“INCEPTION – THE TOP KEEPS SPINNING”: THE GOATMILK DEBATES continue
“THE GOATMILK DEBATES” continue…
The motion: “The top stopped spinning at the end of INCEPTION”
For the motion: Read Mark Maccora’s opening argument here.
Here, we have Zaki Hasan against the motion:
ZAKI HASAN – AGAINST THE MOTION – “THE TOP KEEPS SPINNING”
“So, did it topple over, or did it keep spinning?”
It’s a testament to the profundity of forethought with which writer/director Christopher Nolan has imbued Inception, his masterful mindjob of a summer blockbuster, that a simple question like that has prompted such impassioned commentary both for and against its validity. Indeed, it speaks volumes about how effectively Nolan has seeded the terrain and laid the pipe for analysis and introspection that so much time, energy, and oxygen has been spent weighing this seemingly unanswerable conundrum as if the solution will somehow provide validation not just for the time we’ve spent watching the preceding events unfold, but also our investment in them.
Still, while both sides’ interpretations are equally nuanced, they either willfully ignore or remain blissfully unaware of the larger “truth” that it’s utterly irrelevant. Whether the top spins in perpetuity or whether it succumbs to gravity’s siren song is immaterial to the broader reality that Inception is a dream, from beginning to end. At no point do the characters in the film ever occupy the “real” world, making the entire experience one more level of dreaming — furthest out, and this time one that we in the audience are complicit in along with Nolan and his co-scenarists. It’s a meta-textual gambit as risky as it is rewarding, and it’s one more reason that Christopher Nolan is one of the most talented filmmakers working today.
Throughout the story, we’re told at various points by different characters about the nature of the dream realms that they flit in and out of. As mentioned in my review of the film, the line between the dreamed and the experienced is so nebulous as to be rendered virtually meaningless (both in design and in execution). To this end, a totem is carried by each of the characters to remind them where they are. In the case of our lead character Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) his totem is a small metal top that belonged to his wife (who is either deceased or simply departed based on which interpretation you choose). This top, Cobb explains, will continue to spin endlessly while inside the dream world, thus allowing both he and we a kind of visual shorthand — a compass, if you will — telling them where they are at any given moment.
At film’s close, having accomplished his assignment and conquered the personal demons that have bedeviled him at every step, Cobb is joyfully reunited with his family. Or is he? While he embraces his children for the first time, the camera pans ominously to the kitchen table, where the top is still spinning…and spinning…and then…black. Does it topple over, or does it keep going? The answer to this question will definitively answer, we believe, whether we’ve wasted the preceding two hours-and-change. But the totemic rules we’re basing our judgment on are rendered meaningless if the “reality” in which they’re presented is an imagined one. And if that’s the case, what does that say about everything we’ve just witnessed? This is the question Nolan very deliberately raises, the mere pondering of which becomes a kind of answer in itself.
As my friend and fellow traveler Brian Hall says of that closing shot:
While I understand how it can be a little frustrating, another part of me thinks: Show that moment to a crowd, just that moment, and it means nothing. However, after a two and a half hours of mind yoga, that moment made my whole theater gasp, clap, scream, etc. How could you not put that in? It gets an earned reaction — whether you like it or not.
And that earned reaction is exactly what Nolan is after. The genuine response to the fictional scenario. Far more than merely plying us with an engaging, gripping thriller that uses the world of the subconscious as its visual and visceral playground, Nolan’s two-and-a-half hour canvas is a meditation on the nature of reality itself, delving, like The Matrix before it, into that dividing line between what Baudrillard termed simulacra and simulation. And like The Matrix, but to an even greater degree, the film calls into question those totems with which we define a sense of identity.
That’s the secret to Inception bubbling just under the surface, obvious to anyone willing to look past Nolan’s storytelling sleight-of-hand. It’s something that emerges on the first viewing, but that our natural inclination is to discount, because to do otherwise is to write off our emotional investment in the film as something that was manufactured instead of genuine. This is the hoary metaphor of the cave played out against the backdrop of a traditional Hollywood entertainment, with the rest of us sharing in the illusion before finally being asked to determine for ourselves what constitutes our reality — and, by extension, judge its inherent worth. Read the rest of this entry »
Exclusive excerpt of “The Butterfly Mosque” by G. Willow Wilson
Author G. Willow Wilson gives us the opening of her acclaimed new memoir, praised by Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist. The memoir eloquently chronicles an American woman’s journey in discovering Islam, Egypt, and love.
You can buy “Butterfly Mosque” here.
PROLOGUE
In the upper reaches of the Zagros Mountains, the air changed. The high altitude opened it, cleared it of the dust of the valleys, and made it sing a little in the lungs; low atmospheric pressure. It was a shift I recognized. We had been driving for hours, winding north along a wide dry basin between high peaks; then we turned west. Now the car, an old Peugot, struggled upward along switch-backs cut into the mountainside, past intersecting layers of rock laid down over geological ages.
