Any Dream Will Do

“All that we ever see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”

The Edgar Allan Poe poem occurred to me whilst watching Inception. It’s a good film, but, well, it’s not a great film.

The premise of the film is actually quite simple. The Leonardo DiCaprio goes into people’s dreams as industrial espionage, to find out secrets or to give people bad ideas. That’s it. Yet the film spends the first hour or so establishing all the rules of this process, why half-a-dozen specialists are required to create the dream world, organise the ‘waking up’ and so forth... which means it’s actually quite talky and slow. And then in the second half, we hurriedly receive explanations of exceptions to the rules that have been established, either as easy-get-outs or added-jeopardy, until by the end the audience doesn’t have a clue what the ‘rules’ are, or what dramatically might be at stake. It’s clumsy writing, basically, and feels like the writer changing the rules of his fictional universe on an ad hoc basis.

It reminded me of the Amy's Choice episode of Doctor Who. Amy’s Choice simply and elegantly introduces the same idea of nested dream worlds, whereas Inception unfortunately makes the mistake of thinking that ‘confusing and complicated’ equals ‘clever’, whereas I’d say that ‘ingeniously and unexpectedly simple’ is actually much more difficult to achieve, ‘cleverer’, and certainly more satisfying to watch. Because Inception doesn’t really have twists as such, it just has added confusions and complexities, until by the end you are sitting watching a potentially brilliant movie disappearing up its own computer-generated derriere. In fact, the ending reminded me of the conclusions of Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes – the sort of 'ambiguous reality' that The Twilight Zone was doing with far more finesse over forty years ago with A Stop At Willoughby and that Fry & Laurie so neatly parodied with their Red Hat of Patferrick sketch. Or did they?

The last hour of the film also drags on a lot, and really should only have been the last half an hour. What drags it out are endless cut-back-to scenes to show that yes, there is still some more fighting going on, or that the van is still falling off that bridge in slow motion, which add absolutely nothing until, by the end, you’re trying to make that bloody van hit the water by sheer effort of will.

My penultimate criticism is that a large part of the movie takes place in three dream worlds, and yet you couldn’t imagine three more prosaic fantasies. There’s very little attempt at surrealism or on giving the dream worlds a dreamlike atmosphere (compared to, say, Gilliam’s stuff in Brazil and elsewhere); instead, they are the most mundane dream worlds possible; a decaying industrial American city; a luxury hotel; and Blofeld’s mountain base from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Only in the fourth nested dream world do things actually start getting dreamlike, though it’s too little, too late – if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve basically seen all the moments of surrealism.

And finally, as the film progressed, I found it more and more difficult to follow the dialogue. There seems to be a rule – the Kiefer Sutherland effect, I shall call it – that the more crucial a line of dialogue is to following the plot, the more it should be spoken in an incomprehensible hoarse whisper. Some of the diction was appalling, I mean, it’s probably my cloth ears, but when the dialogue is so crucial to understanding what the bloody hell is going on, and what is at stake, to lose even a single line is to lose the plot.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a good film, I did enjoy it, and it was worth the price of admission. There are some stunning visuals in there, good performances, and the idea behind it is pretty marvellous. It’s certainly better than those dreadful Batman films by the same director. But it’s no Prestige or Memento either. Despite the visuals, I’d say this is a more a film to rent on LoveFilm than to see in the cinema, because on DVD you can always turn on the subtitles and rewind bits to follow what’s going on.

And fast-forward through that bloody van.

Revolver

Listening to The Beatles’ Revolver album, what’s interesting about it is that because, by this point in their career, Lennon and McCartney were no longer writing songs out of commercial necessity, you find that they would set each other song-writing challenges, in order to give them a start point. It’s a process which had begun with Rubber Soul, with Lennon and McCartney both attempting songs with punch-lines, and pastiching styles, and would continue for their rest of their musical partnership – there’s a well-worn Mccartney interview quote about Lennon writing Strawberry Fields Forever, inspiring McCartney to write Penny Lane, or the other way round (as Penny Lane feels more like a response to In My Life, which in an earlier draft was a description of a bus journey through Liverpool which mentions Penny Lane).

