Logic of Contiguity of Form: Inception and Inside Out.

This post started with the question of what type of link I would say there is between Inside Out and Inception when I use the former in the course of explaining the latter in my post on the latter.

I'm pretty sure that, if hearing me use Inside Out in the context of my claim that Inception can be read as portraying motherhood as bringing about a core psychological shift (recall: I use Inside Out to bring in the idea that motherhood so strongly impacts psychological makeup through normal-level postpartum depression by way of having the mother's lead emotion having shifted from Joy, as Riley still has as her lead emotion [center position of the five at the console], to sadness, and I use this to explain the idea that, in Inception, the really deep violation that Cobb did was to incept in his wife the experience of growing old with him without it involving the progressing lives of the children ... the idea that the dream world was not real, incepted with the spinning top inside the safe, is only the surface as far as what can really be said in the movie ... the real crime was, by incepting the experience of growing old without the kids, to incept the idea that the world with the kids is not real, which causes an extreme psychological rift with the core shift that has already happened in becoming a mother. resulting in her suicide), some would say that this can work only if it can be demonstrated that Nolan was directly influenced, consciously, by Inside Out ... which is impossible, since it didn't exist at the time. 

That would be material/efficient causality: The makers of one film intentionally drawing on the specifics of the other. It is possible this happened in the other direction (Inside Out drawing on Inception, rather than taking something from Inside Out and applying it in Inception on the assumption that the latter drew on the former), but it is not what I am talking about, but rather in addition to what I am talking about. It is possible that the makers of Inside Out could have gotten their idea (again, if I am right about there being a significance to the mother's lead emotion being sadness) from a reading of Inception similar to my own, and this would be, indeed, very helpful to my own reading of Inception because there would be somebody who has some street cred in film agreeing with me, but that is largely an unproductive avenue of inquiry, since I am never going to get that conversation in which I ask the people who made Inside Out about it, and even if I could, the fact that they read Inception the same way as do I does not demonstrate either that Nolan had it in mind not that it is an accurate reading even if he didn't intend it (and again, for the record, conscious intention is not necessarily the deciding factor for whether a reading is valid). Pixar's people could be on the same page as me but with us both on the loony page.

I need to note that the use of the term "explanation" is central in discussing this in Inception. As I have done some with Star Wars: Last Jedi, I am here bringing in a little bit "causality" from the Aristotelian/classic doctrine of four causes, which I used to tell undergrad students could best be understood by substituting the word "explanation" for the word "cause," as in the example of a table: the formal cause/explanation of the table is the form of a table (horizontal surface supported up off the ground by vertical legs); the material cause/explanation is the material of which the table is made (wood, metal, stone, Walmart/Target-furniture glue and sawdust crap); the efficient causality is the carpenter or laborer who built it; and the final cause, the telos or the aim, is to set stuff on during use (food for eating or reports for working on or model airplanes for assembling or whatever). When I begin by talking about "explaining" Inception, it's in the current usual sense of the word: putting forth some theory of how the film works and constructs meaning. But when I come to the relationship with Inside Out, it helps to bring in consideration of the use of "explanation" in the "cause" sense, and especially the "formal cause" sense.

The relationship is not causality, even formal causality, at least not in the way of which I spoke in regard to Last Jedi, because there, the image of Yoda fading, for example, is the formal cause of the image of Luke fading precisely because Last Jedi is a continuation of the same story as Empire Strikes Back. Even if they were not the same story line, even just their being in the same genre and in a certain order would be enough to establish formal causality, depending on how closely the forms correspond (e.g., the post-credits Easter egg for Spiderman Homecoming with Captain America giving the "sometimes patience might not seem like it pays off" school PSA can be argued to be a hat trip to the first ever post-credits clip, way back in the way back of the mid 80s, with Ferris Beuller coming out of the shower again with his hair in a towel after the credits of Ferris Beuller's Day Off saying "why are you still here? it's over ... go home!" while others might argue that it's too much of a stretch to read the Spiderman scene as a hat tip, but when you notice that during the movie itself, while Spidey is running through back yards, a TV in one of the houses is playing the scene in Ferris Beuller in which Ferris is running through back yards to get back home and in bed before being discovered, that increases the correspondence and puts the nature of the Captain America "patience" post-credits scene as a hat tip to the FB Easter Egg as without doubt ... there can be varying degrees of similitude in such instances that strengthen or weaken cases for formal causality in literature). With using Inside Out in an interpretation of Inception, there is none of that. And, as stated, the influence/causality would have to be in the other direction than that which is historically viable: Inside Out would have to influence Inception, which is not possible because Inception came out in 2010 and Inside Out in 2015.

