March 20, 2011 at 9:30 P.M. New attacks against this essay have resulted in new "errors" being inserted and corrected, especially in the spacing of titles in the bibliography. New defacements of this work are always expected.
August 20, 2010 at 10:04 P.M. An attack against my security system obstructed my updating feature. I have restarted my computer. I will try to run a scan for the third time today. A single letter was deleted from a word in my list of sources. I have corrected that "error." New arrests are expected in New Jersey soon. I hope. Mr. Codey's brother has a little problema. I will not discuss that matter unless there is more of a connection to Mr. Codey than I have seen so far.
August 19, 2010 at 10:39 A.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected as New Jersey is accused of fraud in connection with pension funds. ("New Jersey is $46 BILLION 'Short' in Pension Funds.")
August 17, 2010 at 10:50 A.M. Several essays appear to have been vandalized overnight, numerous "errors" were inserted in this essay-review with the goal of maximizing harmful frustrations. I have made all necessary corrections. Furthermore, I will do my best to make corrections of reinserted "errors" as they appear in my writings. I have reason to believe that this essay will be republished in a setting where such crimes may not be committed by persons sheltered from criminal liability. I will make use of more public computers in the future.
August 14, 2010 at 10:10 A.M. Several essays were altered yesterday, the spacing between titles was affected in this essay. I hope to have made all of the necessary corrections in this essay today, until next time. This kind of wave of attacks is usually followed by new indictments in New Jersey. Keep your fingers crossed.
August 7, 2010 at 5:33 P.M. A letter was deleted from a word in this essay. I corrected that "error" from a public computer. A word was deleted from "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script." I have also corrected that "error." I cannot say how many other essays or writings have been disfigured in the cybercrimes committed over the past two days. I have run six scans of my computer, removing security risks each time. The number of intrusions into my computer is in the hundreds every day.
July 26, 2010 at 11:45 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight will now be corrected.
July 25, 2010 at 11:56 A.M. "Errors" were inserted in this text which had been left alone for a few days. Let us see what further attacks are directed against this work and others at these blogs. I will do my best to make corrections as they are needed. I think that the quality of this review, such as it is, has embarrassed some persons whose assessments of this movie seem far less good to many readers. Hence, the continuing efforts to destroy this text as well as many others. I am sure that many persons in the world can relate to my feelings upon discovering further vandalisms of this work today. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
July 22, 2010 at 10:20 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight in this essay, after my most recent review and not found in previous versions of the work, will now be corrected. Sadly, we may expect more of this sort of thing during the next several days. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "More Censorship and Cybercrime" then "What is it like to be censored in America?" and "David Denby is Not Amused.")
Mr. Christie, use of these tactics reflects poorly not only on New Jersey, but also on the United States of America. ("Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
July 21, 2010 at 5:09 P.M. "Error" inserted since earlier today. I have now corrected that "error." I cannot say how many other writings have been altered or vandalized today. I will do my best to make corrections of each "error" inserted in these writings as soon as I become aware of it.
July 21, 2010 at 2:07 P.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected, alphabetical order of titles listed altered and repaired. Other harassments that I will not name are about what I usually deal with, nothing special. I am told that important arrests are taking place as I type these words in Hudson County. Perhaps even more arrests will take place soon in New Jersey.
July 18, 2010 at 11:07 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight have been corrected.
July 17, 2010 at 10:47 P.M. "Errors" inserted, once more, as part of the continuing "frustration and harassment" campaign from New Jersey. Mostly letters and words may be removed. Tell your friends in other countries about this spectacle. ("What is it like to be tortured?")
July 17, 2010 at 4:33 P.M. "Errors" were inserted in this work posted earlier today. I cannot say how many other writings have been vandalized in violation of copyright law and the American Constitution. I can only hope that no journalists have or would participate in such criminal conduct. I am sure that Steve Adubato agrees with me on this issue of respect for freedom of speech. I wonder whether Mr. Adubato has visited my sites? Rafael Pi Roman? Rick Sanchez of CNN? Senator Lieberman? Professor Daniel Mendelsohn? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")
I have reason to believe and hope that the review which appears below will be translated into Japanese and, perhaps -- without expressing "delusions of grandeur" -- I may expect the review to appear not only in Japan, but also in many other countries. America's media silence in connection with this sad spectacle of government censorship and computer crime is very strange. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?" then "More Censorship and Cybercrime.")
I am advised that my book concerning Ricoeur's hermeneutics has been selected for inclusion at "In Other Bookcases":
http://www.oscholars.com/to/appendix/library/fthr and
http://www.bookarmy.com/Juan_Galis_Menendez_writer.aspx_UnitedKingdom
My books and these blogs are referenced in: http://www.openlibrary.org/authors/0l2964813A/Juan_Galis_Menendez_mancheckov.net/wordpress/2004/07/nochnoy-dozoy. (Russian culture site.)
This essay along with my review of "The Prestige" (I believe) has been selected for inclusion in http://massdensity.com/category/uncategorized/paper/2/ (Quantum Physics and Scientific Culture.)
"Inception," Directed and written by Christopher Nolan; director of photography, Wally Pfister (Bravo!); edited by Lee Smith; costumes by Jeffrey Kurland (Oscar for Ms. Cotillard's dresses and one for Mr. Kurland); Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ellen Page (Adriadne, Brava!), Tom Hardy (Eames), Ken Watanabe (Saito), Dileep Rao (Yusuf), Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer), Tom Berenger (Browning), Marion Cotillard (Mal), Pete Pothlewaite (Maurice Fisher), Michael Caine (Miles) and Lukas Haas (Nash).
Introduction: "I recognize you from my dreams." -- Pierre Charles Baudelaire, Le Fleurs du Mal (1857).
"And so, being young and dipped in folly
I fell in love with melancholy."
-- Edgar Allan Poe.
