Inception as a Post Modern Text

Inception and the postmodern sublime.

July 21, 2010 \pm\31 4:09 pm

by Tanner McSwain

Disclaimer: Keith S. Wilson and anyone else who hasn’t seen this (excellent) movie should

skip on down to the next post. Spoilers aplenty lie ahead, as well as the revelatory endings to

a couple of decade-old movies that you’ve almost certainly seen and a few video games you

may or may not have played. You’ve been warned.

The other day, Keith asked what the hell Inception was about, and after seeing it last night, I

can say that I’m not entirely sure. Like Christopher Nolan’s best films — Memento,

Insomnia, The Dark Knight — Inception is going to require repeat viewings. It’s a dense little

mindfuck with the philosophy embedded in the action and enough interstitial ambiguity to

keep you unsure of what you just saw even as you wobble out of the theater. Which is to say,

it’s one of those rare films that, just for a second, makes you question your own reality.

Which is to say, I loved it.

Inception deals a lot with lucid dreaming, multi-layered false realities that are almost

indistinguishable from the real world — think The Matrix, but less sinister — that are damn

complicated, and unnerving in the way they play with the form of film. Because movies

themselves are tricks; viewers become temporarily lost in the world onscreen, willingly give

their subconsciouses over to the filmmakers to manipulate, and then return to their real lives

when the lights come up. Any emotions we feel while watching movies — joy, empathy, fear

— are obviously illusory, but they are no less resonant, and some of us carry them with us

long after the movie itself is over. Which is why Inception works on so may levels — it

thrills us with action, but its themes and images are designed very specifically to lull us into

the “reality” of the movie, only to startle us at every turn with a fresh reminder that the

characters are dreaming, that none of this is really happening for them, and it makes us pinch

ourselves, remind us that none of this is really happening for us either.

Someone I used to know called it the postmodern sublime: art that breaks the fourth wall in a

subtle and startling way and makes us question, if only for a moment, whether our life is real

and that is illusion or that is real and our life is an illusion. Like the Chinese philosopher

Chuang Tsu’s famous quote about dreaming he was a butterfly and never again being certain

that he was not a butterfly dreaming he was a Chinese philosopher. Blade Runner and The

Matrix did this to me the first time I saw them. The ending of The Ring is probably the best

theatrical example of it — the static screen and white noise that gives you that half-second of

“Oh shit, I shouldn’t have watched that movie because now I’m going to die.” As other media

come into their own, we start seeing examples in surprising places — Alan Moore’s

Watchmen comics and the video games Braid and Bioshock, and even Metal Gear Solid (if

you fought Psycho Mantis in the 90s, you know what I’m talking about), each of which will

probably inspire grad student theses for decades to come.

What makes it a postmodern sublime as opposed to a regular old Hegelian force-of-nature

sublime is its self-awareness, its knowledge of the limitations and particular quirks of its

medium. You could never achieve the power of The Ring‘s ending in a book. Watchmen was

long considered unfilmable because there was just no way that the apocalyptic ending would

translate to the big screen. It’s too meta. Last year’s film version (which is probably the best

possible film version of that book, which is to say it isn’t very good) changed the ending

drastically to give it more resonance, but it still doesn’t quite work. Possibly the most

gripping example, though, is the third act twist in Bioshock, a game that is until this point just

an eerily beautiful third-person shooter. I won’t completely spoil it, but suffice it to say that

nothing else I’ve ever seen uses the mechanics and mindset of playing video games against

the player this way. It toys with your very notion of free will.

Which brings us back around to Inception, a labyrinthine story that takes place in dreams

within dreams within dreams within dreams, and which may be — here’s the big spoiler,

folks — an actual dream itself, Newhart-style. While the film never explicitly screams

“LEONARDO DICAPRIO AND/OR MARION COTILLARD MIGHT BE DREAMING

THIS WHOLE THING,” there are subtle hints throughout: like the dreams the characters

invade, the film begins in media res with almost no context of who these people are, how

“dream extraction” works or came about, when this is happening, or what it all means. It’s

deliciously ambiguous, especially the final shot of DiCaprio’s top spinning and wobbling

slightly, but cutting out before we can see if it falls or spins forever. We know from earlier in

the movie that the top falls in real life and never stops in dreams, and although there’s some

instability in that final shot, it sure does spin for a mighty long time. And if it is a dream, if

the illusion is that elaborate, how can we be sure that we aren’t dreaming our whole lives?

Of course there’s way more to Inception than high-falutin’ philosophizing. The entire

ensemble cast is filled out with ringers like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, Ellen

Page, Ken Watanabe, and even brief appearances by Michael Caine and Pete Postlethwaite.

