Thoughts After an Inception Film Night

When I'd woken up in the morning, I stumbled into the kitchen to see a resplendent masterpiece by J.: it is his annual gingerbread house. This year it is a stave church made of gingerbread walls, cappuccino chocolate sticks as the roof poles, Mikado chocolate-dipped biscuit sticks as the roof joists, and thin slices of candied ginger and Turkish delight as the roof tiles. Dark cranberries and paler candied fruits have been added to brighten the colour scheme, and he has also sprinkled coconut for snow and crumbled gingerbread for a path to the front door. It took him several days to make it. Supportive sister that I am, I looked at his intricate architectural plans sketched on a piece of baking paper and at the delicate process of making things stay in place using the egg-white-and-icing-sugar frosting; and I kept inwardly thinking, 'It'll never work!' It was wrong of me!

*

In the evening, my work team had its holiday event.

The coordination fell into place with surprising success.

We had all received a vegetarian snack box to eat while watching the film. —  (Except, sadly, our Californian colleague. She had received a kind special exemption from the Finance department, and an office manager and I had collaborated to find and send an American snack parcel on behalf of the company 'to arrive from December 17 to 22.' ... But she didn't get it in time.) — It had a bottle of Austrian red wine, a carton of tea bags made of an Ayurvedic blend, a chocolate-covered almond paste bar, chocolate-covered freeze-dried Amaretto cherries, a coconut bar, chocolate-coated almonds, and an orangey chocolate chip cookie. I didn't open it until just before the film, and it was so lovely to have the surprise.

As for the film itself: we surprisingly settled which one to watch in ~30 seconds, at least a week ago, as M. suggested Inception and no one had strong objections.

And everyone was able to attend, our Californian colleague and our shyest teammates and a colleague who recently transferred to another team included, which was a great pleasure.

***

A colleague who has gone to film school theorizes that Inception is based on jottings in an ideas journal that you are encouraged to fill out when you study to be a director. The scenes were all lovingly put together but a jumble: ideas that the director was passionate about but that weren't terribly coherent as a whole, and patched together by the excuse that these are all dreams anyway.

To be brutal, I hadn't made it into the film five minutes before I thought that it was incredibly self-indulgent.

Leonardo di Caprio had his moments of good acting (an accolade because I am a Caprio-skeptic). I also 'believed' Michael Caine as a professor and Elliot Page as a brainy student. But I felt that none of the characters had a personality that sticks in one's mind after the film is over. The psychology was unrealistic and underdeveloped. And wherever I looked I saw a famous actor (Ken Watanabe, Lukas Haas, Marion Cotillard) and it always took me a few minutes to get past it.

Altogether to me, the film was aesthetically handled like a comic book. Really quick cuts between scenes just like frames in a comic book; and execution and mood and drama, and a creative satisfaction on the part of the artist, mattered most. Exaggerated reactions defined the characterization (e.g. a dramatic eyebrow raise where a look of mild confusion would be a normal reaction, or a straightforward murderous glare to express hatred). The clothing badly pinpointed any kind of timeframe or continuity: it would shift between a grey shirt without a black blazer, grey shirt with a black blazer, maroon shirt, etc..

In my view this treatment would have been more appropriate for a superhero movie or another comic book or graphic novel adaptation.

And altogether I felt that the film was intended to be about deep themes but it wasn't; it really was just an exercise in transferring mental images to film.

The ideal world that di Caprio's and Cotillard's characters were in was creepy and I could not understand why one would be nostalgic about it. And I felt that a few home videos and a photo album or two would have been a fine replacement for eternal reminders of a lost beloved. So the film failed as an embodiment of, or meditation on, nostalgia in my point of view.

If it was supposed to be a metaphor for an addiction to computer games, book series, television, or comic books, or whatever, then that's not really what came across.

