Pursuit of Happiness

What is the point of having an imagination, I ask you, if the only thing that can be imagined is mayhem, perpetrated without regard for even the appearance of human life?
Reviews of Christopher Nolan's Inception; Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime and Samuel Maoz's Lebanon.

Stuart Klawans, The Nation

From Leonardo DiCaprio, speaking in the respectable blockbuster of summer 2010, we learn that no virus multiplies more explosively than an idea; in which case, I'd like to know why the Centers for Disease Control allowed all those people to watch Inception. Lax government supervision of Christopher Nolan, whose credit will hereafter be changed in my book from "writer-director" to "primary vector," has allowed a fresh strain of twisted ideational RNA to burrow into the nervous systems of tens of millions of Americans, when they'd already been infected with that characteristic disorder of our time, Wachowski Syndrome.

It was, of course, through the authors of The Matrix that the virus became pandemic: the notion that you, hero, should feel free to use the snazziest conceivable arsenal to kill as many people as you like, because they're not real. Those human-shaped objects are just shades of an illusory world to which you owe not the slightest responsibility. In The Matrix, this dreamland was controlled by monsters from outer space, from whom Earth had to be liberated. In Inception, it is not quite controlled by corporate spies, and the liberation (for DiCaprio) requires the snapping of tentacles that are emotional rather than ickily extraterrestrial. And yet, in either case, the activity within the fantasy realm is exclusively a matter of bang! bang! kaboom!

More...