‘Inception’: Three Film Theories

Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

We know quite well the analogue that compares the state in which we watch films to the state in which we dream in sleep. Cinema = Dream, the formula goes, and for those who haven’t acquired the labyrinthine art of lucid dreaming, cinema makes a convenient substitute. Both inspire in us the belief that lucidity is an imperative, and the evanescent web of dreams in particular invokes our struggle with the subterranean cognitive faculties of total recall. A dream barely retained at daybreak or upon waking can often be vague, mesmeric beyond recall, prophetic without explanation; sometimes a photograph of a face half-remembered or words spoken in mute on the blank pages of an unopened book. Cinema, on the other hand, is something like a dream completely remembered and thoroughly digested: characters, dialogue, setting, and story compacted into a swift narrative in marked contrast to the infinitesimal cadences of real time. If the proof of the synthesis of the dream-life and real time is the meta-dream of the cinematic, then Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film of grandiose mechanics and mnemonic architectures, introduces cinema itself as a powerful allegory for the possibility of shared dreaming.

Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Inception has been out for more than two weeks now, and already there is a wealth of criticism on the film, ranging from the deeply analytical and adulatory to the faintly contemptuous and snidely meta-critical — in short, if there is anything to be said about the film, it’s been said already.

There should be something said about the massive hype, backlash, and counter backlash that predated the July 16 opening of Inception in the United States. The immense success of The Dark Knight ensured that director Christopher Nolan would receive carte blanche on any of his future projects, the first of which would be Inception, a project Nolan had been developing for more than a decade. The expectations for Inception were resultantly set sky-high, and Warner Bros., the studio producing and distributing it, heightened the anticipation by exclusively showing the film to key web-based and professional movie critics two weeks before the film’s release.

The first wave of critical appraisals was overwhelmingly ecstatic, with scribes calling the film “a masterpiece” and a work of near if not consummate perfection. The second wave of critics, perhaps tempered by the flock of eulogizers who were in line before them, responded with more sober, skeptical critiques that, while admitting to the film’s technical mastery, questioned its numbing logic and confounding magniloquence. The third wave of critics spent time either seriously analyzing the film’s complexities in plot and theme, or vindicating the first wave of critics who were attacked by the second wave critics, or protecting the latter from a counter backlash by those from the first and third waves who accused the naysayers of trolling with questionable motivations in mind (when they were not, by their own admission, learning lessons in film criticism from zealous misspelling fanboys).

Some who found themselves in the middle and at a distance ventured to ruminate on the meaning of the carnage. What’s most astonishing about the critical melee that erupted online is that the greater part of the bickering and name-calling occurred before Inception was even released, demonstrating the anticipatory hyperspeed with which a large-scale film can be discussed, categorized, and judged (or falsely assessed) on the web in under a week.

Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

The basic plot of the film should be known fairly well by now (as summarized by Cinematical‘s Todd Gilchrist): “Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, an expert in what the film calls extraction, the theft of secrets or information from the subconscious mind. After botching a job thanks to the intrusion of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb finds an unlikely opportunity for redemption from one of his former victims: Saito (Ken Watanabe), CEO of a flourishing multinational, offers him amnesty in exchange for planting an idea – known as inception – within the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), one of Saito’s competitors. Enlisting the help of teammates Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Ariadne (Ellen Page), Eames (Tom Hardy), and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), Cobb reluctantly agrees to the mission, only to discover that the mind’s defenses are more formidable than any physical threat he could face.”

The heist film semantics that adorn the plot tie into the multiple layers which enfold Inception’s unmistakable complexity. Nevermind the vast gamut of reviews floating on the web that delve into the aesthetic and technical merits of the film, there are three superb essays which deserve extended discussion, if not for their numerous insights into the film, then at least for their authors’ taking the time to analyze the film seriously and on its own terms.

The first essay, by Bilge Ebiri of New York Magazine, devotes itself to uncovering the “hidden inception within Inception”. “As pretty much everyone knows by now,” writes Ebiri, “Inception‘s titular concept is the placement of an idea into a character’s subconscious — a notion that the film presents as being more or less unprecedented…The process of inception works…by placing the simplest form of an idea deep into a character’s subconscious as they’re dreaming, through a series of suggestions that effectively lead the character to ‘give himself the idea’.”

Ebiri goes on to elaborate that while the ostensible inception is the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream setpiece that crowns the film’s second and third acts (in which Cobb and his team have to artificially insert the meme “I will break up my father’s empire” inside Fischer’s mind while he dreams) the “hidden” inception is in fact performed upon Cobb, who is implanted with an overriding emotion of regret that manages to chain his memory to a guilt-generated image of his late wife Mal.

