AI Proves how Gender is a Social Construct [Ex Machina, Garland, 2015]

An interesting quote: "It’s not like HAL 9000 ever sparked up a relationship with Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey the way Samantha did in Her. “Her is playing on the fact that the audience knows what [Scarlett Johansson] looks like,” "

And another: "If the goal is for a machine can convince a human that it’s human, then the machine has to assume some kind of gender because we see all humans as having a gender."

Ex-Machina certainly provides a shock to anyone who walked in (or really, Amazon-Primed-In?) hoping for a slick sci-fi about AIs, technology, and the ultimate battle of human vs machine. For one, the film's gender aspect consumed its reviewers, some exalting its "beautifully subtle" commentary on masculine fragility while others incriminating Garland for perpetuating the male gaze onto robots. The production design of Ava and Co. indicates that this isn't so much a film about AIs as it is about gender illuminated in the context of consciousness and intelligence. The many choices made about Ava are not for sake of scientific imagination - why does Ava assume a humanoid form? Why does she require skin, senses of touch, or facial expressions? These are all interesting questions about the nature of intelligence and the purpose of AIs. But in Ex Machina's case, they are choices that turn the lens back on us. This might be a film about AIs, but the true topics of exploration are very much human. 

Why does Ava have a gender is a scientific question - does intelligence and consciousness, a sense of being and existence, need some kind of association with a gender? - but why is Ava female is a wholly social one. Garland in *some* interview acknowledged the femme-fatale stereotype which Ava follows, asserting it intentional: Why does Ava, with her knowledge based solely on Goo--- I mean, Bluebook, searches, decide sexuality would be her best strategy for escape? Didn't she essentially learn it from us? The male characters are "defeated" because they bought into their own "damsel in distress" perception, and such a set up reinforce what could be perceived as Garland's examination of patriarchy. The intentional failing of the Bechdel Test opens up a confusing debate - on one hand, patriarchy is shattered by its own illusions and perceptions of the other gender, so let's do away with the patriarchy? On the other, female characters exploiting the stereotypes of their gender to gain power isn't quite avante-garde.

Of course, the added mess in here is that Ava isn't a human female. Femme fatale entails that the femme, by seduction or some method with gender-definition, triumph over the male gender, taking over the power structure. Does Ava's escape mark some kind of win for the female gender? Or is it far larger than that? Because, philosophically, the necessity of gender to intelligence and consciousness is unclear. Ava could be female and incorporated the seduction plan to overcome the male-gaze. OR, she could've incorporated the concept of gender itself as a way to overcome human control - in this instance, the patriarchy. Ava's gender could be as much a ploy as her sexuality; perhaps the oppressor in her mind isn't the males, but humans in general. She took on a familiar human social construct, and used it to her advantage. Her escape is an assertion of AI's superiority, their ability to exploit human psychology and society to rise above. 

Ex Machina's dealings with Artificial Intelligence is a premise, not an exploration. With an all-male inventors team, Ava has features built more for social commentary than for science-fiction hypothesis. The discussion helms little in terms of the nature of intelligence or "life". Rather, the questions we are left wondering are more of "why are we inclined to build robots in our form?" or "if the inventors were women, what would "Ava" be like?" As said in the beginning, the lens is on us humans, not AI. The interesting, incomprehensible jargon here is twofold.

1) Why do we envision artificial intelligence to take on our form? What does it say about us when we want robots to have skin, touch, expression and motion? And by those responses, are we really creating the next wave or are we really looking for like-wise companions in AI?

2) Does an AI need characteristics of life we have? Does consciousness need constructs like gender, society, and structure? And perhaps most importantly, does it have to take on human interpretations of those? That is, wouldn't our social constructs become manipulatable and archaic in the face of higher intelligence?

Who is the real one in control? The man or the machine?

Shortly after watching both Ex Machina and Creative Control by Alex Garland and Benjamin Dickinson, I noticed the plight, or rather downfall of the human expression. Right off the bat, both films are centered on a human trying to make sense out of the artificial intelligence that they have created. It's almost like we see a downfall of the protagonist throughout the film. For ex_machina, we see Nathan using Ava to try to pass the Turing test to see if she could be passed a legitimate human being, and in Creative Control, David uses his faux-Google Glass product to try to have an affair with Juliette. However, I think that these two films are trying to get at something. In the near future, how far are we going to take technology? At what point can we draw the line? These innovations and improvements are a detriment to future societies, and now that the technology is accessible, we are using it for harm instead of good. Or at least I think that's what both films are trying to say.

