First things first, in defence of poor old Inception and its beleaguered fanbase – we’re aware that’s it’s not Plato’s fucking symposium. We’re aware of the fact that when Nolan finished the script a beam of light didn’t emanate from the fucking paper, shooting off into the cosmic mass of God somewhere in the universe because a mere mortal man had somehow, in one fell swoop, solved the crises of the human condition and discovered the answers to all dreams and perceptions of reality. As with just about every, and all, good things in the litany of human fucking existence it was simply just a really good story. That’s it. Of course a perception that this is a problem hinges upon your misguided belief that “it” just being “it” makes “it” meaningless. If you care to gander over a millennia of human self-documentation then I’ll think you’ll find that some other well told stories that were, as all stories are, plagued by plot-holes and inconsistencies and have grown to become as important to people as well…. I don’t think anything is quite important as they are (yes I’m talking about the Bible, shock fucking horror someone said it’s all made up). Of course people are allowed to not like things that I like, as they so often do, but it’s the pure venom that people go after it with that gets to me. What has it done so horribly bloody wrong that it deserves this amount of animosity thrust into its well-meaning face? I refuse to believe that it’s because of loyalist Nolan-ites like me. I mean for Christ sake we all let you go about your Potter-mania bullshit way with little hassle even though it’s a dramatically unoriginal, bland ground-up humus-like, mush a franchise. But it seems to make everyone else happy. It can’t be because people didn’t get it; I mean I can see the affecting nature of some its aesthetics (particularly the ones about moviemaking) sailing comfortably over most people’s heads, but I’ve become certain that the people who were so monstrously stupid they couldn’t even follow the bloody plot were so ashamed of themselves that they kept quiet and occasionally mumbled something in a bashful manner into their shoes – perhaps along the lines of “well you know I just like happy movies, I guess it wasn’t for me”. And I’m pretty sure it can’t be a backlash to hardliners who perhaps did come out swinging a bit too hard from early screenings; you know the ones, the guys who clearly had nothing greater than a GCSE Religious Education grasp of philosophy, declaring it a missing testament from the Bible. Perhaps that’s what really gets me about the anti-Inceptioners, the same level of poorly thought out hatred. It’s the irrationalness of it, an insistence that it isn’t just their personal opinion, it IS an abomination. The worst one I find is the sheer indignity that arose from the anti-Nolanites when he got a few Oscar nods. For starters the man didn’t even get a nod for Best Director – but that didn’t stop the mob from listing, in detail, why he shouldn’t get the gong anyway. I mean for the love of shit people if you’re not going to give it to a man who wrote and directed his own original concept film with a, literally, international super-cast whilst constructing methods of filming in zero-gravity and making fucking buildings BEND then who the fuck are you going to give it to? Tom Hooper!? The man dressed up Colin Firth and shot him wandering around some misty soundstage back-lots which, apparently, constitutes “recreating war-time London”. The Kings Speech was a terrific film, don’t get me wrong and very possibly even deserving of the best picture gong, but best Director is surely taking the absolute piss people. If not Nolan for constructing, and deconstructing, an entirely new world then surely fucking Fincher, but no, and nobody batted a damn eye-lid for longer than 2 seconds and merely went “well that was odd, but British cinema and all that; Slumdog spirit”. If you’re going to endorse anyone as a poster-child for British cinema then why not Nolan? It surely can’t be because of some odd sense of national authenticity and pride, i.e. because he’s never really worked in the British studio system. If people genuinely gave a shit about working in the British studio system then they’d make sure there actually was a system for our artists to work in, not just FilmFour and BBC Films (when and if they feel like it, and if it looks like it’ll tie in with the Dr Who fanbase). Let’s be fair to ourselves here, if British people can’t make ourselves internationally appealing then realistically we’ve got just about fuck all. Just a rainy island that has zero cinematic infrastructure and the ability to still look puzzled when the world doesn’t give a shit about the BAFTA’s. Oh, and Dr Who. In case you haven’t noticed essentially our entire old guard of actors and actresses have been solely employed by the Harry Potter franchise, and the odd Direct Line car insurance advert, and when that’s over they’ve fuck all else to do. The call for Brit baddies isn’t as strong as it used to be as the nation appears to