Time Hans Zimmer Inception (2010) Words by... • The Automaton

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Time
Hans Zimmer
Inception (2010)

Words by Aldrin Calimlim
Illustration by Rob Cham

I can already imagine the compilers and editors of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die rushing to deliberate which film to boot off their current list to make way for Inception in the book’s next edition. Now this may all sound a bit hyperbolic, but I assure you that my apparently feverish excitement over the film is not at all unfounded. I am most certainly not alone in thinking that Inception is one of the best films, science fiction or otherwise, to come out in years.

I’ve seen it twice, and my mind was no less blown on one occasion than on the other. If anything, the film becomes more and more engaging with every viewing, which, concurrent to answering some or all of the questions that were formed in one’s mind during and after the previous viewing, sprouts even more brain-teasing ones. One wonders if Christopher Nolan had the Penrose infinite staircase, a three-dimensional representation of which appears in the film during a dream (for where else can a three-dimensional version of the object exist?), in that brilliant mind of his all the while he was writing Inception. His is a thinking man’s film that does not only require multiple viewings; it deserves them. His is a story with so much daring and so much cunning that it has managed to set minds abuzz and ablaze with intelligent discussions that run the gamut from the profoundly philosophical to the tremendously technical, in-depth analyses that are, outside of the recently concluded Lost and, to a lesser degree, Harry Potter, unprecedented.

Probably the hottest topic of discussion among those who’ve seen Inception is the now famous final scene, an ending showing the protagonist’s totem or personal indicator of the fidelity of his surroundings, an object that tells him whether he is in a dream or in reality. His object is a stylized top which when spun while in a dream, filled with impossible inertia, doesn’t stop rotating, but when spun in the real world behaves as expected, bowing to the laws of physics and ultimately falls and stops spinning. The debate stems from the fact that just when one thinks Dom Cobb, the protagonist, has finally reached the happy ending he desperately wants and deserves, one sees the scene panning to his totem, slowly revealing it as spinning wildly as though stationary, until it begins to wobble, and then… the scene cuts to black. One groans, then lets out a succession of wows, then claps, then contemplates for an indefinite amount of time this feat of legerdemain of an ending.

The gravity of this final scene is augmented by Hans Zimmer’s excellent piece called Time, which is also the final track in the original motion picture soundtrack album, the composer’s best since, well, last year’s idiosyncratic and playful Sherlock Holmes film score. Like the other tracks in the Inception score, the enigmatically and aptly titled Time is, true to the film’s main narrative device, suggestive of an altered state of consciousness, underscoring the dreamlike quality of the scene it plays over, besides being an amalgam of Paul Oakenfold’s ambience and Michael Giacchino’s breadth. The track also serves as the leitmotif of the film score, lending credence to the film’s obsession with the flow of time and its attendant hopes and illusions.

Time starts off slow as Cobb nods to his colleagues who helped him succeed in his last mission and prepares to make his way home, then it crescendoes in true Hans Zimmer fashion with a rise and fall in intensity, emotional and melodic both, and then suddenly becomes soft and silent, a meditation of the titular abstract concept as Cobb is finally reunited with his family, leading to a final, jarring and vaguely melancholy fall-off that coincides with the aforementioned cut-to-black effect, in turn signifying that the top neither stops spinning nor topples, that at that exact point in time, time itself is rendered irrelevant.

For Cobb, in that moment, there is only the now. It’s his wish to be with what’s left with his once complete and happy family again, to start over. It’s where he has finally found himself in. It is, in a manner of speaking, his dream. But also, in that moment, Cobb realizes he’s finished biding his time. He’s through battling his messed-up memories, simultaneously persistent and volatile. In the end, totem or no continuously spinning totem, it may as well be, for all intents and purposes, his reality. I’ve seen the movie twice, and I could swear that right after the scene is blacked out, there’s the sound of a stylized top tottering and ultimately falling. Like a wizened character said early on in the film, “Who are you to say otherwise?”

[reblogged from pelikula, for great justice]

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