I was reading an interview between Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan (full review of the book no doubt to follow at some later date, once I've finished it) - it's interesting and they have a lot of thoughtful and thought-provoking stuff to say about writing, literature, and all that stuff. Anyway, there's one point at which which the two agree that cinema is, in McEwan's words, "a very inferior, unsophisticated medium"; Smith agrees, on the grounds that "you get surfaces only"; and those rather absolute statements particularly interested me, not least because while I strongly share that intuition, it also makes me a bit uneasy.
Well, my thoughts were turned back to that question after watching Open Your Eyes. One area in which films may well have it over books is in rendering the blurry distinction between 'internal consciousness' and 'external world' - evidently a bit of an obsession of mine - in a way which is both convincing and phenomenologically accurate (the two obviously being closely related), whether that be along the reality/fantasy line, or waking life/dreams, or present experience/memory, or any of those experiential sets...and this aptness comes because cinema is a visual medium, and doesn't need to grapple with the level of linguistic mediation inherent in the novel form (or in any kind of writing). It'd be possible to argue that cinema ought not to be trusted for that very reason - that the ease with which its images and surfaces can be assimilated into our ordinary experience and average everyday understanding of the world serves to reinforce [insert undesirable things here] and prevent us from breaking clear to [insert desirable higher state of understanding here], etc - but the fact remains that it's a medium more apt to representing at least some aspects of seemingly unfiltered human experience (which is different from representing human consciousness or its workings).
Open Your Eyes is quite possibly the best illustration of this facility that I've yet come across (I've thought more highly of other films which do similar things - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, and maybe Broken Flowers - but I can't think of any that so adeptly and deliberately efface the lines between consciousness and world). The plot is much cleverness, and the execution is spot-on - visually spectacular (the opening scene's a stunner), creepy, unsettling, and genuinely dream-like. I thought that it was very good.
Okay, spoiler time - anyone reading this should stop if they haven't seen the film and might want to some day.
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Lots to think about - the ending is open, but it's not a cheat, for there's plenty of evidence to point in any number of directions. The obvious way of reading it would be to take things at face value - to accept the sci-fi twist as genuine, and to see César's final jump as a true leap back into the external world of 150 years in the future, so that the voice telling him to open his eyes at the end would be that of an L.E. nurse in that future (particularly given that that voice is different from the one which murmurs the film in at its beginning)...I say 'obvious', but even that would be plenty head-spinning, and all the more impressive for the fact that there don't seem to be any obvious plot holes or contradictions ruining it. Another possibility, I guess, is that the whole thing is a dream - not in a 'and then he woke up' sort of way but rather in a nightmarish 'the L.E. stuff is true, but somehow it's gone wrong and he's being forced to repeat the sequence over and over' way (or 'the L.E. stuff isn't true, but he's been stuck in this kind of internal experiential loop by some other means - possibly psychosis'). Or there's the possibility that César is in Hell, where he's (also) forced to relive this distorted sequence over and over because of his sins while alive (notice the references to religion and God throughout) - which of course isn't mutually exclusive to any of those other possibilities except the first.