I was lucky to see Christopher Nolan's "Inception" on the first day that it was available in New York. As usual with Mr. Nolan's films there is a fascinating mixture of lyricism and philosophical seriousness in this movie. Mr. Nolan is exploring profound and disturbing questions in his work concerning the nature of reality and sanity, good and evil, ethics and fiction. Mr. Nolan studied literature at the University of London, I believe, but he is equally at home in the culture of images, or cinema, in which we all must live in the twenty-first century. These are our languages -- screen music, movement and image, sound and word -- because they shape the subjectivities of persons in our age. ("'The Prestige': A Movie Review.")
"Inception" is a classic example of Umberto Eco's "Open Work." The movie is intended to resonate for viewers in multiple directions. The closest analogy that I can provide to readers is from higher mathematics. For example, a "tesseract" is a multidimensional object placed in abstract space which is describable in various numerical languages and schemes, each featuring its own logic and corresponding aesthetics. This object (a "tesseract") does not exist, empirically, but it is real. For Mr. Nolan, movies are "tesseracts" -- works of art that are necessarily "incomplete" -- "living" stories that may be "entered" by other thriving freedoms-in-the-world and made complete only by the viewer or recipient of the work. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")
"Inception" raises the question "What is a movie?" Is a movie only an empirical object? Or is a movie also its meaning? Movies, like reality, are amenable to any number of readings or interpretations, several meanings may always be attached to good films, altering in the flickering light of "projection" and placed before the viewer. Enigmatically, movies must be interpreted, freely, by recipients or they stop being movies. Hence, the analogy to dreams. This means that you, as the audience member, must respect the autonomy of the work of art which is encountered in the movie theater, even as you achieve a kind of "fusion of horizons" with the work. More on this later in pondering the mystery of identity. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
Happily, this is also Mr. Nolan's view of reality and of those mysterious beings called "women" who may or may not inhabit reality as distinct from our dreams. Women are freedoms-in-the-world who must be seen as equals through transcending subjective male notions of their identities. This fascination with women and darkness places Mr. Nolan's work in the tradition of American Noir cinema. This is also to suggest that Mr. Nolan's aesthetic sensibility is shaped by literary Romanticism, notably, the English variety of the movement -- especially, I believe, by the poetry of Byron and Tennyson. The latter's apt verse is quoted below:
"O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife,
My bosom-friend and half of life;
As I confess it needs must be?"
A final ingredient in Mr. Nolan's sensibility that is shared with Tim Burton is the influence of surrealism. Students of the Surrealist Manifestos and the paintings of Magritte as well as Salvador Dali will immediately recognize key images in this movie and gestures of gratitude to those artists in addition to the Master of the genre, Jean Cocteau, who also gets a nod. (See Cocteau's "Orpheus" and "Beauty and the Beast.")
The central myth unifying the highly sophisticated ideas illustrated in the plot and drawn from quantum mechanics, hermeneutic theory, Asian mysticism and theoretical speculation is the story of Orpheus who must rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the Underworld after her death. Sorrow lives with "Cobb" in the form of "Mal." Orpheus is allowed to bring his wife to the surface (life), only if he refrains from looking back at her lovely features (memory is a thief) until her return to the "day world" of the living. If Orpheus looks back (remembers her long lost beauty and their happiness), Eurydice will be lost forever. Love can only be kept by being given away. Gluck's Opera featuring this myth might have provided a soundtrack to accompany the dizzying images. Memory is a haunting "issue" in all of Nolan's films. ("Out of the Past.")
The parallel myth of Persephone and its linkage to the changes in the seasons is signaled for the audience by transitions from a bleak winter landscape to warm beaches. This is an externalization of what Carl Jung and later Alfred Adler called "guilt complexes" and identity-entanglements that are akin to the relations of particles in the quantum realm explored, as I have said, in other movies by this same director. The Orpheus myth was later absorbed by Christianity as Jesus (in the role of Eurydice) becomes the resident of the Underworld encountering his "wife" Mary Magdalene (the new Orpheus) "as" his resurrection. Noli me tangere. ("'Shoot 'Em Up': A Movie Review.")
The plunge into the Underworld is obviously a psychological journey taking place in the mind of the hero. It is the metanoia journey which is also the descent into madness externalized in science fiction terms and action sequences calculated to get the dollars of young men and their long-suffering girlfriends this summer. From what I saw at the midnight premier of the film, Mr. Nolan will be a much richer man very soon. I am happy for him.
Adriadne's shattering of a glass allows us to step through the mirror and into the "Wonderland" of this film by establishing a relationship between this film, which is explicitly associated with what is "surreal," and the imagery of Luis Bunuel. No accents on this keyboard, sorry. I am aware of where the accents belong in words even if I am unable to supply the accents. (Mr. Bunuel's Mexican films should be studied by Mr. Nolan, especially Cumbres Borrascosas, i.e., "Wuthering Heights.")
Real/surreal is a dialectic that recurs several times in the film. The word "deconstruction" is used by Mr. DiCaprio's character in connection with the dream reality under "inception." A philosopher -- whom I have excellent reason to believe that Mr. Nolan has read -- writes of reality imploding within multiple levels of meaning that are inextricable from memory and language as death nears: "Might something like this -- we might call it Zeno's eternity -- be a model for an enlightenment experience, or for the experience of dying? If our consciousness survived biological death for (only) one minute, but that minute subjectively felt like eternity, would that constitute a satisfactory form of immortality?" (Nozick, "Being More Real," in The Examined Life, at p. 129 and Kurosawa's "Ikiru," which is a recent discovery for me.)
