ABSTRACT
Following the popular success of narratively complex films over the past two decades, there has been a recent tendency for overt temporal tricks, puzzles, and formal twists to appear in films aimed directly at mass audiences. A prominent example is Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Inception (2010), in which a team of corporate spies led by Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is hired to infiltrate a business magnate’s dreams and implant an idea that will alter his (and his company’s) future. In its labyrinthine plotting and temporal convolutions, Inception is paralleled by the minor hit Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011), in which soldier Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is projected into the mind of Sean Fentress, a passenger aboard a train that is about to suffer (or rather, has already suffered) a terrorist attack. Reliving Fentress’s final eight minutes repeatedly, Stevens must find the bomber who destroyed the train. Suggesting both linear progression and configurable modularity, these complex narratives produce distinctive articulations of cinematic time and space.
