"Once an ida has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate."
This was probably already my 11th watch of this fantastic milestone of action cinema. Nonetheless, this time was special, as I watched Inception for the first time on a big screen in a cinema- a dream came true!
Nothing really to add as everything what should be said about this film has been already said by someone else in the last 10 years.
But there’s one thing I’ve thought about quite some time already and which I’ve noticed even more while
watching Interstellar and Inception this time. It’s the very special mise-en-scène of dialogue in Nolan’s more recent films, and what it tells us about Nolan’s
characters.
The thing is: Nolan has no desire to recreate reality. Sure, this isn’t a new observation. In which reality can someone steal in dreams and travel back through
gravitation in Black Holes? But not only his concepts are fictional, even his dialogue scenes aren’t realistic- not even a tiny bit.
In Interstellar as well Inception, many dialogues are coherent in the script, but in the actual film, one dialogue is split up on many
locations. Take for example the scene in Interstellar in which Dr. Brand (Caine) is explaining Cooper why leave the planet- in one second, they stand in front of the rocket, then
in front of the labor, the in front of the lift- although their conversation should normally take place in one location. At least, if you read the screenplay, is one uninterrupted conversation.
Same in Inception - the characters are often just standing around in random locations- at one point on some stairs, then in the middle of an empty street. Still, the location
might change but it feels like just one scene, as the conversation goes normally on. The interesting thing is, it doesn’t seem weird. These Jump Cuts between the locations obviously make no
sense, as in reality, the scene in which they stand in an empty city street takes place in a completely different moment than the scene in which they are sitting in their headquarters in Paris.
The topic actually couldn’t be the same, or at least what the characters speak shouldn’t match the script from the previous scene so perfectly.
But nobody notices, on the contrary, it makes the film much more entertaining- it’s undoubtedly more interesting to see many different locations than just see the characters sit in only one place. Nolan understands and experiments with the medium film: there is no need to make it look like reality, everyone knows how reality works. No, in film, as everything else is already unrealistic, we can split up a dialogue into many locations- and it still works. Not only that- it makes the film even much better.
That’s one of Nolan’s major techniques to create a rhythm and this absorbing effect in his films. Dialogues don’t serve the classical purpose like they do in many
other films. In many (great) films, the directors try to make a scene and its script as naturalistic and reality-like as possible. Nolan, as I already mentioned, uses dialogue completely
different: if you deconstruct and analyze his films structures, you’ll quickly notice that there are actually never real dialogues. There’s rarely a scene in which a character has a longer
monologue, or in which two characters have a longer conversation together. Mostly, the scenes in which characters speak together are only fragments of dialogue. And these fragments have some
purposes different than what dialogue is mostly for. As we can observe in Nolan’s post-2010 films, his characters get more and more shallow. Nolan doesn’t go into depth anymore when it comes to
his characters’ personalities, he uses them more and more as a sort of archetype which the viewer can project his own identity on and therefore connect with. Dialogues don’t serve anymore the
creation of character depth, in Nolan’s films they have two major goals: the first is exposition and the second is benefiting the story, bringing the story forwards.
Exposition is clear: Nolan’s concepts are so complex that it needs a lot of explanation, not only at the beginning, but throughout the whole film, to make the
audience understand what all this is about. Apart from exposition, Dialogue serves simply to bring the story to the point Nolan intended it to end.
We can observe that perfectly in Inception, but also in his other features who mostly follow the same pattern: there is one central character with one central emotional problem, which is necessary to make the audience connect with the film. In Inception, it’s Cobb who wants to return back home to his children, and in Interstellar... yea, well, the same with Cooper. The other characters are basically uninteresting as they’re not there as characters, but as archetypes of smth. In Inception, we learn basically nothing throughout the whole film about Eames, Arthur, Yusuf, Saudi and Co. - they all just serve the purpose of entertainment, explaining what’s going on and bringing the story forward.
All this sounds very negative, but it’s definitely not: what Nolan does in his films is an art. He basically explains the audience a complex twisted theory to the
audience through his characters and with an easily accessible story. Nowadays, we tend to think that a good film needs profound character depth, mostly because we’re so influenced by watching a
ton of series- which have no concept, but irrelevant character depth to the maximum.
Nolan goes into the opposite direction: we know less and less about his characters. Dunkirk only underligns this. And that’s what makes his films so
intelligent: he doesn’t waste any time to bore us with for example Eames’ mother’s health problems or why he’s part of the heist. Nolan uses the precious dialogue time instead to introduce us to
complex ideas, though-provoking theories and visually stunning scenes in many different locations.
Is Nolan the best director of all time? Yes.
watched at SPI Promenade cinema, Pondicherry, South India
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