The literal "fall" (Albert Camus) into the abyss ("leap of faith" in Kierkegaard's terms) is depicted in multiple images, most powerfully as the woman the hero loves falls from a ledge ("Mal"). This movie is a deeply religious work which has already received the attention of theologians. Discussions of theological implications of the movie are scheduled for July 18, 2010 at The Journey Church/Upper West Side, at 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., Brandeis, HS, 145 West 84th Street, New York, NY (84th & Columbus). http://www.Journey/Metro.com
From a Christian gnostic perspective the movie is a meditation on sin, evil, loss, redemption and the unbreakable bonds of love. Jesus, according to gnostic accounts, spent one day in the Underworld before his resurrection. (I direct the reader to Rene Magritte's Le Soir qui tombe, 1934, reproduced in Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, at Plate 17 and "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
I hope to see and review "Salt" and "The American." Those films are concerned to explore existential and identity questions that are often placed in the context of espionage thrillers.
I.
Ms. Cotillard does not "warble," despite the ravings of Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Ms. Cotillard is beautiful and elegant in several of the most provocative dresses that I have seen a woman wear on screen for many years. The beauty of this woman's features amplified on screen is worth $13.00. "Mal" (the word means "evil") is a personification of the femme fatal archetype, but she is also "anima." ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")
Several of Jung's archetypes are visible in the film underlining the subconscious messages conveyed by the work: the "twin trains" ("A" and "B," the Nolan Brothers?) that travel in different directions hint at alternate time-journeys (past and future), then and now, masculine (past) and feminine (future). I agree that we are heading into a century that is dominated by the feminine side of the human mind. "All of the facts revealed by the train leaving Paddington Station can equally well be explained," Tom Stoppard assures us in Jumpers, "by Paddington Station leaving the train." ("Faust in Manhattan.")
Notice the contrast between Michael Caine's character as "Philemon" and the "wise child," Adriadne, played by Ellen Page, who is excellent. Again, the reference is to Greek mythology, Adriadne of Naxos. Adriana (same name) fashions a thread through the labyrinth to escape the minotaur. The thread is the thematic unity of the text which guides you in the maze of ideas in which you are inevitably involved by seeing this movie. This is a common motif in hermeneutic writings: "The narrative thread in dream logic." Ms. Page understood that she was playing a "trouser role," where gender was "in question." (See "Oscar" in "The Tales of Hoffman" or Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier.")
Intertextuality is also important to the movie which uses the music of Edith Piaf -- Ms. Piaf was "played" by Ms. Cotillard in another movie -- to cope with guilt issues while breaking out of the boundaries of the screen canvas. Mr. DiCaprio's "image" of his character "Cobb" is real, but the man on screen is not DiCaprio. The disturbing idea forced on viewers ("incepted?") is that reality itself -- or the very notion that there are "real versions" of persons apart from how they are seen by others -- is doubted or made into a question for the audience. We have entered a hall of mirrors.
Is the person we see doing these "actions" on screen, Mr. DiCaprio? Is Mr. DiCaprio the person "seen" in interviews pertaining to this film? Which version of DiCaprio is real? The dream subject in DiCaprio's subconscious is real to him? The person "acting" in the empirical world is real to others? The person "acting" on screen seems "real" to audiences? Or is the real person known only to himself? Is there a single "Leonardo DiCaprio"? Is "Cobb" Mr. DiCaprio's "shadow equation"? Is there a single "Inception"? Have we seen the same movie when we sit next to each other at a screening of "Inception"? Arguably, all of the characters in this movie are aspects of a single psyche. Incidentally, I do not have a cell phone. Anyone who does have a cellphone should turn it off when seeing this movie because you will need to pay attention.
In a quantum universe, like it or not, we seem to discover a set of realities that are only constructed as we perceive them or through our perceptions of them -- while remaining objective and true -- even "true illusions." The movie is the tree that falls in the forest but only makes a noise when someone hears the "fall." Think again of "Mal's" leap into the darkness. ("David Stove's Critique of Idealism" and "G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")
"Schopenhauer regards his deduction of transcendental subject and object as being legitimate ... we are left confronting them as two mysteries: the unknowable subject and unknowable matter. (Perhaps they are rather one mystery, [God?] for our analysis has already led us to expect them to be different aspects of the same thing.) The transcendental subject, as the sustainer of the world of space and time, cannot itself be in the world of space and time; as sustainer of the realm within which the principle of sufficient reason operates, it can itself be neither object nor agent of that principle. For these reasons it could never be an object of empirical knowledge to anyone -- quite apart from the fact that, for other reasons considered separately, it cannot be an object of knowledge to itself. Yet its existence is a necessary presupposition of our having the experiences that we do have. Putting this the other way round, this whole world of experience is perfectly real, just as real as it presents itself as being, but is unconceptualizable in any terms other than such as presuppose the existence of a subject. This is, in a nutshell, what transcendental idealism means." (emphasis added)
There is no "Inception," until you see the movie. The movie is an "inception" into your subconscious. Schopenhauer's interest in Altman, the Hindu "worldsoul" is shared by Mr. Nolan. Today's physicists as well as biologists articulate the same idea in different terms and, often, without realizing that the latest description of the universe is really a few thousand years-old:
"This means that we cannot fall out of time, as the realist supposes us to do when we die. [Death is a character in this movie that is associated also with eros, "Mal."] The idea that we can [fall out of time] is likened by Schopenhauer to childish misapprehensions about space. When a European child first learns that the world is a giant ball, and that Australia is on the other side of it, he commonly imagines the Australians to be walking about upside-down, hanging from the world by their feet like flies from a ceiling, and is puzzled that they do not drop off into space. If he is imaginative he may also wonder why he himself, if he is perched on top of a giant ball, does not slide down the side of it. His puzzlement can be partly removed by gravity's being explained to him, but only partly: such a young child will almost certainly be unable to grasp the point that it has no meaning to talk of an 'up' or 'down' which is not relative to a subject, so that in a universe thought of as being without an observer there could be no up or down at all. His puzzlement about space, like an adult's bafflement about time, would spring from regarding a particular state of affairs as objectively existing when in fact it can have being and significance only for a subject. Our minds seem to be constructed in such a way that in both cases it borders on the inconceivable not just that the states of affairs in question should not be able to exist independently of us but that they do not in fact exist independently of us. ["Is it rational to believe in God?"] Yet so it is. The top of the giant ball is quite simply wherever one is, and separately from that there can be no top. [Where is "Inception" located?] Similarly, 'now' is wherever one is, and separately from that there can be no 'now.' ..." (Magee, The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, at pp. 116-117, pp. 214-215.) ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "Donald Davidson's 'Anomalous Monism.'")
