head games: reviews of "Inception," Ender's Game, "The Hunger Games," and "Oldboy"

Over the past two months, I've had some interesting cinematic and literary experiences, all of which share the theme of head games. Christopher Nolan's "Inception," starring that puny blond ninja turtle Leonardo DiCaprio, takes us through the deliriously funky layer-cake of human consciousness; Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is a 1970s sci-fi novel about the training of a boy genius who may be earth's last hope against an insectoid race, but the story contains a twist at the dénouement-- a massive head-fake for the reader; "The Hunger Games," starring the earnest-as-hell Jennifer Lawrence, is a movie (based on Suzanne Collins's novel) about mind control through the media; and finally, Park Chan-wook's "Oldboy," starring the hammer-and-scissors-wielding Choi Min-shik, is just a good old-fashioned twisted psychodrama, with great emphasis on the psycho.

1. "Inception"

Non ! Rien de rien ...
Non ! Je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait
Ni le mal — tout ça m'est bien égal !

Non ! Rien de rien ...
Non ! Je ne regrette rien...
C'est payé, balayé, oublié
Je me fous du passé!

"Inception," Christopher Nolan's head-tripper of a film, came out in 2010. The basic premise isn't far removed from that of Dennis Quaid's 1984 "Dreamscape": clandestine dream infiltration. Of course, the rules of the game are different in those two movies: in "Dreamscape," if your dream-self dies, you die in real life (a theme picked up by 1999's "The Matrix"), but in "Inception," if your dream-self dies, you simply wake back up in actual reality (or do you?).

"Inception," like "The Matrix," is a movie for nerds. It's full of intellectual Easter eggs-- sly philosophical and intertextual allusions, as well as convoluted, ouroboros-like self-references. Some critics have complained that this is a movie about itself, a claim that has been interpreted to mean it's either a movie about moviemaking, or an extended metaphor about extended metaphors. Dr. David Kyle Johnson, editor and contributor to the compendium Inception and Philosophy ("The Matrix," loaded with its share of philosophical and religious Easter eggs, got its own scholarly ...and Philosophy treatment some years back), has pointed out that (see his video here), if you line up most of the main characters' names, they spell D-R-E-A-M-S. Johnson also notes that Hans Zimmer's music for the opening credits is a slow-motion reference to Edith Piaf's "Je ne regrette rien"-- the tune that the dream-invaders hear when it's time to bug out of their mark's dream. The slo-mo is a nod to Nolan's idea that time flows differently in different layers of dreaming. These are only two examples of the Easter eggs available to the astute filmgoer.

The basic setup for "Inception" is that Cobb, played by DiCaprio, invades people's minds in the hunt for information. What he does is a form of corporate espionage, since his targets are primarily powerful businesspeople whose secrets he aims to uncover. The film's main plotline involves an ambitious project: inception, i.e., the implantation of an idea as opposed to the theft of one. This project is being backed by Saito, the Japanese rival of a large Western conglomerate headed by Maurice Fischer (Peter Postlethwaite), a dying man whose son Robert Michael (Cillian Murphy) resents Fischer the elder. The goal is to persuade the son, through subconscious means, to break up his father's conglomerate.

Most of the movie is devoted to the main characters' adventures in Robert Michael's headspace. We learn a lot about the ground rules of dream-invasion along the way. We learn, for instance, that dreamers can develop defense mechanisms in the form of subconscious "projections" that can focus on and attack the dream-invaders. Cobb has another worry, too: his dead wife Mallory (Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf in "La môme"), sporting the sinister nickname "Mal" (in French, le mal = evil), keeps popping up during these heists, complicating every operation. Cobb feels guilt over his wife's suicide, because he may very well have carried out the first successful inception on her, by giving her the idea that she was still inside a dream when she killed herself in real life. We also learn about the pliable, plastic, multilayered nature of the dreaming mind; in one early scene, we witness several arrondissements of Paris folding in on themselves like a cosmic waffle being folded by God. In other scenes, we see Escher-like staircases, explosions that dream-characters take for granted, and wildly fluctuating gravity.

"Inception" is a mixture of heist, noir, and sci-fi. Overall, I found it watchable despite its convoluted plot, but I did feel frustrated about the rules of dream physics. You see, to my mind, dreams are far more flexible than how they're portrayed in Nolan's film. They're wild, often nonsensical-- and casually so. Shifts and transitions are simply matters of fact, not cause for drama. Spike Jonze's "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" comes closer to portraying this unbridled interiority than does Nolan's film. I suppose the strictness of the rules matters to Nolan because, in his zeal for combining film genres, he was also shoehorning in the action genre, and you can't make a decent action film without some sort of time pressure to motivate the characters. This fact was most evident in the third reel of "Inception" during the latter stages of the dream-invasion, when the van containing our heroes is slowly falling off the bridge, serving as a timer for what was happening in other levels of the dream.

A good analogy for Nolan's concept of the dreaming mind is not so much a labyrinth as a skyscraper: in Nolan's dreamworld, levels of consciousness are clearly demarcated and interpenetrating (think: elevator shafts transpiercing a building's floors), and are also lucid and coherent. This clarity and rigidity actually made it harder for me to suspend disbelief, probably because it ran fundamentally against the grain of my own notions of what dreams are. Nolan's landscape just isn't savage or protean enough.

