I updated my original blog review of Inception to turn it into a more coherent essay. It is freshly minted at Reality Sandwich. Meanwhile, you might be interested in the above video, which a commenter posted at the RS sight. It’s strangely related to what I had written, though the video is less cogent (me thinks!). I don’t totally get the “528″ reference. The video seems to be borderline spam (you need to read the video description at YouTube to understand why). The purpose and intent of the video is confusing. Which is exactly the point of my article: it’s getting too difficult to tell the difference between people and media bots.

It took months to arrive, but Inception finally screened in Italy this weekend. Here’s my take. There are spoilers here, but I assume everyone who’s interested has seen it by now.

Regardless of what anyone says, Inception is a good object to think with.

And I think Christopher Nolan is a clever filmmaker. Mind you, clever doesn’t always mean wise. But he has a knack for making films that can splinter your mind. Even the Batman franchise’s The Dark Night had some deep guano buried within its pyrotechnics. But is Inception the zeitgeist film it aspires to be?

I was about to write a ho-hum review when I realized that Nolan was a bit smarter that I had initially understood. He made an entirely self-referential film about implanting an idea in a stranger’s mind, and abracadabra, here we are talking about a film’s idea in our heads. It took a few days to gestate, but that’s one of the major points of the film: ideas don’t simply replicate, but cook on the back burner until the right conditions concoct something new. (Coincidentally, Steven Johnson has a video about his new book, which deals with this very issue.)

As I wrote about The Prestige way back when, I had noted that though the film was ostensibly about magicians on screen, in fact it was really about film as an act of magic. Likewise, Inception is about the consequences (and ultimately ethics) of trying to convince people to believe ideas that are implanted without their consent. The idea in question is the one DiCaprio’s character planted in his deceased wife’s mind: that the world isn’t real.

OK, so historically this is an old philosophical point that can be found in any Ancient Religions 101 course, but thanks to postmodernism and the persistence of mass mediation, the trope seems to circulate more readily (i.e. The Matrix, Truman Show, Videodrome, etc.).

As it should.

Inception makes the argument rather clinically, however, and certainly lacks the poetics of Plato or the Vedas. I also think we can agree the film is mostly un-dreamlike, unless you were trying to depict James Bond’s lucid dreaming skills. So why spend so much time debating Nolan’s realization of dream theory, or lack thereof?

What struck me more about the film was his exploration of how ideas spread, in particular the popular concept of memes. One of the better insights of the movie was the point that you can’t just implant an idea and expect it to work the way you want it to. Everyone has history and a context, so ideas won’t motivate anyone unless they have some kind of emotional charge. Isn’t this what advertising aspires to? Really, the best “extractor” for the job is Mad Men‘s Don Draper.

Inception’s take on memes is actually refreshing, because usually memes are treated far more mechanically, such as the view that an idea simply replicates itself like downloaded music files. At least in Inception, the way ideas digest has more complexity.

Curiously, ideas are the one thing that cannot be copyrighted. This is due to the public nature of them. It is very hard to trace the origins of an idea to a pure source, just like in the dream you cannot remember how you got where you are. Ideas are networked beyond the individual’s belief in a singular concept. So when it is proposed during the movie to make an “inception”–to implant an idea in a person’s dream so as to make him think it is his own–most believe it is impossible. The characters acknowledge that ideas really do not have a beginning, and in a sense aren’t real, at least in the tangible sense. The capitalist system likes to reify and commodify everything into things, but ideas evade enclosure. There is something about this notion similar to Buddhism, which speaks of thoughts as being like flames that light other flames. But try to capture fire and you get Prometheus and his eternal suffering.

No doubt, regardless of what is possible, “inception” is a marketer’s wet dream and will be the subject of lots of wasted money and human creativity. You can see evidence of it in peer-to-peer marketing and from brand managers who dream of colonizing mindshare by dropping little brand bombs here and there, hoping that they propagate and “stick.” But unlike viruses, marketing slogans and images are more like weeds. In our age of mass media we have to learn how to be good gardeners.

The difference between Inception and say a good PK Dick story (or even a Cronenberg film like eXistenZ) is that by the end, you really don’t know what was/is “real.” Though Inception‘s closing shot leaves you with a question (a good move, by the way… Luis Buñuel was always a big fan of leaving story elements open like a zen koan), I was not–spoiler alert–confused about whether or not DiCaprio was dreaming (nor did it really matter), unless that is, the overall metaphysical message is that life is but a dream. I think it hints at that possibility, but there are definitely other films where I’ve been left with a much deeper sense of unease about the groundless condition of the universe.