II.
The logical conclusion of this reasoning is that for the world to "hang together," as it does, there must be a unifying consciousness underlying reality keeping our scientific knowledge in place and fixing the order in the cosmos (or as that order) in the absence of any particular individual or of all persons in the world. The question that arises next for film makers and audiences concerns the freedom of the protagonists and viewers "conditioned" by subconscious forces and desires, trapped in the logic of dreams and the mysteries of a universe that is also a "dream" seducing all of us. This coincides with the so-called "dreaming universe" theory postulated by physicists. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
The various levels of the subconscious are similar to the levels of ascent for the soul in Dante's "Divine Comedy" -- from "Inferno" to Purgatory," then to "Paradise." Paradise is symbolized in the love and innocence of children and the idea of "homecoming." Milton's "Paradise Lost" and battle in the heavens is also analogized by a director who has done his homework. I suspect that Mr. DiCaprio's character would have found "Mal" in his "home" at the end of the movie wearing a lovely dress, as a blond perhaps, wondering whether he wanted a sandwich for lunch. ("Duality in Christian Feminine Identity" and "'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review.")
Mr. Nolan is beguiled and frightened by a reality expressing itself in his works that contains genuine horrors (I don't blame him) together with the beauties also found in the world. Terror and joy at beauty seem to come from women for this film director. One shudders to think of Mr. DiCaprio's views of women. The universe -- like women -- plays tricks on us in a quantum reality that we are only beginning to understand. I can spare Mr. Nolan many years of puzzlement: He will never fully understand women. As for Mr. DiCaprio, I would never presume to offer him advice on the subject of women. ("God is Texting Me!")
We learn of "levels" of the subconscious (Underworld), also in particle physics, where reality is manufactured and may be programed by observers. As with "The Prestige" and "Memento," the "I" (Cobb) is divided into a duality (Adriadne), Hamlet and Horatio. Schizophrenia is a constant presence in Mr. Nolan's films, perhaps as a way of commenting on what must be an interesting relationship with his brother. The Nolans are gentile versions of the Wachowski brothers of Chicago. My guess is that Christopher Nolan is the older brother. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Mr. DiCaprio's "Cobb" is a corporate spy who "plunges" into the dreams of his targets or victims -- which is what Mr. Nolan is doing to all of us, plunging into our minds, with "his" movie -- ostensibly in order to steal secrets that are worth money to sinister corporations. There may be no non-sinister corporations. This is evidenced by the logo of "Time-Warner" that accompanies this movie. More difficult is "inception" or planting an idea in the mind of a subject who will act on that idea in the real world. Subconscious manipulations were charted by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World Revisited. The C.I.A. is very good at that sort of thing. This effort involves actual entry into the mind of another through hypnosis and other, sometimes horrifying interventions. Sexual analogies are intentional and obvious. ("What You Will ...")
Behaviorists at Yale University experimented with "creatures" (this was the term used for all "animals") by stitching their eyelids shut and rotating them on sticks -- sometimes very rapidly (spinning tops?) -- using electrical prods (on humans!), as well as many other indescribably cruel techniques for inducing continual stress and "defensiveness" leading to collapse or self-destruction, starvation maybe. This psychological torture method probably accounts for the constant "error" insertions in these writings and other harassments I deal with, every day. The goal of hackers is to cause permanent and severe psychological damage through constant anxieties and frustrations. Much of this research is parallel to developments in the plot-line of the movie:
" ... at higher levels the subject becomes more and more sensitive to pain; his torment becomes exquisite. However, should this cycling continue without diminishment, then one would observe at last, 'the ultimate demoralization of behavior': a nervous breakdown." (Rebecca Lemov, "Circle of Fear and Hope," in World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men, at pp. 92-93.) ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture." Has Joseph Nye visited my sites?)
Saito (Ken Watanabe) wishes to enter the mind of his victim Cillian Murphy's character, whose father, Pete Pothelwaite, is a business rival of Saito in order to have him break-up the rival empire controlling all of the energy in the world. Topical allusions to "evil empires" seeking control of the world's energy are obvious and (I think) secondary to the metaphysics of the film. Elaborate subconscious defenses or security forces (Mr. Cheney is burned in effigy) are developed to cope with such threats, as in a torture chamber. The analogy to viruses in electronic space and our adventures on-line makes the collective subconscious depicted in "Inception" like the Internet. This is is to describe persons inserting "errors" in my writings as a virus or fungus of evil.
Beyond Freud, Jung's experiments with altered consciousness and anthropological studies led him to formulate theories of individual, then collective and/or species subconscious (the realm of the archetypes) where we find ourselves in this movie. Collective mind is transcendent consciousness. This is a Buddhist concept and also, I keep insisting, a doctrine discussed in physics and mathematics today. For example, by Oxford's superstar quantum physicist and computer expert, David Deutsch, and fellow Oxford superstar, biologist Rupert Sheldrake:
"Thus we have arrived at a significant moment" -- with the development of probability theory and, soon, quantum computing -- "in the history of ideas -- the moment when the scope of our understanding begins to be fully universal. Up to now, all our understanding has been about some aspect of reality, untypical of the whole. In the future it will be about a unified conception of reality, [that spinning top,] all explanations will be understood against the backdrop of universality, and every new idea will automatically tend to illuminate not just a particular subject, but, to varying degrees, all subjects. The dividend of understanding that we shall eventually reap from this last great unification may far surpass that yielded by any previous one. For we shall see that it is not only science, but also potentially the far reaches of philosophy, logic and mathematics, ethics, politics and aesthetics; perhaps everything that we currently understand, and probably much that we do not yet understand." (Deutsch, "The Theory of Everything," in The Fabric of Reality, at p. 29.)
