Inception

What do I want to say about Inception? Phew. It's hard to even start.  Inception resonates with so many themes of reality, dreams, representations as alternative realities, that I'm so fascinated by this summer.   The confusion of reality and dream, reality and representation are pressing concerns in our contemporary moment, as we experience our lives increasingly through the artificial realities provided by the Internet, film, TV, literature, and video games.

Like Cobb’s journey into dreams within dreams, Inception brilliantly operates on multiple conceptual levels.  First, Inception is about the nature of our dreams, their relationship to our reality, and the driving power of our conscious and unconscious minds. In Inception, the characters can access and travel to the dream state, not only individually, but collectively.  Hooked into the shared network of dreams, the team can not only access other’s dreams; they can actually construct dreams in the shared space.  This network of artificially induced dreams (read: alternative realities) seems analogous to the network of Internet communities and cyberspaces. Through the creative imagination of a dream architect and the perception of the dreamer, a dream space is created. The alternative reality of the dream seems as real as living reality. For Cobb’s work of extraction and inception, the dreamer must not realize that they are in a dream; the blurred lines of dream and reality become indistinguishable. Cobb’s team must construct a dream that tricks the perception; yet, in the vivid dreamscapes they create, the team risks losing their own “grasp on what’s real and what’s a dream.”  To prevent this psychic disorientation, they all carry totems, individual physical objects that provide a tangible way of connecting back with reality. The sensation of the totem in Cobb’s hands provides his way back to the tangible Real. The film seems to ask viewers, what will be your totem in the world of artificial alternative realities? If we begin to live and perceive through the digital world, what is our connector back to the Real?  What is our totem?  

 As Cobb explains, the access to dream sharing lies in the gap between a mind’s creation of a dream and its perception. This gap in the mental architecture allows Cobb’s team and their dream technology to enter and manipulate the dream creation and alter what the dreamer perceives. Cobb’s team is able to manipulate a person’s sense of reality through the dream space, an alternative reality created through a blend of the architect’s imagination and technology. The combo of an artist’s imagination and technology that represents a version of reality.  This sounds like art. In Nolan's story of dream manipulation, we have another story, one about our contemporary relationship to representations of reality, like film itself. 

The conceptual puzzle of representation and reality Christopher Nolan constructs is, for me, the most fascinating aspect of Inception. What’s real? What’s a dream? How is Cobb’s construction and manipulation of reality any different than the alternative realities created and circulated by film, literature, and art?  What’s a film? What’s reality?  To return to an idea from my post on 3D technology, I wonder how the vividly crisp CGI images in Inception can momentarily cause viewers to lose themselves in the film, like Cobb loses himself in the dream.  Are there moments that our minds forget we are watching a film, a technologically produced alternative reality?  Do we ever think the film is real?  Nolan’s Inception raises questions not only about dreams and reality, but about our relationship to film’s alternative reality. The film itself is a process of inception, introducing and embedding an alternative reality in the viewer’s mind.

Inception warns against the dangers of losing our touch on reality, against the manipulation of dreams, against losing ourselves in the alternative realities that technology can provide. The film elegantly comments on the relationship between the creation and perception of artificial dream realities, while providing a vivid alternative reality in itself for viewers to get lost in. What is our relationship to these alternative realities, to dreams, to drug states, to representations, to art?  Inception dramatizes contemporary concerns about how we understand the Real and the artificial, themes which resonate far beyond the realm of dreams.  

Image Credits: Inception Poster

Why Do We Read?

Why do we read? What do we get out of this activity? These are questions that I keep tossing around, searching for possible answers in the stacks of books overcrowding my office. But, in the search for an answer, I’m finding incomplete evidence. The plurality of “we” in the question resists any definitive answer. How can I say why you or anybody reads? The best I can work with is the scattered insights in novels, essays, and criticism; different authors offering up to readers a glimpse of their sacred, individual relationship to books. Usually snuck into the narrative of a novel, these moments, where the author reveals his/her view of reading, often seem randomly thrown in, disruptive to the drive of the plot.  But in Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, reading is a transformative activity that shapes the very direction of Wright’s life.  As a black male raised in the South in the 1920s, Wright’s reading practices exceeded that society’s normative expectations, and were even outright questioned as challenges to white authority. To be a black reader in the South was dangerous, for reading demonstrated the desire to expand one’s knowledge and potentially one’s position in the world, a move that would challenge the dominating rule of white supremacy of that time.

 Throughout Black Boy, the question, “why do you read,” is repeatedly posed by white and blacks alike.  Wright’s response poignantly resonates with the ideas about emotion, the imagination, and a reader’s relationship with texts I’ve been considering lately.   For Wright, reading is about expanding human potential.  In reading, he seeks “new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different” (272-3).  Reading allows Wright to see new perspectives, but it is more than just learning new knowledge about the world. Rather, the activity of reading evokes feeling in the reader, forging an emotional experience that connects us with that new perspective. Wright compares this encompassing emotional experience to a drug state: altering his mood and shifting his perspective, “reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days” (273). Through these “books that opened up new avenues of feeling and seeing,” Wright learns of and feels a wider spectrum of human emotion than ever before (275).  Living under the segregation and violent racism of the South, Wright’s restricted existence prevented him from experiencing the freedom and fullness of life that he reads about in novels.  He learns “that there were feelings denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach” (274).  The altered perspective and new emotional awareness gained by reading causes Wright to reevaluate the reality around him. He looks at his world in a more critical way: “My reading had created a vast sense of distance between me and the world in which I lived and tried to make a living, and that sense of distance was increasing each day” (277). 

