"Inception" and the Secret of Character Development in Cyber-Punky Narratives

It's summer, and while there's still plenty of art world business, I'm taking advantage of the sweltering heat and slightly slower pace as my excuse for indulging in another passion of mine, amateur movie deconstruction (which isn't to say I enjoy deconstructing amateur movies, but rather love picking apart major motion pictures in my own less-than-professional way).

Like apparently millions of other people this past weekend, we saw "Inception" ... you know, that new Leonardo di Caprio flick described variably as "The Matrix meets Oceans Eleven" or "The Matrix meets Casablanca" or "James Bond meets The Matrix" (it's the special effects, not the nearly catatonic under-acting, that's drawing the main parallel).

Each member of our three-person party expressed being somewhat bored at times during the film, but feeling totally invested and engaged by the end, which is a movie experience I rather prefer to the other way around.

MULTIPLE SPOILERS BELOW: Do not continue reading if you don't want to know certain things about the film.

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What consumed the bulk of our discussion after the film were the holes in the plot, of course. There were two big ones for us. My main problem was why Fischer wouldn't be more suspicious that the people he'd just spent 10 hours dreaming with were in the same first-class cabin on the plane with him. Sure, it was a dream but the exact same people? Not even a bit suspicious?

After that, it might have made sense that Fischer's anti-extraction training would create armed guards trying to kill his kidnappers, but by they time he agreed to enter the third level of the dream (the snowy fortress), why were they still there? He willingly entered that dreamscape.

And while, with the cliff-hanger ending, it's easy enough for the movie makers to argue that all will be answered in the sequel, that wouldn't address the cheater's path they took to getting the Ellen Page character back into the dream team. As one member of our party pointed out, having Leo say "She'll be back" was a lame narrative short-cut. We understood why Nolan chose it (he had a great deal of more interesting story to tell, and to "show" us why she changed her mind would have easily taken another 3 minutes at least), but over dinner this opened up a discussion of two central critiques (I'd go so far as to call them genre flaws) of cyber-punky narratives.

The first one is central to the second one---which is why the Ellen Page short-cut stood out so much---actually, so forgive the careless leaping transition here.

One failure of the film (and of cyberpunk stories in general) is that the villains (usually uber-wealthy egomaniacs or corporations) and/or their geopolitical situations are generally left so generic that it's difficult to relate to the peril they pose or the characters' conflicts in any depth. Funny enough, and I have to wonder if self-aware on "Inception"'s writers' part, it's kind of like the "projections" (other people walking around in a collaborative dream) noticing that something isn't quite right with the central dreamer and becoming annoyed with or aggressive toward him/her. If you make the details of the villain or geopolitical time/space too specific, your reader becomes subconsciously obsessed with the anachronisms and their suspension of disbelief falls through. By leaving the landscape more vague, you assure the audience won't notice the anachronisms (as much) and will let you lead them through the story. Moreover, in stories in which the suspension of disbelief is the only way some technological advance seems plausible (such as the notion that you can extract memories/ideas from other people's dreams), the more specific the landscape you set that in becomes, the less likely the reader/viewer will be able to dismiss the nagging doubts they'll unquestionably have cropping up.

The big problem with these vague landscapes, and the second flaw of the genre in general, is that it is precisely specific details that one can relate to that most quickly endears any story's characters to the reader/viewer. Without those shared experiences, empathy is much more difficult. Of course, like ramming a blunt object into your audience's mind, you can introduce some defining tragedy (and "Inception" does) to make the audience care a bit, but even there, to truly feel their tragedy requires that you know this person a bit first, and cyberpunk stories are too bursting full of clever inventions and plot twists generally to leave the time to let you get to know more than one or two of their characters, if that.

Because of this, many people complain that they just don't care about the characters in much science fiction or cyberpunk stories. What happens to them might as well be happening to a crash-test dummy.

By the end of "Inception," we had all climbed on board the thrill ride emotionally; we felt we cared about the characters, somewhat.

Maybe we had been forcefully manipulated into it, I can't tell, but we agreed that our early favorite among the characters was Eames (the forger, who could make himself look like other people inside a dream). The reason we liked Eames the most (and a simple trick that too many science fiction / cyberpunky storytellers forget) is because he made us laugh. It was also his fantastical talent as a shape-shifter, but mostly it was his charm and humor. Charming characters are much more attractive and seem to cut right through our empathy defenses.

More than even charm, though, humor seems to be the most powerful antidote to the empathy problem introduced by necessarily vague landscapes. Unfortunately, too few "serious" science fiction writers (I know, we literary snobs consider that an oxymoron...as life goes on, I really don't care as much about such things) seem to remember that. Humor is the fastest path through most types of defenses, which is why I like it in literature and visual art. Done well, it's universally disarming.

Of course, doing it well is anything but easy.