Mind and world are described, again, as mirrors set facing each other which is to describe the postmodern condition:
"The very existence of general explanatory theories implies that disparate objects and events are physically alike in some ways. The light reaching us from distant galaxies is, after all, only light, but it looks to us like galaxies. Thus reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artifacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical. [Immanuel Kant] In those symbols -- in our planetariums, books, films and computer memories, and in our brains -- there are images of physical reality at large, images not just of the appearance of objects, but of the structure of reality. There are laws and explanations, reductive and emergent. There are descriptions and explanations of the Big Bang and subnuclear particles and processes; there are mathematical abstractions; fictions; art; morality; shadow photons; [DiCaprio/Cobb?] parallel universes. To the extent that these symbols, images and theories are true -- that is, they resemble in appropriate respects the concrete or abstract things they refer to -- that existence gives reality a new sort of self-similarity, self-similarity we call knowledge." (Deutsch, "Criteria for Reality," in The Fabric of Reality, at pp. 95-96. "Gravity?")
This dialectical form of transcendental realism/idealism (Roy Bashkar) amounts to much the same as scientific phenomenological-hermeneutics as outlined beautifully in this movie through the symbol of a spinning top.
"The symbol gives rise to thought," as Paul Ricoeur has taught us. The deployment of master symbols and their use in defense against governmental efforts at manipulation is an unexplored aspect of the continuing controversy over subliminal conditioning or "inception." ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
III.
Scientists and others speak of the "many minds" or mentalistic interpretation of quantum theory. (Octavio Paz, David Deutsch) Religious persons speak of "God." However, the insight is very similar for both types of persons. Mind is required to hold intellectual order in place. You are "Inception," as you experience the movie or through your interactions with the work because you are changed by the movie and your accounts of the movie to others changes their ways of seeing "Inception." If scientists are to be believed, the same is true of what is laughingly called "Reality." We change reality, even as reality changes us. This is another way of describing the unitary message of the great religions concerning the experience of God. ("Is this atheism's moment?")
"Ontology" (the study of the ultimate nature of reality in metaphysics) is "bracketed" or set aside for viewers experiencing the movie. (Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer) The spinning top is the "hidden variable" in quantum mechanics to which David Bohm referred in his discussions with Albert Einstein. Orson Wells calls it "Rosebud" the hidden and then exploding symbol that keeps "Citizen Kane" unified, as a character and in terms of that classic movie. "Rosebud" is the symbol of what mattered in a life as that life ended. William Randolph Hearst on whom "Kane" was based, used this term, "Rosebud," to describe a portion of his wife's anatomy. This cannot be "verified" empirically. Deeper levels of reality explain what appears mysterious to us, except when it comes to women, of course, where one is simply faced with a "conundrum" (as it were) that is irresolvable. "Rosebud," indeed. (Gore Vidal)
Time is the liquid in which this cinematic experience floats for the viewer. Ironically, levels of reality are in tension, once again, because it may take years to complete a film that audiences will enjoy over two-and-a-half hours. Time orders weave together in "Inception." This is true within the cinematic text and outside of that text, for us, as viewers. ("A Review of the t.v. Show, 'Alice'" and "Time is the Fire in Which We Burn.")
A field is established for interaction. We are shaped, subconsciously, by the movie and the movie changes based on how we see it, with some people seeing more and others less of what is on-screen. This is a dialectic without termination. The movie is always new for somebody. The narrative, then, in which we are -- you can call it God, if you like -- is increasingly elastic today, protean, variable, yet still real and true, even necessarily true. To hold these ideas in place the image of the spinning top serves as a Sufi device for disorienting and refocusing the mind. This achievement of dislocation is the traditional role of madness as a journey in human experience aimed at integration of the fragmented self. For this reason, psychological dislocations from normality were sought by mystics, great scientists, and many artists throughout human history as their chosen "doorways" to illumination. ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Philip K. Dick's great subject is this boundary between sanity and madness:
" ... we have entered the landscape depicted by Richard Condon in his terrific novel The Manchurian Candidate: Not only can delusions and hallucinations be induced ["incepted"] in virtually any person, but the added horror of 'posthypnotic suggestion' gets thrown in for good measure ... and, by the Pavlov Institute, all this for clearly worked-out political purposes. I don't think I'm wandering into fantasy here, because recall: Freud originally became involved in a form of psychotherapy that utilized hypnosis as its cardinal tool. In other words, all modern depth psychology -- that which postulates some region of the mind unavailable to the person's conscious self, and which, on many an occasion, can preempt the self -- grows from observation of individuals acting out of complete convictions and perceptions and motivations implanted by 'suggestion' during the hypnotic state. Suggestion? How weak a word and how little it conveys compared to the experience itself. [Forced hypnosis is a kind of violation comparable to rape.] I've undergone it and it is, beyond doubt, the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me.) ..." (Philip K. Dick, "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, at pp. 169-170.)
Hypnosis in the wrong hands can cripple or kill victims by destroying their lives as well as minds as the ultimate form of "inception." Medical techniques should not be seen as "weapons" to injure people in order to serve political objectives, or as a way of keeping victims as personal experimental animals or slaves, much less for purposes of interrogation or investigation of innocent persons. Psychologists agree:
" ... the neo-Jungian or metanoia journey construed madness as an inner journey, [a kind of 'leap of faith" or "fall,"] or one occurring in 'inner space,' rather than as a social artifact occurring in the social domain. In his own words: 'This journey is experienced as going further in',' as going back through one's personal life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even further into the realm of animals, vegetables and minerals."