It is uncertain in Bilge’s essay who exactly implants the idea in Cobb’s mind that he is guilty of his wife’s death (otherwise, if it had been self-implanted, the process wouldn’t strictly adhere to the “inception” term), but the meme which suggests or relates to Cobb’s guilt is spoken three times in the film by both Saito and Cobb: “I am an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone.” It is only when Cobb visits the projection of his wife for the last time in limbo, that he realizes the meaning of the meme (discovers its source) and is subsequently freed from his self-inflicted guilt and regret. He tells the projection of his wife (who is a projection of his inner guilt, in effect telling himself) that he had kept his promise (remembering an old memory in the moment of speaking it): he and Mal had grown old together already, in limbo when they were young. This revelation leads Cobb to find the greatly aged Saito in another section of limbo, where the meme which Saito spoke originally is returned to him, liberating both men from the illusion of limbo and back into “real life”.

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The film’s final scene is the subject of much speculation, in which Cobb’s totem, a spinning top used to verify whether Cobb is dreaming or awake (if the top continues to spin forever he is obviously in a netherworld), is seen to continue spinning, albeit wobbling a little, before the camera cuts away. The two conclusions (Cobb is still dreaming, having maybe dreamt it all up, or Cobb has woken to real life and is returning home) hardly matter: Cobb learns from his wife’s projection (or had learned from her true self) that the only attitude which shapes real life and distinguishes it from the dream life is utter belief.

In the old formula of Cervantes, authentic belief is what causes a humble hidalgo named Alonso Quijano to believe himself a valiant knight renamed Don Quijote de la Mancha; life and dream (for the dreamer who mistakes the dream for life) are one and the same field, extensions of the one act in the heart of an action, tributaries of the one river that leads, by necessity, into the oceanic consciousness where all identifies with all.

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Following Ebiri’s theory, it is conceivable to think that Saito, a skilled dreamer himself, plants the meme “I am an old man, filled with regret…” into Cobb’s mind (presuming that if Cobb dreamt the entire movie up, he was asleep at the time Saito intercepted him) only a few moments before Saito (in this case, ironically) asks Cobb if inception is even possible. Another consideration: Cobb may also/instead have been “incepted” by his wife’s final words before her suicide, “Take a leap of faith…” (something to that effect), seeding him with the notion that he must take a similar plunge into limbo or death, at the cost of risking his life, or much later, hazarding his entire crew during the Bobby Fischer mission. It is just as well that Cobb must make a Kierkegaardian acceptance of whatever reality he is faced with, be it dream, life, paradox, or absurdity, so long as he is mentally and spiritually prepared for an infinite resignation which would lead him inevitably toward infinite faith.

The inception concept is central as well to understanding the greater allegory Nolan alludes to in the film’s setup. Slate’s Jonah Wiener smartly observes that the overweening logic and “literalness” which some critics find fault with in Nolan’s depiction of Inception’s dreamscapes are not meant to qualify the kind of dreams you and I experience during sleep:

Critics are right to identify Nolan’s vision of dreams as somewhat literal-minded, but to call that a flaw in the film risks countering his literalism with essentialism… That dreams in Inception aren’t normal dreams is a central plot point. The movie’s exposition is passing and partial, but the rough idea is that, to better train soldiers, the military developed a technology through which dreams could be manipulated and shared—this technology eventually migrated to the private sector. When Cobb and his cohort enter a dream, they take the creative reins from their dreaming subject so as to better sift through and steward his subconscious—the tidier the dream, the easier it is to manage and mine it.

Indeed, the “dreams” that structure Inception are hardly any dreams we know of (but wouldn’t we desire them all the same?) Wiener points out that Nolan has little interest in dreams save for the processes which generate and control them. Nolan uses the dream trope as a narrative expediency rather than as a set of categorical types — as a vehicle of lucidity and metronomic abstraction purposed to give shape to the uncontrolled and unknowable substance dreams are made of (for this task, Nolan ditches the tools of surrealism potentially because they are far too imprecise or chaotic for his purposes).

“In dreams we are at our most vulnerable,” explains Cobb to one of his clients, and we are introduced to a team of professional mercenary dreamers whose vocational excellence consists in exploiting this vulnerability by mitigating the role chance plays with the subconscious. If Cobb is the flawed emotional dreamer we are meant to sympathize with, his team of experts — the cool, calm, and collected Arthur (the Point Man), the dry and witty Eames (the Forger), the savvy and logical Ariadne (the Architect), the patient and scientific Yusuf (the Chemist), the genteel and honorable Saito (the Tourist) — taken together or separately are Nolan’s idea of the gifted dreamer, the lucid dreamer capable of mining into another’s emotionally vulnerable subconscious by keeping his/her own subconscious in check.

