Rereading : Inception

I have this book on Inception for a few years now. Whenever i pick this book, i usually flip through the drawings only. I have written earlier about my fascination towards Nolan’s drawings. Below are some brilliant sketches from the storyboard. This time when I rewatched the movie, which i have done a few times already, i also read the shooting script of the movie. It was a unique experience of reading the script of a movie, that already i am well aware of. But still, the script revealed subtleties which i missed in the movie. For example, the heavy rain happened in the train-in-the-road scene, because Yusuf had a lot of champagne in the plane (the parallel reality) and he had to pee. I know it is a trivial detail, but my fellow fans would agree with the brilliance.

Reading the script, i understood the conceptual distance between the idea (the script) and the actual movie. Like architecture, film-making relies on collaboration. The collaborative journey from an initial idea to the final manifestation (film/building) is a fragile one, conceptually speaking. Imagine getting people on board to imagine such a complex idea of a movie which is even difficult to summarize after watching. Imagine the creative process of making an idea like this tangible.  This book starts with an interview discussion between Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. Below is an extract from the discussion.

It is this trait to ‘impose rules’ and create ‘order’, that makes Nolan’s thinking simultaneously architectural. Once you starting looking this way, the movie becomes something more. It is evident in these dialogues :

Cobb : What is the most resilient parasite?….An idea…..Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea’s taken hold in the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. A person can cover it up, ignore it – but it stays there.

Saito : But surely  – to forget..?

Cobb: Information, yes. But an idea? Fully formed, fully understood? That sticks (taps forehead).. In there, somewhere.

From now on this will be my cool job description for teaching. Isn’t that what we do or we should be attempting to do in teaching. We are all aware of the crisis of the classroom because of the internet. Actually what the internet can’t automatically do is the delivery on a regular basis of a fully formed, fully understood ( I will add the word relevant here) idea. Imagine this reply from a teacher, when asked what do they do. “My job is to implant fully formed, fully understood and relevant ideas into fleeting-state-minds” A little delight in otherwise dull (as usually misread) teaching job. Cobb also says “No idea is simple when you have to plant it in someone else’s mind”  In this another scene that happens in Mombasa between Cobb and Eames, Eames says “If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination”. He adds “It’s not about depth. You need the simplest version of the idea – one that will grow naturally in the subject’s mind. Subtle art”. Again, Eames could easily be talking about teaching here too.

Even the emphasis – idea, understood – in the dialogue are from the script. There is specificity (this word is also borrowed from the script) in the thinking. In one of the earlier scenes, Mal “studies a painting by Francis Bacon” and Cobb replies “Saito is partial to postwar British painters” In an another scene, Saito realizes that he is dreaming, only when he figures out that the carpet was actually “stained and frayed in such distinctive ways.. but very definitely made of wool. Right now i am lying on polyester”.

In this dialogue with Ariadne, Cobb says an architect’s mind “creates and perceives a world simultaneously” and it is how one “imagines a building”. When you “build a bank vault or a jail, something secure, and the subject’s mind will fill it with information he’s trying to protect”. Ariadne says in an another scene “I love the concrete sense of things – real weight, you know? I thought a dream space would be all about the visual, but its the feel of  the things” Note the emphasis – feel – here in the script by Nolan, like someone who had read Pallasmaa would do it. This tactility is emphasised again in the scene where they are discussing about the totem – a key component in the movie. Arthur says “You need something that a has a weight or movement that only you know”. Like Lewerentz handling bricks.

This is my first experience of reading a script. So it was amazing to know what a ‘script/screenplay’ does to do a ‘story’. It is this transition that marks the uniqueness of film-making. It is this trait of screenplay that makes film-making distinct from other forms of storytelling. As an architect, i always carry the question “What is that only thing that architecture can do that other fields can’t”. This question has always kept me on the edge – both in professional and academic practice.

I am simply amazed every time i watch Inception that how well thought and architectural the movie is – in terms of how the ideas are ordered. Looking forward to discover more details the next time i watch. I am going to end here with this line by Cobb “.. the subconscious motivates through emotion, not reason, we have to translate the idea into an emotional concept”.

Few pages from the book :