The last two movies of Leonardo DiCaprio center around two classic philosophical views of reality. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (based on Dennis Lehane’s eponymous novel) uses Kantian a posteriori, that what we know about the world is subject to our perceptions and thus not entirely objective. Christopher Nolan’s Inception builds on Cartesian dream argument, about the limited means of distinguishing illusion from reality.

I watched Shutter Island on its last show in town, and lost the chance to rewatch. Inception, I watched its first show in town and then again five days later. I am likely to have missed and misunderstood several things in both the movies but as enjoyably ambiguous as both tried to remain I found the former more interesting.

The Kantian philosophy of subjective reality is not new to cinema. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary Baby and to some extent Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix are among the most celebrated and classic examples. I also recall Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road, Joseph Ruben’s Forgotten and Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan, all of which have parents fighting desperately against some universal perceptions in order to save their sons or daughters. Shutter Island takes a very different approach than all these. By setting it on an island filled with certified mad men and untrustworthy authorities Scorsese directly brings forth the classroom discussion about the justification of a mad man’s perception of the world. The reason I find this interesting is because it is only an exaggeration of the mild differences between the perceptions of two uncertified individuals (sane or otherwise), something that is most exceptionally handled in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly.

I have never seen the Cartesian dream argument in cinema before. Inception uses another classroom discussion, about reality possibly being a part of an infinite dream sequence. Christopher Nolan’s biggest nod to the philosophy comes in the form of Mal/Cobb’s totem, a top which is to spin indefinitely within dreams but stop spinning in the real world. In a world following the laws of physics — dream or real — every top is to stop spinning at some point according to the second law laws of thermodynamics and thus Cobb’s totem will stop spinning in a dream just as in reality. There are things like seamless sharing of the dream environment (how?), gravity transcending dreams and the subconscious (what’s with that?), and a single global limbo (like 4chan is on the Internet?) which I found hard to digest. Even after willing to overlook these and some others I didn’t find the movie memorable beyond a level because Nolan — unlike Scorsese — himself overlooked a quote that Cobb makes, something about emotions being the vehicle of ideas. His investment in the emotions wasn’t sufficient to make me care about the motivations of any of the characters, including that of Cobb’s desire to meet his children. Even though I was thoroughly entertained by the plot, the subtle hints, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s lithe manouevres through the zero-gravity dream scenes, and even though I wouldn’t mind watching the movie again.

The reason why I care more about the Kantian philosophy than the Cartesian one is because of the significance of perceptions whether the world is real or not and because there is nothing much I can do about the latter. Not that I could or would about the former. Philosophy is one of my weak subjects, mainly because I never went through a GRE word list. I find the need to reach for the dictionary twice to read any given sentence tedious. I go round and round, looking for the same word again and again as much for the same argument. I haven’t yet the leisure in life to deeply think of such matters while chewing air.

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To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the few works that I read more than twice, watched more than twice, read the book first and then watched the movie and still didn’t get disappointed. Harper Lee’s novel is also my default gift, the way some gift the Bible when they can’t think of anything else.

The novel is dearer to me than all the other child-protagonist novels that I’ve read, including those by Mark Twain and JK Rowling. Even though Scout, Jem and Dill all together have hardly an adventure that can compete with those of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter’s. Even though their thriller isn’t as thrilling as the others’. Even though their presence to the world is seemingly inconsequential. Perhaps for those very reasons.

What Scout narrates about that summer creates in me the most intense nostalgia of a childhood that I seldom dwell in. I find it effortless to imagine walking beside those three with our hands on each other’s shoulders, to pull Scout’s hair, to grab Jem’s collar, to kick Dill’s shins, to grow up along with them. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter are great fun, but I didn’t belong to their circle as a child.

When I think of the narration, I can hear Kim Stanley whispering in my ears. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices, right there beside Joan Fontaine’s Rebecca. The movie opens with the most creative title sequence I can remember. And Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch. Not getting tired of superlatives, am I?

