I love Pulp Frictions.
(via mylonelylittlesecret)
(via thejokersfavour)
While watching Inception I realized that Mal (as played by Marion Cotillard) was a specter not only of the character Dom Cobb’s dead wife but of someone who wasn’t technically in the movie at all—Heath Ledger. Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is a doppelganger of the film’s director Christopher Nolan—who also directed Ledger in the The Dark Knight. I believe that Nolan injected himself into Inception via Cobb so that he could make leave his memory of the beautiful and tragic Ledger amongst the crumbling ruins of the cinematic art they created together.
In the same way that Cobb wrestles with the guilt of having “planted the seed of the idea” in Mal that their dream underworld wasn’t real—an idea so powerful that it led her to question the reality of the world they returned to upon waking up—Nolan enabled Ledger to carry out the character of the Joker to its fullest, most psychopathic, Uber-mensch potential—entering a post-morality nullified space of primitive and apocalyptic evil. The Dark Knight’s cinematographer told the NY Times:
Mr. Pfister, the cinematographer, said Mr. Ledger seemed “like he was busting blood vessels in his head,” he was so intense. “It was like a séance, where the medium takes on another person and then is so completely drained.”
In both cases the break with reality was so severe it was described using the language of possession. The role of The Joker took hold of Ledger in the same way that the idea that reality wasn’t real blossomed inside Mal’s unconscious. Another similarity is that Mal and Ledger’s subsequent deaths were never confirmed as suicides, in part because of alterations made to the scene. Neither left a note—the hallmark of a suicide and the absence of which seems to curtail labeling a death as such. In the case of Ledger, however, insinuations about this possibility continued to be made in light of oddities surrounding his demise—including the prolonged time it took to contact 911. This resonates with Mal’s strategy of staging her suicide to look like a fight that ended in murder—recklessly implicating Cobb in a bid to convince her husband to join her in “waking up.”
In addition to these powerful parallels there’s a strong physical resemblance between Cobb and Nolan that seems to further bind the director’s identification with his character. A Google image search of “Christopher Nolan” turns up a still from Inception in which DiCaprio ‘s Cobb is in a dark suit and tie that matches a number of the images of Nolan. The two also sport the same dapper, combed back blond hair. The “real-life” Christopher Nolan appears almost as an understudy to his own main character.
Are these similarities purposeful? Did Nolan knowingly select an actor and create for him a character with whom he had psychological and physical similarities? Was this the case in the Batman movies (Christian Bale) and Memento (Guy Pearce) as well? Did Nolan openly think of Mal as Ledger, or was this pairing hidden to him? If he didn’t “know”, then do these doublings point to a set of thinly veiled traumas in Nolan’s psyche, or does being an artist mean that someone is always bringing up something of themselves with whatever they create-at least the ones who aren’t playing it safe?
In movies, just as in dreams, doublings and doppelgangers are clues to unconscious activity that can be found both inside and outside of the frame. Freud referred to doublings as uncanny harbingers of death. The Cobb/Nolan and Mal/Ledger doublings have the aura of death all around them. This is not an intimation of a physical end but of an existential untethering in which a person’s soul is lost for an eternity in limbo. This can be felt when Cobb/Nolan takes the new architect Ariadne in an old-fashioned elevator down to the lowest level of his mind. (The name Ariadne is a clue to the scene’s resonances with the Greek myth of Orpheus, who was allowed to rescue Eurydice from the underworld as long as he didn’t look at her—something he is unable to do, thereby losing her forever.) Cobb/Nolan pulls back the metal accordion door and reveals a beach scene where he keeps his guilt infected memories of Mal remixed with a fleeting sample of the last glimpse he had of his children. In addition to the guilt Cobb/Nolan feels, he also has to resist the desire to disappear into the memory of what he and Mal/Ledger (i.e. “Evil Ledger”) created—a dark universe and a dark cinema without boundaries or regard for the everyday world. A place of pure creation where anything was possible. Inception is in part the story of Cobb/Nolan’s journey back home from the precipice overlooking that underworld—in the end, the director and his doppelganger remain true to the script and bring the plot back home to the “real” waking world populated by living children and human relationships.
