Inception: Dreams as Memory Consolidation

Spoilers, if you look hard enough.

I liked what jonnymugwump said on twitter: "inception may be flawed but I feel that's a little like criticising Dali for having the wrong time on his melting watches" an apposite image and critique, there's surrealism shot-through this movie, surrealism before marketing, when it was just a few guys in suits fucking around with each others' dreams. Inception is flawed perhaps, but not vitally. As an experience, an immersion (and a suspension), it sets itself apart; Nolan has taken a huge gamble with a bad old dream theme and he's come out, well, enhanced. This teeters, almost falls over itself, but works quite beautifully in places and does provoke new thought... for an unashamedly Summer Blockbuster this is a simply astounding achievement.

Even the weaker - predictably snowbound - action/adventure scenes are full to the brim of memory (this is Nolan's thrash at the Bond movies, playing with the archetypes... I was reminded of someone's -2ndFade?- memory of watching the Bond 'The Spy Who Loved Me' Union Jack Parachute Jump in the cinema and the crowd going mental - an impeccably old cinema story, an entirely different time) and memory is the real theme of this film...

Dreams as memory consoldation, as process rather than product, verb rather than noun. Dreams as essentially layered constructions, added to and substracted from memory, as forming new schemas; new ways of looking at the world. The dreams are the memories struggling towards the dark, wanting to be forgotten... this is the reverse of Psychoanalysis, an indictment even... I'm wondering who had what crappy experience with which Psychoanalyst...

Inception seems especially about the way sadness and regret (and joy, and happiness) detourns events, perception, experience... the way it changes the world.... causes roads to contract and flip over themselves (I have similar, very personal, feelings about Paris as, I suspect, does Nolan), causes time to expand...

...a dressing gown cord becomes a noose, a mirror becomes a shield, a home becomes a prison, a view becomes a dead drop, a watch becomes melting camembert...

Even Leonardo De Caprio's face(even the name Leonardo)follows the theme; it's a face unravaged by memory, or at least untarnished by it, his weaknesses come from not looking old enough but in this film (in most of his films - he chooses well, I think) this works to his advantage; he's old literally beyond his years, he's not allowed Chronos in at all... his memories are old, his body is not...

Contrast, if you've seen it, with the Ken Watanabe's character and then look again at Joseph Gordon-Levitt, at Ellen Page, even at Tom Hardy and consider whether this is a cast chosen at random...

Look at the hollows in the face of Cillian Murphy and the re-emergence of Tom Berenger...

There's a million strands to this film, it's brilliantly, beautifully considered and very difficult to alternate (i.e. hard to say: "What if this guy played that character..."). There are flaws and Hollywood sops (I'd like to see the him and her story foregrounded and the action flashbacked) but Christopher Nolan went for a bigger audience and I hope he finds it. Can't wait for my 12 year old to see this; it's the kind of thing we talk about all the time and now it's up on screen, shining brighter than any mainstream Hollywood film I can think of in, um, recent memory...