When I read somewhere that Pauline Kael described Atticus as “virtuously dull”, I had to agree and to face the question of why he was still one of my favorite characters. “There just didn’t seem to be anyone or anything Atticus couldn’t explain.” That’s why. Atticus is seen through the eyes of Scout, his daughter. Most children below ten probably still feel that way about their dads. I hope they do. When I was ten my dad was the calmest, wisest, strongest, noblest and the most loving man there could possibly be in the whole world. He hasn’t changed much, though I have. Harper Lee through her vivid, humorous, and sensitive writing created a magnificent lens to see the world through.

Shush now. I actually wished to type a few lines from the novel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and this whole post is a tiny thin excuse for it. I may be breaking a law or two here. I consider the following scene the most powerful one I’ve ever read and watched.

———-

“Hey, Atticus?”

I thought he would have a fine surprise, but his face killed my joy. A flash of plain fear was going out of his eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.

There was a smell of stale whisky and pig-pen about, and when I glanced around I discovered that these men were strangers. They were not the people I saw last night. Hot embarrassment shot through me; I had leaped triumphantly into a ring of people I had never seen before.

Atticus got up from his chair, but he was moving slowly, like an old man. He put the newspaper down very carefully, adjusting its creases with lingering fingers. They were trembling a little.

“Go home, Jem,” he said. “Take Scout and Dill home.”

We were accustomed to prompt, if not always cheerful acquiescence to Atticus’s instructions, but from the way he stood Jem was not thinking of budging.

“Go home, I said.”

Jem shook his head. As Atticus’s fists went to his hips, so did Jem’s, and as they faced each other I could see little resemblance between them: Jem’s soft brown hair and eyes, his oval face and snug-fitting ears were our mother’s, contrasting oddly with Atticus’s greying black hair and square-cut features, but they were somehow alike. Mutual defiance made them alike.

“Son, I said go home.”

Jem shook his head.

“I’ll send him home,” a burly man said, and grabbed Jem roughly by the collar. He yanked Jem nearly off his feet.

“Don’t you touch him!” I kicked the man swiftly. Bare-footed, I was surprised to see him fall back in real pain. I intended to kick his shin, but aimed too high.

“That’ll do, Scout.” Atticus put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t kick folks. No –” he said, as I was pleading justification.

“Ain’t nobody gonna do Jem that way,” I said.

“All right, Mr Finch, get ‘em outa here,” someone growled. “You got fifteen seconds to get ‘em outa here.”

In the midst of this strange assmebly, Atticus stood trying to make Jem mind him. “I ain’t going,” was his steady answer to Atticus’s threats, requests, and finally, “Please Jem, take them home.”

I was getting a bit tired of that, but felt Jem had his own reasons for doing as he did, in view of his prospects once Atticus did get home. I looked around the crowd. It was a summer’s night, but the men were dressed, most of them, in overalls and denim shirts buttoned up the collars. I thought they must be cold-natured, as their sleeves were unrolled and buttoned at the cuffs. Some wore hats pulled firmly down over their ears. They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more for a familiar face, and at the centre of the semi-circle I found one.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham.”

The man did not hear me, it seemed.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin’ along?”

Mr Walter Cunningham’s legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked his thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen falt.

Mr Cunningham wore no hat, and the top half of his forehead was white in contrast to his sun-scorched face, which led me to believe that he wore one most days. He shifted his feel, clad in heavy worn shoes.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr Cunningham?” I’m Jean Jouise Finch. You bought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.

“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy, ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”

Mr Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.

“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. He’s a good boy,” I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr Cunningham dispalyed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.

“Entailments are bad,” I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. Atticus had stopped poking at Jem: they were standing together beside Dill. Their attention amounted to fascination. Atticus’ month, even, was half-open, an attitude he had once described as uncouth. Our eyes me and he shut it.

“Atticus, I was just sayin’ to Mr Cunningham that entailments are bad an’ all that, but you said not to worry, it takes a long time sometimes … that you all’d ride it out together …” I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed all right enough for living-room talk.

I began to feel sweat gathering at the edges of my hair; I could stand anything but a bunch of people looking at me. They were quite still.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.

“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.

Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”

I watched Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy during three consecutive nights three weeks ago. I’ve wanted to write about it because I’ve felt that I understood something, yet my understanding is vague enough to elude words. Now I am grappling with words to express a vagueness that I know about.

The trilogy has been called different names — Faith, God, Man-God, Religious Chamber, Silence. Some even argue that they don’t form a trilogy but two of these along with some other one do. I haven’t read or watched enough of Bergman’s interviews, so I only hope he amused his audience by keeping mum. To me it’s the Silence trilogy. After carefully arranging all my notes and reading numerous critiques and interpretations of others (most of them on the IMDB boards), I have decided to discard them all, acutely aware of their thoroughness and incompleteness. Instead I take to addressing two different questions.

Some great works are timeless, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. They embody powerful capsules of truth that make us gasp once they get to our bottom. Some others reflect the state of the recipient’s mind at the time of reception, like Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Bergman’s movies — at least those that I’ve seen — fall in the latter category, thus offering a multitude of interpretations from different viewers and enriching the viewer through multiple viewings. I feel certain to draw different conclusions from the trilogy after experiencing some other things in life, or even the same things.

The urgent question, for which there is no single nor complete answer: How are such kaleidoscopes conjured?

The way this is usually achieved is through an unreliable narrator. Like a Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman uses Karin, a schizophrenic. Schizophrenics make wonderful narrators when they are not in the dock and when they are not like John Nash in Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind. Karin is played by Harriet Andersson whose teetering along the edges of sanity is as dizzying as Vivien Leigh’s Blance DuBois in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire. What does one make of a Virgin Mary’s apparently immaculate conception and a woman’s claims of being raped by a Spider-God? Who among the two women is mad and who isn’t? Which of the images is symbolic and which isn’t?

Another way is to use an introvert. In Winter Light we closely follow the life of a Doubting Tomas, but it is so filled with silence (his, God’s, and Bergman’s) that his doubts themselves aren’t clear (to him, to God, to the viewer), and when Tomas speaks one is not sure what to make of his words, like when he brutally tells Märta what he exactly thinks about her. This movie appears the most direct and simple of the whole trilogy, but it is this silence that is beguiling and thus seeds interpretations.

Another way of allowing multiple interpretations is through maintaining a strict distance from its characters, the way Bergman does in The Silence. In this movie he never tries to explain anything and allows the viewers to make what they can out of what is shown and heard, the way young Johan is forced to do all around the hotel. The actions are not always clear, and even when clear their intentions remain mystifying. This is not as easy as it sounds, neither for the director nor the viewer, and in addition to meticulous craft requires the director to trust the viewers with their intelligence.

Another question, one that is more commonly raised by Bergman’s fans is: Why incest?

As is perceived by many (not all) viewers of Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence, and in a few other Bergman’s movies, incest is never shown nor even implied. But it is frequently hinted. As simplistic and incomplete as this seems, I think one can find answers in the Bible. This Jonah hasn’t yet read the book and is hopefully waiting for an Esther to handover a leaf of translations.

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This Friday evening a friend who wanted to get out of the office told me that he hadn’t been to a theatre in a long time. Actually I haven’t been to a theatre in a long time and he hasn’t been to one in a very long time. We decided to watch some movie, any movie. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 couldn’t be the one for various reasons – I watched it this morning – and after striking through every other movie playing in the nearest multiplex I stumbled upon Allen Coulter’s Remember Me. The title was desperate enough to match our impulsive neediness, and I vaguely remembered Roger Ebert’s review.

The hour-long schmooze before the delayed start and the three-hour-long drunk confessions after it overshadow the movie, but they didn’t need to. I wouldn’t anyway remember anything about the movie apart from its title. The good thing about the movie is that it is mediocre enough to shove me out of my slumber and tempt me to at least show the snarkier side of me. Though being snarky is my first nature, as I show every now and then, it is hardly satisfying being so for an insignificant movie that no one would remember. I am going to try something “different”, as we Indians – filmmakers and moviegoers – like to say.

