Inception

Hello World!

It wasn't all that long ago that I was willing to pay the cost of an economy car to purchase a home-built clone PC. I probably wasn't willing to pay enough to buy the brand-named item, just as I will probably never be interested to spend more than economy car prices for wheels. But it was a chunk of change - over $5K -  to have something without graphics or mouse on which to calculate complicated spreadsheets. Eventually some statistics. Mostly for word-processing.

Think of it! Nowadays, when cars are still more essential than they were even back at the beginnings for PCs, what would it take for you to be willing to spend, say, fifteen thousand dollars, to do something you can already do, but in new ways? Seemingly better ways? How much more of your world is there left to mediate, digitally. Remember the thrill of graphics? Of color? But do you remember that the price had already dropped, and that's what made your desire harden into purchase.

Can you even imagine such a thing? A fifteen thousand dollar digital device? There's very little difference among various flavors of wheels so far as what they're good for, and  yet the price differential can be intense. But less intense, really, than it used to be. There is a standard car price, just as there is a standard PC price, and the spread from luxury to abject suffering is as if from all to nothing. Cars generally work better than they used to and so the only reason to spend more is likely for comfort or luxury. If you can't pay for reliability, buy a used car. But used laptops cost more than the newer cheaper ones. And cars are really digital devices now too. A big giant brain on wheels, is how I think I heard the Ford Focus touted. The most economical car around.

These days if you see someone engaged in extreme physical maneuvers, you will almost certainly see someone nearby with a video cam. What's it called? Parkour? The Guggenheim is soliciting You-tubes for a major show of "the new" and movies have become about what a movie is about. The world has ended and we are driving on fumes. Momentum carries us as though things were still as they ever have been, word without end, amen.

It is my turn now, to get the job I really love. Now, where will I be applying? The only amazing thing about this film, Inception, is that its protagonists, the dream invaders, are still doing someone else's bidding. They have no independent source of income. They have a boss. These dream invasions are done for the purposes of corporate espionage. Victory means staving off world domination. Mac beats PC. Google rules. The movie maker mocks himself mocking his audience; the roobs who will pay to be hyped and think they can think as fast as the film can move.

I watched this one, as I once did the Lord of the Rings, right up close at neckbreaking vantage. It sucked nearly as badly. In a mall full of unselfconscious mallrats and never a one of them with video cams, since why would they need them? There is nothing apart from self-disclosure in the mall.These people all look like they want to be a porn video. Personally. Just for you, my love. Or, safely, can I pay for some private anonymous session across the 'net. You show me yours and I'll show you mine, but only one of us picks up the tab? Weird.

I picked that one up listening to Gary Shteyngart just now. How can he know about these things and I can't? He seems to think he's the last reader on the earth, the last writer, likening himself to some Jap shooter still hiding out in some cave on some Pacific island, not having heard the news that the unthinkable has happened and the sacred emperor has been defeated. No one reads anymore. But I read Absurdistan, and this guy is as far from a writer as you can get and still be published. His text is digitally mediated; all satire, no earnest sense. There is no irony left in the world anymore. No sense of irony, since it's all ironic all the time.

So Inception, the movie, insults its audience almost beyond the point of endurance. It mocks all chase scenes, all shootemups, all secret agent movies, and the only thing I don't get is why the protagonists still have to have employers. I mean if you can dig into people's dreams, shouldn't you be self-employed at the very least? Shouldn't you be the master of the universe instead of minioning for some other master? Or is that how they work out the bad guys' bullets never landing?

But really, the moment of Inception is when you are up against it. When you return from Seattle, say, to Buffalo and you just can't help noticing that the people in the commuter airline ghetto out of JFK have last years' model of laptop, smartphone, clothes, looks on their faces. You can't help but wonder if the genepool has been drained by the cooler places, or is it just a matter like those vanity photoshoots you used to be able to do for your boyfriend, where you get all made up like a whore or like a bride and that's what they do in cooler more moneyed venues. Some combination of both by each?

But really, when you want that kind of beauty then you are a rapist as were these mind-fuckers in the movie as they were doing to you in the audience, and it isn't art or literature or even satire. It's rude and deadly to your soul. Don't watch it. It really really sucks. I don't even know what I'm saying, but I know the message has been implanted. Don't watch it if you value your soul.