The Inception Movie: Getting High and Not Getting High

INTRODUCTION

Inception is a movie about dreaming. Some reviews I’ve read or seen have said that the movie is “too complicated” or they (the reviewer) “didn’t understand.” This guy is my favorite:

I don’t think the movie is that complicated. People dream in the movie and sometimes they dream within dreams. There are four “levels” of dreaming in the movie. There is reality, dreamland 1, dreamland 2 within dreamland 1, dreamland 3 within dreamland 2 within dreamland 1, and dreamland 4 within dreamland 3 within dreamland 2 within dreamland 1. The end of the movie kind of makes you second guess whether the afore-enumerated hierarchy is correct or not, but I don’t want to think about that so I’m not going to.

GETTING HIGH, WATCHING INCEPTION

The day Inception came out, at 9 in the morning, I participated in a giant email thread with three of my friends about seeing the movie later that day. Two of those friends and I got tickets before it sold out, one friend didn’t. In the giant email thread, I said I really wanted to get high before the movie because I thought it was going to be a “spectacle” and being high would make it more of a spectacle.

Later that day, I bought weed from two obese Hispanic people in an apartment and, after that, I got high with one of the friends who I was going to see the movie with. The other friend didn’t want to get high.

We saw the movie at a large ‘megaplex’ in downtown Brooklyn. Both of my friends had printed out their tickets beforehand so they went ahead to the theater to get seats while I silently pressed buttons in a distracted manner on a kiosk in the lobby. I then remember riding something like 12-15 escalators to get to the theater. While on one of the escalators, two or three people with British accents said “excuse me” and “pardon me” as they moved quickly passed people on the escalator. When they were gone, a young African American woman turned to her friend and said in a mocking tone, “Pip pip cheerio!” and then, in an angry tone, “I’ve had enough of this ‘Spy Kids’ shit.” I stood behind them on the escalator feeling extremely confused for a moment before I felt myself grinning uncontrollably and laughing a little bit.

When I got to the theater, I found my friends looking around idly for seats. We sat in the second row because there were no other seats left. They talked about a funny thing that happened to them on the way to the theater which also involved a young African American woman saying something mean. Then the movie happened. There was a pretty sweet trailer for The Last Airbender, I think.

After the movie, we went to a bar and talked about the movie. The friend that got high with me and I both said we didn’t really like the movie because there seemed to be no ‘emotional motivation’ behind anything that the characters did. The motivation behind the inception was corporate sabotage, which is boring and stupid. The reason Leonardo DiCaprio’s character agreed to do the inception was to get back to his kids, who we didn’t get to see until the last five minutes of the movie and were just boring, stupid little kids. His character was also still in love with his dead wife, who was boring and stupid as well. These are things we said at the bar. I said the movie was pro-suicide and then I started laughing. I changed my mind and said I actually really liked Leonardo DiCaprio’s wife in the movie because all she wanted to do was commit suicide and she spent the entire movie trying to convince Leonardo DiCaprio to commit suicide with her. She ended up jumping out of a window while Leonardo DiCaprio watched. The friend who didn’t get high said he liked the movie.

WATCHING INCEPTION, NOT GETTING HIGH

I haven’t done this. I don’t know what this is like. From talking to people, though, it seems like people who don’t get high before seeing Inception tend to like the movie, while those who do get high seem to not like it that much. The people who don’t get high before it seem more willing to look past the weak overall plot and unsympathetic motivations to enjoy the movie on a more comprehensive, less questioning, almost visceral level. Sometimes these people will acknowledge the plot and motivation things as weaknesses of the movie, however, they will ultimately say things like “it didn’t bother me” or “I didn’t care about that.” I don’t know, seems weird. You’d think it would be the other way around. I’d go see Inception without smoking weed, but I don’t think I could live with myself being someone who has seen Inception more than once.