Dream on: Inception captures the collective online experience

Ideas are to cinema what the ramps used to build the pyramids are to the pyramids themselves. They are crucial in the making of the movie but are seldom visible once it is completed. This is for two reasons. The first is that the makers of mainstream films don’t want the fingerprints of thought to be visible on their gleaming, reflective surface. They want us to fall under the movie’s spell without us knowing that it is appealing to our ideas about heroism or beauty or eros. The second reason is that the medium of film is better at inspiring thought than containing thought. It is so alive, so present tense, so much about what things look like—and less good at what things think like.

One exception is Christopher Nolan’s Batman film The Dark Knight (2008), which foregrounded ideas. The movie argues