Ultimately Inception‘s hierarchical dream stages (dreams within dreams, kicking “up” levels, a bottom “limbo”) gave the dreamworld too much structure. Nonetheless, the film valiantly recapitulates the idea of lucid dreaming by offering us the vague possibility that a lifetime could indeed be a dream. If we can acknowledge who’s doing the dreaming, then we can have far more control over our lives. For example, the film offers us the vision of dreamers being dreamed within an architecture designed by multinational energy corporations. This is a scary kind of manipulation that can only be guarded by our projected antibodies (one of the film’s more intriguing concepts). No doubt, without proper mindfulness and training, we are vulnerable to being dreamed by interests that are not our own.

Wait a second… when watching the film, wasn’t Warner Bros. dreaming our dream for us, too? Or was it the director? Did we have a group dream in the theater?

Ice cream headache. If only we had the militarized mental antibodies of say… Dick Chaney. Scary thought.

I tend to think of dreaming as a consequence of growing new connections in the brain. Our minds attempt to fill in a groundless reality through a symbolic language of poetry, which is possible when our rational minds are turned off. During these moments we tap into the creative condition of the cosmos, maybe defaulting to its natural state. I can only guess.

The problem with Inception is that the dreams were far too logical and controlled, with the exception of the occasional train coming out of nowhere. But to impose a Hollywood narrative on a dream, well, that’s Hollywood. I think films by the likes of Maya Deren or Buñuel are far more successful at emulating the dream state and marrying the potential of film with the creative energy of the universe (and let us not forget the infinite possibilities of animation, such as Richard Linklater’s Waking LIfe or A Scanner Darkly). A Hollywood narrative, however, does offer us the experience of entering into another reality and temporarily believing that it is real–just like a dream– but so do books (good ones at least). This is a matter of master storytelling.

Frankly, The Prestige moved me far more, perhaps because its speculative reality and allusions to magic were philosophically more complex (and creepier). Plus, Bowie playing Testla is a far better coup than DiCaprio’s dream sleuth. However, I do like Ellen Page, and look forward to seeing her repertoire expand as her young career grows.

There was a small touch that I liked quite a bit. The main action takes place during an overseas flight. As I have argued in my discussion of Lost (chapter five in my book) and 2012, airplanes are the techno-dream bodies of our world. In pop culture they often represent the vehicles through which we travel the liminal realm between worlds. I thought it was symbolically appropriate that the major dream sequences took places during an intercontinental flight, the jetliner being a good metaphor for corporate media.

My final verdict? Part Citizen Cane (with its Rosebud moment), part PK Dick ( although light on the mindfrak quotient), part James Bond (skis, guns, fortresses and global corporate intrigue), and part self-reflexive magic trick. It is the latter characteristic I associate with Christopher Nolan, and will likely be his signature for years to come. In the end, the fact that we are having a broad cultural discussion about dreams is always a good thing, and even more so when we connect dreams with media. Ultimately because so many are talking about this film, it is the mark of successful art–to a degree. It was interesting and compelling enough that we didn’t ignore it.

Sci-fi great William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here– it’s just not very evenly distributed.” That could also be said of sci-fi protagonists: the depiction of non-whites is unevenly distributed. In fact, Gibson–who I admire and respect greatly– has been critiqued for focusing on characters who solely work within the networks of elite power. They are technically literate and savvy, and though may on the surface appear to be on the fringes of society, more often than not their lives spin centrifugally towards money and global corporate power brokers.

This is why I have found Octavia E. Butler‘s work so refreshing. In Parable of the Sower (and its sequel Parable of the Talents) it is easy to imagine the novels’ characters inhabiting the same world as Gibson’s cyberpunk sprawls. The difference is that Butler’s characters don’t have access to technology, money or power. Most are barely literate and live in a semi-medieval reality that rims the Emerald City of Cyberspace and sexy hi-tech. They forge and self-organize to defend themselves against an indifferent political disorder that re-legalizes slavery and privatizes the public good. Police, education, water and the fire department are privatized entities beyond the access of poor people, in particular blacks and Latinos. Even television is rare for this population, let alone the ability to read and write.

So while we can imagine cyberpunk cowboys trolling virtual reality and jet-setting at the behest of multinational corporate bosses, in the desert exburbs encircling Butler’s near-future Los Angeles, the planetary underclass struggles to survive amidst the walled communities and ruins of capital’s primitive accumulation. It is in this realm that a New Age religion emerges–founded by a young black woman– which is non-hierarchical and serves the poor. This is a far more hopeful post-collapse vision than one offered by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You’ll have to read the series to see how the Christian Right captures the flimsy threads of democracy and predictably use that power against the anti-slavers and self-empowered “minorities” who threaten white supremacy.

I think Gibson and Butler are complimentary: they offer parallel visions of a world characterized by the neoliberal logic of social disintegration. These are “alternate” realities, yet also offer stark scenarios that we can hope and pray never transpire. Yet for billions of people, this is a world that also exists today. As any aficionado of sci-fi knows, these books are always about the future present. In an age in which science and rationality have disorganized the world, sci-fi authors are natural prophets. Reluctantly, me thinks.

Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Walter Benjamin

Via Goodie Bag

2012: Great mat boards of destruction!

If you are at all a perceptive being, then you feel that “collapse” is in their air. The rise in apocalyptic fiction, books, TV shows, documentaries and cultural groups are expanding exponentially. This Fall’s slate of blockbuster films is no exception. As cultural interpreters, what can we glean from the craze? Well, first of all, it’s not new. Disaster films were big in the ’70s, not coincidentally at the moment when the US was reeling from the oil crisis, failed imperial war, disgraced presidency and flat economy. Still, in regards to the state of our global ecology, the sense of impending doom is not trivial. But whereas one generation’s response was the punk anthem, “no future,” the current 2012 meme is the end of the future. Period.

Unless you are a Hollywood producer.

Nonetheless, it’s about time that time ended. Mechanical time, like our outmoded view of nature, needs to be destroyed. But when it’s done in film, it may stave off the necessary cultural adjustment needed at a time of crisis. Many media theorists have pointed out that film, photography and mechanical recordings have a way of capturing “contingency.” If we can put it into film and be entertained by it, then the danger has been contained, because media has a way of turning the inexplicable into a narrative (for example, post-9/11 TV news turned the disaster into a visual narrative so it would look like a movie instead of crisis with complex origins). Christians have borrowed from Aristotle’s notion of the three act play in which there is a final, concluding drama that culminates the historical and linear drama of civilization. Now we have Monday Night Football.

To put this on the Maya (because it is from them we get this idea of 2012 ending time) is too bad, because it is a wild misapplication of Western metaphysics on non-Western perception. The Maya believe (I use present tense because they still exist) time is *circular*– 2012 can not end something that is nonlinear. This doesn’t mean that their ancient calendar is not important or insignificant. There is a great deal of correlating evidence that shows that the calendar is quite accurate in mapping solar sunspot cycles, which introduce more radiation and potential for mutation than at other points of time. As we know from observing nature, there are cycles within cycles within cycles, but we tend to be oblivious of the impact of sunspots on evolution. What may be hitting our intuitive radar is the transition from one large solar cycle to another. As sensitive biological creatures we may know that. But because of our cultural aptitude, our way of dealing with that sensitivity is to turn it into cathartic spectacles rather than as a tool for organizing political action.

Anyhow, you may enjoy the following trailers. I think they offer a good feel for the cultural Zeitgeist, including the few that have bimbo intros which make global destruction sound as enticing as Michael Jackson’s funeral.

Follow the jump to see video clips.

Knowing: “Are we going die?” “I will never let that happen. Never.”





The Road: “A cannibalistic barbarism”





The Book of Eli: Another kung fu Western?





9: “Sometimes fear is the appropriate response… you should protect the future.”

Les Derniers Jours Du Monde (The End of The World): Apocalypse French style… nude sunbathing and all.

The first ad is the latest from Barclay’s Bank which seeks to distinguish itself from the financial fakers. Ironically, though, they seem to have aligned themselves with all the other sci-fi genre films dealing with false realities (such as Dark City, also posted above– see also The Matrix and Truman Show). The troubling thing for Barclay’s is that in all these dystopic scenarios, the only ones who have a grip on reality are the aliens, TV producers and machines with artificial intelligence. I guess this puts Barclay’s in like-minded company.

I’ve written an extended essay about the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica. I hope you will click through and read the whole piece at Reality Sandwich.

Reality Sandwich | Battlestar Galactica Mystique:

Spoiler alert!

“Earth, a dream we’ve been chasing for a long time.”–Admiral Adama

So concludes one of the greatest epic runs of sci-fi on TV: Battlestar Galactica (reimagined). Ripe with sci-fi’s prime directive to comment not on the future, but the present reality, like its cult-like progenitor Star Trek, BSG was rich in allegory, philosophy, and literary references. A sure sign of this is the how BSG generated a cottage industry of fan Websites, books, podcasts, Webisodes, fan films, chats and wikis that manifested all the positives of the current convergence media environment. By leveraging the collective intelligence and participatory components of the contemporary pop commons, BSG illuminated a vast zeitgeist embedded in the historical tension between humans and their technological tools. The show was a kind of conjuring of the collective unconsciousness, with the producers acting as media alchemists distilling cultural properties like mad mediacologists hermeneutically absorbed by the world’s pop culture dream code.

Thank the Great Whatever that someone compiled the top 25 sci-fi movie ads. It is something I started on my own a while back but couldn’t find the time or energy to get it done. The scene from Minority Report (clip above) is in my opinion the most likely future scenario (aside from ads being directed to inside your skull a la Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon).

