New World Cinema: Does Inception Remind You of Second Life?

Mitch Wagner loves Inception, and being journalist who's written about Second Life for quite awhile, he makes an interesting parallel in his review on the TOR blog:

The experience of Cobb and his team reminded me of Second Life. I know in some ways it’s laughable to compare the crude graphics and buggy software of Second Life with the rich, imaginary worlds created by the dreamers in Inception. But the real interface for Second Life (and the MUDs that preceded SL) is the mind, not the computer, and Second Life is all about building imaginary worlds where you can live alternate lives and share them with other people. In Second Life, like in dreams and in Inception, you can fly. Many of the best builds in Second Life are dreamlike, a mishmash of images and ideas from all over the world and all periods of time. As in a dream, you might visit a nightclub in the clouds, where robots, cat-people, cowboys, Romans and vampires dance.

Mitch expanded this point to me in an email:

"I was struck by the connection between SL and the dreamworld of Inception during the scene where the architect Ariadne displays her models and designs for the other members of the team. She reminded me of a Second Life builder or architect, in both cases using architectural principles to design something that will never exist in the real world."

As it happens, Inception writer/director Christopher Nolan has obliquely mentioned Second Life as an influence on his movie, albeit a minor one:

"The whole concept of avatars and living life as someone else, there's a relationship to what we're doing, but I think when I first started trying to make this film happen it was very much pulled from that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had [Nolan's] Memento too.

What parallels did you see when you saw Inception? Not having seen it yet myself, I leave that conversation to you.

Comments

[Crap Mariner]

The top hasn't fallen...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/isfullofcrap/4820223716/

Yet.

-ls/cm

[Adeon Writer]

Trying so hard to avoid spoilers for this thing before I see it. It sure looks good.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

I think SL is more like the last scene of repo men. This tune was good for that scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_070zWcEuk

[Annyka Bekkers]

Does this mean we'll be seeing Inception-themed web ads now?

"The Dream is Real. Live it in Second Life."

[Silverfox Rainbow]

perfect slogen for an ad theme

[Dylan Rickenbacker]

Hamlet, go see it. It's an awesome movie. And yes, I had to think of SL frequently while I watched it.

[Metacam Oh]

Yeah I definitely thought about Second Life when watching Inception, they kept referring to the dreamer as "The builder" and immediately made me think of SL, and where the Metaverse is heading in the future.

[Hamlet Au]

Haha, that's a great slogan, Annyka, LL should pay you for it.

I totally want to see it, Dylan, just been so fricking busy.

[August Lusch]

"The Dream is Real. Live it in Second Life."

That slogan is great Annyka. Pitch it...I'm sure a Machinimist could do something with an ominous chord to do a video trailer in Inception style...

[Hamlet Au]

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

[nexus burbclave]

My twitter review was:

#Secondlife could approach its original vision if LL ditched its twilight ads for #inception ads. #Weareallarchitects.

I highly recommend the film and I definitely saw parallels, especially with the architect. Its one of those movies where even now I'm loathe to mention any spoilers, but the vision of dream space very much reminded me of virtual worlds. This also meshed rather well with that study that showed the increase of lucid dreaming in gamers.

One final thing this discussion brings to mind is the short film World Builder by Bruce Branit, which I highly recommend to anyone that has not seen it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzFpg271sm8

[Ann Otoole InSL]

@nexus - you mean add new ads to marketing programs that work right? It would be stupid to stop something that actually brings in paying customers. Personally I doubt SL would see more than maybe 100 new signups off an inception ad. As compared to thousands and thousands of twilight fans that want to rp.

[Nexus Burbclave]

@Ann, yeah the tweet was more wishful thinking than realistic. Inception reminded me of what had attracted me to SL, but I'm probably not very similar to their target "mass adoption" audience.

[Rodion Resistance]

"You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling"- Eames (the "copybot" artist in Inception hehehe)

I saw it in IMAX. Amazing film, I highly recommend it for Second Life users.

[John Branch]

Now that Hamlet mentions it, drawing from Mitch Wagner, I can see one or two points of comparison. The scene in which Cobb meets Ariadne in a dream--which she doesn't realize is a dream until he tells her--depicts first him, then her (if I recall right), altering the originally real-looking streets of Paris in fantastic ways. The results resemble some things I've heard about people building in SL. (I don't think I'm giving away anything with that description; parts of the scene have been shown in ads.) There's another moment, involving a walk on an Escher-like staircase, that reminds me of something Escher-like in SL (Relativity House, which I think Hamlet blogged about). That's the most obvious resemblance for me.

But this didn't occur to me while watching the film. Unlike Mitch Wagner, I see nothing very dreamlike about the movie, with the possible exception of the train barging through city traffic (which has also been shown in ads). Sooner or later, dreams usually involve something surreal, oddly out of place; I just awoke from a nap in which I dreamed something peculiar. As the _New Yorker_ magazine review observed, Luis Buñual employed dreams to fantastic effect in some of his films, but Christopher Nolan seems a literalist, despite his fondness for grand or momentarily mind-bending vistas. His script bends over backwards to ground everything that happens in some kind of explanation; even when it looks dreamlike (the suspended-gravity sequence) it's never surreal but instead rational. By the way, apart from that suspended sequence, I don't recall anything to justify Mitch Wagner's statement that people can fly in _Inception_, and in that scene no one really had the power to fly--it was explained rationally.

Nonetheless, I think _Inception_ must be seen, because otherwise you won't know what other people are talking about. No doubt takeoffs and parodies are even now in the works, if not already out there on YouTube or in a TV skit.

Nolan's reference to _The Thirteenth Floor_ touches on the movie that I think best compares to _Inception_, in at least one sense: multiple levels of reality.

[Extropia DaSilva]

To me the most obviously 'SLish' part of Inception is when the character Ariadne is walking around a dream of Paris and transforming it in realtime.

I suspect that, for some people, the obvious connection will aspects of the story where people become confused as to where the dream ends and reality begins, and become damaged as a result. I expect comparisons will be drawn with social networking sites and online worlds where people become addicted to escaping into fantasy lives to the detriment of real life. I also suspect that such beliefs will be expressed mostly by people who do not use SL and only formulate an opinion of it from what they read in the gutter press.

[Pavig Lok]

The Matrix, Brainstorm, Solaris, The spy who loved me, etc. Inception reminded me of a LOT of things, but not really second life at all. It seemed quite derivative of a ton of dream movies (and action adventures) but not very deep in that respect. In my opinion the focus on action derailed any really profound investigation of the shared dream.

Surrogates (though it was even dumber) reminded me of SL a lot more in some ways.