I also didn't think that the way the children were depicted was compelling. In reality a parent would be worrying about all kinds of details (their diet, if they're getting along, etc. etc.) if they were suddenly separated from a child. And the children would have specific needs and personalities. Instead, we just got generic photo studio portraits of towheaded little angels gambolling about. For realism, the screenwriter(s) should also have lined up child therapists by the end of the film to help them cope with the sudden disappearances of both parents. The 'Eh... They'll sort it out' approach to childhood psychological development adopted instead by the screenwriter(s) made me want to bang my head against a desk.

In the end I felt that the children were McGuffins.

The 'searching for the children' aspect of the film might be logical to people whose children are raised by nannies, governesses, boarding schools, or their other parent. But I think it is emblematic of the emotional immaturity and navel-gazing quality of the film that parenthood is so unconvincingly portrayed. Although to be honest I am just judging by the way my siblings and I were raised, so 'your mileage may vary.'

Then there were a few other logical contradictions:

For one thing, if we're working with dreams: are they ever as clear-cut and precise as the scenes in this film? I'd say that they're far more often vague and swimmy like a Salvador Dali painting. There was so much creative work done on subconsciousness and dreams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Spellbound with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, for example — that this glib version is a big letdown.

For another: I also complained to the team when a van drove off a bridge. The van was properly nosediving off a bridge at first, 'properly' because of course the engine is toward the front of the van and is the heaviest part. Then — and this is what I object to — suddenly it flipped upside down and parallel to the water before sinking. But maybe I just fail to appreciate dream physics.

In the end, a high school English teacher whom my sister T. and I both appreciated taking classes from in Canada said many years ago that 'books need to be real, even if they are about dragons.' Let's apply the same standard to films. I do very much appreciate the special effects in Inception, which are cleanly and finely executed, and I guess they do pay respect to reality because the director recognized that they needed to be pretty convincing. But otherwise, by this metric, Inception has very little to say.

*

In any case, the film night was so nice that we hope to have it again. Next time we'll order pizza. And next time I hopefully won't write such an ungrateful critique!

A Rambly Look at the Post-Black Friday, Pre-Christmas Situation

I'm still trying to fight my way out of the mists of the Black Friday season. Things are fine again in terms of workload, but as I was complaining to Mama and the siblings today, it still feels a bit like my self-confidence was doused in gasoline and set on fire.

Even as the team is heartwarmingly kind and friendly and hardworking as ever, I feel like I have messed everything up as a team leader. And whenever I feel like (on top of things I actually feel guilty for) I'm being blamed for additional things that are neither my fault nor my responsibility, then I do feel like it's my responsibility to bring other people to a point where they feel willing and able and eager to tackle these problems.

Besides I've been doing a ton of 'meddling' lately. The impression dawns that these things are often something that should be done by the HR team instead. It's also an unfair world: Some good intentions and a little work mixed with a boatload of tact gain far more gratitude and goodwill than a boatload of good intentions and tons of work mixed with little tact. And I don't want to get more credit for the former than other colleagues get for the latter.

It often feels like having tact is like a sneaky superpower. But I think simple rules do great good even if one doesn't intuit why they're needed. (Whereas intuition hasn't been a problem for me lately: the tendencies toward empathizing with others have become creepily intense to the point that I need to check that I'm not overstepping.) For example: There's nothing people love more than having most of the work prepared whenever they're asked to implement a new idea, and then they can just add finishing touches and leap ahead. (Besides, I think that the best proof that I genuinely believe in an idea is that I'm willing to try it myself; and I like the principle that Papa cited that one should never ask e.g. employees to do what one isn't able and willing to do.) So that's what I try. But instead, a lot of colleagues have great ideas and then dump the work needed to put them into practice onto the person who is benefited by them — unaware that this is likely going to tick off the beneficiary, no matter how pure and helpful the intention is. The beneficiary is quietly working along and then they're being 'helped' by being given more work; the natural instinct is to think indignantly, 'What?!'

It often worries me that a situation where people could easily get along, turns into a butting of heads. And sometimes observing workplace interactions is like watching a collision between two cars in slow motion...

St. Nicholas Morning and Bible-Thumping

Today we celebrated St. Nicholas Day surprisingly well, considering that I'd completely forgotten about it while the shops were still open yesterday.