Professor Burston associates Jung's theory with the works of Foucault, Laing, then Lacan:
" ... Lacan said the goal of analysis was to deconstruct the ego, rather than to support and strengthen it, [the opposite of adjustment or normalization,] as Freud and his followers had enjoined. This therapeutic objective echoes the ancient Gnostic view that all but a handful of cogniscenti fundamentally misrecognize themselves and their condition. They imagine that they are free, that they know who they are, but their sense of identity is a chimera born of unconscious subjection." (Burston, "Normality and the Numinous," in The Crucible of Experience, at pp. 121-122.)
"Inception" like all excellent art is designed to make us free, to disturb us, to be unclassifiable and not easily absorbed. If the movie bothered you, if you found yourself arguing about what it all meant, then it "worked" as drama and belongs with several of the great films invoked during the course of the "story." I regret that the numerous defacements and vandalisms of this essay or other attempts to injure me will be interpreted in any way as discouraging people from seeing the film. The hostilities reflected in these tactics are directed at me because of my opinions and comments, not at anyone associated with "Inception." ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")
"Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, [homecoming or fusion with divinity,] the unitive knowledge of the imminent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle -- the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: 'How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?" (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, at pp. IX-X.)
Conclusion.
"A labyrinthine human being never seeks the truth, but -- whatever he may try to tell us -- always and only his Adriadne." -- Friedrich Nietzsche. (Krell, Post-Ponements, at p. 15.)
The review in the Times missed many or most of these important themes of the film. The newspaper's critic, A.O. Scott, offered some "conclusory" and dismissive remarks. She also failed to detect nearly all of the cinematic allusions and references in "Inception":
"Freud believed that dreams were compounded out of the primal matter of the unconscious and the prosaic events of daily life. If he [?] were writing now, [Freud lived into the era of cinema and placed films within his theory of art as displacement,] he [?] would have to acknowledge that they [films? or dreams?] are also for many of us, made of movies."
Hollywood has been called: "The Factory of Dreams." Hence, this film which aligns dreams and art in a view closer to Jung's analytical psychology than to Freud's psychoanalysis posits that the unconscious speaks through dreams or art (equally) because both are externalizations of the "powers of the psyche" (Joseph Campbell) that allow persons to cope with life's transitions and crises, like the death of a beloved spouse. We see Cobb and Mal as an old couple, then enter the hero's mind, possibly during his final seconds, as he comes to terms with recollections of this woman and love that are "now" lost to death's dateless night. "This was our dream world for thirty years," Cobb says. This is to describe a marriage. (Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, at pp. 231-267.)
"Film as dream, film as music." Igmar Berman writes of themes similar to those which feature in Mr. Nolan's contemporary movies: "No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. [A spinning top?] At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind on one frame after another, see the almost imperceptible changes, wind faster -- a movement." (Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, at pp. 74-75.)
This narrative called "Inception" is about the loss of one person and self in shifting temporal orders together with the forlorn partner's suffering and pain. This is called "being-there" for the other in the mode of love and compassion. The final image of Mr. DiCaprio's character evokes the compassionate Buddha as love for all suffering children. Please see the film, "Taken." This grieving for a child is a theme of Tim Burton's not always sanguine view of childhood. Is the frightened and threatened child with a great sense of humor in Mr. Burton's films, himself? I certainly understand that child that was (is?) Mr. Burton. (Paul Ricoeur, Keiji Nishitani)
"Inception" is aimed at entertaining audiences and being successful commercially. It is also a movie that helps persons to live through and understand the language of the "collective subconscious" -- by sharing in a dream with these artists -- in order to meet the challenge of individuation so that we can bear the encounter with evil and death. Seeing "Inception" is the meeting with Mr. DiCaprio's "persona" that matters not encountering the man who happens to be an actor in Hollywood.
Nietzsche describes this process of self-narration as "becoming the person you are." Jung spoke of individuation towards mortality. "Inception" is as good as Blade Runner and other films that are now seen as classics. I believe that, in time, this fine film by Mr. Nolan will take its place with those few other movies that endure in our new century. Mr. DiCaprio's way of becoming himself is through the externalization of his inner journey in his art or self-narrative: compare "Shutter Island" with "Inception."
No film can "resolve" philosophical issues that have concerned humanity for thousands of years. This movie dramatizes such issues in archetypal forms to make them accessible to all kinds of people who may not otherwise think about such questions. This is a valuable service. "Inception" is a work of public theology that is non-sectarian. The Cartesian spectator in the theater of the mind is you, the audience member. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
"Inception" is a postmodernist text that is highly self-aware and self-questioning because it poses the ultimate riddle of cinema: What is movie reality? What is any reality? What is this "dream" (nightmare?) called "history" from which we cannot awake? (Karl Marx) Personal identity is a narrative which we create or enter through interacting with another "project in time." A personal journey is a project in time. A movie is also a project in time. Interactions that are interpersonal are also intertextual. Experiencing art is a kind of energy exchange, a form of love-making or love-sharing, which happens or does not happen to a different degree for each viewer of the work. There is art in shaping experience into a narrative by making a movie or a personal identity. Everyone is and must be an artist to some degree:
"Accident engages the question of the truth-status of 'fictions,' and therefore of the truth-status of what we call 'reality.' Consider, for instance, the problem of who is supposed to have written the text we have just finished reading. [Who "made" the movie "Inception"?] Is it Charlie, the novelist, or Stephen, who looks remarkably like Charlie?"
Postmodernist artists are suspicious of --
" -- how our everyday experiences are rationalized, plotted, from the moment they slide away from us. Stephen claims: 'You live in the present, which does not exist; it exists in memory.' And Accident argues that what is real is not a text [by creating a text] -- for it is essentially non-narrative, accidental. [A "Memento"?] But Mosley adds the proviso that as 'reality' becomes past it is accessible only as a 'text' ... when it is known through episodic memory, in story-telling." (Stephen Weisenberger, "Afterword," in Nicholas Mosley, Accident, at pp. 195-196.)