All the same, dream-invasion is a team effort, and the ensemble cast-- consisting of practically everyone who appeared in the latest Batman movie (Michael Caine, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, et al.)-- did a fine job with their performances, although I still have trouble taking the diminutive DiCaprio seriously as a lead actor. In all, I'd say "Inception" was enjoyable, but it didn't push my nerd buttons in quite the way that "The Matrix" had done in 1999. Both "Inception" and "The Matrix" possess a sense of fun and adventure, but while "The Matrix" gleefully took the religious fork in the road, "Inception" grimly veered into the realm of the more self-seriously philosophical. I may have to watch "Inception" again just to get a better handle on all the crisscrossing plotlines, the details I know I missed after only a single viewing, and the deeper themes lurking in the background, patrolling the cinematic depths like sharks in the dark.


2. Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game is a 1970s-era sci-fi classic, originally published in serial form, then as a novel in 1985. Like William Gibson's Neuromancer, Card's opus anticipates, by several decades, communication technologies that we denizens of the twenty-first century take for granted. The story centers on Andrew Wiggin, whose nickname "Ender" is a cute mispronunciation of "Andrew." Six-year-old Ender is also a genius, like his older siblings Valentine and Peter. While most of the novel focuses on Ender, part of the story tracks Valentine, who adores Ender, and Peter, who is Ender's first, and possibly greatest, tormentor. A lot of the novel reminded me of the travails of Harry Potter, a much-abused child hero who exploded onto the literary scene two decades after Ender first took the stage.

In Ender's universe, it is a time of war. As in Robert Heinlein's magnificent Starship Troopers, the enemy is insectile: the hive-minded Formics, who are given the discomfiting moniker "Buggers" (cf. Heinlein's Bugs). The earth has battled the Buggers for years, and planetary extinction is a real possibility. In desperation, we Terrans recruit child-geniuses for training in an academy known simply as Battle School. Part of this training includes three-dimensional zero-gee combat in a chamber called the Battle Room: a place often filled with obstacles, in which teams of children essentially play a form of Laser Tag. Ender proves to be a tactical and strategic whiz, and he quickly garners an unbroken string of victories. At the same time, Ender's mentors ensure that Ender experiences social isolation and ostracism, all in an attempt to anneal him to the pressures of real battle.

One of the most delicious ironies of the book is that Ender doesn't see himself as an actual killer, but he personally-- and unknowingly-- kills at least two fellow students. In both cases, it was the other student who provoked the fight: Ender's opponents' own hubris did them in, and Ender is convinced that he has only seriously injured his assailants. These two deaths are a precursor to the book's central head fake (I hope you won't mind a spoiler about a book from the 1970s!): Ender's latter-stage combat "training" hasn't been training at all-- it's been the real thing. Without knowing it, Ender has actually been battling the Buggers, commanding genuine fleets in real space like a true admiral. Ender's improvisational ability and combat acumen prove too much for the Formics, who suffer defeat after ignominious defeat at Ender's hands. In the end, Ender effects a near-genocide, leaving only a single queen egg alive.

And this, to me, was the most disappointing part of Card's novel. Sci-fi authors often fall down when portraying aliens; I normally find that the aliens suffer from a failure of imagination. In Ender's Game, Ender encounters the last surviving queen, who is still housed in her egg and awaiting the proper time and place to hatch. The queen "speaks" to Ender through direct telepathy, thereby obviating the need for a linguistic medium like English. She expresses her surprise and sadness about the human/Formic war, claiming that the Formics didn't realize quickly enough that human beings were indeed a form of sentient life, despite our lack of a hive mind. That such a deep being-to-being entente is even possible is something of a disappointment for me; it would have been better had the Formics remained mysterious in their motives. Ender himself feels guilty at having nearly extinguished the Formic race-- something of a PC move on the author's part.

In fact, I tend to view Ender's Game as a critical leftist response to Heinlein's right-tilting manifesto, Starship Troopers. Ender experiences years of what is essentially child abuse at the hands of his military mentors; the reader is invited to view Ender's treatment negatively, and not as a necessary evil for the earth's survival. Whereas Heinlein shrugs and adopts an "us or them" mentality in the battle for cosmic Lebensraum, Card is obviously revolted by any notion of genocide.

Along with being an adventure story, Ender's Game is an exploration of human foibles: in one major subplot, we follow Peter and Valentine's escapades on the Internet as they inject radical political concepts into public discourse through online alter egos, stirring up the hornet's nest of competing global superpowers, all in an effort to maneuver Peter, the psychopathic bully with a utopian vision, into an eventual position of power.

Overall, I found the novel readable and fascinating, despite its disappointing ending. Ender's Game is ambitious in scope: it tackles many provocative themes and is a sometimes-unnerving exploration of human psychology. It works well as a critical response to Starship Troopers, and should probably be read in tandem with Heinlein's book.

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[AND THOSE ARE THE FIRST TWO OF A PROMISED FOUR REVIEWS! STAY TUNED FOR REVIEWS OF "THE HUNGER GAMES" AND "OLDBOY"!]



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