ABSTRACT
Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) is without doubt the most prominent and biggest-budget of contemporary Hollywood articulations of the puzzle film, hence its prominent place in this volume. A Warner Bros. production made at a cost of some $160 million (plus another $100 million for marketing) and given a wide initial release in the US in mid-summer on 3,792 screens, it is a film on the scale of the largest of ‘tent-pole’ pictures, a domain of central importance to the commercial fortunes of the major studio distributors. One of the aims of this chapter is to examine exactly how far the puzzle dimension takes the film from the typical characteristics of such large-scale, star-led, spectacular productions, including close consideration of how a degree of narrative complexity or ambiguity is combined with more conventional Hollywood ingredients. I also seek to offer an explanation for the phenomenon constituted by the film. How might we account for the presence of a production that offers such a mixture of qualities, at the levels either of broader studio strategy or more proximate factors specific to the individual case? This chapter finishes with brief consideration of how this kind of film has also been interpreted in relation to wider sociocultural factors, but the principal focus is on the more immediate industrial context.