But the reason it is helpful to bring in the four "causes" idea of "explanation" is that the relationship here, meaning my using Inside Out as a lens for interpreting something in Inception, does have to do with what "formal causality" is about, which is the similarity of form. Basically, my argument is that if two things are similar in form, it can be helpful to examine one (Inside Out) for insights that can be fruitful in examining the other (Inception) even if there is no actual causal relation.

In the case of these two films, the similarity in form is the shared structure, or at least very similar structure, of the several layers getting deeper (In Inception it is the layers of "dream within a dream within a dream," with the unconstructed dream world at the bottom, and Inside Out has the three layers of "control tower," "Islands/long-term-memory-storage," and "deep forgotten"). The forms of the topographies of actions (dreamscapes and the infrastructure of the psyche as where action plays out) would be at least contiguous in a taxonomy of forms of such narrative topographies. And so the logic being discussed is contiguity, rather than "causality" in the "cause and effect" way in which we usually think of it. It moves away from materialist ideas of "causality" as modes of exploration. Insights from Inside Out could really be spoken of as connected to those in in Inception, but not by our usual way we think of such connections in literature when we are thinking purely materialistically, which is the fetish of authorial intention. It's not just an instance of causality from an ephemeral situation-based completely subjective string of associations only inside the head of one person (translation: the fact that it is not our usual modern "objective" "causality" or "connection" does not mean that it is completely imaginary to one person, me). That explanation would fit only a radical reduction of all causality to to efficient material causality.

The reason that it's difficult to speak of it in terms of causality is that "cause" explanations are usually taken as one of them being the cause of the other, but the situation is actually more that they both look back to some common cause of them both on the formal level. But as long as one is careful to avoid forms of saying that one of the two (Inception or Inside Out) is a formal cause for the other (which is impossible to say in the one direction, and in the other, difficult to substantiate at best and ultimately unproductive), one can safely see a connection of the forms. From there, I would say that the logic fits that, if they have that kind of connection on the form level, maybe they have some kind of connection on other levels, like a reading of mothering as a core psychological shift.

And that is the final question/element in this post. I have already spoken of the two films as being at least contiguous or abutting or adjacent in a taxonomy of forms/structures with respect to the layers of psychological action, but can that contiguity fact involve it's neighbors, so to speak? What I mean is that doing a comparison between the concept of the impact of motherhood on female psychology is very different from doing a comparison between the structures of layering. It could be argued that the contiguity or adjacency of the structures in a taxonomy of structures, the two films being neighbors in that taxonomy of structure-form, does not yield a "neighborly" relationship between the two conceptions of female psychology in the two films that would make comparison and support possible. The basic form of this question would be a critic saying, "ok, so you have demonstrated that the two have similar structures and that might get you the ability to use what is in one concerning that particular structure and apply it to the other concerning that structure even if it is not direct 'influence' ... but that doesn't get you a basis for being able to use anything other than that specific structure in that way." The argument would be that the structures (call them B and C) being neighbors in the taxonomy and each structure being a neighbor with the portrayal of female/mother psychology in its own respective film (call them A and D, such that layer-structure B and layer-structure C are adjacent within the taxonomy of narrative topographies, and layer-structure B is adjacent to female-pyche-reading A within film 1, and layer-structure C is adjacent to female-psyche-reading D within film 2) does not necessarily make the two psychological concepts neighbors in a productive way (does not make A in film 1 a neighbor with D in film 2 in a way that can yield productive comparison, particularly using one to fill out the other where it s a bit more latent).

My argument is that neighbors of neighbors do have a distinct neighborly relationship. First of all, any film in the world could be used as an an aid for explaining, even if it did not have the similar structure, as long as it had the same subject, and such comparison would proceed by way of analogy. The question here is whether the analogy between the two presentations of female/mother psychology has a little bit of added weight by the fact that the two films have another comparison, the comparison of the structures that are at least neighbors, if not living in the same house, in the taxonomy neighborhood. And I would say they do.