The table was set with a new saffron-yellow tablecloth, a candle in the centre, and new placemats where needed. We had little saucers for our food, dark brown to go with the faintly 70s colour scheme, and I put out the flower-sprinkled Gmunden tea cups for the traditional weekend morning coffees.

Mama cycled off to the bakery (the one with the nicest people in Berlin) and fetched croissants, Schrippen, and so on. When she returned, T. was just rolling along the street toward us to join us for breakfast.

Fortunately we had general Advent-time supplies left in the pantry. So for breakfast we had plates of fondant and gummy stars, hearts, circles and squares; Printen bars with dark candied sugar and an almond slice in the centre; Spekulatius, in the traditional windmill shape; Zimtsterne; marzipan 'potatoes'; and mandarin oranges. There were three chocolate St. Nicholases that we divided amongst ourselves. Ge. heated milk and whisked it, then poured us all cups of warm café au lait.

A little blasphemously, perhaps, I put Barack Obama's new memoir on the table, because I'd just bought the hardcover paper version at Dussmann yesterday, and it is almost like a St. Nicholas present to us all.

(Due to coronavirus safety measures, a long line of people led from the entrance of Dussmann around the side of the building, and shoppers were being let in gradually by a bouncer. Neither Mama, who had come along with me to look for a Latin grammar to help with her university studies, nor I, wanted to keep the people who arrived after us waiting. So we browsed very swiftly. But of course from a bookseller's perspective she was delighted to see the interest in a bookshop.)

After the meal, T. tried to set up Steam on Mama's laptop, so that Mama could play Age of Empires as a multiplayer game. I've liked playing Age of Empires, too, but it's a 'time-suck' for me and so — like manga and animé — I've decided that it's best to avoid adding it to my list of guilty pleasures for now.

*

My plans for the rest of the day are to listen to audiobooks and maybe begin reading A Promised Land. A Hundred Years of Solitude, Don Quijote de la Mancha and a few other books that I've started in paper form are also waiting for me...

I've already played Christmas songs on the piano, including St. Nicholas songs ("Lasst uns froh und munter sein") because the lyrics are necessarily only relevant for a brief window of time; and perhaps that has filled the musical quota.

A colleague passed on a link to a petition about the Rummelsburger Bucht, a bay on the Spree River here in Berlin that is being redeveloped, and I might do more research about it today.

Then I might take up my art supplies and do a bit of drawing. An HR colleague has commissioned me to make illustrations for the electronic thank-you cards that we use in the company, if I have time and without setting a hard deadline.

Perhaps I'll also do my half hour of daily exercise again; the programme has lagged lately because (probably in a reaction to the high-pressure achievements of the pre-Black Friday season) I feel weary.

Then there are letters that my father wrote in the early 1970s. I don't know if it's good for me to read them or not. They are excellent biographical material, but I don't really like myself for feeling so much self-pity over the last few months for not having Papa around any more.

I need to appreciate the good, feel grateful for having had a father whom one can miss so badly, and keep remembering that he died quickly and on his own terms, so that from his perspective it ended as well as one could expect. During the first months when he died, I felt that I need to honour his memory by taking things well. Inwardly I'm still throwing a few howling tantrums; and I might not be crying in my room every day as I did for a few weeks, but it's undoubtedly a life-changing experience.

***

In the meanwhile, Mama and I got out a stack of Bibles and, for the first time in years, we looked up the Vatican's suggested readings for today. It was nostalgic because when Papa was alive, every now and then Papa, Mama and I would feel more 'Catholic' than usual and do the same thing, in 2017 or earlier. Generally, the Bible being what it is, some of the readings would leave me thinking 'What the hell did I just read?'.

It feels awkward to read the Bible out loud even when the readings are more sympathetic, and I don't manage to do so in a natural way. I don't believe that everything I'm reading is right, and it sometimes feels like I sound like a bigoted Bible-thumper in a Hollywood western. It's also a little overawing to read an old text that has been processed by millions of people over thousands of years.