AUTO-AUTEURISM

Historically, your abuelo's auteurism polemicized that that film object that the middlebrow thought was JUNK, the second or third rank product generated by the studio machinery, was really the work of an individual artist. These artists themselves, more intimate with the way the sausages were ground, often denied their artistic condition -- their scars and humiliations were still fresh wounds, and any autonomy from what they often saw as hackwork could only be bought with occasional success --  but at the same time, being artists, they loved the attention that was lavished on them by the abuelos. It was infinitely harder for the White Elephant broker to ever find his way to the love of posterity. Smart people, for this reason, cannot give George Stevens his due.

This termitic class of auteurs today we might find among people like Sheldon Lettich, Jay Roach, Sidney J. Furie, Yamada Yoji, etc.

What we often have today is that the middlebrow geniuses, (Tarantino, Aronofsky, Scorcese, Nolan, Boyle, etc...) who often have solid artistic credentials from the hardscrabble universitas indiecae, but in contrast, whose films, almost by definition, have that pretentious air-sucking quality (The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical, sits heavily, etc...) but also have baroque & cannily pre-meditated termitic spaces in them. The infestation is always under control. Incoherence is always a PRODUCT in these films.

There is no terrifying Farberian purity here because the audience WANTS a White Elephant disguised as a termite.  Only THAT can inflame their callow seriousness.

What's a poor schmuck to do...?

Self-consciously INDICATE the termitic spaces with a flourish, which rather defeats the purpose...but the kids eat it up anyway.

The ideal solution would be another auteur assigned scenes at random to work against the grain of the baggy monster. But that would be just re-starting the dream maquila all over again.

MERCURY THEATRE

Nolan's latest radio drama comes with his usual slovenly "based on an executive's notes" action sequences, lazy-ass father-son lacrimal porn, a terrifying array of hmmm-that-might-be-interesting thematic concerns, knowing "auto-auteurist" references to his and a million other films, and paint by numbers videogame architecture. In other words, he delivered what was expected.

And the problem with these overstuffed lazy-boys that blockbusters have become is that they have too many fulcrum points for anyone to care about any of them.

No ragged hobbyhorses to ride out of the theatre. But enough exposition to kill all the horses of the emperor's terra-cotta army.

The exposition is what is interesting here. There's a Wellesian film about storytelling trapped inside of this one somewhere. Nolan's artistic failure in this instance is his pedantry -- he can't resist closing every gap in meaning -- jamming it with more explanation. He is so worried about confusing the audience with his nonsense that he keeps adding more.

Which makes it rather funny that he's intentionally flubbed his last bit of magic: the reveal that our protagonist is a Quijote, a madman, almost exactly like the Leo of Shutter Island. Who is, in Nolan's defense, a twin of Leonard in Memento. But Nolan swallows this final triumphalist note with a weird, guilty legerdemain. A psychotic who has preferred the dream life to reality (everything he accuses his wife of is true of him) suddenly receives the stamped visa back to "reality". WTF?

The infection of the one film by the other is what makes this one rise above mediocrity. Inception fights off the contamination, suffers it like swine flu, to deserved box office gold. There is a strange beauty achieved in the flurried interpenetration of images.

Instead of doing something really interesting by making the REAL WORLD drab, unsentimental and anti-magical, and showing us the character's despair -- Nolan goes with a trick ending that certifies the audience's growing desperation that nothing matters. Except the smiles of children.

KITSCH NIHILISM.

The Dream is Real. That shit sells itself.