Christopher Nolan’s Life is a Dream
It continues to amaze me how the literature of the past enhances our appreciation of the cultural work of the present, and how the conversation between the contemporary and the historical can shed light on the ways in which we still struggle to understand ourselves, our nature, and our possibility.
Here is a case in point:
In Calderón’s immensely strange Renaissance play, an abused and abusive Prince gains and loses everything he had dreamed of: wealth, power, and revenge. Returned to the terrible dungeon in which he has – unfairly – been forced to spend the majority of his life, Segismundo delivers one of the most haunting monologues of the world theater:
I dream that I am in here
with these chains and prisons burdened
yet I dreamt that I in other,
more fulsome state saw myself.
What is life? A frantic moment,
What is life? But an illusion,
but a shadow, but a fiction,
and the greatest good is small:
for life is all but a dream
and dreams are just that, they're dreams.
(translation: http://copinapitli.blogspot.com/2006/08/segismundos-monologue.html)
At this moment Segismundo faces an impossible choice, worthy of the French Existentialists. Why do right, if it is impossible to know what reality is and if what you do even matters? Segismundo’s answer is do choose to do what he thinks is moral, regardless of whether his experience is real or imagined.
Christopher Nolan’s film INCEPTION takes up these Calderónian questions, and for me the film is at its most effective when it presses this issue of ethics, and shows us characters making increasingly complicated choices– from inside the dreamscape. Fans of Life is A Dream will recognize the traumatized billionaire son who remains determined to penetrate to the secret of the safe – which is in fact his own imagination – and to receive the blessing of an imagined father. These are the topics of Calderón’s play, which also features an indifferent abandoning patriarch, whom the son must somehow forgive in order to become his own person. The Machiavellian corporate mogul who would manipulate the minds of others receives the curse – or is it a gift? – of living the life he dreads. Dreams are instructive – in often terrifying ways. Finally, the problematic hero, a suspected killer (also like Segismundo) must choose whether to descend ever deeper realms of dreaming to rescue his future, himself, and the man who promises to save him.
Does Nolan’s hero win? The end of the film is as ambiguous as Calderón’s play, wherein Segismundo attains the throne and his inheritance, but remains a haunted figure – uncertain, still, whether he dreams or wakes.
Nolan’s contemporary action-packed fantasy in tandem with Calderón’s ethereal drama from Golden Age Spain remind us that fiction provides us with a powerful imaginary tool whereby we confront the fictive quality of our own lives, and the unexpected truths those existences may contain.
Hey Stephanie.
ReplyDeleteGlad to see this blog. I didn't know you had one.
Just saw Inception last night and it's still spinning in my head. But I have to admit that I was too caught up in the labyrinth-ness of the dreams and the dream in a dream and limbo, to consider the corporate heir.
His role seemed almost too simple to give a second thought. The way they presented him in the film. I forget which character, but one of the guys suggesting the key to finding out the man's fear is to look for his relationship with his father. And bam! Billionaire boy's got daddy issues.
I enjoyed Inception a lot. It was entertaining and thought provoking. But I did wonder more about the consequences of losing or gaining thoughts, ideas, beliefs. If we can tamper with our dreams and subconscious, potentially rearranging our memories and sense of identity, then wouldn't we be creating our own realities, or at least providing meaning to the events of our lives? And if that's the case what difference does it make if a thought is a consequence of our own desires (or self-loathing) or a consequence of examining reality?
Maybe outside of literature and films, we aren't so affected by our dreams. But what about memory? I keep reading articles on how unreliable memories are. That when we remember, we aren't retrieving information. Instead it's more an act of recreation. That the more you remember, the more potential for that memory to be incorrect, because we try to make sense of our lives. Our brains tend to believe that there's a narrative to our lives and that there is an order or a meaning to how remembered events fit into that narrative.
And now my head continues to spin and I'm rambling.
Peace Stephanie.
I hope things are well.
--Belline
Thank you, Stephanie. Based on the commercials touting Inception I had planned to pass on what appeared to be a mindless orgy of special effects and little else. But reading your blog gives me new hope for the film.
ReplyDeleteA pity it has to be marketed that way. I suppose if the ads had dealt with the moral content the movie would already be out on DVD.