also think Nolan's films can underwhelm critics because for all of their complexity, they are not exactly profound. As A.O. Scott writes, Inception "trades in crafty puzzles rather than profound mysteries, and gestures in the direction of mighty philosophical questions that Mr. Nolan is finally too tactful, too timid or perhaps just too busy to engage." One might think of the way Nolan dealt with the issue of surveillance in The Dark Knight: he introduces and resolves it within the context of the story, but never bothers to tease out or moralize the real world implications.

Nolan, as a filmmaker, strikes me as simply more invested in the intricacies of structure than he is with the mysteries of the universe. His movies lack depth because they are tautological metaphors: the form is the content and the content is the form. The Prestige is perhaps the most explicit example: Nolan overtly spells out the three acts involved in a magic trick and then precedes to follow the same setup with the structure of the movie. A movie about magic tricks is itself one.

The same can be said of Inception. The ambiguous last shot opens a few possible avenues for reading the movie: how certain are we as an audience of the reality of what we thought was the principal level of the narrative? But it is a false question: of course Cobb's reality isn't real. He is a character in a movie. The spinning top is a cheeky wink right before the closing credit music awakes the audience to once again return to reality. A movie about inception is itself such an act.

You might not find this to be entire satisfying or dismiss it as simply "a crafty puzzle." But to demand anything more is to unfairly ask the movie to be something it is not. And I, for one, can't wait to see what wily riddle Nolan comes up with next.