The Talking Picture, Ep. 5 - Defeat, Deferred

The Talking Picture, Ep. 4 - The High Brought Low

Episode Four!

The Talking Picture, Ep. 3 - High Minds and Middle Brows

Episode Three of The Talking Picture.

The Talking Picture, Ep. 2 - Restart Now?

The second installment of The Talking Picture.

The Talking Picture, Ep. 1 - You Are The Crowd

The first episode of my ill-fated but still theoretically ongoing video essay series, The Talking Picture.

On the Ending of Inception

A few quick words on Inception, particularly its ending. Even today, I hear confusion from some people as to what the ending meant, or even frustration as to Christopher Nolan’s alleged failure to provide us with a hard-and-fast answer to the question of whether Leo ever did manage to reach the real world or if the entire end of the movie is just another dream.

First off, I’d like to say that the ending is perfectly timed. When the spinning top wobbles, the image cuts out before we get to see if it will continue wobbling and eventually fall or just right itself and carry on forever. This is reality vs. the dream world in a nutshell, and withholding the final verdict from us creates ambiguity.

But that’s precisely what those confused by the ending or particularly expressing frustration at it are missing: the ambiguity is the point. Leo doesn’t care anymore whether he’s in the real world. This level of reality is where he gets to be with his children. This level of reality is where he has a life. So even if it’s not entirely real (and who’s to say?), it’s the reality he will choose to live out.

This is the choice that all of us face to one extent or another. True, we could all be living in the Matrix, we could all be living out a lie and really just be brains in vats. But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter. As long as I can make a good life for myself here, it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not. It’s where I live, and I will make the most of it.

Nolan really knows how to end a film, though. I think part of the reason he’s so universally acclaimed is because, psychologically, we as humans tend to remember the first and last items in a sequence better than anything in the middle. I imagine Nolan understands this and thus understands also the value of a good ending. He certainly puts a lot of effort into them. Sure, the ending of “TDKR” was lacklustre, but the ending of The Dark Knight is perfect. The endings of Batman Begins and Memento are terrific. The ending of “The Prestige,” well, your mileage may vary depending on how thoroughly you’ve thought out the mechanics of Hugh Jackman’s magic act. By the end of the film, I had thought about it and had already realized that the Hugh Jackman character had basically been drowning a replica of himself every night for the length of his entire performance run in a wonderfully grotesque metaphor for how he’d been tearing himself apart piece by piece after the death of his wife, so the final shot where we realize that the long rows of tanks each contain a dead Hugh Jackman didn’t have much revelatory value for me. Sure, it’s still a cool ending and the sudden cut to black, plunging the audience into darkness at the precise moment of maximum horror, is an effective technique (and consequently one that the ending leans on heavily). 

On this spectrum, the ending of Inception falls toward the upper end. It makes an unavoidable misstep in teasing us, provoking an automatic and involuntary reaction just when it needs us to step back and look at the situation more analytically. At the same time, if you’re basically a sociopath like me, you’ll have no problem looking at it analytically. So for me, it works in a way that the ending of The Prestige doesn’t, but for someone who didn’t get Inception that would probably go the other way around.

On Sports

I have noted in the past that fantasy league sports clubs are basically Dungeons and Dragons for the deeply closeted. This is true, but I would like to switch to actual flesh-and-blood sports and see how it stacks up to my personal passion, fiction. First, I think it is important to understand that the comparison is not so ludicrous as it would initially appear, and I say that for this reason - the winner is not really the point. Okay, it is important, but it is not the most important aspect of the game or else you could just look up the scores in the paper the next day and be content with that.

No, clearly watching the game is a crucial element, and I assert that is because of the drama. The minute twists and reversals, each of which could affect the outcome of the game as a whole, all stretched over multiple hours. Now I hope you see what I mean when I say that the ending is not all that matters. Getting a play-by-play description of a football game rather than watching the real thing is like having the major plot points of a Game of Thrones episode dryly recounted to you in lieu of watching the actual episode.

But here is where I feel fiction enjoys a definite advantage over sports - the narrative of a football game is made up on the fly. Certainly I can appreciate the visceral appeal of watching a story that no one can spoil for you because no one knows the ending themselves. By the by, I suspect this is also why sports fans get so up in arms about steroid abuse and suchlike - it gives the advantage to one potential ending over another, making the product less spontaneous and hence less exciting.

Fiction, on the other hand, while less visceral and unpredictable, is at least a narrative that has been crafted by a professional writer, manifesting their intent in words, images, and what have you. Even when after a game the headline writers may brand the result a Cinderella Story or whatever else they managed to pick out from the catalog of cliches that day, it is a narrative that they as an author have imposed on the real life narrative. Giving significance to a narrative requires human input, and that is why I think fiction trumps sports every time.

On a related note, I find the whole premise of athletics - or at least the most basic athletics - questionable. We may find the Fastest Man Alive, but we have to remember that the word Man is the thing that is not like the others. No matter how fast we run, other animals can run faster. No matter how high we jump, other animals can jump higher. No matter how quickly Michael Phelps can swim, put him in the pool with a shark and he is going to get fucking eaten. Something that celebrates what actually sets us apart as a species would be a more appropriate celebration of our shared heritage as a world people. I will even settle for games that have rules and strategies like Basketball, Baseball, or yes, even Football.