I’m still trying to clarify how to explain what I see in Inception, which I see as a postmodern tragedy, a phrase that is oxymoronic, yet captures for me the qualities of the film. It has that postmodern focus on fluidity in reality, the failure of humans to discern an externally situated reality and the even more significant fluidity of the internal self-story, that seems to “ground” it. The impossibility of humans to come to terms with the condition of “fluidself” seems the heart of postmodern tragedy, and the film does offer a series of gestures—perhaps more accurately a series of stories—aimed toward that sublime moment when the self—in this case, both character and viewer—has moved through some sort of liminal zone of dreamscapes and stories within stories into an understanding of what? The inapproachability of self? Impossibility of becoming?
By virtue of this story the viewing self only sees the shimmer of a self in a slightly warped scene—or is it a mirror image staring back, mirror within mirror, receding mirrors and stories and truths—and . . . and the whole scene-of-self converges on this single story theme, that singularity of story is impossible. This is the moment of the anagnorisis that may not be, the sublime impossibility of anagnorisis. This is the gesture of self in a scene both folding inward upon its set and collapsing outward at the same time. This is the gesture of self in a plot that must be believed yet is implausible, a mere gesture moving toward something profound at the same time it falls off . . .
All this is too too abstract to make any real sense. Let me root it in that which is sensate, the body rather than the mind. My mind has no idea which narrative, if any, the filmic framework asserts as real. Dom’s top may have stopped spinning . . . or be spinning still. But does that matter? What if I embrace the anagnorisis that may not be? Then I am physically, vertiginously drawn toward a collapsing cliff, to sit upon a vertical structure about to be sliced away. This urge to construct a single story up and through all other layers of story falls away. I like that feeling of free fall toward nothing at all, not being so “Romantic” or “Modern” as to need either externally-formed top-layer narrative or some sort of deep-buried core-story.
Sliced away from the scene, looking down upon it, I cannot help but imagine the self/story as a set of grainy film frames in an eternally looping oroboros. As if I am a character (an object looking like a human) seeking the pleasure of the fall, and my story is of a fall forever nowhere toward the never enough of story. This sounds like tragedy, this condition of having no self/story—not even a loop of film—to cut away or splice into.
Only the gesture of a sharp collapse—collapse of meaning language image story―cutting viscerally through . . . that’s the postmodern gesture. An ever imminent evisceration of an immaterial cliff face. The sublime frame of a human face of cliff always ever crumbling away. Katharsis in freefall toward indefinite shimmer. The Inception of postmodern tragedy.
