The politics of spoilers and the illusion of “smart” cinema

First, a quick question about spoilers:
What’s the statute of limitations on spoiling a movie?
A TV series? A play? A book?
When can we talk about Rosebud? Or the ending of the Sixth Sense?

In a helpful guide the New York magazine suggests something like this. Note the considerate allowance between spoilers allowed in the body of the text, and directly in the headline of the article:

So, for movies, they’re saying spoilers are acceptable within the article a week after opening, and in the headline one month later (eg: OMG, The Girl In The Crying Game Isn’t!, which, of course, by then is perfectly pointless).

Inception has been in Australian cinemas since July 22, and The Hedgehog, the movie of the very popular elitist French novel of philosophical musings, is practically off cinema screens, so we’re safe with these mulchings. But don’t worry there is only one spoiler in this lot and I’ll warn ya.

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Inception: the critics went nuts

I was sucked into wanting to see this by (i) the huge hype — this is nearly the smartest movie ever made, and (ii) the brilliant marketing visuals, one of which is the hoarding poster above. Overcoming my reluctance to see LdCaprio in anything. (To see his face is to hear Celine Dion insisting that My Heart Will Go On, at which my heart begins to sink titanically.)

Everyone will know by now what Inception is about, right? Skip this if you do: Dom Cobb (LdCaprio) is an expert at “extraction” — stealing secrets from people’s subconscious. He has a dark secret preventing his return to America to be with his young, motherless kids. He’s made an offer he can’t refuse — if he executes an “inception,” the near impossible act of planting a thought so the person thinks that its her own, Cobb’s way back to his kids will be cleared.

The critics went nuts.

Overwhelmed, the venerable Roger Ebert wrote: ‘Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It’s a breathtaking juggling act … Inception is wholly original, cut from new cloth.’

Not to be outdone, the ultrapopulist New York Post thought: ‘Inception may well be a masterpiece masquerading as a summer blockbuster.’

Breathless, Time‘s Richard Corliss wrote: ‘Inception is writer-director Christopher Nolan’s first movie since The Dark Knight, the second in his Batman series, a film that earned $1 billion worldwide …  seeing Inception — or seeing it twice, which we suggest — does not answer all the riddles … Inception is like the coolest, toughest final exam — or like the dream of one, in which you’re suddenly in class and you realize you didn’t prepare for the big test. This is a movie that you’ll wish you had crammed for.’

Amazed, the SMH‘s Paul Byrnes wrote:  ‘You are travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone. And a few stops after that, Inception … It will certainly take two viewings to work out the subtleties of the arguments.’

Thrilled, the marketers incorporated that idea into the poster campaign: ‘See it twice.’

Faux smart

Well, here’s the thing. I must be really stupid because I can’t work out why it’s so smart. It seems perfectly obvious to me; indeed, for a complicated stack of parallel action sequences, and for all its attempts to foot faulting the audience over its chronology, the story’s lucidity is to Nolan’s great credit. What Inception is, is an ingenious heist movie with some stunning — instant classic — movie sequences, folded into a dodgy emotional backstory and sold with maximum hubris.

The complications arise because the heist — the inception — occurs on three planes: in a dream within a dream within a dream. The three layers pass at different dream times: eg, layer one might pass in 4 hours; which would become 3 days on the next; and the third would be like a month. And back in real time it was only a 15 min. powernap.

Therefore we have the pleasure of watching Leo and his heist team play out three simultaneous action movies. And because it’s all supposed to be a dream they’ve engineered wonderful visuals like this:

But really that’s it. It’s a lot, mind, three unreality action flicks in one, though anyone who’s read quality science fiction won’t be greatly impressed by the concept, much less have their minds blown. It’s clever, but no cleverer than dozens of scifi novels and much less clever than the better stuff. What’s sensational about Inception is the way it looks, and some of the way it moves. After all, the great thing about action movies is you don’t have to take the plot, the emotional content or the outcome seriously. (With rare exceptions like the first two Bourne movies, say.)

And the trick ending — of course there’s a trick ending. Even I — who can never pick the culprit in whodunnits — could see it coming like a train (in-movie joke). Inception having an ambiguous ending — why that signals this movie is really Film, as good as Art. Is it a dream, or reality? Am I a butterfly, or only dreaming I’m a butterfly? Am I a keyboard, or just QWERTY?

Go see Inception, and don’t forget the popcorn. And don’t mind the limp backstories and supposed profundity. Relax. No need to get sweaty, like the SMH, trying to ‘work out the subtleties of the arguments, one of which is about terrorism, and what makes one person decide that another person’s reality isn’t real enough to be respected.’

Dreams are stranger than movies

(BTW. Inception deals in dreams. Christopher Nolan, extremely talented as he is, doesn’t grasp the peculiar narrative illogic of dreams. In Inception, the dreams all go from A to B, the start of the mission to the neat end of it. Dreams are extraordinarily hard to write, and often the most tedious part of a novel is the bit with the dream passage. It’s almost never as vivid and gripping to the reader as the supposed dreamer. An exception would be Roberto Bolano’s dream descriptions in 2666.)

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The Hedgehog: faux dumb,
and a rant against the taste for tears

The Elegance of the Hedgehog sold 1.2 million hardbacks in France. Why not: a novel about class — an unlikely (aren’t they all) Upstairs Downstairs love story between an intellectual concierge who pretends to be dumb and a wealthy Japanese widower in an exclusive Paris apartment block — spliced with the philosophical musings of a genius 11-year-old who intends to commit suicide on her twelfth birthday. Authored, of course, by a professor of philosophy.

The concierge, Renée, is the Hedgehog, an epithet coined by the girl, Paloma. Prickly on the outside, refined and elegant inside. Renée plays dumb because she thinks that ‘to be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age.’

I saw the movie adaption with the girlfriend who had given me the book. She’s a great fan of the nove,l which I liked very much, except for the ending. (Spoiler alert) Just when everything is sorting itself — love blooms between concierge and widower, Paloma makes friends with the widower and René, and starts to reconder her death wish —  it all comes to a tragic end. And even more graphically, if slightly comically, tragic in the movie.

A tragic story — as per Shakespeare — comes about because of an inherent flaw in a character. The tragic flaw. To simply append a tragic end is a misunderstanding of dramatic structure. To apply a tragic ending to a fictional story tending towards happiness so as to illustrate the chaotic uncertainty of life is … infuriating.

I put it down to the desire to jerk tears from your reader. It’s opportunistic sentimentality. Or worse — so many writers are afraid to make the ending happy because their peers might think they’ve gone all bourgeoisie. Or it’s a conflicted combo of both instincts. For heaven’s sake. If the story wants a happy ending, let it have a happy ending! It is far more sentimental to be falsely tragic. Kitsch, even.

As the tragic Nietzche put it: ‘What is good is light; whatever is divine moves on tender feet.’