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Inception is not a film that attempts, nor does it seem to care, to align itself with the long and storied lineage of surrealist or dream-based cinema (from Méliès, Cocteau, and Buñuel, down to Gilliam, Lynch, and Weerasethakul), since Nolan’s object is to (violently) “wake us up” rather than submerge us in lyrical slumber. The meticulous dialogic expositions which take up so much of the film’s breath seem bent on keeping us focused on mnemonic acrobatics; the dexterous transitions from one dream level to the next are certainly not designed to lull or pacify us at any point. One of the main plot threads is emphatically concerned with Cobb and co.’s escape from dreamland, as they sink deeper and deeper into Fischer’s mind at their own peril. Moreover, Cobb’s delayed catharsis, his chief purpose as the film’s odyssean hero, is to “return home”, or as Michael Caine’s character puts it, Cobb has to “wake up” and get back to life. The “dreams” in this sense are merely vehicles of transition between controllable/uncontrollable waking states.

And how does one manage and militarize a dream so as to mine the assaulted mind of its hidden resources? By simply watching films. Absorbing the memes of cinema into the subconscious, the foreign and fragile atmosphere of the dreamscape is familiarized through the proxy language of the movie house. Control of a dream, we find, is analogous to the control a director/cinematographer wields through the arbitration of the camera; in french, this control is a way of deciding what the objectif (the lens) sees in contradistinction to what the subconscious chooses at random. Inception in this regard may function as a balletic allegory of the order which cinema enforces on our dreams. Where the dream is ultimately subjective experience known by the dreamer alone, the mechanical and objective origins of cinema afford us the opportunity of sharing dreams, infinitely translatable images, with anyone else willing to sit with us in the dark.

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Hence the dreams on display in Inception are really cinema tropes controlled and fashioned by the films and technology that informed Nolan and his production. The zero-gravity hallway fight scene, though splendidly original in its execution, is also a hybrid replay of The Matrix mashed up with 2001: A Space Odyssey. The snow fortress level is equally Jason Bourne and James Bond (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, cited by Nolan as a childhood favorite), seasoned with a little Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare. Numerous films (intentionally or not) are alluded to or “extracted” from directly: Paprika, Synecdoche, New York, Heat, Shutter Island, Last Year at Marienbad, Bladerunner, La Vie en rose, Citizen Kane, etc. As Jonah Wiener makes clear: “Added up, Inception is something of a love letter to some of Nolan’s favorite films, and his extracting, forging, architecting heroes are not simply culture-bludgeoned victims, but emblems of that liberated Postmodern figure, the remixer, who bends and subverts mass culture to his will. There is a certain claustrophobia to this vision, too—a sense that there’s nothing new under the sun, even in dreams, and that mass culture has co-opted our inner projectors.”

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Perhaps it is Nolan’s accidental intention to point out that the old Freudian constructs and Jungian archetypes are being crowded and draped with the symbology and new noise of 21st century media saturation: our dreams, no different from the video games we play and the television shows we watch, programmed from without within, are quickly becoming extensions of the media technologies that keep up as dazed in waking life as we are when asleep. The overarching inception at play here is the subconscious mental seeding of media tropes that can play broadly across a wide range of dreamers, bending the mind to favor the accessibility and compatibility which only standardized media provide. In consequence, those who produce these visions — the auteurs, producers, architects, engineers — are at liberty to raid our sleep.

The allegorical roles that the characters in Inception fill go even further. Dom Cobb is more than just an “extractor”: he is in many ways a direct image of the director himself, Christopher Nolan, the auteur challenged to perform inception in the mind of an unwary, potentially hostile man (i.e. challenged to inspire real emotion in the skeptical average filmgoer). In what is likely the most ingenious reading of the film, Devin Faraci (of Chud.com) believes that Inception at bottom acts as a complex allegory for the filmmaking process itself, starting with Cobb/Nolan as the embattled auteur seeking to create a film which instills in the viewer an authentic glimmer of inspiration (i.e. to successfully perform inception in said viewer):

It’s important to realize that Inception is a not very thinly-veiled autobiographical look at how Nolan works. In a recent red carpet interview, Leonardo DiCaprio – who was important in helping Nolan get the script to the final stages – compares the movie not to The Matrix or some other mindfuck movie but Fellini’s 8 1/2. This is probably the second most telling thing DiCaprio said during the publicity tour for the film, with the first being that he based Cobb on Nolan.

