Tattoos as Human Meta Tag

This is a bit more random than my usual posts, but I was just watching TV and an ad came on for the unfortunately named Lugz shoes (the male version of Uggs?). It caught my attention because of the way it combined sex appeal and violence: man wakes up in bed next to a sexy dame, thinks about an MMA fight he had, cut back and forth between the sexy woman, the dude sitting in bed remembering whilst pondering what shoes to wear today, and a brutal fight. I didn't have the sound loud enough to hear but the message seemed to be that men earn their women through fighting other men...and these men wear lugz. It was hard to tell if the guy in the ad was just some guy or if he was a particular MMA fighter. Without any mention of his name, it would be hard to google him to find out. However, he happened to have a huge, ostensibly unique tattoo across his chest: BROWN PRIDE. How many guys have that tattoo? I googled the tattoo and, sure enough, I came up with the guy from the ad who is, indeed, an MMA fighter: Cain Velasque.

I'm sure the same thing happened with Tupac, or would have if Google were more prominent when he was alive. It reminded me how text-based search (and the internet) still is. I keep waiting for facial recognition to get better, faster, and more accessible. Someday, I'll just be able to point my IPhone at the TV or at someone walking down the street and get their name and whatever else I want to know about them. Until then, I suggest we all get unique phrases tattooed in prominent places.

Discussing Inception

After seeing Inception for the 3rd time, I've become almost as interested in the way people discuss this film as I am in the film itself.

I first became interested in the discussion around psychological puzzle or "mindfuck" movies when I wrote a chapter of my thesis on the IMDB discussion of Mulholland Drive. I found that the arguments fell into two distinct categories:

Those who thought the film's creator was trying to create a coherent fictional universe in which cause-and-effect applied vs. those who thought the movie was like an abstract painting. The first group thought that the plot was like a puzzle and that if you understood which parts were "real" for the characters and which parts were dreams, fantasies, or hallucinations, and you understood how the "real" lives of the characters influenced those dreams/fantasies, then you could "understand" the film. The second group thought either that the artist is having a laugh at the audience by making them think that the art is somehow "important" b/c its so inscrutable or that it has real beauty which cannot be analyzed the way a cause-and-effect narrative is typically analyzed.

In a way, the same thing is happening with Inception (based on my observations of a very limited sample of audience reactions: my friends and people on reddit). But I think b/c Inception has all the markings of a traditional Hollywood film as opposed to the art-house pedigree of Mulholland Drive and b/c the film's characters spend so much time explaining how everything fits together, most people debate what the final reality (for the characters) of the film was and/or whether the creator of the film was successful in his attempt to create a coherent fictional reality. Those who loved the film seem to believe that it all fits together and those who didn't like it either felt that it didn't all fit together or that its construction - its attempt to weld together an action film, a psychological puzzle, and an emotional story of loss and acceptance - is clumsy and draws attention to itself as artifice. Here's what I'm interested in: why do people fall into those groups?

Here's my pet theory. People think that some characteristic of the plot's coherence is to blame/praise for why they liked/disliked the film. They argue as if that were the case. But really, its their abilities to emotionally connect with the characters and some pre-existing disposition towards the type of movie they see Inception as (a summer blockbuster, a Christopher Nolan film, a smart film, a trying-to-be-too-clever film) that determines how hard they look for those flaws. This categorization and emotional identification with the situations and characters in the film, in some sense, precede viewers' desire or attempts to piece together what exactly happened in the fictional reality of the film, even though we're not aware that they do. With Inception as with many sci-fi and/or mindfuck movies, there certainly are inconsistencies or blind-spots to find. Those who were pre-disposed to liking the film could acknowledge these, but they would probably say that they don't matter, that its all part of the willing suspension of disbelief, that all stories must leave out some information and that the rules of the genre demand that we overlook some un-reality of the film's world. Those who were pre-disposed to disliking the film would call these "plot holes" and treat them as a kind of empirical evidence that the film is poorly constructed.

So when people have debates over whether the film made sense or what happened in the reality of the film, they're really just reflecting whether or not they identified with the film and whether they typically like the type of film that, before they entered the theater, they had categorized the film as.

I have this hunch b/c I try to imagine if these relatively minor things in the movie that people talk about were altered (the spinning top falling over/not falling over, a bit more explanation here or there, things going a bit differently with the kicks, etc.) and what the people having these arguments might think of that altered movie. I am highly skeptical that their opinions would change. They talk as if these minor changes would alter their opinions of the movie, that their arguments for why this movie was good/bad rests on these features of the film, but this seems ludicrous to me.

Perhaps its easier and safer to talk about one's like or dislike of a movie in this way. To understand how or why one categorizes a film as a certain type is a really hard thing to be aware of. Also, when you talk about what characters or situations you identify with, you can be revealing something very personal about who you are. Any statement against the film could be construed as a statement against someone who identified with the characters, situations, or sentiments in the movie, which would cause a whole lotta friction.

It should be obvious which group I fall into by now. But the more I think about the multi-layered pleasure I get out of this film, the more I think, "why can't I experience this more often with more movies, TV shows, songs, etc.?" We talk about these things as if its the artists' responsibilities to bring us a pleasurable experience, but I think we as audience members have some control over this, more than we think. If I'm arguing this for Inception, I'm arguing this for all art. What if I had gone to see Eclipse instead? My knee-jerk reaction would have been to hate it and to argue why this was a bad film. But I wouldn't have to have done that. I could've acknowledged the fact that I categorized the film as "awful teen chick romance" and understood that, on the face of it, I probably wouldn't have identified with the characters, situations, or sentiments expressed in the movie. But that doesn't mean I couldn't have found something positive in the experience and that I shouldn't have to wait for an artist to cater to my desires or find a fan to convince me of the work's merit. Everyone could love everything, and if loving something is more fun than hating something (I know that hating films, TV shows, people can feel good, but as someone who really loves Inception, I can tell you that loving feels better than hating), why shouldn't we try? I think my arguments for the greatness of some works are arguments for enjoyment in general, arguments against not enjoying yourself at a movie.