Within a few minutes of the movie I got bored enough to embark on my own journey making vague references from any given scene. It was largely a purposeless and unconscious act of recalling recent movies and books through Remember Me. Being a fan of Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past (which I haven’t read) and of the concept of involuntary memory, I found the exercise engrossing enough.

Update: Below is only a list of several things that I remembered, and not a description of any of the memories corresponding to them. This makes it boring. It makes sense to delete the post, but I’m tempted to preserve it for posterity. If it stirs any of your own memories, that may give this a little more value.

When the opening scene was set in 1991 and the next scene in 2001 I remembered the many anachronisms that commonly feature in the Goofs section of IMDB.

During the introductory scene of Robert Pattinson several girls sitting beside me gasped in delight on seeing his face. When he bent across a bed to reach for the phone his pajamas fell below the hips. I remembered all the metrosexuals consciously buying low waist jeans to ostentatiously wear and unconsciously walk around in them. Once I saw his face clearly I wondered whether he looked paler in the Twilight series and I couldn’t remember how he looked as Cedric Diggory. Most of all I remembered the year-old interview in which Stephen King declared that Stephenie Meyer couldn’t write worth a darn.

When I saw Lena Olin in the next scene I remembered her tattoo in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate. I was saddened to see how much older she has become in a decade and remembered Kamal Hasan in Gautham Menon’s Raghavan. Later when it was mentioned that her character is a social service worker she reminded me of Urmila Matondkar in Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara.

During the post-funeral scene when all members pieces of the Hawkins family sat at a table, I remembered JD Salinger’s Catch in the Rye. When it was clear that the only person Tyler cared for was his sister Caroline, the image grew more intense. I quickly wrote off Tyler as the real empty phony, but continued to think of little Phoebe Caulfield whenever Caroline entered a scene. I also remembered Coraline, which I’ve neither read nor watched. (After watching the entire movie, I wish it had been about Caroline Hawkins, about her loneliness and “freakishness” and her way of dealing with the tragedies in her fragile life, because that character had a vivid story arc and because Ruby Jerins can act.)

During the classroom discussion in a Global Politics class about morals and ethics in the recent wake of terrorism (2001, before Sep 11th) I remembered the classroom discussion about the nature of fantasies in a Philosophy class in Alan Parker’s The Life of David Gale. I wondered why there is hardly ever a second discussion in a similar setting in such movies.

When I heard Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich coming from the Craigs’ TV, I was sure that Sgt. Craig must have had a better time watching that movie than I would watching this one and than Ally would with Tyler on their first date.

When Ally started getting intimate with Tyler, I wondered why and how many girls fall for the damaged types. I invariably remembered Dr. Lisa Cuddy, Dr. Allison Cameron and Stacy Warner, and winked at Dr. Gregory House. Of course, Tyler only resembles a violent vampire eternally sucked by teenage angst. Later, whenever Ally looked happily in love with Tyler, immediately after his displays of anger, I was reminded of the few such women I’ve heard about in real life and felt sorry for them.

When I saw Chris Cooper sulking alone in his apartment as Sgt. Craig, I remembered his several lonesome characters like in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty and Billy Ray’s Breach, and realized that I’ve never seen him play an upbeat character.

When the interval began I remembered an old Little Hearts advertisement. Reporter: “Which part of the movie did you like the most?” Moviegoer: “Intruvall.”

When Caroline was shading a drawing with a pencil while talking to her brother’s new girlfriend the soft scratching reminded me of couples rocking on beds, and then the scene where young Forrest Gump sits on the front yard listening to the sounds coming out of the room with Mrs. Gump and the principal inside, and inevitably of the subsequent grunts that the boy himself makes.

