wildestranger | and spend the day there

I've been thinking that I should post more for a while now, but events (that is, students and marking and work) have conspired to keep me from doing so. Now, however, I have some free time and thus can share with you all my very important thoughts on Tom Hardy. Aren't you glad? *g*

And no, I'm not even kidding because due to my electricity being cut off several times this week, I've been spending a lot of time watching things on my laptop, including, yesterday, Inception.

I'm kind of interested in the fact that this film has gathered so many different responses from fandom - I have friends who think it's the best film ever, friends who thought it was a bit rubbish, and friends who absolutely hated it. I am somewhat puzzled by all of these reactions, but they show the different ways in which we approach films with fannish content. And of course, Inception is a bit peculiar in that the fandom tends to privilege characters whose narratives are not privileged in the film.

This is actually something I like about the fandom because it shows the extent to which we are a transformative community - that we value banter and dynamics over manpain and Heavy Anvils of Storytelling, for example, rather than simply accept what the film tells us, and that we put that banter at the centre of our interpretative community.

This makes, I think, Inception a good film for fannish purposes. There is the overarching Hollywood plot and a serious hero with serious manpain, but the other characters are not subsumed into this narrative and allowed only a supportive role. There are tiny moments of characterisation for all of them and that's what makes this an interesting world, and also, what makes me want to rewatch this film. Other than, you know, Tom Hardy being hot and stuff.

For example, Eames speaks with an accent that sounds less like a real regional accent than a fictional posh British accent, intended for drawing room sarcasm in Oscar Wilde plays or Regency romances. But his vocabulary varies between 'piss off' and 'condescension', and there is a sort of deliberate performativity in how he arranges his words - as if he's taking the piss out of the fact that he's playing both a vaguely colonial British expat and a bit of rough at the same time. And this changes between Mombasa and Paris, of course, as he sheds one role and settles more fully into Tantalising Arthur mode. Think of when he's talking to Cobb about the job, and goes from political and anti-monopolistic motivations to 'hrrmph, Arthurr'. There is this wonderfully gleeful rumble in Tom Hardy's voice, and then the almost parodic lecherousness of 'Arthur', as if he's telling himself how he's going to entertain himself on the job by doing a mock-performance of leering. I don't know to what extent that's Christopher Nolan's script or Tom Hardy being a clever actor, but it's there and it makes this a more interesting film.

Or think of Ariadne, and her constant poking at Cobb. It reads as part infatuation, part newbie trying to give herself a place in the group, and serves to give us lots of information about past events. It can seem sort of heavily-anvilled narrative, but it also serves as Ariadne's characterisation. It tells us that despite her attraction to Cobb, she is keen to give him shit for being a dick. Most of her conversations with him consist of her criticising him, arguing with him, or being angry with him. I like the idea that while she does feel some interest in him, this is her way of telling herself no, don't go there, this one will fuck you up - she is not naive enough to accept his stupidity.

Or even smaller things, like Fischer asking Saito if he's all right in the third level. This is something that strikes me with every viewing - okay, there's this guy who's a serious businessman, doesn't really like talking to strangers and knows that he'll get away with showing it (see the Blonde, and Cobb in the plane), is mostly concerned with his own grief and issues. Yet he takes the time to ask if some guy whom he's never met, whom hasn't even been introduced to as far as we know, is okay. It would not have hurt the plot if that moment hadn't been there, and we are not being asked to care that much about Fischer anyway, but it's there to give us something more, a wee moment of connection between the two people whose entanglement with each other serves as the plot premise of the film but who we never see interacting otherwise.

Things like this make it a rich viewing experience for me, and I like to see them juxtaposed with Cobb's story which all about intense faces, Serious Issues and no subtlety. And then if you consider the questions of reality vs. dreaming in the film, it raises even more possibilities - is Cobb's narrative so simplistic and heavily-anvilled because it is a dream, or just because his monomania makes it impossible for him to conceive of the world with more complexities? I love that it includes different kinds of story-telling into the narrative, and that there is space within the film to criticise Leonardo de Caprio's serious manpain - that one can argue that the film does this itself.

What do you think?