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"Nothing but self-indulgent shit with no other meaning in the movie. That is all."

When Inception Fails To Explain Itself

That familiar feeling of bafflement and embarrassment set in when the director Christopher Nolan took the stage at the beginning of the movie's press conference in July for this summer's blockbuster about dreams. Nods to dreams, surrealism, and other literary and cinematic icons dotted the statement, which included some time for the audience to ask questions, but the whole affair felt so forced that most folks wanted to get out of there. The truth is, many of us had been asking for a big-screen explanation of the world of Inception. Now we know why Nolan didn't deliver it. He didn't want to. There's no scene that provides the big payoff that Hollywood producers make movies for: clarity and a means of getting out. Nolan, a former theoretical physicist, didn't want to go there, as he's described, because the unarticulated truths behind dreams would pose too much of a challenge for the technology of the moment. He also had another reason: he didn't know. In retrospect, Nolan says it's likely the one thing that Inception did exactly right.

It's not that Nolan doesn't like his ideas to be interrogated. In 2001, he became fascinated with the old Soviet adage of karma, telling The Independent that he asked himself what his motives would be in following through on a fatal fantasy he'd once had. (Spoiler alert: This involves breaking into the President's private quarters.) "Is this just the dumbest idea in the world? Is this just your desire for attention? Is this an affirmation that there is no heaven, and in any case no future, so why bother?" In his mind, the best explanation for why the president wanted to be killed by intruders, even a fantasy version of them, was that his subconscious had prompted him to such a situation. "I went back to that idea of karma. If you live your life feeling like you did something as well as you could, then when your time comes you come back and do what you could have done and what you would have liked to have done. In this case, I could have saved the president's life if only I had been able to do that."

Nolan's question becomes a kind of Rorschach test for audiences. Why is the White House breaking into the Oval Office to break a top-secret NSA wiretap? The general explanation for the invasion of privacy, whether given by Bruce Willis, Theo James, or the guy who plays the White House photographer, is that the president's abusive ex-wife told his men to do so. What kind of "karma" did these guys get? Does it matter? When those answers come, viewers can make up their own minds. But if nothing about the fate of a fictional president seems obvious or unavoidable, you can safely ignore the explanation and imagine that the movie is telling us something even more profound. Why did we care?A higher meaning unmasks itself. We don't know how or why things happen in our minds. The script may give us some sense of that. "There was no better test of a filmmaker," Nolan says, "than if they came to you and said: 'The very best art can deal with these fundamental questions and even science.'"

It's an argument to which Alan Watts responded: "To ask yourself: What is truth? Then make it your goal to make it true. To ask: How can I understand this thing, this body, this world of illusion, this world of paradox, and then make it my business to see through it to its end, to its true nature, to its meaning? To go beyond the problem and make it transcend the moment. To go beyond the problem and make it the center of all my activity." To Watts, Watts had written: "Everything I know, everything I feel and everything I know I know in the same way. I know the same thing because it is of me. I am the same because it is of me."