The pacing and action sequences are impeccable, as they were in Nolan’s Dark Knight (the

anti-gravity hotel has to be seen to be believed), and the writing is sharp, dense, and

suggestive of a far deeper story. The ending is a conversation-starter and the climactic

confrontation between DiCaprio and Cotillard certainly casts everything that preceded it in a

new light, but what makes Inception such a joy is its ability to function on so many levels at

once: a crisp action flick and special effects dynamo on the surface, a human drama about

obsession and risk below, and an eye-crossing piece of experimental art underneath all that.

Other thoughts? Who else has seen it?

Rejects Jameson's theory that Postmodernism is "depthless" because characters are complex and develop

throughout the film. The plot develops and raises the question what is reality? The ending adds to the

philosophical questioning by not clearly establishing whether Cobb (a character) was dreaming about returning

to his children or not, the top is left spinning on the table however screen goes to the credits so the audience

don't see it fall. Postmodernism is usually against interpretation but the ending is clear, which leaves the

audience questioning; the reality portrayed in the film with Cobb returning home, the reality portrayed in the

film - is the director hinting to the audience that it is fictional, hyper real story, or whether life itself is "real" in

the sense is life actually just a dream and we wake up when we die, like Mal believed.

http://extremelyloud2012.wikispaces.com/message/view/Favorite+Postmodern+Movies/50521440

#50630456

Inception - Analysis using Postmodern Theory

The ending scene of Inception is very open-ended, allowing

the audience to come to their own conclusion.

The film 'Inception' is a post modern film, which is already evident through its' use of the narrative - it's not a

linear narrative, as it includes a more circular storyline and also has a very open-ended closure, in which the

audience can almost decide and create their opinion of the possible ending. It also includes characters which

feel alienated from the 'norm', and this film in particular does explore this even further, and the idea of "stories

within stories" is also looked at, and creates a more dimensional approach to the film and narrative.

The different genres in which this film reflects a postmodern aspect is:

Hyper Reality - The ability for a mind to be opened into another reality is intriguing and could also be

deemed as a lot more desirable than reality, creating this sense of a new and better world which almost

convinces the audience that it's authentic.

Time-Bending - The manipulation of time plays an essential part to this film, and also creates "What

If?" scenarios within this film - i.e. "What If this was our reality? What If minds could be accessed?"

These questions can circulate the audiences mind, drawing them further into the film.

Posted by Lelly at 22:16

Journal 44 Postmodernism in Inception A lot of the characteristics of Postmodernism can be seen in the recent movie staring Leonardo

Dicaprio and Ellen Page Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan. Postmodernist tend to rely on

opinions rather than facts and scientific ideas. This is obvious with this movie as it is about being able

to access the dreams of different people to steal or implant ideas. The entire movie is about being

able to put an idea into the mind of a powerful man. Most people don't believe that it is possible, but

Cobb believes it to be possible even though scientifically it shouldn't be. Another concept of

Postmodernism is that morality is personal and defined differently from person to person. Technically,

all of the members of Cobb's team are criminals as they are stealing but to them, it isn't really

anything bad. Their concept of morality is much different than those that would say that it is unethical

to access the mind of another human being through their dreams. In Postmodernism, it is said that

reality is created by those in power which could be very true for this story. It is never really said if

everyone in the world was aware of the technology that they used, but if they weren't, then the

government could have been creating reality. Ethically, maybe everyone should have access to the

technology they use for different purposes, but the government could have regulated that so it was

only criminals that were actually using it. The characters of the story are actually avoiding falling into a

false reality, but eventually no one can really tell if they have gotten stuck in a false reality or not.

Overall there are a lot of characteristics of Postmodernism that can be seen in the film Inception. It is

just a great movie with great acting and a great story, but there are some things to be learned about

literature from this great movie. Inception is an awesome movie.

Ideas on Inception and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction"

I watched Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) for the first time this last week.

After two viewings and looking at some of the theories that have been discussed on

the internet as to the meaning of the whole thing, I think that I’ve got a pretty good

idea of what it all means.

