Inception: icons and meta

[bennet_7]

Is there anything better than a DVD rip leaking a month before the official release?
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Well, Christmas is pretty good. So is winning the lottery. And getting into grad school (which is what I should have been trying to do instead of making icons).

Still, I was pretty pleased when Inception appeared on the internets last weekend as I've been enjoying the hell out of the fandom. Rewatching the film, the flaws I mentioned previously (characterisation, dialogue: Nolan, get better at these!) are still there but they don't diminish my enjoyment of the film overmuch and hopefully it won't fall apart the more I view it.


The quality of this copy isn't the greatest but it was decent enough for me to waste a couple of hours making icons.




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Alternates

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Usual rules apply: comment, credit, don't hotlink, don't re-militarize the Rhineland, be nice to your mother, there is no rule six, live every week like it's shark week.

Caps are my own. My resources.


If you'll allow me a moment's self-indulgence, I'd like to discuss two of these icons. Firstly, this one which, let me just say, there is an essay and a fic on the parallels between Jane Eyre and Inception and husbands who lock up their crazy wives and the young women who discover them. However, I find the idea of Ariadne as Jane squicky as hell so if you are tempted to fic the idea, please have her walk a different path.

Secondly, this was a joke on my part because this scene (where she asks whose subconscious they're going into) is one of the two clunkiest exposition scenes in the film (I think the other is when they get to the third level and she finally gets around to asking if they're killing parts of Fischer's subconscious when they kill a projection). But having thought over it a littlelot, I don't think Ariadne is just the exposition fairy and she has a lot more agency in the film than I first thought. It's her idea to go to limbo after Cobb and Eames have given up, she then shoots Mal, and she gets herself and Fischer back to safety rather than risk more time in limbo helping Cobb with Saito. Honestly, I think she'd shoot the tyres and that's the highest compliment that I have for fictional characters.

Really, someone needs to write about the representation of women in Nolan's films in general. I don't think he's misogynistic but I do think he's sometimes a little neglectful. Ariadne's something of an exception in that she isn't a love interest or a love interest who dies, although YMMV if you're wearing shipper goggles (Natalie from Memento also, maybe, because her relationship with Leonard wasn't really romantic and I haven't seen Insomnia so I can't comment on that (but I do know that Nolan didn't write that script)). I don't see any reason why Eames or Yusuf couldn't have been female (I do think Arthur and Saito needed to be the same gender as Cobb or his close relationships with them might have been hard for the audience to view as strictly platonic and that would have lessened the importance/impact of the loss of Mal (if there's someone waiting in the wings, as it were)). I'm not saying that Nolan needs to shoehorn women in for the sake of flag waving feminism and he's certainly not the biggest offender out there, but considering he makes such big movies that also garner critical respect, it would be nice to see more women in them, doing things other than dying. I hope Ariadne was a step in a better direction.

Am I expecting too much? Is it a day ending in "y"?

Comments

[filmophilegirl.livejournal.com]

Yea, I do hope that one day Nolan will make a great film with a lead female instead of a male. He was close to making one, called The Keys to the Street which had a female lead but the screenplay was terrible and I'm glad he never made it.

But I think a lot of movies, not just Nolan's movies, have more supporting male characters than females. Like Harry Potter for instance, we have Hermione and Ginny but the rest of the majority of sides and leads are male.

[bennet-7.livejournal.com]

Yea, I do hope that one day Nolan will make a great film with a lead female instead of a male. He was close to making one, called The Keys to the Street which had a female lead but the screenplay was terrible and I'm glad he never made it.

Really? How fascinating. Maybe he needed to give it ten years work, like Inception.

But I think a lot of movies, not just Nolan's movies, have more supporting male characters than females. Like Harry Potter for instance, we have Hermione and Ginny but the rest of the majority of sides and leads are male.

It's a thing with the majority of movies, certainly, and I could write screeds about most writers and directors but I brought it up with Nolan because he was on my mind and I dearly love pulling apart works and artists I admire. But actually, with Harry Potter, I think the women put up a good show. Yes, probably still more men than women but you've got Molly Weasley, Professor McGonagall, Professor Trelawney, Luna, Cho, Tonks, Lavender, and Fleur on the side of good, and a sliding scale of evil from Aunt Petunia to Narcissa and Bellatrix. Not all are as deeply fleshed out, but they generally represent different conceptions of womanhood,if you know what I mean.

[filmophilegirl.livejournal.com]

Yea, I agree.