When he put out Shutter Island and Inception back to back, it got me thinking. Then I read where former KGB Commander Vladimir Putin called him a “real man”, for some extra effort to get to a “Save the Tigers” conference.
So I read through his filmography, and it is pretty obvious that he has committed himself romantically to radical politics, and social subversion. A credible case could be made that he is a Communist sympathizer.
All film is propaganda, to some extent. All art is intended to influence you in some way. Much of it is banal, some of it is profound; when profound, it can be so because it operates on you at a deep, unconscious level, for good and evil.
The point of Shutter Island was that your sense of sanity is precarious. You can be a lunatic and not know it. More insidiously, that you can be called out as a lunatic by authorities, and be forced, more or less, to comply with their diagnosis.
One thinks of the abuse of the Soviet and other psychiatric systems for the “treatment” of political dissidents, whose mental defect was pointing out self-evidently true facts about the monstrous systems within which they were imprisoned.
You identify with his character, then you learn that you are mad. I only saw the movie once, and my first reading was that a credible case could be made that his character was not in fact mad, but was made so by a carefully contrived set of circumstances and drugs. The author claims no, but to my way of thinking if he was trying to mess with peoples minds, why stop once he got out of the book and off the screen? I’d have to watch it again to make a confident diagnosis.
The point of Inception is that your dreams are not your own. The State–or anyone–can come into your mind, into the most private parts of your self, and control or at least influence them.
Both of these movies are thrillers, on the surface, but particularly in a theater, when you are deeply absorbed in them, they will also have effects that linger, that introduce ideas and doubts about who you are, and a following increased tendency towards decreased trust, increased alienation, and openness to the influence of others.
This case can be made with regard to virtually every movie DiCaprio has made in his whole career, which I am not going to take the time to do. No wonder Putin admires him.