One of the most interesting articles I found was at CHUD.com. The author of the

article, Devin Faraci, suggests that the whole movie was a dream, including the

parts where Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an extractor who performs corporate

espionage by penetrating people’s dreams and stealing their thoughts. He goes

further to suggest that the movie is an autobiographical work about Christopher

Nolan and his work as a director, similar to Fellini’s 8 ½. In this case, Cobb, who

breaks into people’s dreams, represents the director. Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt),

who is the researcher, represents the producer who sets everything up. Ariadne

(Ellen Page), the architect, represents the screenwriter who creates the world that

the dreamer will enter. Eames (Tom Hardy), referred to as the forger, represents

the actor, who assumes the form of other people in the dream world. Yusuf (Dileep

Rao), the chemist, is the technical guy who furnishes the chemicals necessary to

create the shared dream state. I would go even further to say that Yusuf is the

cinematographer – where the camera is the dream-sharing “apparatus” and the

sedatives used to facilitate the dreaming could be considered the actual film in the

camera. Finally, Saito (Ken Watanabe) is the financier of the dream (or film) and

Mark Fischer (Cillian Murphy) - the corporate guy being targeted - represents the

studio system.

With all that being said, the movie is the dream. The shared “dream” is the

collective consciousness we all share as the audience, while the dream represents

the director’s dream, which he seeks to share with the audience, and the ideas

implanted in our minds by the movie represent the inception taking place. Walter

Benjamin talks about this concept in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction. He says that: “thanks to the camera… the individual perceptions of

the psychotic or the dreamer can be appropriated by collective perception. The

ancient truth expressed by Heraclitus, that those who are awake have a world in

common while each sleeper has a world of his own, has been invalidated by film –

and less by depicting the dream world itself than by creating figures of collective

dream.” The movie, therefore, could be considered a metaphor for the filmmaking

process. On the psychoanalytical level, one could say that the catharsis achieved

through the shared dream state represents the catharsis achieved for the filmmaker

in sharing his vision with the world as well as the catharsis achieved by the masses

in the reception of the film as distraction.

On another level, I would suggest that the subplot involving the penetration of

the corporate mogul’s dream to implant the idea of the will, which dissolves the

corporation into smaller companies spread equally among the investors, could

represent the studio system’s control over the film capital and the capitalist

exploitation of the medium of film. The will would represent the property relations

that Benjamin speaks of, and the inception of the idea to change the will to split up

the company could represent the revolutionary change of property relations

(redistribution of wealth) that could be attained through the use of film. Benjamin

puts forth this idea and says: “there can be no political advantage derived from this

control until film has liberated itself from the fetters of capitalist exploitation.” So,

Christopher Nolan, represented by the extractor, is using the film (the dream) as a

means to reclaim control of the film capital in favor of the proletarian masses

through the use of collective consciousness.

Obviously, there are many more levels to the reading of this film, however, I felt

like this was one level that hadn’t been explored yet. Analyses of the dream within a

dream, and whether or not the whole movie was a dream have been described at

length many times in message boards and other blogs. As a result, I don’t feel the

need to explain these theories. I do believe, though, after having read The Work of

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, that Benjamin would have come to

similar conclusions

Inception and Postmodern Tragedy?

I’m still trying to clarify how to explain what I see in Inception, which I see as a postmodern tragedy, a phrase that is oxymoronic, yet captures for me the qualities of the film. It has that postmodern focus on fluidity in reality, the failure of humans to discern an externally situated reality and the even more significant fluidity of the internal self-story, that seems to “ground” it. The impossibility of humans to come to terms with the condition of “fluidself” seems the heart of postmodern tragedy, and the film does offer a series of gestures—perhaps more accurately a series of stories—aimed toward that sublime moment when the self—in this case, both character and viewer—has moved through some sort of liminal zone of dreamscapes and stories within stories into an understanding of what? The inapproachability of self? Impossibility of becoming?

By virtue of this story the viewing self only sees the shimmer of a self in a slightly warped scene—or is it a mirror image staring back, mirror within mirror, receding mirrors and stories and truths—and . . . and the whole scene-of-self converges on this single story theme, that singularity of story is impossible. This is the moment of the anagnorisis that may not be, the sublime impossibility of anagnorisis. This is the gesture of self in a scene both folding inward upon its set and collapsing outward at the same time. This is the gesture of self in a plot that must be believed yet is implausible, a mere gesture moving toward something profound at the same time it falls off . . .

All this is too too abstract to make any real sense. Let me root it in that which is sensate, the body rather than the mind. My mind has no idea which narrative, if any, the filmic framework asserts as real. Dom’s top may have stopped spinning . . . or be spinning still. But does that matter? What if I embrace the anagnorisis that may not be? Then I am physically, vertiginously drawn toward a collapsing cliff, to sit upon a vertical structure about to be sliced away. This urge to construct a single story up and through all other layers of story falls away. I like that feeling of free fall toward nothing at all, not being so “Romantic” or “Modern” as to need either externally-formed top-layer narrative or some sort of deep-buried core-story.