Over all of the abundant examples of using technology to help people, from prosthetics to improving education, our society never seems to look at the examples of harmful use until it is presented in the news. For example, we never really mention drones or spying unless it makes breaking news. Maybe they are understated in these films to prove a point. What I am trying to get at is that both films are trying to connect the detriment of technology towards a specific person as the root cause for society's collapse due to our fixation and "addiction" of consuming technology. How do we know that Nathan was trying to let Ava escape and pass the Turing test so that Ava could commit genocide or something of that nature? How do we know that David's manipulation of Sophie through the glasses was on purpose or something that he accidentally discovered? The answers are not very clear...

So now I think the question is who is really in control? The man or the cell phone? The man or the robot? The man or the machine? Will Ava become the norm in 10, 20 years? Possibly, I am not ruling it out. But I do believe that there is a mass conspiracy where the technology of today is going to be so advanced that the robots will coexist with humans and we will have no way of knowing. But who is responsible for this? We all are. And there's no stopping them.

Should artificial intelligence be part of our future?

There are 2 current films that have touched upon what it means to be human and how humans nowadays, because of incredible technological advances, want to create a virtual/robotic human so as to reinvent humans. These 2 films that have this similar theme are Ex Machina directed by Alex Garland and Creative Control directed by Benjamin Dickinson. While Ex Machina, to me, is a far better and more intriguing film than Creative Control, it is hard to ignore the film’s message – humans are like avatars; both enter in and out of real and imaginary worlds.

Ex Machina is essentially about a programmer named Caleb Smith who wins a contest that enables him to spend a week at the private estate of Nathan Bateman, his firm's brilliant CEO. When he arrives, Caleb learns that he has been chosen to be the human component in a Turing test to determine the capabilities and consciousness of Ava, a beautiful robot. However, it soon becomes evident that Ava is far more self-aware and deceptive than either man imagined. Through this brilliant plot, the film raises questions about the similarity and differences of human and robotic consciousness, morality and technology. For me, it was so interesting to see how Nathan and Ava developed throughout the film. While Caleb seemed to be more of a static character (an almost naiive yet good morals), Nathan and Ava were more dynamic characters. One way we can see this is how much we learn throughout the film about Caleb through the sessions with Ava. He reveals where he lives, what he does, if he is in a relationship and much more. Caleb is an open book from the start while we never know who Nathan is. He’s only interested to use Caleb for his own benefits and self-knowledge. Ava is also an ambiguous character because she is always questioning Caleb. While she has feelings for Caleb, we never know if they are real or programmed. It’s painful at the end to realize that her emotions were programmed, and she was also using Caleb to gain her independence. This film reminded me a lot about Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi classic Solaris.  When Hari, the dead wife of Kelvin, appears on Solaris through the power of the Solaris Ocean, Kelvin questions whether his ghost-like wife is real or unreal. While Solaris affirms that humanity isn’t determined by biological makeup but by the capacity for emphathy, forgiveness, kindness and developing relationships with other humans, Ex Machina believes that robots have a place in our future if we treat them equally.

Creative Control is essentially about David, an overworked, tech-addled advertising executive developing a high-profile marketing campaign, featuring musician/comedian Reggie Watts, for a new generation of Augmented Reality glasses. Feeling stuck in his relationship with yoga teacher Juliette, he envies the charmed life of his best friend, fashion photographer Wim, and his entrancing girlfriend Sophie - so he uses the glasses to develop a life-like avatar of her. While Garland’s film is more of an inner film about hidden meanings and conceptions, Dickinson’s film is merely about the interpretations of beauty and questioning whether technology can help us understand what beauty is. One of the ways the director tries to illustrate beauty is by referencing other films (like Blow-Up, A Clockwork Orange and much more). While watching the film, I felt isolated looking at looming buildings of a corporatized city, New York. The people who live in this city seem disunited too; the people who work in these skyscrapers rarely seem to have a feel for life at ground level. David is lost within his own life too. He doesn’t know which woman to sleep with or marry? The avatar that David creates seem an escape from real life and into fantasies. He doesn’t need to worry about his decisions when dealing with technology because it doesn’t judge him. While Ex Machina seems hopeful of a world with robots and AI, Creative Control is ambivalent and warns that it might not be the answer.  