Faraci’s allegorical mode doesn’t stop there:

The heist team quite neatly maps to major players in a film production. Cobb is the director while Arthur, the guy who does the research and who sets up the places to sleep, is the producer. Ariadne, the dream architect, is the screenwriter – she creates the world that will be entered. Eames is the actor (this is so obvious that the character sits at an old fashioned mirrored vanity, the type which stage actors would use). Yusuf is the technical guy…to get the movie off the ground… Saito is the money guy, the big corporate suit who fancies himself a part of the game. And Fischer, the mark, is the audience. Cobb, as a director, takes Fischer through an engaging, stimulating and exciting journey, one that leads him to an understanding about himself. Cobb is the big time movie director (or rather the best version of that – certainly not a Michael Bay) who brings the action, who brings the spectacle, but who also brings the meaning and the humanity and the emotion.

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The movies-as-dreams aspect is part of why Inception keeps the dreams so grounded. In the film it’s explained that playing with the dream too much alerts the dreamer to the falseness around him; this is just another version of the suspension of disbelief upon which all films hinge. As soon as the audience is pulled out of the movie by some element – an implausible scene, a ludicrous line, a poor performance – it’s possible that the cinematic dream spell is broken completely, and they’re lost.

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As a great director, Cobb is also a great artist, which means that even when he’s creating a dream about snowmobile chases, he’s bringing something of himself into it. That’s Mal. It’s the auterist impulse, the need to bring your own interests, obsessions and issues into a movie. It’s what the best directors do. It’s very telling that Nolan sees this as kind of a problem; I suspect another filmmaker might have cast Mal as the special element that makes Cobb so successful.

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Inception is such a big deal because it’s what great movies strive to do. You walk out of a great film changed, with new ideas planted in your head, with your neural networks subtly rewired by what you’ve just seen. On a meta level Inception itself does this, with audiences leaving the theater buzzing about the way it made them feel and perceive. New ideas, new thoughts, new points of view are more lasting a souvenir of a great movie than a ticket stub.

If Faraci’s confidence in the film’s value is to be countered with the insistence that Inception has yet to reach the apogee of the “great movies” it takes pains to simulate (one critic snarkily remarks that the real inception performed involves inserting the idea that Inception is a “great film” at all in vulnerable filmgoer minds), the film at least establishes a new standard for operatic action kinetics that considered separately should be admired and emulated. If anything, Nolan has crafted an erudite summer blockbuster willing to push the attention span of less discerning filmgoers.

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The central hypothesis of Inception is that all original acts must emerge from within; we learn toward the end of the film that this is only partly true: self-knowledge may also occur from without, with help from compatriots and enemies equally. Seen in this light, the film isn’t “original” in the way that we expect the term to mean (that something may be truly new under the sun’s all-seeing eye) but it is original in that it disputes the conditions by which originality is asseverated, declaring the very idea of “inception” an unoriginary act. The hypothesis is forwarded this way so it can be disproved; that  is the conceit which leads the characters to engage with the dangers involved in the act — “It isn’t impossible, it’s just bloody difficult” — but ultimately we learn that inception is in effect a private emotion that is somehow, paradoxically, shared by all and understood by anyone; that the act isn’t criminal because the product is inevitable, and necessary: that self-knowledge is indeed the root of all attainable knowledge.

If this knowledge involves other people, it is so because it must involve other people, all those strangers one meets in life and who may very well turn out to be our saviors and benefactors, by even a glance, a glimpse, a stray word, rewiring the neurons that tell us who we are and what we may become. Robert Fisher Jr.’s mind (whose name curiously evokes the legendary American chess grandmaster’s) may have been breached and invaded, but ultimately it is his trust which leads him toward an emotional knowledge that we are at liberty to observe but which only he is at freedom to inherit and make his own. That this young man possesses himself, in the manner that Cobb learns to extricate himself from his own deceitful memory, is the final act of positive theft.

Inception is possible — to strike gold in the unoriginal ore — because inspiration means just what it claims: the breath of an idea which descends from the external sphere(s) and is internalized and rendered into one’s private language. Nolan watched the films alluded to in his film, and from their parts he has constructed a grandiosity (clumsy in ways that are also masterly) as inadvertently original as those works which preceded it. Cobb plants an idea in his wife’s subconscious, and she is thereafter implanted in him; her totem becomes his memory, his curse, his salvation. If the top topples over, or spins onward into oblivion, Cobb has already made his decision, has moved on and resigned himself to the dream/life.

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