Sliced away from the scene, looking down upon it, I cannot help but imagine the self/story as a set of grainy film frames in an eternally looping oroboros. As if I am a character (an object looking like a human) seeking the pleasure of the fall, and my story is of a fall forever nowhere toward the never enough of story. This sounds like tragedy, this condition of having no self/story—not even a loop of film—to cut away or splice into.

Only the gesture of a sharp collapse—collapse of meaning language image story―cutting viscerally through . . . that’s the postmodern gesture. An ever imminent evisceration of an immaterial cliff face. The sublime frame of a human face of cliff always ever crumbling away. Katharsis in freefall toward indefinite shimmer. The Inception of postmodern tragedy

Inception’s misconception!

Monday, July 19, 2010, 1:56 PM

Robert Cheeks

My wife and I went to see Inception Saturday afternoon. I don’t have much ‘good’ to say about

the film other than I liked it. It was way to long, and the film itself seemed intent on providing

images of some college sophomore’s perspective of T.S Eliot’s “Waste Land.” No one involved

with the production seems to have really explored the idea of a nonexistent reality whether one is

explicating the various “levels” of a dream, or a second reality where both are a unique

phenomena defined by the original experience, the dogmatic exposition, and finally, skepticism. I

couldn’t help but think that if the dude who did the screen play for The Book of Eli had written

this, it would have been a whole lot better. I did like, for the first time, young Mr. DeCaprio in the

lead and his excellent portrayal of a young man who loved a young woman so much he was

willing to do anything to exist in that love. Sadly, it never occurred to anyone involved with the

film to move that concept toward the transcendent. Had they done that, they would have

produced a film that would have challenged The Book of Eli as the finest film ever made. And,

finally having sacrificed my ear in years of “hard service,” I have trouble with films where the

background music raises to a crescendo during a crucial explanation, in this case of the dream

phenomenon. Add to that the fact the actors inevitably begin to whisper at this time and bingo-

bango I miss stuff. So I have to confess I’ll have to buy the film and watch it at home.

http://www.inceptionending.com/final-scene/

Inception By covenanter on Saturday, February 19th, 2011 | 1 Comment

Inside “Inception”

Christopher Nolan’s worldview is dangerous because he shrouds it in an incredible plot.

[Warning: Contains Huge Spoilers!]

To understand the film Inception (2010) one must understand the postmodern worldview. To

analyze this film properly we’re going to have to get philosophical, and take a look at the

worldview of Postmodernism. The term “post-modern” refers to a paradigm shift in philosophy. It

is the logical succession of Existentialism. While in the past, philosophical views believed in

objective reality and that people must operate on the basis of what that reality is, Existentialism

created a world where people cared more about experience than truth and what is real.

Postmodernism, like Existentialism, is an atheistic and relativistic system of beliefs, but it differs in

that it is basically the view that there is no such thing as objective reality. To the postmodern, life

has no meaning, and we cannot be sure what we perceive as truth or reality is actually real. You

cannot judge whether something is real or not, so absolutes and morality are dispelled with. Brian

Godawa, author of the book Hollywood Worldviews explains the difference between Existentialism

and Postmodernism:

“The two worldviews agree that… there is no underlying objective reality… no absolute reference

point to judge true and false, right and wrong, real and unreal… But whereas the existentialist

idolized the individual as supreme, the postmodern posits the loss of identity for the individual in

favor of collective groups of people (cultures) constructing reality through their own interpretations

and imposing them on others.”

The postmodern refers to this

collective coercion as a “prison house of language”. Because, in a world of no right and wrong, the

current opinions or views of the culture is all there is. Reason is thrown off, so you can never

discover real truth, you can only impose your beliefs on others.

Postmodernism, boiled down, denies epistemology because it denies absolute truth. Epistemology

means, as defined by Doug Phillips: “The study of the nature, sources and limits of human

knowledge. To be epistemologically self-conscious is to be aware of your worldview and its

implications on life. It is to know how to get from point A to point Z.” Basically it means

knowledge; or as Francis Schaeffer put it, “how you know what you know, and how you know you

can know.” This worlview will thus blur the lines between reality and fantasy.

This is getting very, very confusing and complex (if your head isn’t hurting yet, stop and think

about all this for a minute – and it will!) Postmodernism, in the end, will deny all other worldviews

because they are all simply stories we tell ourselves, and others, in order to shape the world we

want to live in, (apparently we are all extremely self-deceived – except for the postmodern that is!

He somehow knows that there is no way to know anything, despite that his very statement is in

fact, knowing something! The relativist and postmodern cannot live consistently within their own

worldview because without epistemology there could be no true existence at all – think of a world

where you really didn’t know –couldn’t know – anything at all! It would be nothing.) Now, I bet

your head hurts.

But back to the matter at hand: Inception.