For a moment I was reminded intensely of home. It had been almost a year since I had been back to Boulder, in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. The snug valley where I had gone to high school, learned to drive; where my parents and sister still lived, could be seen as a tidy whole from this height in cliffs much like these. Looking down into the plain below, I felt as though I was seeing double, and that an hour’s hike along the switch-backs would bring me to my own doorstep.
At the time, it was a sensation that seemed a little perverse. I had just flown into Iran from Egypt—this journey had begun thousands of miles from my own country. That a mountain and a change in the air in Iran should make me think of home in the spring of 2004; the spring of the War on Terror, the Clash of Civilizations, the Jihad, the things that had made my quiet life almost unlivable, must be sheer perversity. I thought so then. I didn’t yet realize that the Zagros Mountains had no name when they were forced out of the ground millions of years ago, and neither did the Rockies; that the call of earth to earth might be something more real than the human divisions of Iran and America. I had faith, then; it was in the mountains that I first thought of divinity, and these mountains reminded me of that sensation. But I didn’t yet have faith in faith—I didn’t trust the connections I felt between mountains or memories, and if I had been a little more ambivalent, I could have allowed the Zagros to be foreign, and the memory to be coincidence.
Fortunately, I didn’t.
Ahmad, my guide-plus-chaperone, pointed west over the receding peaks.
“If you keep driving that way, you would get to Iraq,” he said. He was a Shirazi man with silver hair and laugh-lines. Before the revolution he flew planes for the Shah, whom he had hated, but not as much as he now hated the mullahs. During one of our conversations on the road from Shiraz to Isfahan, he told me he used to fast during Ramadan and pray with some regularity. The Islamic regime had so deformed his religion in his eyes that he stopped. Thinking I would judge him for this lapse lest he provide a rationale (I was an American and a Sunni, and therefore unpredictable) he told me he didn’t need to fast; fasting was meant to remind one of the hunger of the poor, and he helped the poor in other ways.
“Then why do the poor fast?” I asked him. The Ramadan fast was required of all Muslims, not just the wealthy. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye; evidently I was an American Sunni who discussed theology. Among the middle classes, theology had gone out of fashion in Iran. But I had just come from Egypt, where the reverse was true. Ahmad left the question floating in the air. Read the rest of this entry »
Introducing the cover for “The Domestic Crusaders” book, published by McSweeney’s Fall 2010
We are proud to unveil the official cover of “The Domestic Crusaders,” a play about a Muslim American Family living in the post 9-11 world. It will be published by McSweeney’s in Fall 2010.
The fully colored, wrap around cover was created by artist Daniel Krall.
Let us know what you think! And please buy the play, which will be out as part of McSweeney’s #36 and independently available on Amazon.com and bookstores.
Also!!!
If you know friends in Toronto, please spread the word about our “Domestic Crusaders” performance this Saturday and Sunday, July 31 and August 1, at Muslim Fest. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=140045622687882&ref=search
Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap
July 18, 2010
A security guard standing at the entrance of a Mercedes Benz dealer in Islamabad.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Much of Pakistan’s capital city looks like a rich Los Angeles suburb. Shiny sport utility vehicles purr down gated driveways. Elegant multistory homes are tended by servants. Laundry is never hung out to dry.
But behind the opulence lurks a troubling fact. Very few of these households pay income tax. That is mostly because the politicians who make the rules are also the country’s richest citizens, and are skilled at finding ways to exempt themselves.
That would be a problem in any country. But in Pakistan, the lack of a workable tax system feeds something more menacing: a festering inequality in Pakistani society, where the wealth of its most powerful members is never redistributed or put to use for public good. That is creating conditions that have helped spread an insurgency that is tormenting the country and complicating American policy in the region.
It is also a sorry performance for a country that is among the largest recipients of American aid, payments of billions of dollars that prop up the country’s finances and are meant to help its leaders fight the insurgency.
Though the authorities have tried to expand the net in recent years, taxing profits from the stock market and real estate, entire swaths of the economy, like agriculture, a major moneymaker for the elite, remain untaxed.
“This is a system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite,” said Riyaz Hussain Naqvi, a retired government official who worked in tax collection for 38 years. “It is a skewed system in which the poor man subsidizes the rich man.” Read the rest of this entry »
“INCEPTION – The Top Stopped Spinning”: THE GOATMILK DEBATES
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“THE GOATMILK DEBATES” will be an ongoing series featuring two debaters tackling an interesting or controversial question in a unique, irreverant manner.
Each debater makes their opening argument, followed by a rebuttal.
