Avatar vs. Inception: Two very different takes on the power of escapism
Avatar/Inception trailer mashup
At first glance, Avatar and Inception might seem entirely unrelated; the former is a CGI theme-park-ride with
a boilerplate going-native plot, the latter a brainy and zany
big-budget puzzle that's as much a meditation on storytelling as it is a
summer popcorn film. But in fact they stake out opposite positions on
an issue near and dear to sci-fi fans everywhere: the power of escapism
and the value of reality.
The disturbing part of Avatar
(both the film and the phenomenon) was its wholesale contempt for
reality and embrace of escape. Here, the journey of protagonist Jake
Sully (Sam Worthington) started with all the makings of a tragic arc. We
first meet him as a wheelchair-bound Marine, living in the shadow of
his golden-boy twin brother. But once Jake's in the avatar program, he
spends more and more time with his consciousness projected into a
godlike blue Na'vi body, heroically leaping across treetops and taming
feral Toruks -- while in reality, his own crippled, anonymous body lies
passively in an electrode-studded coffin. Instead of making difficult
choices and suffering and growing, Sully manages to enter the Warcraft-like
world of his avatar full-time, freeing himself from his earthly bonds
and leaving his "real" body and life behind. Escapism is his salvation.
In a disturbing parallel, Avatar's 3-D projection of Pandora was
hailed as better-than-real, and stories abounded of rapt moviegoers
facing withdrawal and depression when having to return from the film to
real life. 2010 was beginning to feel like the year when reality just
wasn't good enough.
Now let's turn our attention to Inception (some
minor spoilers here, but we'll tiptoe around anything major). This film
shares many of the themes that have come to define Christopher Nolan's
body of work -- guilt, grief, obsession -- but in the case of Inception, escape from
reality is the glue that binds them together. For Dom Cobb (Leonardo
DiCaprio), dreams let him cling to an illusion of his wife, children,
and even happiness. He wallows in this fantasy world, even knowing that
it is also what took away all three. He knows that by endlessly reliving
his past he is blocking any possible future. In the end he must delve
deeper into dreams only because it offers the possibility of regaining
some of what he's lost in the real world. The heroes can't be killed in
their dreams but in the film's giant caper they face a danger far worse
-- of burrowing too deep and going mad, unable to get out. The hell you
go to in Inception doesn't make you a slave; it makes you God over an empty world.
The characters of Inception
live under constant guard against being unable to distinguish between
the dream and reality, clinging to their "totems" almost
superstitiously, the tiny pieces of reality that are truly their own.
Characters dread the possibility that they won't know whether they're
dreaming, or that they will know and won't be able to wake up. But they
expressed another fear, what I took to be their greatest fear, which was
that they would know they were trapped in a dream -- and they just
wouldn't care.
These two
opposing philosophies -- the value of the fantastic over the real, and
vice-versa -- even guided the production of the two films. In Avatar, James Cameron set out to take reality down a peg: repeating a trick he learned making the models believable in Aliens, he made the live-action look more CGI-like to make the CGI paired with it seem realistic. By contrast, Inception's
effects are most notable for how analog they are, with approaches
ranging from model shots to nitrogen-gas explosions to a
hundred-foot-long spinning hallway set that beat Joseph Gordon-Levitt to
a pulp.
Movies and games
just get progressively more immersive. Now as we start to hear stories
of gamers in China and Vietnam playing continuously for days before
dropping dead, phrases like "internet addiction" and "WoW intervention"
are starting to seem less and less silly. We can't predict how our
relationship with escapism will change, but it would be foolish to
assume that it won't. So if it does, how, and what does that mean for
us?
Avatar and Inception provide two diametrically
opposite answers. In one the escape is to freedom, to endless
stimulation, righteousness, community, even enlightenment. In the
other, escapism is really the path to a prison, cutting off or
destroying those you love, a place where you can lose everything
meaningful or even your very self. But if reality is defined as the
experience we share with others, then the most profound difference is
whether escaping is something we do together or alone. Because in Avatar
the ultimate escape is something that the nation shared as an audience
and Sully shared with the Na'vi. In Inception the ultimate escape means
being trapped endlessly inside yourself, leaving everything with any
meaning behind and being so alone it is indistinguishable from death.