Pierce Brosnan showed a paunch in the movie. I don’t know whether it was a prosthetic, but the word (and he himself) reminded me of his panache, more as Thomas Crown than as James Bond. When Charles Hawkins missed his daughter’s art gallery exhibition, I imagined the irony of his Thomas Crown character enamored by Claude Monet. When he finally took Caroline to the museum, I remembered James Stewart looking dazed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. When he argued with Tyler and Ally that some Yankee team member was not fat but only big-boned, I may have laughed louder and longer than anybody else in the theatre, thinking about Eric Cartman’s claim that he was not fat but big-boned and Stanley Marsh’s retort that Jay Leno’s chin was big-boned and that Cartman was a big fat ass. When the family album scrolled on Charles’ office desktop, I remembered Brosnan’s deceased first wife and their three sons. (The word ‘deceased’ is used in the movie once, by Chris Cooper.) When Tyler told Ally that he came from a family of Irish musicians, I wished that they had kept the Irish accent of Pierce Brosnan. The Irish connection sprang several other memories like its great works of literature (I recently completed James Joyce’ Dubliners. Involuntary memories play a significant role in his works like Dubliners and Ulysses.), the current golden age of Irish crime, the beautiful Irish accents, of how Meryl Streep disappointed me with her accent in Pat O’Connor’s Dancing at Lughnasa, and of the Magdalene Asylums.

During the scene in which Tyler was sitting in a theatre, apparently wondering why he is sitting there, I empathized with him. (Or did the director empathize with the audience?) I remembered another recent mirroring of the character in a movie with the audience, in a scene in James Cameron’s Avatar.

Towards the end of the movie, I remembered that namedropping books and writers was regular early on in the movie and quickly died down. Rereading this very post, I realized that it may have been for the best.

When one of the main characters died at the end of the movie, I thought not about Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, but about K Balachander’s antulEni katha and Mark Rydell’s Intersection. I have been particularly impressed by the latter movie (which I never saw completely), where the death of a character significantly alters the outcome of the movie, and it was not how the character died but under what circumstances the character died that made a difference. After thinking for a long time I also remembered VN Aditya. In all his movies that I’ve seen he gets the hero or heroine stabbed and then promptly recovered, and it felt insignificant in all of those movies. In Remember Me as well, the death is in the Sep 11 attacks. “What a croc of shit!” I thought, and remembered the wonderful monologue in Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman. It would’ve made no difference had that character died of dysentery (like in Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima), for the aftermath is only a montage of closed ones dealing with the death in due course of time. This also reminded me that I haven’t yet read any Sep 11 literature, and decided that John Updike’s Terrorist should be an especially good choice.

After walking out of the theatre I remembered that I seldom watch movies about teen angst as I can neither appreciate it nor tolerate it. This movie actually doesn’t fall under teen angst, for neither of the main romantic pair is a teen (both are college students), but the movie seems targeted on teens.

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Cross-posted on I. Updated with information about modes of donation and contacts.

Akshar Bharati is an NGO with a beautiful aim: opening libraries for under-privileged children. Since its inception 3 years ago it has opened nearly 200 libraries across 6 states. That is a great achievement for an organization in which there is only one full-time activist and rest are all volunteers. As an awarness and fund raising campaign, it is organizing a musical night by Avdhoot Gupte on 18th April, 2010 at VIT College, Pune.

If you see the irony in a book-centric organization holding a music-centric event you should realize that we adults want very little to do with books ourselves though we want children to read more. Imagine a joyless event like a three-hour-long public book-reading session and you will agree that we are more likely to want to be paid in such a scenario, not the other way round.

As an occasional volunteer, it is imperative that I implore you to buy donation passes (worth 300, 500 and 1000 INR) or give donations or sign up as volunteers. Those are all inclusive ors. Interested folks can call me if you have my number, contact me (cinecynic AT gmail DOT com), or post a comment below. All donations come under Income Tax, 80G exemption and are eligible for programs like matching grants in several corporations.

Spread the word about spreading joy through reading.

UPDATE

Donations: The online payment gateway system is not yet on because Akshar Bharati is still waiting for the government approval. Donations of all amounts are accepted in the form of cheques (pay “Sewa International”). Library adoption costs: primary (10000 INR), secondary (12000 INR), complete library (22000 INR).

Office: Akshar Bharati, Sewa Sahayog, Flat #7, Shreya Apartment, Near Swanand Hospital, Deep Bungalow Chowk, Shivajinagar, Pune – 411016.

Contact: Kailas Narawade (+91-9604533919), info AT aksharbharati DOT org.