Inception takes a simple concept and imbues it with just enough emotion to make it relatable and transcribable to many other experiences. In this near-future where dreams can be excavated technologically, our protagonist sees people in the throes of addiction, of luxury, and destitution, he reflects on his own privilege in this world while fighting to take back his true life. He loses his own wife to a suicide caused by this addiction: the addiction of chasing one's own dreams. Chasing what is not real. Choosing to create a supporting architecture for ideas which you are yet too scared to actually share with the world. The curse of dreaming without living. These themes are heavily implied through pastiche but they rarely get in the way of the characters. Perhaps this was a choice to preserve the flow of action, by keeping each character razor sharp in their function within a grander scheme. As a heist movie, this is not overly complex or confusing. At most, the audience needs to keep track of three separate timelines but they are clearly delineated, with multiple shots in the superceding dreams showing the relevant characters asleep with their face masks.

The Shining is a surprisingly deep tear down of masculine fragility by a person whose legacy betrays no kind of self awareness. Jack is shown to obsess over his craft to the point of breaking, and he lashes out at both his wife and child as a result. The film makes it clear that Jack has already had a shaky relationship with the two of them, with the inconsistency in when exactly Jack had harmed his son from both him and his wife as they relayed their stories to various other characters. Jack is easily seduced by the charm and luxury of the spirits haunting the hotel, and one of the former keeper's specifically plays into Jack's paranoia and anger towards his family. He feels tied down, anchored to nothing and always responding to chaos. He feels the victim for all the things he has done for which he was mostly to blame. He becomes a victim in his own minds as other people respond to his overreactions. The maze scene is quite frightening in a way I did not expect to hold up since the last time I saw this movie as a kid. The twists and turns within the maze are beautifully foreshadowed and they are shot with such a frantic, claustrophobic anxiety that I couldn't help but forget whether Jack's son would make it out or not.

Synechdoche New York is an excellently crafted allegory for artistic self obsession. The main character searches for meaning in his own life by recreating a vision of his day to day in the form of a play. He is granted a massive budget by the city of New York, and an old subway station, to flesh out his vision. He recreates his whole neighborhood block and hires actors to play himself and other people around him. His main actor begins to stalk him in real life, and starts to give ever more accurate portrayals of the MC during unscripted scenes.