With Revolver, there were various song-writing exercises. The most common one is ‘who can write the best pop song on one chord’, influenced by George Harrison droning on about Indian music all the time on C. George’s attempt, ‘Taxman’, owes pretty much all of its appeal to McCartney’s bass riff and Lennon’s sardonic additions to the lyric. McCartney’s seems to be Eleanor Rigby, which is nearly all E minor (with some sixths and sevenths and some C for the choruses) while Lennon’s was, of course, Tomorrow Never Knows. McCartney using the harmonic limitation of one chord to create an ingenious Dorian-mode melody, while Lennon opts for hardly any melody at all and instead opts for mind-expanding lyrics and strange sound textures to hold the listener’s attention.

But there’s other songs which are nearly on one chord – McCartney’s Paperback Writer, for instance, which only uses other chords for the chorus, and Lennon’s And Your Bird Can Sing, melodically and texturally similar and also only using other chords for the chorus and bridge. There’s also Lennon’s Rain, another ‘drone’ song despite numerous chord changes, but my theory is that at this point Lennon & McCartney were have a competition to see who could write the best song about the weather, McCartney probably coming up with Good Day Sunshine as a response to Lennon’s Rain.

Lennon’s other contributions to Revolver are I’m Only Sleeping and Doctor Robert, in which he seems to be writing under the influence of the Kinks – I’m Only Sleeping’s melody and feel being close to Dead End Street, while Dr Robert’s schoolboy bridge recalls the Kinks’ Funny Face. Dr Robert and She Said, She Said are both also ‘I like drugs’ songs – McCartney’s ‘I like drugs’ song being ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ which is more of a Motown pastiche. She Said, She Said is melodically very similar to Rain for the verses, but has another song idea, in three-four time, used for the bridge, the first of many Lennon experiments with shifting time signatures (after an early attempt in We Can Work It Out, leading to Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Good Morning, Good Morning, All You Need Is Love, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, Don’t Let Me Down etc).

McCartney, meanwhile, has decided to write a children’s song – Yellow Submarine – which Lennon would eventually follow-up with The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill and Ringo would rewrite as Octopus’ Garden. Then Here, There & Everywhere, an incredible song possibly born of an exercise to write a song with key changes – the verses in major, the choruses in minor, with the transition taking in another key and some rather jazzy chord changes. And finally there’s For No-One, based around a simple descending bass line but with lyrics, extremely unconventionally, given in the second person (after Paperback Writer, written as a character in the first person, and Eleanor Rigby, written about characters in the third person).

Oh, and there’s two more George Harrison songs on there but they’re crap.

I'm In The Mood For Dancing

Various things written by me are out now. Buy them!

Big Finish have released an audio adventure I wrote, Cobwebs, of which I shall blog later. Instead, this blog is to plug the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine, The Guinness World Recording-Breaking journal of Adventures In Time And Space, and in particular, the comic strip contained within its pages, ‘Planet Bollywood!’ Artwork by Roger Langridge, who did such a marvellous job on 'Death To The Doctor!' you’d think he wouldn’t be able to surpass himself, but he has. It looks brilliant. I realise I say that about every comic strip - and oh, the next one looks brilliant, and the one after that too – but, well, that’s factual accuracy for you.

The idea for the story was to find a way of doing a Bollywood musical in comic strip form, with characters bursting into song and dance routines. I like to set myself near-impossible challenges. And as an added difficulty, I decided not to go down the ‘unreliable narrator’ route, which was my first thought, because it would be too easy and because my first idea, of having the Doctor starring in and directing a Bollywood version of one of his adventures, was complicated without being clever.

