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What Does 'Inception' Reveal About Christopher Nolan's Own Subconscious?
by Richard O'Sullivan
Posted Monday,
July 26, 2010
Years ago, an agent told me I wrote like a girl, and before I could bring myself to punch him in the face, I realized he was paying me a huge compliment.
What he meant was that I wrote female dialog as well as I wrote dialog for men. That my women characters didn't come across as though they were simply a man's projection of how a woman speaks, thinks, or reacts but that I had somehow channeled a woman through my writing. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty important skill to have given the importance of male/female relationships in cinema.
Prior to that conversation, I'd never really seen it as "a gift." I just instinctively assumed that's what you do. You write a female character, you make her sound and act like a woman sounds and acts. It never occurred to me that some writers might actually have a mental block that prevents them from accomplishing this (after all, a screenwriter can hide in his or her material in a way that many singer/songwriters feel afraid to do so, which is why you rarely hear singers sing a song in the "voice" of a character of the opposite sex).
As a result of that exchange with the agent, I've always been hypersensitive to the psychology of gender in scripts. Some of my favorite male screenwriters are guys like Charlie Kaufman, Alex Cox, Joss Whedon, and Daniel Waters, all of whom write extraordinary dialog for women. But some writers, even writers I admire greatly, seem to get tripped up when they try to write in a female voice. One scribe who fits this category (in my bastard opinion) is Christopher Nolan.
Now don't get me wrong. Nolan is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers and he's a damn good screenwriter. So good, in fact, that he's able to write around what I consider his most glaring flaw in order to make brilliant movies that are simultaneously daring and profitable. But if you closely examine his body of work, you'll see an interesting pattern, particularly when it involves the (always) male protagonist's relation to women (and in some cases, the antagonist's as well).
In every film Nolan has made thus far, the central McGuffin (though sometimes shielded by his trademark non-linear bells and whistles) has been the death of a woman. Never a gratuitous "throwaway" death though. Always a death--usually a murder--which jars a main character to the point that he behaves in some manner that leads to the direst consequences imaginable.
Go back to Nolan's first flick from 1997, "Following." Shot on a shoestring budget of just $6,000, this film noir told the story of a young man pulled into a life of crime on the streets of London. Wrapped up in a triangle of deception, he's framed for the murder of a woman who betrayed him.
Nolan followed his debut up in 2000 with the bigger budgeted "Memento," an ingenious mindtrip in which the story of a man with anterograde amnesia is basically told in reverse. But, like "Following," the script--which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay--was driven by the death of a female character (the amnesia victim's wife, who had been brutally raped and killed).
Up next was 2002's "Insomnia" (a remake of a 1997 Norwegian movie of the same name). This was the only Nolan project he didn't script or co-script, but like his first two films, the main plot point involved the murder of a female, this time a 17 year old girl in a quiet fishing community.
By 2005, Nolan scored his biggest hit ever with the blockbuster super hero reboot, "Batman Begins." In this film, the deaths of two women played an important part in moving the main characters and story along. The first being the slaying of Bruce Wayne's mother (along with his father) outside that fabled Gotham City theatre, the second being the off-screen death of villain Ra's al Ghul's wife.
The following year, Nolan released "The Prestige," a mystery/thriller set in the world of performance magic. Again, a key plot twist revolved around the demise of a female (the Chinese water torture death of Hugh Jackman's character's wife).
In 2008, Nolan went back to the Batman well with "The Dark Knight." This time out, he killed off the Rachel Dawes character (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes), setting into motion a catostrophic showdown between the two men who loved her (Bruce "Batman" Wayne and Harvey "Two-Face" Dent).
Then, most recently, Nolan delivered "Inception," which, just like his first six features, was built largely around the death of a woman, this time the wife of Dominic Cobb, the lead character played by Leonardo DiCaprio. I won't say how the woman died but suffice it to say her passing strongly informed Cobb's behavior and thus the plot.
