Dreamscapes

This weekend saw the opening of the much-anticipated action thriller, Inception - the biggest non-sequel, non-adaptation box office hit since... Avatar? Inception tells the story of a rogue group of good-looking "dream investigators" who pry the secrets of unsuspecting victims through their highly architectural dreams. Ellen Page, of Juno fame, plays the Paris architecture student charged with designing the labyrinthine (but rarely surreal) landscapes where the high-speed illusory pursuits take place. Among the backdrops for the action are a Soviet-era arctic military base, a placeless cosmopolitan hotel, and a post-apocalyptic Waikiki beach. While the majority of the plot occurs in an in-flight dream en route to Los Angeles, many of the shooting locations, where named and not, are within our city limits.

While Los Angeles is certainly not new to appearing on screen, her scenes in Inception are used not to establish any real life locale or support a preconceived stereotype about this city, but to represent a dreamscape - a building or a place so amorphous or unreal that we might conceive something similar in our own dreams. The architecture of Los Angeles has long been identifiable in this way: with its longs stretches of Wild Wild West ramshackle monotony punctuated by look-at-me displays of ostentatious if not always intelligent landmarks. Now, one of the film's shortfalls (spoiler alert) is that, aside from liberal shows of antigravity and a compellingly tensile Paris skyline, there are conspicuously few scenes that make full use of the absurdity and total unreality that we know dreams are so often capable of. But to the film's credit, a large part of its thrill is that we never quite know when we are in a dream and we are in reality - a testament to the frightening lucidity that we also know dreams are capable of.

Among the most identifiable of the Los Angeles shooting locations are a downtown street corner (Hope and Wilshire), the Music Center and DWP headquarters, and the sleek 2000 Ave of the Stars in Century City. The first of these is used to represent a presumably New York City street, lined with skyscrapers and filled with yellow taxi cabs. In fact, an entire chase seen is filmed at this intersection alone, but is meant to read like a continuous series of urban intersections. If not for the distinctly eye-catching Famima!! that appears constantly in the bottom left quarter of the screen, we might never know we weren't actually hurtling down the monotonously urban New York City blocks. The second is perhaps the best example. The music center and the DWP are possibly the two most distinct of our mid-century modernist palaces. The cold, wide emptiness and the unrelenting repetititon of steel and glass reflecting off the shallow moat waters somehow feel equally at home in our nightmares as they do as our civic centers. The last of these represents more the hulking bravado that has come to characterize the contemporary office building. But the glass tower with a gaping hole through its center, better known as the home to the CAA talent agency, plays the sexily anonymous hotel where our dreamers rub shoulders with billionaires and high-rent prostitutes.

But aside from the brief dream-like glimpses of our city inserted alongside more majestic profiles of Tokyo and Paris, Inception has also brought architecture back into the discussion of cinematic spaces, and along with it, the more complex and intriguing question of what the spaces in our dreams look like.