be growing somewhat of a feeble backbone as of late and demanding that it’s actually Cool Britannia after all. But what’s so wonderful about people like Nolan is that they simply couldn’t give less of a fuck about any of that. The man is just a story-teller. If we’re going to be pedantic and cling only to those artists who stick it out in Blighty then we’re going to be left with Shane Meadows…..and that’s about it. Danny Boyle has been making international pictures for quite some time now if you think about it, The Wright brothers (Joe and Edgar – no actual relation) aren’t coming back, we never really had Matthew Vaughn, Guy Ritchie’s gone, we’ve even bloody lost Kenneth Branagh. The formula is if you’re talented you work your way out of Britain, much in the same way an actor works their way out of theatre and into film. So is that what we’ve become as a nation – the decaying theatre of the world that is refusing to quite except that cinema kicked the living shit out of us over a hundred years ago? We’ve become so obsessed with this idea of British purity that we might as well club ourselves over the fucking head, put on a balaclava and join the EDL. I’m sick to death of this incessant whining over Brits making films abroad and therefore why we’re refusing to support them. The amount of times I’ve heard “yeah I’ve loved every single thing he’s ever done [Edgar Wright] but It’s in Americaaaaa”, actually it’s set in Canada, “same thiiiiing” and of course there is the classic “It’s in America now, they don’t get the subtle British humour” – it’s enough to make me want to rage-vomit.
But I digress. It’s not that I feel Nolan is the be-all-end-all of International cinema but, as tired as the comparison is, the man is like Hitchcock before him. His success-to-quality ratio is pretty much unrivalled, if you want to achieve the kind of figures that James Cameron or Michael Bay pull in you’ve usually got to sacrifice a hell of a lot for spectacle and let’s be honest here (whilst Inception is a veritable bonanza of awe-gasmic treats) his most successful picture, The Dark Knight, is a slow-burning talkie that builds to a kinetic, and harrowing, finish. Nolan’s Gotham is far removed from the Disney, pastel colour, dream-worlds of Cameron’s Titanic or Pandora instead presenting a cold, monochrome and sometimes even dank metropolis, this is not the eye-candy that usually earns you a billion box-office. In the simplest terms people slag off the man for the exact reason that makes him great, because he’s noticeable. He is a distinguished name that has become, very quickly, a quality mark. Are films like The Prestige or Inception flawless exercise in mind-bending philosophy or existentialism? No, not really. They’re flawed, as essentially all things are. But people seem to be convinced that they claimed to be flawless entries in the canon of human progression, when in fact we all know that they didn’t. It would appear all Christopher Nolan has to do to piss people off is exist. Following Christopher Nolan is not a religion, as it has unfoundedly been dubbed, but rather it’s like following Hitchcock – it’s an admiration and an affinity. Do I think he’s my best friend? No. Do I think he understands me better than anyone else ever could? No. Do I think he’s good at making films and getting his own view across? Yes. Do I sometimes agree or learn from his view? Yes. There’s something so incendiary about an auteur (yes I called him auteur, because he is one), something that inspires such vast amounts of both adoration and hatred. There are many responses to a Nolan movie, but they’re rarely ever “meh”. I think Lars Von Trier, a man it took me a long time to love, may have weirdly put it best (as he so often seems to in his cryptically weird and semi-offensive manner). When standing amid the storm of fury conjured up by his film “Antichrist” at Cannes he stood perplexed at why so many people bade for his blood, why everyone seemed so personally insulted by what he’d done. Von Trier responded, if somewhat garishly, that “I don't have to justify myself. I make films and I enjoy very much making them. You are all my guests, it's not the other way round.”. At first I despised the sentence as I despised the man, but after a while I came to see its irrefutable validity. We are his guests, as we are the guests of any filmmaker, they didn’t strap us down and force us to watch it; in fact in this day and age there appears to be nothing harder than getting someone to sit still for 2 hours and pay attention to one thing. The truth is you can hate a filmmaker all you like but they never did anything to you. Didn’t get what you expected? Should have watched more trailers and read more info before paying for it (if you indeed did actually bother paying for it). So if Christopher Nolan really does bother you THAT much, how about when The Dark Knight Rises comes out you piss off and don’t watch it; and leave, blatant, philistines like me to enjoy it for what it is.
Mark Birrell
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