I still like the film Inception. This is not an unusual opinion, it was a huge blockbuster hit, but in general the film seems to have diminished somewhat in the public estimation in the decade since its release. Many of its signature elements have been repeatedly imitated by later films (at times quite artlessly), and the current anti-ambiguity culture prevalent in popular media criticism has reduced its arguably charming incongruities into mere plot holes, incontrovertibly caused by carelessness and begging to be fixed. However, in my experience it is the closest any film has come to capturing the actual sensations of dreaming – the hushed loudness, the sudden shift of situation, the freewheeling filmic pastiche of unaccountable imagination. Some have complained that the scenarios aren’t weird or wild enough for a dreamscape, but my experience of dreams is more about the mundane being made uncanny through ever-shifting context than overtly strange or surreal imagery – and this is a sensation Inception captures well.
One of the strikes against Inception in the popular conception is the implication, at the end, that it may all yet be a dream within a dream. It has become something of a truism that any ending that so much as involves the possibility that “it was all a dream” is by definition lazy and hackish – and this is a stance I strongly disagree with. Such endings are indeed frequently used to undermine meaning and consequence, to defang the events of the preceding narrative and deny any outcome – and doing this is cowardly and lazy, pointless hackish writing. This is not, however, a necessary trait of a story about dreams! Dreams have an impact on the ways we see the waking world, dreams are a part of our personality and emotional life and how these develop, and even aside from “real world” implications dreams can be powerful emotional experiences, deeply worthwhile on their own merit – much the same as the experience of art is worthwhile even when it fails to immediately manifest a material effect on the world.
All this tracks back to value judgments in what we deem meaningful, important, and “real”. This devaluation of dream in art speaks to a devaluation of art in reality, alongside a sort of confused conflation between the stakes of the artificial and the real. The current values of popular art lie primarily in visual bombast and conflict, frequently at the cost of character and understanding, and this seems intertwined with our apparent inabilities to separate art from artist. We swamp performers with threats over capable performances of villainy or judge the moral values of a writer by the goodness and wholesomeness of their characters, trying inanely to deliver hate mail through the fourth wall in a ritual to manifest the simple moral tales that we are trained to crave into reality. We are invested in the idea that these must be, on some level, real conflicts with real stakes that are of galactic importance – and attempts to step away from that framing, to deny the reification and deification of these toy wars, is often treated with reactionary disdain.
Inversely, real conflicts, existential conflicts, are often reduced by association, treated with the same seriousness as fan clubs, as arguments of taste and aesthetic. The cost in human life of war and capital extraction is abstracted away, and in the end what people object to is not the massacre but the unsightliness of the massacre. The bloody wages of modern economics are shrunk down to the size of a silver screen or silver dollar, binding our beliefs with a silver collar. The gold rule is that those with gold lead and those without follow.
This sad state of artistic affairs is a direct consequence of a political narrative where the only behavior deemed permissible is rooting for team A or team B, with these teams flexibly defined to suit whatever political project is demanded of the moment. Just as you must back the blue lest the red win, you must back Stark so Thanos doesn’t win, making all conflict binary and total, fighting proxy blank check wars where everyone gets to align themselves, project themselves, into a heroic silhouette on screen. The hero is usually defending justice and seldom dismantling injustice, framed as defensive no matter who they attack, rarely wrong except in the service of a greater righteousness. Relatively little art is intentional propaganda, made explicitly to convince people of a political viewpoint – but recent popular art has almost universally taken the shape of propaganda, a generic jingoism for a meta-country, ready for any particular viewer’s viewpoint to get poured into its mold and made self-reinforcing. The world we’ve made is one where only art in this shape is valued, because these are the stories where anyone can watch and cast themselves into the hero’s role, and any time the question posed by the narrative is abstract or personal we ask “what’s the point?” because art must be pointed, jagged, weaponized.
Then its creators say it isn’t political! And then they say it is political – but not in a way that means anything in particular. The politics of contemporary art is the politics of orphaned propaganda, that which claims nothing except the existence of an us and a them, the groups between whom no reconciliation is possible and any excess of violence is permissible. It’s so convenient, anyone can cast themselves as an us against this them – and in so doing give themselves license for any moral transgression, since it is by definition for the purpose of preventing a greater evil. We know we are us, therefore anyone who opposes us must by definition be them – and you know what they say about them.
Perhaps I have traveled far from the topic of dreams, but that is how things happen, with hushed loudness and sudden shift of situation, and we have ceased to value any dream but those which we can paint as prophecy. Toward this end we will conveniently define any dream which appeals to us to be prophetic. It is perhaps a naive hope to believe that we might yet wake up, become aware, snap out of this dream of endless faceless contrived war and conveniently demarcated heroism. It is certainly never going to happen as long as we fear and hate introspection and exploration, devalue anything that departs the immediate, the pseudo-real, the visceral, the conflict and the war, the living and the dead, the heroic and the villainous, the plot and the thread, the end. The end.