The main challenge – and the most fun part – of writing the story was the song lyrics, which are occasionally Bollywood-esque but most of the time, in order to get across the idea that they’re supposed to be song lyrics are sometimes more cod-Sondheim show tunes with multiple rhymes.

As a ‘taster’, here’s the script for page 1:

PAGE ONE (4 panels)

Panel 1 (big)

We open in outer space, where a small space freighter is being pursued by a massive battleship. The freighter is in good condition, functional and boxy, while the battleship is dirty, ugly, spiky, all engines and weaponry. Both ships leave jet streams in their wake – indicating that the space freighter has been swerving about while the battleship ploughs relentlessly ahead belching smoke and fire.

The battleship is firing a laser bolt, which is impacting with the freighter, causing a large, frame-ripping explosion – the laser bolt it has clearly been attempting to swerve to avoid.

Other ships are engaged in the battle – freighters fleeing, battleships chasing them.

This is taking place in low orbit above an Earth-like world; we can see the curve of the planet’s surface and its hazy blue atmosphere.

BOX: “WE’RE HIT!”

Panel 2

Inside the ship, which is veering wildly, out of control, and hence tilting at an angle. The flight deck, a cramped cockpit containing three or four crewmembers – the standard Star Trek arrangement of the captain in the middle, with navigators seated in front. All around are glittering hi-tech instrument panels, many of which are damaged or on fire.

The cockpit is bathed in the red glow of emergency lighting. The crew all wear elegant, decorated colonial suits, like servants from a Maharaja’s palace. They are all humanoid, with human eyes, ears and mouths, but with fur and elephant trunks for noses. They are all pale, jade blue in colour.

The Captain is grabbing onto a panel to prevent himself from falling and is shouting into a desk-mounted intercom. The Navigator is checking instruments and looking fearful.

CAPTAIN: THE CARGO, IS IT DAMAGED? REPORT! REPORT!

NAVIGATOR: NEVER MIND THE CARGO, SIR -- THEY’VE WIPED OUT OUR ENGINES! WE’RE DONE FOR!

Panel 3

The captain turns to look at the Navigator, and we have a reverse angle on the cockpit, so we can see the forward view screen – filled by the surface of the Earth-like planet and readings in an alien script indicating altitude, fuel and so forth. They’re heading towards its ‘night’ side, which is dotted with the lights of cities.

CAPTAIN: WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ‘DONE FOR’?

NAVIGATOR: I MEAN, CAPTAIN, WITHOUT OUR ENGINES, THEN -

Panel 4 (big)

While the cockpit continues to burn and lurch, and remains lit by emergency lighting, the crew launch into a song-and-dance routine! They are all caught in Bollywood-style poses – the seated crewmembers raising their hands to point, palms-upward, up to the left, the standing crewmembers also pointing up to the left but leaning back as they do so, doing that exaggerated high-stepping walk. They are all facing towards us and smiling.

The Navigator is doing all the singing – he’s standing up, as though leading the routine.

NAVIGATOR 1: WE’RE GONNA CRASH INTO THAT PLANET, DAMNIT!
THERE’S NO WAY THAT WE CAN ALTER COURSE!
I ENVISION WITH PRECISION A QUITE IMMINENT COLLISION
WE’RE GONNA STRIKE IT WITH GREAT FORCE!

NAVIGATOR 2: WE’RE GONNA SMASH INTO THAT PLANET, DAMNIT!
THIS SHIP’S GONNA BE A TOTAL WRECK!
IT’S TOO LATE TO ABATE A CATASTROPHIC FATE
I WISH I WASN’T STOOD ON THIS FLIGHT DECK!

NAVIGATOR 3: WE’RE GONNA CRASH INTO THAT PLANET, DAMNIT!
ONE ONLY HAS TO CALCULATE THE ODDS!
IT’S A FACT THIS IMPACT WILL NOT LEAVE THIS SHIP INTACT
WHICH REMINDS ME -- WHAT ABOUT THE ESCAPE PODS?