Reading springs in him “a new hunger,” for reading “made me see what was possible, what I had missed” (274).  Reading not only shows Wright new perspectives and feelings, but also reveals the horizon of infinite and unknown possibility.  As he becomes a young adult, Wright dreams of moving North to escape his restricted and threatened life in the South.  His dreams of the future are inspired by the enlarging perspectives and limitless possibilities that he had gained from books.  Observing around him a world of black submission and defeat, Wright wonders, 

“what was it that made me conscious of possibilities? For where in this southern darkness had I caught a sense of freedom? Why was it that I was able to act upon vaguely felt notions? What was it that made me feel things deeply enough for me to try to order my life by my feelings? The external world of whites and blacks, which was the only world that I had ever known, surely had not evoked in me any belief in myself. The people I had met had advised and demanded submission. What, then, was I after? How dare I consider my feelings superior to the gross environment that sought to claim me?” (282)   

His answer: “It had been only through books—at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions—that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books (282).  For Wright, reading expands his human potential, providing him access to new perspectives to reevaluate his own world, invoking new feelings that expand his range of emotion, and inspiring his dreams of infinite future possibilities. For me, this is a powerful response to that central question, “Why do we read?” 

Wright, Richard. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper & Row, 1945.

Image Credit: Black Boy Book Cover

The Affective Experience of Music

Last night I saw Wolf Parade perform at the Boston House of Blues.  Perhaps because I’m getting older and standing still in a crowd for an hour kills my back, but I’m finding myself less able to get wrapped up in the concert experience like I did in high school and college.  I no longer find myself caught up and carried away.  Instead, I found myself thinking about the ‘concert experience’ more than experiencing the concert itself.   What I’d like to think about today is the experience of listening to music, how music engages the human body, and what kinds of affective experience (emotions) are produced from music.

Since we began dating, Nate has been teaching me how to listen to music. Sure, I was into music before, and had what I consider fairly good taste. But most of the time when I listen to music, I am engaged in another activity, while walking around the city, reading on the bus, or as I write. I rarely just listen to music on its own; I’m a passive music consumer.  What Nate has been teaching me is to engage with music, to give it an active ear. Mind you, these are not necessarily Nate’s words. I don’t want to injure his ‘street cred’ by my awkward word choice.  Like analyzing sports, I’m new to this music game.   My artistic medium of choice is text. I’m a reader.  The visual-oral appearance of the words on page engages me.  Yet, as I’m embracing other artistic mediums such as film, music, and even sports and dance, I’m finding they differ in how they engage the human senses. We listen to music.  We apprehend it aurally, first and foremost.   Though I’ve always enjoyed music, I’ve found I have to train myself to really listen.  I’m learning to take note of the nuanced variety of sound, and finding this aural concentration is changing my listening experience. 

Yet, music is not solely aural. It is experienced through a living body, which simultaneously sees, feels, smells, tastes.  How do we consider these other senses when we talk about music?  Music criticism very reasonably focuses on the aural quality of music.   But, how do we discuss the bodily experience of music?  How we listen to music matters.  The situations in which we listen to music shape not only how we hear, but also how we understand that music.  We listen with IPOD and headphones, with a stereo or computer, at a bar, attending a concert or even producing music ourselves.  Each of these situations invokes the different senses to varying degree, producing individualized emotions that affix to the experience of hearing that music, eventually embedding that sensory and emotional experience as a memory.  We carry these emotional memories of music with us, and we can often visually recall a time when we heard a certain song. How do these different music-listening situations engage the other senses and fulfill certain emotional needs?

As we listen to music, what do our bodies and minds do in the process of listening? Where do your eyes fixate? If you close your eyes, do you experience music more directly?   While music is primarily aural, it is not exactly non-visual.  Listening to music is an embodied experience; music is experienced through a living body engaged in multiple senses.  Our vision and sense of touch are not suspended as we listen.  At the Wolf Parade concert, I could feel the vibrations of sound in my stomach.  I could see the musicians on stage. I even bounced around a little to the beat (or in my case, slightly off the beat).  The songs, which I’ve only heard through my headphones or stereo, are now performed in front of my eyes.  I’ve often noted the feeling of the uncanny when attending concerts.  When you know a band’s songs intimately, yet have never seen them perform either on video or live, the experience of confronting the band’s visual existence can be surprising, incongruous and strange.  You sometimes doubt that that voice, that sound, is coming from the person you see on stage. This disconnect comes from how we individually imagine/visualize music when listening without a visual aid or spectacle like a concert or music video. Listen to a song, close your eyes, and what do you imagine seeing? 

Music has been described as the most abstract art form, for, as the argument goes, music resists visual representation.  What does a sound look like? How would you visually represent a song? Yet, if we turn to our cultural collection of music videos, we see music represented in incredible visual variety.  Music can be represented visually, but these representations are of course personalized interpretations, translations into the visual medium of film.  Are there certain principles or patterns to how we translate music into the visual?

I recently rewatched The Soloist.  The overly sentimental previews for this movie did this artistically challenging and moving film little justice, and I recommend that you check it out if you haven’t already.  Director Joe Wright takes up the challenge of visualizing music. He does this most successfully through shots of the affective experience of listening to music. Throughout the film, Wright uses close ups on the characters playing and/or listening to music, registering their emotional, affective experience as they listen. Through this pairing of music and the human body listening to music, Wright gives the abstractions of music a visual bodily presence.  The Soloist shows how we feel music, how the sounds become embodied within us by engaging our senses.  I’m still working out why all of this fascinates me.  This post feels scattered and confused, but I feel as if these ideas are touching upon some relationship I'm  seeing between art and the human.  So, to end this post of a million little questions, I'll return back to the big questions:  What are our bodily, emotional, and mental relationships to different art forms? And, what do we need from these relationships?