I need to be clear on the question at had and what is at stake. The concept of motherhood being so definitive in female psychology, at least once it happens, is MUCH clearer in Inside Out by the fact that the mother's lead emotion is sadness, whereas the girl's is joy, implying a fundamental shift, and given that the result is is sadness at the top of the hierarchy and that some level of PPD is ubiquitous, the conclusion becomes clear that the experience of becoming a mother results in core shifts in psychology. It's not anywhere near this clear on the Inception end. And so, what is at stake is whether the clear similarity of topographies of psyche can bolster claims for a similarity in other psychologically centered concepts, such as those of mother-psychology, such that, while  "motherhood as fundamental psychological shift" us MUCH more latent in Inception, the fact that it had contiguity of forms of psyche-scape (layered) does increase the probability of and justification for reading the "motherhood as fundamental shift" in Inception because it is there in Inside Out.

In some ways this is the sort of argument that you either see or you don't. Gravity either makes sense or it doesn't. But the psyche, which is what does the reading of stories, is much more about contiguity than we like to think. And the psyche is more determining . "Meaning" is a bit like breaking the seal when you've been drinking: once a connection happens, it is easier for it to happen again, just as once you break the seal and have the sensation of much-needed evacuation enter the mix of present experiences, it happens more easily (needing to go again and again) because the psyche now has the "going .... going .... aaaaahhhhhhh" in the surface apparatus for processing experience data (and if you think it's a bit odd to bring that sort of thing in here, I would just offer that I am not the only one to dwell on "breaking the seal" type situations; Pratchett does it with Greebo the cat in one of the Witches books). And the same is true of meaning: once you see one similarity, having others is easier ... more apt, more likely, more justified.

But I would offer one piece of final evidence, and that is a narrative consideration. Outside of the type of thing I have been talking about, outside of the "growing old without it involving the kids" being problematic in some way, I find it difficult to conceive of a way in which the fact that they did grow old together down there is significant as a revelation ... it becomes just "but you promised? ... yeah, yeah, I promised, and I delivered, remember?" BUT it can't be that low-level of a revelation, because it occupies prime narrative real estate: it's pretty much smack dab in the middle of the main denouement crescendo. The revelation of "I incepted the idea 'your world [=dream down here] isn't real' by putting the spinning top in the safe" is earlier. The revelation of growing old comes in the actual key moment of him letting his phantasm of Moll go, which is a core psychological event for the film. To quote Paul Simon, "love songs and negotiations are often one and the same": The two arcs that run side-by-side are the son's letting go of his construct of his father's expectations so that the world can be safer without power monopolies going on and Cobb's letting go of his construct of Moll so that his kids can have a father (although his burden to carry in punishment is that he can't know whether it is real or just a dream, but he has to keep being a father to his kids in case it is real; he has to undergo the same uncertainty he foisted on his wife and keep doing it so that, if the kids he interacts with are the real kids, they have a loving father growing up ... that is the point of not finding out at the end whether the top eventually falls over ... he foisted on his wife the experience of growing old without the kids, so now he must be there for all those moments of the kids lives even though he's not sure they are real, just in case they ARE real).



Afterthoughts
I have to admit that some of this method, for me, goes back to ideas encountered in grad school from a scholar at Jewish Theological Seminary and is involved in challenging at least the monolithic simplicity of the modern Western notion of causality. This particular scholar was giving a class on 8th century (BC/BCE) prophecy, and he was saying that it is often more to do with contiguity than with "cause and effect." But this connection would take more to flesh out.

This theoretical part of lessening the idea of material/efficient causality gets really complicated because it can sound a lot like David Hume, the famous English skeptic, who said that we never really perceive cause and effect, just constant contiguity in temporal sequentiality ... not actual material consequentiality. We see B follow A so many times that we start to think that the relation is "causal." Part of my interest that has developed actually in the writing of this post (as Fr. Lienhard likes/d to say to his undergrad classes, "we write to think" ... not the other way round) is wondering whether Hume's skepticism about causality to a decline in understanding and emphasis on the four-causes system in Western thought. But that too would take more to hash out than I have room for here.