[mechanical_fish]

No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated for many people, but probably not if you're a computer programmer in which case you literally have years of formal education in the structures that this plot is built on, and even a formal vocabulary to describe it with. (e.g. "Inception is a movie that keeps pushing other movies onto the stack.")

You're suffering the mathematician's disease, ably satirized by Feynman in that quote I can't stop paraphrasing: "Mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because once proved any theorem is immediately seen to be trivial."

But I think Inception succeeds as a film only because following the plot thread in real time isn't of the essence, just as I was able to enjoy Beethoven's Fifth Symphony long before I was taught its formal structure. Without the education required to really dissect that structure, you nevertheless sense that it's there, and it enhances the emotional experience that the work is trying to convey – in Inception's case, the experience of being a man (well, two men, actually, and possibly also a woman) immersed in a dreamlike world full of symbols, mazes, masks, bluffs, and distractions, a world that he himself is creating to distract his own attention from the pure, simple, but unthinkably awful pain at the center of his life.

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EDIT: Fixed my prose, which got away from me. So tempted to just delete this whole thing, but I try to avoid erasing history even if it's really embarrassing and exhausting.

[bh42222]

No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated, unless you're a computer programmer

Personal anecdote: My friend who is in marketing and is not at all a geek also thinks if you have half a brain the plot is obvious. She has no special math training beyond an MBA, and has done absolutely zero programming in her life.

[bad_user]

I do have at least one acquaintance that watched it multiple times to understand it. In fact this acquaintance convinced me to go watch it, as I was actually curios about what's so hard to understand about it. And while watching it, I kept asking myself what's the big deal with it, as the plot unfolded itself pretty linearly.

So there is something about it that makes it hard to understand for some people, although my non-technical wife also had no problems with it.

[pharrington]

Just to be sure, you're getting downvoted because you're claiming non-programmers can't easily understand the concept of an activity having -multiple layers-. An execution stack is but one example of this. The construction of a cake, for example, is another.

[mechanical_fish]

It's nice for someone to actually say so, thanks. I'm getting tired of all the reflexive, unexplained downvotes. HN is an unfriendly and cold place, these days.

Meanwhile, sure, it's easy to understand that Inception is a cake. I'll concede that. But: it's not so easy to frost all three layers of the cake at the same time. The part where Inception gets tricky for me is where they start intercutting from layer to layer, and taking actions on one layer that have ramifications on the others.

[javajosh]

There seems to be a pervasive misunderstanding that downvoting is for what you disagree with, rather than for comments that do not add to the discussion. That is, downvotes are for noise, upvotes are for signals, and "signal" includes things you disagree with.

My new hobby (in the XKCD sense) is upvoting every well-reasoned argument that I disagree with on HN. :)

[obilgic]

It is actuLly interesting, may be the demographics of hn users is changing gradually, meaning that programmers(people with cs degree) are becomming the minority? So people get offended when you talk about cs education...

[klez]

Maybe Common Lisp continuations could be a good example in that you go up the call stack, then down, then up again and so on.

[Avshalom]

>No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated, unless you're a computer programmer

Or a carpenter.

Or a secretary.

... chef, janitor, burgerflipper, librarian, bassist, cop.

[mechanical_fish]

Sigh. It's so exhausting to have to write bug-free prose.

I apologize. Let's try that again.

What I meant to say:

Some people do not claim to understand Inception all that well. Some do. And some understand it so well that they go out of their way to publicly state their annoyance that everyone on earth doesn't see how obvious it all is. I venture to guess that computer programmers are disproportionally likely to be members of the second and third groups. (Please note that I have said nothing about carpenters! I didn't mean to say a thing about carpenters!!)

EDIT: Incidentally, I'm upvoting you even though your razor-sharp criticism makes me do more work. ;) These downvotes! They are like mosquitoes!

[krelian]

Don't worry, your explanation did sound perfectly reasonable and I have a feeling that the source of these downvotes are attempts to be holier than thou.