Winter                                                             Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Inception.  Kate and I watched this last night here at Artemis Cinema.  Kate, who doesn’t tolerate much fiddle-faddle when it comes to movies, said early and often that it wasn’t clear.  Later on, perhaps around the time they’re navigating a well-defended ego, complete with snow camouflaged Hummers with tank tracks in place of tires, snow mobiles and white clad gunmen protecting a concrete gray fortress, we both decided that we had something of a grip on things.

A Russian nesting doll movie with plotlines and concepts connected but difficult to unravel, determining what was real or not became a challenge.  Which was, I suppose, the whole point.  Mol, Decaprio’s wife, kills herself because he convinced her the world they shared inside a dream was not real.  She carries with her, back into waking life, the idea that the world she is in is a dream, an illusion, and that killing herself will cause her to wake up and be with her real husband and her real kids.

This is, of course, a neat cinematic version of solipsism turned inside out.  A solipsistic thinker believes the world to be a creation of their own imagination.  In this case the solipsist believes the world cannot be her creation and therefore must not be real.

This is a movie more about epistemology, how do we know what we know, than it is about psychology or ontology.  In the end we’re left hanging, not sure whether the world Decaprio’s character has returned to is in fact the real world or only a figment of a dream, “A slight disorder of the stomach… You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Scrooge faced the same epistemological problem with a strong dose of skepticism.

We’ll watch inception again.  See how it fares on a second pass.