Mal is a trickster who appears at the exact right/wrong moment in order to foil whatever heist Dom is trying to pull off. Ledger was also a trickster—i.e, “The Joker”—who threw a wrench into the idea of a movie based on a comic book being a safe, contained form of escapism. The evil that Ledger channeled was TRUE: it spilled out from the screen and was felt by everyone in its proximity. This included the pedestrians who packed theaters, pouring in from the hyper brightness of malls and fast food places, turning off cell phones and reclining with their popcorn and ironically understood, pop culture contextualized, Hollywood fueled desires that over the course of the movie were simultaneously fulfilled and emptied of meaning by Ledger and his demonic channel.
Mal is a gorgeous angry ghost—an avenging memory that terrorizes and comforts Cobb with her presence. The are lovers as she explains to Ariadne—they make each other whole. She seems to glow with cinematic energy in her iconic non-existence. She appears on screen as a classic Hollywood beauty, from her skin to her accent—and yet we know all along that she merely exists as a projection of Cobb/Nolan, in the same way that audiences watched Ledger appear larger than life in The Dark Knight while knowing he was dead.
There are those who will dismiss this reading as callous and insensitive to the memory of Leger. They will claim, quite rightly, that we can never know what drove Ledger to OD—he might have been messed up over something else entirely. They will argue that it was an accident, and that I’m doing an injustice by stating otherwise. I’m in agreement and attest that I’m not making any claims except that the line between what is real and not-real has never been as distinct as we’d like to believe.
As we learn in Inception, the most powerful ideas are the ones that slip into our unconscious as seeds that take root and grow into our consciousness as parasites disguised as our own inspirations. It doesn’t make a difference if the ideas are from a fictitious or a real source—our mind treats it as though it originated from inside of it. We think we are in control but we aren’t. The experience of Inception reveals that the joke is on us all, including the director. The maze of the movie turns into feedback waves radiating out from the experience of watching it. The question of which came first, the movie or the dream, becomes as impossible to answer as it is to walk up one of Inception’s never ending staircases.
“Turn on’ meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. ‘Tune in’ meant interact harmoniously with the world around you – externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. ‘Drop Out’ meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean ‘Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.”
“My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to the flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”
I recently had a dream about the aquarium.
I try out new ways of thinking with the ease of putting on and taking off a coat. The only rule is that there are no rules. I think in mash-up, I think in rhyme. I think in dreams—which is to say i get lost in the stories that other people tell me about their dreams. I think when I’m jogging. I think when I’m all alone in a crowd and when I’m watching someone’s mouth move. I think about things and then I think about the words that make up those things. It changes from what they mean to how they look and sound. The entire thought becomes a collage that isn’t ready until the last piece has been applied. A bit here, a bit there—I add and take away words like a painter dabbing the canvas with a brush. I try to concentrate on one small task at a time. Like writing one sentence or running one Google Image search. In this way, I can create art in a cubicle, in the midst of email attachments, intercom buzzes, instant message nudges and various internet time sinks and never feel overwhelmed. The important thing to remember is that everything can be used—even the so-called wasted moments. Among the greatest revolutionaries are those who were able to turn a prison cell into the Eye of the world. A life can be ended but an idea can not. It can be burnt and pulverized and blasted into powder but it will only become stronger.
I wrote a scene in which a woman puts out a Craigslist ad and hires sexy women to sit around cutting up the only existing paper copy of her novel manuscript (the hard drive and disc versions having been deleted) using long silver scissors. They were instructed to cut the pages line by line, turning a pile of paper into a pile of curling fortune cookie streamers. The author collected all the pieces and shook them up in a plastic garbage bag. Then she pulled them out, one or two at a time without looking, and these lines became the basis for the lyrics for the album that the book turned into..an album that would go viral online, until it was broadcast across all the internets…