Story-telling means objectivity, cohesiveness, unity. Thematic unity can be spiritual, as in the "unity of the Holy Spirit." This phenomenon called "Inception" is real and not real, yes-and-no, the center that is everywhere. (Kaballah) The least significant aspect of the movie from the "point of view" of audiences is "technical." The ideas in the work -- this is and probably will be true of anything that Mr. Nolan creates -- are as ancient as the Buddhist doctrine that the world is "Maya," illusion. In Buddhist lore: Illusion is a woman. Truth is also a woman. ('The Fountain': A Movie Review" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")
The film's gestures in the direction of Akira Kurosawa's interpretations of Shakespeare and Yukio Mishima's "Temple of the Golden Pavillion" lead to the wisdom of the great Kyoto school of philosophers. People who like "Inception" should see Takashi Yamazaki's brilliant, "Returner." Kyoto is mentioned in the script. In light of the relationship between Cobb and the architect, the lore of knights and squires, Samurai and their "youthful assistants" should be kept in mind:
"On the one hand, the thing-in-itself is truly itself on this field, for in contrast with what is called objective reality, it has shaken off its ties with the subject. This does not mean, however, that it is utterly unknowable. For reason, it is indeed unknowable; but when we turn and enter into the field of emptiness, where the thing-in-itself is always and ever manifest as such, its realization is able to come about. On the other hand, on this field the being of a thing is at one with emptiness, and thus radically illusory. It is not, however, an illusory appearance in the sense that dogmatism uses the word [illusory] to denote what is not objectively real. Neither is it a phenomenon in the sense, say, that critical philosophy uses the word to distinguish it from the thing-in-itself. A thing is truly an illusory appearance at the precise point that it is truly a thing-in-itself." (Keiji Nishitani, "The Standpoint of 'Sunyata,' in Religion and Nothingness, at p. 139.)
The audience's "role" is written into "Inception." ("Master and Commander.") Your reactions are necessary at key points in the story for the movie to succeed, a movie whose mysteries also create room for unanticipated developments or reactions by (and within) your mind. If you see "Inception," then you can say that you were in a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.
If a movie must now be thought of as a whole "gestalt experience," then every movie must be supplied with an "emergent principle of totality" ("Soft Chaos Theory") -- say, elegance, beauty, or simplicity -- in its dream logic. Curiously, it seems that "Reality" also prefers beautiful solutions by creating intelligible order with your help. Spin that top.
Sources:
Periodical Reviews and Articles:
A.O. Scott, "This Time the Dream's on Me," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. C1.
David Denby, "Dream Factory," in The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, at p. 78.
Stephen Witty, "Building on a Dream," in The Sunday Star Ledger, Sec. 4, July 11, 2010, at p. 1. (Mr. Adubato?)
Dennis Overbye, "Is Gravity Real? A Scientist Takes On Newton," in The New York Times, Science Times, July 13, 2010, at p. D1. (The "ideal" nature of gravity and its "illusory" properties are set forth, allegedly, by daring physicist and Kantian, Erik Verlinde.)
Benedict Carey, "Columbia Lab Halts Research Over Injections," in The New York Times, July 17, 2010, at p. A1. (Columbia University scientists halted research that involved secret injections of harmful substances on unknowing human experimental subjects. Inceptions? My experiences of torture, as someone who has never been diagnosed with a mental illness, are worse than the horrors described in this article.)
Richard Perez-Pena, "New Jersey is Sued Over the Forced Medication of Patients at Psychiatric Hospitals," in The New York Times, August 4, 2010, at p. A15. (Involuntary chemical lobotomies inflicted on unsuspecting victims, many of them women -- Jennifer Velez? -- who may have been sexually and otherwise abused. How many of you in New Jersey had sex with Marilyn Straus? New Jersey is accused of "suspending people's civil rights without due process." Many victims are made worse and some are destroyed by this practice. "Jennifer Velez is a 'Dyke Magnet!'" New Jersey may have surpassed Libyia in violating human rights.)
Donald G. McNeil Jr., "U.S. Infected Guatemalans With Syphilis in '40s," in The New York Times, October 2, 2010, at p. A1. (U.S. physicians experimented on unwilling victims by infecting them with syphilis, as they experiment today with techniques of psychological torture in New Jersey.)
Charlie Savage & Scott Shane, "Bush Aide Calls Some Methods Used by C.I.A. Unauthorized," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. A12. (Circuit Judge Bybee, an architect of America's torture policy, regrets being "inconvenienced" by an inquiry. "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?")
Nina Bernstein, "U.S. Court Orders Safety, Not Deportation, for Woman Facing Torture," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. A20. (Person facing less severe hardships than are deemed legal by Mr. Bybee, or routine treatment of the mentally ill in N.J., will be given asylum in the U.S.)
Anthony Thomasini, "Cause for Worry: A Deep Drink of Bliss, With Confusion for a Chaser," in The New York Times, Arts Section, August 3, 2010, at p. C2. (Review of Gluck's Opera "Orfeo ed Euridice.")
Helen Vendler, "Science and the Poet," in The New Republic, June 24, 2010, at p. 28. (Warum schriftlos leben.)
"The Film Issue," in Granta 86, Summer, 2004 (Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Sajat Ray). http://www.granta.com/
Cinema referenced in this work by Christopher Nolan:
1. "Citizen Kane."
2. "A Clockwork Orange."
3. "2001, A Space Odyssey."
4. "Pan's Labyrinth."
5. "Orpheus/Blood of a Poet/Beauty and the Beast."
6. "Apocalypse Now."
7. "The Matrix Trilogy."
8. "Out of the Past."
9. "Casino Royale."
10. "Vertigo/North by Northwest/The Lady Vanishes."
11. "Blade Runner."
12. "Wings of Desire."
13. "Ikiru/Seven Samurai/Ran/Rashomon."
14. "L'Age D'Or."
15. "Returner."