What's different, however, about the death of Mrs. Cobb (played by Oscar winner Marion Cotillard) is that unlike Nolan's earlier work, where the protagonist or antagonist (presumably extensions of himself) were usually motivated by revenge for a slain female, there's a certain sense of self-aware guilt on the part of Mr. Cobb, in that he feels he was, in fact, responsible for her tragedy (a variation on the theme that's seaped in gradually over the course of Nolan's last three films).
What's also different is that for the first time, I felt Nolan truly spoke in a woman's voice when creating his female characters. For the first time, the women didn't just feel like a man's projection, they felt like true flesh-and-blood, as full and rounded as Nolan's well-crafted male characters. Of course, irony of ironies, Mrs. Cobb actually was a projection.
Contrast the emotional connection shared by the Cobbs to, for example, Rachel Dawe's relationship to the men in her life. Both Holmes and Gyllenhaal took a lot of flak for dragging down the "near-perfect" Batman films, but the fact is, the cold fish Dawes character was horribly underwritten and not fully formed given its paramount importance.
Nolan showed a distinct mastery over the male characters' reaction to Ms. Dawes, but was seemingly clueless about the woman herself. She wasn't a mystery, she was a void, which in turn stunted the power of the passion she inspired in her men. Add to that the unequal architecture of Bruce Wayne's parents (and thus an unequal weight derived from their deaths) and you get the sense that Nolan is in an unwavering state of confusion when it comes to women (while obviously being obsessed, consciously or subconsciously, with the thought of being abandoned or betrayed by one, and the overriding need to emotionally distance himself from the power such a fear holds over him).
I initially wrote this off as Nolan "simply being British," but "Inception" seems to be both an evolution, and, no pun intended, an awakening, for the Writer/Director. Not only do his male and female characters finally seem equally (or nearly equally) drawn, they seem to be connected in a way heretofore unseen in one of his projects. That Nolan is working through this perceived block is impressive. That he is showing his work, so to speak, in such a texturalized manner (both esoterically and exoterically) is downright striking.
Now keep in mind, I don't know Christopher Nolan. I've never met the man. All I know of his personal life is that he's married to his producer Emma Thomas and that he shares my fascination with lucid dreaming (or hypnagogia for the initiated). But since seeing "Inception," I've become a bit obsessed with delving into the mechinations of his mind. To paraphrase Hugh Laurie, the true mark of great material is that it makes you literally want to know the person who created it.
As such, I've become intrigued with the notion that "Inception" is an autobiographical metaphor for Nolan's writing (and production) process. That, like Mr. Cobb, he felt trapped in a situation that was impeding his conscious growth. That he needed collaborators to either create or flush out his consciousness. For Cobb, that collaborator was a student dream architect played by Ellen Page. For Nolan, it was his frequent co-writers David Goyer and brother Jonathan Nolan.
I find the fact that "Inception" was a solo scripting effort for Nolan (his first since "Memento") to be most interesting, as was the speech Mr. Cobb gave to the projected Mrs. Cobb (and thus to himself) while they were buried deep inside (someone else's) subconscious realm. It was as if Nolan were telling himself that he had stripped the mine clean (seven movies worth in fact) and that it was time to move on to another level of his own conscious growth, for the sake of both his art and his sanity.
That he dragged his architect, forger, chemist, and benefactor along for the ride was also quite revealing in a fucked up "Wizard of Oz" kinda way. If the architect was, metaphorically speaking, his previous co-writers, then I would assume the forger would represent his actors, the chemist would be his special effects team, and his benefactor would be his executive producer. The mark (Cillian Murphy) would seemingly be Nolan's audience (a fresh canvas which he could use to plant thoughts in others while sorting through his own issues). I don't even want to think about what the abduction of poor Lukas Haas "meant." The story "works on several levels" both as a literal narrative and as a thesis on existentalism.
With a third installment in the Batman series looming, it'll be very interesting to see if Nolan continues the death-of-a-vital-woman string or moves on to a new theme as Mr. Cobb might advise him to do. I hear the villain in the next Batman will be The Riddler, which is apropos given that Christopher Nolan seems to have just solved a riddle or two of his own with "Inception."
Richard O'Sullivan is currently in pre-production on the horror feature "Hallows," set to shoot later this summer in New York.
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