Boy Movies #26

I rewatched Inception

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My apologies to anyone who subscribed without knowing this newsletter is written by a person who was deeply, permanently changed during the year 2010. As someone who also measures so much of their life through culture, I, as a result, have a warped perspective on the things I watched and heard and read during that time. With that being said, I rewatched Inception the other day.

Few films have been requested more than Inception, though I’ve joked it would be a conflict of interest with this newsletter’s pro-Social Network agenda. (I will never write an issue on the great Social Network vs. Inception fandom wars, but iykyk.) Still, I immediately loved Inception when I saw it in July of 2010 and think about it often, to the point where my first reaction to a friend happening to log it on Letterboxd is always, “Aw! I wish that were me!” A handful of great movies were released in 2010¹, but two stand out as the best of what the year had to offer. I’ve written extensively about one, and the time has finally come to tackle the other.

Eames? No, he’s in Mombasa

I’m sorry to say that the first thing I noticed, mere moments into my first Inception rewatch in many years, was that Leonardo DiCaprio was still hot. That was an absolute shock to me, as my biggest takeaway from this film back in the day was that Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who???²) and Tom Hardy were crazy in love with each other. But Leo looks great with his permanently furrowed brow, playing a man named “Dom Cobb.” (DOM COBB!) Somehow, Leo has become the actor I’ve written about the most for this newsletter, which is also a shock coming from someone who has spent years claiming to be Leo agnostic. He’s such a huge loser in real life that it almost makes you forget that he has a lot of bangers to his name, and his contributions to boy cinema can never be ignored.

Christopher Nolan’s Inception is one of those bangers. It’s a sprawling and silly tale of dream espionage, following DOM COBB, a thief who makes a living extracting information from his targets’ subconscious minds. He also has a criminal record after being accused of killing his wife (played by 9/11 truther Marion Cotillard) and is given the opportunity to have it eradicated if he’s able to complete The Big Job. You surely remember how Inception’s premise proved to be so baffling to the general public that people spent months talking about how they didn’t understand the ending. Sorry if this comes off as overly intellectual (I’m often accused of this…), but I’ve never thought of Inception as difficult to understand. While I’m always in favor of a movie being the thing everyone is discussing at the same time — it takes me right back to a bygone era — I would actually even say that Inception is a little stupid, in the most loving sense of the word.

Despite that, Inception falls into a category of boy movie that I don’t think I’ve touched on yet: the smart boy movie. Christopher Nolan is a huge proponent of this type of movie, as is Alex Garland. (Darren Aronofsky thinks he is, but he’s just regular dumb.) Smart boy movies³ are for people who think they’re a little more sophisticated than, let’s say, the Fast and Furious brand of boy movie. These films usually inspire debate, and will at some point become the subject of a tweet that says something along the lines of, “If you didn’t like this movie that just means you didn’t get it.” What I’m about to divulge might be enough to warrant a coup on my position as CEO of Boy Movies, but I’m not what you would call a Nolanhead. (I saw 2/3 installments of his Batman trilogy in theaters, will literally never make time for Tenet, and have caught enough pieces of The Prestige on TV over the years to make me feel confident in saying I’ve basically seen it in full. Don’t even talk to me about Harry Styles Presents Dunkirk.) His interest in existentialism is often interpreted by his male fans as an untouchable cerebral quality, though I don’t think he’s as humorless as these guys make him seem. I mean, the protagonist of this movie is named Dom Cobb.

Like I said, Inception is a little stupid. It’s goofy, goofy, goofy. Its Oscar-nominated screenplay is filled with ridiculous bits of dialogue: “She locked away a secret, deep inside herself… something she once knew to be true… but chose to forget”; “I knew inception was possible because I'd done it to my wife.” Its ensemble is full of great actors turning in performances that would not feel out of place in an episode of 30 Rock. (Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy are exempted from this; they’re the ones tying the film back down to earth, god bless them.) The rules of the universe are established and remade and established again — you always wake up if you die in a dream, except for the times where you instead enter the dreaded limbo state! Its loopiness is masked by a huge budget and Hans Zimmer’s glorious score BWAAAAAAA-ing away in the background. That hallway fight scene alone is enough to make you feel like you’re watching a masterpiece. 

I generally find smart boy movies insufferable, mostly because of the smart boys who swarm around them like hungry little ants. But there’s a baseline idea to Inception about the impossibility of outrunning or dwelling on the past, and how the only way forward is to accept the things that have happened and find a way to move on, which gives it a certain gravity. I liked something Nolan once said about how all the arguing about the ending means that people have lost sight of the essential emotional element of the whole thing, which is that Cobb doesn’t look to see if the top is still spinning because he just doesn’t care. The only thing that matters is that Cobb finds the strength to put his demons behind him, allowing him to reunite with his children. I’ve always loved Inception’s very human conclusion. Who cares that it’s surrounded by some light buffoonery? All the best smart boy movies should be a little stupid, if you ask me.

• Had a good excuse to interview Lorene Scafaria, my absolute fave, about directing Sunday’s Succession. Not included in this piece is the moment at the start of our interview where Lorene, an iconic New Jersey native, clocked the area code on my phone number and asked, “Are you from Jersey?” Jersey girls for life <3

• Loved this piece by friend of the newsletter Shirley Li about the glorious, revelatory Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

1. Such as Hot Tub Time Machine and Burlesque.

2. JK!!! I hope I would be called out if I ever tried to act as if I was in some way above the JGL cultural revolution of the early 2010s. I was so obsessed with him that I paid to see Don Jon in theaters :(

3. The smart boy movie does not actually have to be a smart movie, of course.