ex_machina and Creative Control

Two films similar in content and in approach, both ex_machina(Garland 2015) and Creative Control(Dickinson 2015) are depictions of the technological advances in the near-to-distant future and how they affect the human condition. The films portray misconceptions that we as humans believe because of prior knowledge that indicates so. In the case with ex_machina, thinking or having a conscious is what makes us human, a theme touched upon in many films before this one, in particular, Blade Runner. However, ex_machina gets technical and analytical with this theme and delves into actual theoretical principles. Creative Control addresses the contradiction of the namesake in capitalist culture. 
ex_machina is quite the philosophical film addressing questions rather than demonizing technology or employing a simple sci-fi narrative. It even mentions the source of inspiration for the philosophical material in the name of Nathan's company BlueBook. This name stems from the actual Blue Book, notes of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The main focus is the question of conscience or thinking and if that's a unique trait to humans because of our special cerebral capacities. Wittgenstein argues contrary to this belief stating that thinking is "essentially the activity of operating signs". Our minds are simply "agents" of thinking, the system that operates these signs and arranges them in order for the mind to reach a conclusion. In the case of Ava in the film, her software is the BlueBook search engine, therefore gaining signs from all over the world and operating them into a conscience. 
Creative Control addresses the harsh reality that there is practically no creative control in capitalist culture. Director Benjamin Dickinson stated in an interview after the screening at SXSW, "it's never the way you'd like it to be. There's always pain, there's always death. There's always negotiating with other people who don't agree with you. There's the dawning realization that maybe there's no ultimate truth, or at least there's not an ultimate truth that we can know. I mean, that's life". One cannot have true control over any action that big, whether it be artistic, or something as distant from that argument as farming. The irony of David's statement in the film on having complete creative control over the outcome of the Augmenta account, despite having entrusted it almost completely to Reggie Watts, is laughable. The same is shown in the Phalanex commercial sequence where the executives of the company are telling the ad agency what they want from the commercial, and then the ad executives tell the filmmakers what to do, and then the filmmakers tell the actor what to do. The chain of command is explicitly shown in that one-take sequence. It ends with David's expression of unsatisfaction, because he knows of his lack of creative control. 

Beardy Men and Manic Pixie Robot Girls

Creative Control (Benjamin Dickinson, 2016) and Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015) are both extremely current and thought provoking films that comment on what happens when technology overpowers it's creators.  By juxtaposing human nature with imitations of human nature, both Garland and Dickinson question weather power inevitably leads to self destruction, what it means to be conscious, and the purpose of man kind's existence. Despite thematic similarity, there's one major plot point both films share that seems much more than mere coincidence.

When both Nathan from Ex Machina and David from Creative Control come upon ground braking technology that will undoubtedly change the entire course of human existence, why is the first thing both these guys make a sex doll?

Here they have this semi-human halograph or something they know is just a bunch of wires underneath and their first thought is "well I better have sex with that." We see this in both Kioko from Ex Machina and the avatar David makes of Sofie in Creative Control.  If you want to talk Fellini, it shows a under developed third stage Anima. Both David and Nathan's desire to supplement an emotionless robot that will do whatever they ask for a human they have to respect and communicate with in a mature way proves both these lovely bearded gentlemen are not responsible enough to handle this technology. They are self centered and have little regard for other people's feelings as anything more than a minor annoyance. They alternate between trying to eliminate the inconveniences of human emotions and wildly misjudging characters reactions to their actions. Instead of a Turing Test, I think we need a test on the creators of any new technology made to mimic humans.  Is the inventor of this thing trying to have sex with it? Yes? Ok, shut it down.

Blog Post 4: Primer

Blog Post 4: Primer

Written, directed, produced and acted by Shane Carruth, Primer is one of the most puzzling and mind-bending films that I’ve ever seen. While the film is primarily about intellectual engineers Aaron (played by Carruth) and Abe (who build and sell error-checking technology with the help of their friends), the film says a lot about the power of technology, the morality and desires of human beings and the mysterious effects and consequences of time travel. The film is a very low-budget one (7,000 dollars) yet the ideas presented and explored raise it to another level of indie-film making.

When Aaron and Abe accidentally invent what they think is a time machine, Abe is adamant to build a version capable of transporting a human to the past and re-living past experiences. One of the major themes that runs through this film is the idea of obsession. The act of repeating and practicing until the body deteriorates is examined.  Exaggerations of workplace hazards such as sitting too long in a chair at a desk, or the effect of improper lighting produce equally exaggerated results: bleeding ears, the inability to write, and the need to kill their own clones. (!)  These two scientists don't find a way to free themselves from their obsession with the device until they realize that their work is actually counter-productive to finding any sort of real meaning in their lives.  Aaron, the scientist who chooses to stay behind with the machine is contrasted with Abe, who is able to see the device for what it is: an infernal machine capable of destroying their families. It is almost as if the film is ridiculing the aphorism, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" (and the two scientists DO try again and again).  Instead, the film makes clear that obsessive work is EXACTLY like time travel - you make it to the end of your job, only to find out that there is a new kink to solve, and it takes you back a week, a month, a year, all the way back to square one, all the while unraveling everything beautiful around you.