Top 25 fictional ads in sci-fi movies – Den of Geek:

Some of the promo spots to come may literally make you explode…

Whether video or printed, advertisements only have moments to engage the viewer/reader and convey an enormous amount of information. Therefore they can be a great benefit to science-fiction films which have complex societal or technological backstories essential to the core plot, but which are a potential drag on pushing the narrative forward.

Apart from this practical consideration, the scope for humour and societal satire is immense when inventing ads in this particular genre. Robocop writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner admit that they strip-mined the rich vein of satire – much of which is contained in commercials – in the UK Judge Dredd comic (created by John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra). Dredd’s incisive take on advertising culture has spread through Robocop not only into that film’s sequels but also into a number of other SF movies since, including many by Robocop director Paul Verhoeven and his Total Recall collaborator Arnold Schwarzenegger. As we shall see…

Air Force Academy chapel, Colorado Springs, CO

Cylon Resurrection Ship, somewhere in outer space

In case you haven’t seen Sci-Fi network’s Battlestar Galactica (I highly recommend that you do), the premise of the story is that a race of robots created by humans decides to destroy their creators. The cyborgs, called Cylons, have developed a theistic construct of the universe, believing in a single God (the humans are polytheists who warship something akin to the the Greek pantheon). It’s one of the more interesting twists in the series plot lines. The Cylons eventually believe they are doing “God’s” work, so instead of simply destroying the fleshy heathens they decide to invade and occupy a human colony in order to convert them to their cybernetic lord (sound familiar?). In the process of the occupation the Cylons torture, detain and kill the humans without a hint of irony (again, sound familiar?). The hint that perhaps the Cylons are stand-ins for fundamentalists comes with their ability to “resurrect” their consciousness into cloned bodies whenever one of their advanced humanoid models is killed. The “resurrection ship” (pictured above) contains fresh cyborgs that can be downloaded with the consciousness of terminated or killed Cylons.

The religious pursuits of the Cylons obviously have their real world analog, and is a sophisticated commentary on the nature of fundamentalist religion. In it I find echoes of my own sense that monotheism is a bit like a dangerous thought virus that has no logical basis in reality, yet has a way of repeating and transferring itself from one generation to another. Thus I was intrigued to discover the similarities of the Air Force Academy chapel (the first image) with the resurrection ship. Since we know Cylons are not modernists (as the chapel was made in the 1960s and is clearly inspired by modernist architecture), it’s probably a clue that Battlestar Galactica’s writers do in fact view the Cylons as a type of fundamentalist culture which is militaristic, dogmatic and homogeneous. After all, one of the key reasons the Cylons initially attack the human race is that they are viewed as sinful and impure. All these elements happen to be aspects of what is transpiring at the Air Force Academy– and the US military in general– which has become a fierce fundamentalist conversion center, thereby combining high tech with militancy and intense faith. Things get a little loopy, however, when it turns out that it’s tied to the ministry of Ted Haggard (you know, the preacher guy who apparently loved speed and hard (male) bodies).

According to David Antoon, who writes about the academy in a scary article about Christina fundamentalism in the US military:

The Christian supremacist fascism first reported at the Air Force Academy is endemic throughout the military. From the top down, there has been a complete repudiation of constitutional values and time-honored codes of ethics and honor codes in favor of religious ideology. And we now have a revolving door between Blackwater USA, which is Bush’s Praetorian Guard, and the U.S. military at every level. The citizen-soldier military dictated by our founding fathers has been replaced with professional and mercenary right-wing Christian crusaders in control of the world’s most powerful military. The risks to our democratic form of government cannot be overstated.

It’s expedient for the warmongering neocons to encourage fundamentalist militancy in the armed forces because it gives them a hardcore base to execute their goals for economic domination of Muslim controlled oil fields. But like the Cylons, the danger of cultivating such a class of “theo-cons” is that they ultimately may not be controllable and will put forward their own agenda of apocalypse and rapture, something Bush apparently believes in, although I find that to be an excuse at best, and a deadly ruse to hide more nefarious goals. The connection between the mercenary army, Blackwater, and Christian supremacy is an example of the kinds of bad things that happen when you let the tiger out of the cage. In the end, by deploying its private fundamentalist army in the heart of Iraq, the White House may have ultimately undermined its mission. It’s hard to put a smily face mask on extremists in the age of transparent global media. So we may be saved from a Cylon attack after all.

How do you turn mat art into a viral video? Sci-Fi’s Tin Man series has this wormhole site that draws you into its various worlds– one after another. It’s a compelling visual fantasy; you have to give the creators credit for having cajones to tackle the Oz story and contemporize it with darker themes. I don’t know if they can top Gregory Maquire’s Wicked, which envisions Oz through the eyes of the Wicked Witch, but given the trend of recent remakes, I bet it’s a fairly bleak retelling.

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