I find it interesting that Inception! has come to mean “nesting” or “recursion.” First, as was just demonstrated, we already had fine words for the concept. An attendee of SciFoo using the Googleplex wifi to locate themselves on Google Maps, after, say, Googling for the URL, is performing Googleception!, though it could just as well be Googlecursion. Second, more intriguingly, in the film, “inception” is the planting of an idea through manipulated dreaming, not the nesting of dreams within dreams. The film begins with nested dreams being used for extraction, and almost all the characters believe inception to be impossible. The nesting procedure is, in the fictional world, a means to either end. In one of the lovely puzzles of life, the movie established a use of a term at variance with itself.

It also established our low societal standards for “complex” cinema. A heist movie? About Assembling a New Team for the One Last Job Before Retirement? Really?