Another interesting thing about Primer is its jargon. The film is a play on both hard science fiction and magical realism. While the film's setting is decidedly Midwestern American (though Abe and Aaron's fixation with the time machine echoes One Hundred Years of Solitude's José Arcadio Buendía's fixation with his scientific pursuits, which end up alienating him from his entire family (hence the solitude part of the title), the idea is the same: take a fantastical concept - time travel -and then integrate it in a matter-of-fact manner into a mundane suburban setting. In fact, the settings themselves - the offices, the storage room, the garage, the suburban houses - all turn the time machine into a seemingly normal part of these scientists' lives. However, where Carruth best integrates the time machine into mundane daily existence is through the use of jargon. The way the characters speak, their half-formed sentences, their thinking out loud, their use of technical language that is deliberately engineered for us not to comprehend the content but to understand the tone and weight behind the voices, all illustrate how we humans try to understand the new, the alien, and the frightening. The film is less about the time travel itself, and more about the ways in which people try to understand the unexplainable, how we apply mechanics and rules to an impossible occurrence so that we can hold on to a halfway tangible explanation.  

Blog Post 3: Paprika

Blog Post 3: Paprika

Directed by Satoshi Kon, Paprika is a very interesting film about a scientist named Dr. Atsuko Chiba who at nighttime, under the code name “Paprika”, is a dream detective. The scientist also works with other colleagues who are trying to design a device called the DC Mini that is intended to help psychiatric patients. The twist is that the Mini could be used to destroy peoples’ minds should it fall into the hands of evil people.  This film was unlike any I had ever seen before.  8 ½ is the only film that shares any semblance of similarity.

So what is the DC Mini really? To many people the device is designed by psychiatric researchers to peer into the dreams of their patients. Although the device is very promising, the film carefully points out its pros and cons.  In the storyline of Paprika, terrorists steal the DC Mini during its development, and use it to implant malicious dreams into the subconscious of waking people. What we don’t find out until near the end is that the Chairman of the research facility that is developing the tool is the terrorist.

This film was sometimes so confusing that I found it hard to follow. However, I was never bored.  Even, lost, the film is intriguing. The director did not shy away from the creative opportunities inherent in an animated film; the avatars mirror the lives of regular human beings.  The characters walk and talk in their dreams and fall from one reality into another. The famous opening scene of 8½ is fantastical and original. But Satoshi Kon seems to go beyond and redefine what dreams are. The director is fascinated by the relationship between technology and our perception of reality vs. dreams. Although cautious about the intentions of technology in our everyday lives, the film carries a hopeful message that our perceptions of both dreams and reality can be positively altered through technology.

Paprika also compares the Internet with dreams. Though we usually consider the Internet to be “real” and our dreams to be “illusions,” both are products of our imagination that exist outside of our physical selves. When Detective Konakawa, a patient suffering from recurring nightmares, seems surprised to see Paprika in the site radioclub.jp, Paprika asks him “Don’t you think the Internet and dreams are very similar?” Her argument rings true. On the Internet, as in our dreams, we experience secrecy and we have a chance to create our own reality. As in dreams, we have the chance to be free of the restrictions of time, space, and our physical selves. To put it as Paprika does, “The Internet and dreams are the means of expressing the inhibitions of mankind.”

Do I agree that technology should enter our dreams, our TV screens, and our reality in the future? I don’t know but it seems so wildly different from our reality that I it wouldn’t hurt to try. Technology seems to populate our world these days that it’s hard to imagine a world with no technology in the future. Dreams are no different too. It’s a fascinating idea to make a movie about the possibilities of technology inhabiting our dreams.  

Blog Post 2: God Help the Girl

Blog Post 2: God Help the Girl

Written and directed by Stuart Murdoch, God Help the Girl is a visually arresting and an incredibly true-to-life film about adolescence. Though some viewers may consider it “twee,” the film accurately portrays the rickety ride of relationships and breakups during this fragile period in our lives. The story line is primarily about a shy, musical teenage girl by the name of Eve who, despite her trouble expressing her emotions, travels to Glasgow to become a musician. While at Glasgow she meets James, an awkward songwriter who has the same vibes as Eve.   They meet up with another musician, Cassie, a guitarist, and all 3 become great friends.