16. "Dark City."
Selected books I have relied upon in writing this essay:
Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement (New York & London: Penguin, 2003).
John Barth, Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 1984-1994 (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1995).
Roy Bashkar, Plato, Etc.,: Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (London & New York: Verso, 1994). ("Explanations and the Laws of Nature," esp. p. 35.)
Igmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1988). (Joan Tate, trans.)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964).
John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, eds., Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985).
Daniel Burston, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
A.S. Byatt, Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Times (London: Vintage, 1997). (The Nolan Brothers?)
Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992). (Particularly good discussion of dissipation theories.)
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1949), (2nd Ed., 1968).
Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Carl Jung (London: New York: Penguin, 1976).
Albert Camus, The Fall (New York: Vintage, 1956).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). (Analogy to Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of belief in writings about God.)
Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998).
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 7, Modern Philosophy, Part I, Fitche to Hegel (New York: Image Books, 1963).
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 8, Modern Philosophy, Part I, Bentham to Russell (British Empiricism and the Idealist Movement in Britain) (New York: Image Books, 1966).
Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (London: Penguin, 1997).
Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1995).
Thomas Doherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 1993).
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983).
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1966).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973).
Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). (See the first letter from Rene Magritte to Michel Foucault in the Appendix.)
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). (Robert Bernasconi, ed.)
Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995). (" ... consciousness is the true foundation of all we know or perceive.")
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London & New York: Penguin, 2005).
George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe: The Life and Mind of the Cosmos (New York: William Morrow, 1988).
John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: mcMillan, 1966).
Ted Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper & Row, 1946).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1932). (La vie marche vers les utopies. -- Nicolas Berdiaeff's opening quote.)
Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993). (Focus on the Romantics is perceptive and sympathetic.)
Mark Johnson, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry (Oxford & Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Carl G. Jung, et als., Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell-Laurel, 1964).
Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Leszek Kolakowski, Religion: If There is No God ... (Indiana: St. Augustine Press, 2001).
Lawrence M. Kraus, Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, From Plato to String Theory (By Way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and the Twilight Zone (New York & London: Penguin, 2005).
David Farrell Krell, Post-Ponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). ("Adriana" ... is the problem of the "mask that looks upon itself as a mask ..." pp. 15-31, and Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask.")
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1961). (Schizophrenia as defense and liberation in environments of forced encounter with extreme evil, like Auschwitz, that shatter the looking glass of identity.)
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980).
Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005). (Behaviorist "Inceptions"?)
C.C. Lin & L.A. Segel, Mathematics Applied to Deterministic Problems in the Natural Sciences (Philadelphia: Society for Applied Mathematics, 1988). ("Tensor Theory," especially so-called "Cartesian" tensors analogous to "leaping" from one dream to another.)
Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (London: Penguin, 1984). (Letters have been deleted from this author's name and defacements will probably continue in the future.)
Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1991).
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (New York: Pantheon, 2005). ("Dreams on Film.")
Colin McGinn, Mindfucking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation (London: Acumen, 2008). ("Error" insertions, alterations of the alphabetical order or spacing of titles in this bibliography, computer crime, obstructions of my cable signal, harassments intended to injure a person forced to make corrections many times.)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964). (" ... movies offer as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams.")
Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking Press, 1971).
Libuse Lukas Miller, In Search of the Self: The Individual in the Thought of Kierkegaard (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962). ("Leap of Faith.")
Nicholas Mosley, Accident (Illinois: Dalkey Press, 1965).
Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters (New York: Random House, 1990). (One of the great novels of the last several decades in which "key" passages are echoed in the dialogue of "Inception.")
Nicholas Mosley, Inventing God (Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2003).
Nicholas Mosley, Experience and Religion (London: Stodder & Houghton, 1965). ("Anyone can spin any theory ..." see page 39.)
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California, 1982).
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
Olivier Pauvet, Noir: A Novel (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2005).
Octavio Paz, Alternating Current (New York: Arcade, 1990). ("Notes on La Realidad y El Deseo.")
Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others (New York: Arcade, 1990) ("Labyrinth of Solitude," Reflections on "Jean Paul Sartre -- Memento.")
William Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason (New York: Anchor, 1976), ("The Maze and the Mystery" or "The Paradoxes of Completeness in the Labyrinths of Ts'ui Pen.")
Douglas Shrader, ed., The Fractal Self (New York: Oneonta Philosophy Center, 2000).
June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology (New York: Anchor, 1973).
Ninian Smart, The Philosophy of Religion (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). (What is reality "piercing" -- inception -- to achieve the "religious ultimate?")
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (New York: Grove Press, 1972).
Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001). ("Closed Loops.")
Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
James Waddell, Erotic Perception: Philosophical Portraits (New York: University Press of America, 1997). (How heterosexual men see women.)
Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965). (See Ronald Penrose's painting "The Invisible Isle.")
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1994).
Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses: Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Andrew Wiles, "Modular Elliptic Curves and Fermat's Last Theorem," in Annals of Mathematics 142 (1995), pp. 443-551. (Fusion approach unifying the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture establishing a dialectic between "elliptical equations" and "modular forms" in order to "prove" Fermat's Last Theorem. ... Every woman is an "elliptical equation.")
Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor, "Ring Theoretic Properties of Certain Heckle Algebras," in Annals of Mathematics 142 (1995), pp. 553-572. (They had to get the kinks out of the first formulation of the proof by what Goro Shimura described as a "more elegant and beautiful" statement of the field or negative proof of Fermat -- interestingly, in terms of the movie "Inception" -- these approaches are called "phantom equations" and are almost always captured in feminine metaphors. "Mal" is the shadow equation of "Cobb." Each of the movie characters is a shadow equation for the actor playing the part.)
Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). (Williams comments on P.F. Strawson's "Individuals.")
Colin Wilson, The Essential Colin Wilson (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1986). ("The Ladder of Selves.")
Richard Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Away: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994). (See what I mean?)
Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
