Inception plot details to remain a mystery? Dream on.

“Don’t you get it? You’re a rat in a maze.”
(George Noyce, Shutter Island)

*SIGH* Everyone who was thrilled with the magnificently orchestrated mystique and old-school teaserrific intrigue of Christopher Nolan’s exquisite teaser for Inception released yesterday, please close your eyes and clamp your hands over your ears for the next 11 months. Unless you have a very large rock you can crawl under until June 2010, you won’t be able to see Inception with virginal eyes when it premieres next summer.

A few days ago /Film published a very classy and brief expansion on Inception’s reported theme of “the architecture of the mind” — elaborating ever-so-elegantly on what we might expect from the film. I winced just a little, but relaxed when I realized the leak could have been much worse. Well, gang, today the worse caught up with us. Apparently unable to resist the lure of an “EXCLUSIVE!” headline, our reliable nemesis buddy Kris Tapley broke down and dropped a massive bag of bean spillage. I agree with Kris that this was bound to have happened eventually. Just a little demorlized that it had to come from one of us instead of the likes of TMZ or Perez Hilton (Though I’m not ashamed to admit I’m looking forward to whatever nekkid pictures of Joseph Gordon-Levitt Perez is hoarding.)

So yeah, no doubt this leak was inevitable. News this hot was bound to break free sooner or later, and I guess I was being blithely naive in hoping it would have been much much later. FULL DISCLOSURE: I received a fascinating email from an anonymous tipster exactly 10 weeks ago, worded with much of the same phrasing Kris uses in his descriptions of the plot details today. There are bits of Kris’s loose synopsis that match my source word for word, so we can assume this is all flowing from the same dribbling leak. I’ve held onto what I knew for 2-and-a-half months — in fact, I stopped reading the email in June when I felt I was finding out stuff I’d rather not know. Why? Because I have so much respect for Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker that I wanted to respect his sense of classic showmanship as well.

ok, so it’s no great tragedy that the plot details are all over the net this afternoon. Indeed, we can’t even be sure our source is entirely legitimate, so a lot of this information might be garbled, misleading or wrong altogether (wouldn’t it be sweet if this were nothing but a carefully manipulated red herring?) Either I’m a little discouraged that Kris takes such glee in disrupting the carefully calculated marketing scheme for the sake of an EXCLUSIVE. Or else I’m pissed that I held onto my own skimpy principles a day longer than he did. I’m no angel. I already had my own version of the plot reveal written and ready to post. I’m not proud that I thought about posting it, I’m not happy the spoilers exists, and frankly I’m conflicted about what the fuck the internet has done to our moviegoing innocence.