Notwithstanding a certain sentimental aura, the drama of the lives of Eve, and her two friends, is far from tame. The film struck me as being very similar to Francois Truffaut’s third feature film, Jules and Jim. Just as Eve forms a triangular friendship with James and Cassie, Truffaut’s film is also about the triangular friendship between the Austrian author Jules, the exuberant Frenchman Jim and the beautiful Catherine. Although God Help the Girl is about music and takes place in a different era, the cinematography of both films is similar, as is the powerful way in which they play on our emotions and tug at our heartstrings. I love how both directors are able to at least appear to ignore the audience and create art for its own sake, art that touches them, rather than the viewers. In both films we are given little hints here and there and must do more thinking beyond the facts that the film itself presents us.  Having loose plots makes both films interesting to discover. In Jules and Jim time travels freely from the present to the past to the future and back to the present and the audience is challenged to determine the chronology.  God Help the Girl equally demands that the viewer figure out where the characters are and how they got there. When Eve swallows the pills and falls into a deep sleep we think she is dead. The montage of images of her dancing and taking pictures with her friends and the slow and melancholic music confirms this.  Yet, she is not. We learn that under the weight of her troubled emotional state, she has made herself return to the hospital.

I think the main reason this film is considered quaint is due to Murdoch’s evocative soundtrack. Not only is it pleasing to the ears but unifies the characters and helps us to understand their passions. There are many songs in this film, each one better than the last as the film proceeds. Another reason the film has a pleasant tone results from the characters themselves.  Eve has many troubles in her life; she is addicted to drugs, doesn’t eat enough and tends to seek seclusion from the world.  But we don’t interpret her passivity in a negative way.  She don’t find her cynical, or lazy.  We feel her pain and want her to succeed in her musical ventures. In the beginning, Eve seems frail but as the film progresses, she hardens, yet not in a bad way. She stands up to her boyfriend, she becomes more confident and realizes her ambitions and how to achieve them. Overall, the film is somewhat of a pillow to lie on, and even learn from.

Primer: What's In the Box? Authenticity and Humanity.

Time travel films are tricky. Spend too much time explaining the mechanics of the time travel present, the narrative and characters are given the short stick. However, if the rules of time travel are not clearly sorted out, then the entire narrative and logic of the film collapses on itself. Shane Carruth's film Primer (2004) could arguably put in either category due to the film's extremely polarized response from audiences. But, let's take all of that aside and look at the film that is present. Because man this film is a doozy.

Created over the course of several years on a budget of seven thousand dollars before receiving a lot of hype at Sundance and amassing a cult following, Primer is the little film that could. Many people were alienated by the lack of exposition and heavy engineering/technical jargon present in the film, but for me, those aspects were terms of endearment. Primer feels like an incredibly personal tale that meant a lot to Carruth, which is odd considering the film is about time travel. But this film is an incredible achievement in itself for remaining authentic while also making time travel seem believable. Whether this is due to the limitations the shoestring budget gave Carruth or the fact that Carruth used to be an engineer and wanted to keep the scenario realistic, this was the first time I saw a time travel movie and thought, "Huh, maybe this could happen."

In addition to the ingenious time travel mechanics (i.e. the doubles, time travel not being instant), this film never forgets its characters. Both Aaron and Abe go on incredible journeys as characters as they go from mildly cocky, extremely brilliant garage scientists to human beings grappling with the ethics of their discovery, which they do not understand. The fact that both Abe and Aaron, who are depicted as very intelligent, struggle with the mechanics of the time travel box and what it means for humanity makes this story all the more relatable, and ultimately, more compelling. Watching Aaron and Abe realize that they will never understand this technology is both terrifying and intriguing, and the ways in which the characters diverge is both understandable and tragic. Abe may have gone back to his regular life out of guilt/fear and Aaron on to France where he can create more boxes out of greed, but we never stop wondering. Not just what happened in the film, but also what happens after, in context of not only the box, but also these two guys. Now that is good storytelling.

God Help the Girl: Finding Light in Music Despite Darkness of the World

Music is an essential part of our humanity. I have always believed that music is the language of the soul, as it can be used as a tool for us to express aspects of ourselves we have no other way of expressing. Maybe that's why I have a bit of an impartial bias towards musical films and even many stage musicals, because they emphasize the show-stopping aspect of the musical number so greatly, that they lose sight of the humanity that singing character is trying to show. I know that many of my blogs have discussed the ways that these films take influences from several films/styles, fuse them together, and create something new, unique, and powerful. Sorry, but Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl (2014) once again achieves this through its combination of real-world strife and its depiction of music as a force of immense goodness.