The winner will be decided by the online audience and judged according to the strength of their argument.
The first motion: “The top stopped spinning at the end of INCEPTION”
For the motion: Mark Maccora
Against the motion: Zaki Hasan
FOR THE MOTION: MARK MACCORA’S OPENING ARGUMENT
Is Inception all a dream or what? I can debate this point all day. Actually, it’s been over a week so far, and the debates keep coming. You’re probably reading this to better understand the resolution- it’s why I’ve seen Inception three times. That’s exactly the filmmaker’s desire. Christopher Nolan worked hard to sow visual ambiguity into his picture. This seductive confusion creates a demand for repeat viewership, endless analysis, and public debate. Kubrick achieved the same thing with the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nolan is a Kubrick fan, as cited in his quotations section on IMDb. It is quite admirable that Nolan tries to use a communal dream with a hidden message, sorry, I mean a major movie with a theme to inspire thought. Wait, movies are a lot like communal dreams, huh? Hold on to that idea. I’ll get there. Thought provocation has been missing from tent pole pictures for, oh, 2 decades or so. Upon my first watch, I thought the whole thing was a dream. I found it thrilling. Then, instead of getting caught up in my own thoughts, I went reinspected the movie without so much awe at the crosscutting action sequences. I revised my conclusion because the images did not support it. Visual evidence exists to conclude that what we are told is true. The film ends in the reality of the near-future. Clues to the truth are purposefully opaqued, both by the style of the filmmaker and the language of cinema itself, but they exist. The main confusions & clues are in the costuming & casting of the child actors and the repeated test of the spinning top. They prove that despite his purposefully ambiguous, debate inspiring style, the story is that Dom Cobb ends the picture awoken from his dreams, free of his neuroses, and enjoying a real moment with his children. In his life. Not in a dream. Really. I promise.
A primary confusion rests with the child memory. Those kids look SO similar in the dream memories and the last scene of the movie. It must be a dream because the kids are dressed the same in the same situation. Cobb’s just rewriting his memories with his desires in his dream. Well, it’s not true. Watch the movie again. It’s a very cheap, yet clever trick. The kids are wearing similar clothes. Warm colors shot in gold afternoon light- colors that make us feel safe and comforted (Remember those palates?). The easiest difference to see is the difference in the cut of the girl’s dress. While their faces are obscured in the last shot, they kids are positioned in front of the camera (blocked) differently. The boy is in front of the girl with his back turned, and his head keeps hers from view. In the early shots, both have their backs turned. The real tell, though, is in the credits. Check them out. There are two sets of kids playing the kids at different ages. The two Phillipa’s are credited at 3 & 5 years, and the James’s at 20 months and 3 years. One appears to be the director’s son Magnus (The next Next Karate Kid perhaps?), and the other three are siblings in an acting family. I didn’t notice until it was pointed out to me. I assumed he would use the same kids. They looked the same, right? It is much cheaper and easier to shoot the same kids. He changed them for a reason. This was not just the old experience with a new resolution. This is the present, two years since he last saw his children. Though he’d seen them in his dreams moments before, those were his fake kids. The ones of his memories. the real present the Cobb has sought the entire movie. Going to all the effort to change the kids, yet keep the experience similar, means that he’s probably doing so to eff with us, the audience. To keep us talking. As we are. That’s two times win.
Dom Cobb is quite aware and worried that his reality may be a dream. That is why he uses and reuses the test of the top. Within the dream, we never even see the top wobble. It spins in perfect perpendicularity. During the scene at the beginning of act 2 while he waits to leave Tokyo, Dom spins the top with the gun in his hand. It wobbles and drops thus proving he is in the real world. Dom is nearly addicted to his dream world. He knows this. He could be seduced into staying there quite easily, but the happiness it can grant him is limited, like his version of Mal. He repeats his test at the house during the resolution. Only when he sees the top wobble does he know that this experience is not just a dream. He is clearly in reality, which is his utmost priority. Only in reality will he finally give himself permission to enjoy his happiness. Nolan cuts away early from this moment to imbue it with ambiguity for a specific purpose- which I discussed- our continued discussion. Nolan win trifecta.
Mark Maccora is a storyteller in Los Angeles currently whoring himself by directing Direct Marketing commercials and toiling within the post department of the CBS hit Big Brother 12 (AKA the Soap Opera Stanford Prison Experiment). Soon he will buy his way out of indentured servitude by writing a children’s fantasy book or directing a suspense/horror movie.
Written by Wajahat Ali
July 28, 2010 at 5:55 am
Posted in The Goatmilk Debates, Uncategorized
Tagged with inception ending, inception debates, inception top spinning, inception top stopped spinning, inception dream vs. reality, inception meaning, inception movie review, inception does the top stop spinning, inception dream interpretation, inception movie commentary