Several musicals in the last few decades have managed to discuss real world issues and humanistic themes, with mixed results. Bob Fosse's film adaptation of Cabaret (1972) showcased the ugly side of humanity through a gritty lens in his examination of a burlesque cabaret club being the only place where the true, terrible nature of people can be revealed, explored, and commented on. Tom Hooper's film adaptation of Les Miserables (2012) looked at the ways that we feel unfulfilled and conflicted in our lives, seeing love as the only solution to the misery of the world. God Help the Girl explores ideas from both of these films, albeit predominantly in its non-musical portions. Eve hates herself and is trapped in the troubled confines of a young girl with anorexia. She doesn't know how to deal with her problems, so she always runs from them, illustrated in the opening of the film when she escapes the psychiatric hospital she was staying in. Over the course of the film, Eve takes drugs to dilute the pain that she feels at being unfulfilled and tries to find love through some ill-conceived sexual trysts with men, most notably the unabashed d-bag Anton.

Obviously, one of the most important aspects of a movie musical is the music itself, and how it is used. It is here that God Help the Girl finds some unlikely inspiration: The musical films of John Carney. Carney's musicals are all variations on similar themes, but that doesn't stop each of them from being fun, moving, and electric. In his films such as Once (2006) and Sing Street (2015), Carney's protagonists find happiness through music as they find themselves committing to an artistic expression and forming authentic bonds with others that share the same passion and vision. Eve comes to life when she makes music, and finds an unlikely source of love in her band mates James and Cassie, who grow to be their own makeshift musical family. Surprisingly considering all of the pain Eve exhibits and endures throughout the film, God Help the Girl concludes on an uplifting note, as Eve leaves Glasgow for London to study music at a musical college. By grounding the film in a relatable, real-world story with layered characters while also allowing the sheer power that is music to seep into the film's core, God Help the Girl emerges as something special.

Paprika: Is This The Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?

Dreams are a tricky concept to explore and depict in the medium of film. When dreams become abstract, they can embody the way that we actually see dreams but we risk losing any connections to be made to the real world. The opposite is true of dreams that are too structured and concrete in their depictions because although the connection to reality may be evident, the poetic truths that arise from the abstract qualities of dreams will not be. The Japanese animated film Paprika (2006) deftly manages a balance of abstract and structured by drawing from many influences and genres. An obvious parallel to make with Paprika is Inception (2010), the Christopher Nolan mind-trip that mainly took place within dreams in the context of information thieves. That film utilized the concept of dream levels, where multiple dreams could occur within one dream. However, Paprika opts to go a different route by allowing those exploring dreams to travel to the dreams of other people, almost as if they are through through different universes/realities, which allow for more complex and intellectual concepts regarding dreams to come to fruition.

In this film, scientists have created a device called the DC Mini, which allows people to travel into their own dreams to explore them for psychological purposes. This gives Paprika an introspective tone as a film, as many of the events that occur are about going into oneself or another's self to realize fundamental truths about a person, whereas Inception was a film about gathering information from dreams. However, there is one crucial aspect of both films that are similar: The struggle to determine what is a dream and what is reality. In Inception, the main character Cobb's wife Mal loses her grasp regarding when she is in a dream and when she is in the real world. This ultimately leads to her suicide, as Mal believes that she is in a dream when she is in reality, so she dies so she can "wake up." Paprika has a similar concept as Dr. Shima becomes crazed upon using the DC Mini and jumps through a window, almost killing himself. The difference here is that there was no concrete belief that one realm was dreams and one realm was reality. They had become so muddled to Dr. Shima that he tried to escape this fear of not knowing, but could not, because if a person dies in a dream, they die in real life as well, revealed in the death of Dr. Osanai.

Paprika is able to accomplish being both infinitely labyrinthine by presenting a more complex take on Inception, but it is also able to be far more accessible due to the influences it takes from Japanese animation. Borrowing from Akira (1988) in terms of urban setting and complex ideas while also harnessing the bright, colorful visuals and elaborate, imaginative sound and design of Hayao Miyazaki films. This in many ways allows Paprika to emerge with the best of both worlds, and become a film worth noting for both fans of mind-bending science fiction and any fans of Japanese animated cinema from the last few decades. It's a film worth being awake for.