Nolan spent somewhere around ten years writing the screenplay alone, so this may prove difficult

to unpack. Hang on!

It took me three times watching this film to see it for what it was, a testimony to a postmodern

world. The intricate web of plot that is woven so masterfully by Nolan is so easy to caught up in,

especially because the ideas are so perplexing and philosophical. In the film we are introduced to

Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo Dicaprio) who is a rogue specialist in a field known as “dream

sharing”. This technology, apparently created by the government to train soldiers, allows people to

go into other people’s dream and do whatever. They can simply walk around inside this world

created by this person’s subconscious or they do something else, something illegal – they can steal

information from that person’s mind! Dom is running from the law, and so he gets work in high-

tech corporate espionage, but we have “sympathy” for him because he’s really just trying to get

back to his family. A rich businessman offers Dom a guarantee that he can return home, if he will

perform an impossible task: inception! This involves going deep into a man’s subconscious, down

many levels of dreams, and actually planting an idea in his mind so carefully that he won’t know

that it was planted! (Sound like a imposing your views on others via a “prison house of language”

to you?) The businessman says he wants Dom to perform inception on an industry rival and make

him give up his dying father’s business. To do this, the band of rogues that Dom assembles to help

him, have to manipulate the man’s emotions, knowledge and relationships to finally plant the idea

“your father would want you to be your own man”.

This seems straightforward enough

(not!) until things get even more complicated. The process of dream sharing is so real seeming,

that you need to carry an object with you that tells you whether you’re in the real world or not.

(Dom carries a top that will only stop spinning in the real world.) At one point in the film, Dom

ends up in a room where people come to sleep and go into the dream world, because “the dream

has become their reality, who are you to say otherwise?” Is there objective reality or isn’t there?

That is a thesis that the film battles out between Dom and his dead wife. You see, in the dream

world, Dom’s guilty subconscious haunts him in the ghost of his dead wife, Mal. What?! To answer

that, I need to explain another facet of the plot; I told you this was complex. When you are dream

sharing, you are put to sleep and the effects only last awhile. However, in the dream world, five

minutes can feel like a week (or more), and it gets longer the deeper down you go. So, unless you

want to be stuck in the dream world for years (though only minutes in reality) you need to get out

sooner. This requires a “kick”, a dropping sensation that jolts you awake. Getting killed in a dream

will also do the trick, except when you’re too deep in the subconscious; if you get killed then, you

end up in “limbo” where you wait for years and years until the time runs out and you wake up, or

you kill yourself. This ending up in “limbo” thing happened to Dom and Mal. They happily built

their own world, down in limbo (sounding very postmodern), for decades (in “dream years”) until

finally Dom can’t take it – he needs to get back to reality. But Mal has convinced herself that the

dream is reality. Dom then performs inception on her to make her realize that “her world was not

real, and to get home we needed to kill ourselves.” This they do and they wake up in the real

world, happily home. But, the idea that Dom planted was still there. Dom refers to ideas as

“parasites”, this is because in Postmodernism, as Dom says, “a single idea can grow and grow

inside someone” shaping who they are. Mal believes that she is in a false reality and so she

commits suicide again, only this time for real! Dom, torn by guilt because of the idea he planted,

and being blamed for her death by the authorities, runs away.

Now, to get safely through this last mission, and thus home to his now parent-less kids, he must

confront his guilt about Mal. They have a final confrontation inside the dream. Mal (or Dom’s

subconscious projection of Mal) wants him to stay in the dream with her. He insists he must get

back to the real world for their kid’s sake. To this she responds, “you keep telling yourself what

you know, but what do you believe, what do you feel?” This is explicit postmodern belief:

knowledge is impossible, what do you want reality to be? What Dom told Mal as they committed

suicide was, “you’re waiting for a train; a train that will take you far from here. You hope you

know where this train will take you, but you can’t know for sure – but it doesn’t matter!” If there is

no reality or truth, then suicide is a valid and logical choice: maybe you’ll end up in a better non-

reality. However, Dom seems to stand up against Mal’s enticement to forget what he knows for

want he wants. He leaves Mal, they finish the mission, and he makes it home to the kids that he

loves and missed! Maybe there is objective reality? A happy ending disguises Nolan’s final

statement, right before the credits roll: Dom is so overjoyed to see his children that he spins his

top on the dining room table, to make sure he’s not still dreaming. But he doesn’t care anymore.

He walks off happily with his family, and the camera pans down to the top, still spinning. The

audience all lean forward in their seats, a hush falls over the room, people hold their breathe – is

he in the real world? Will the top fall? It looks like it just might be wobbling when – black. The

credits roll and the audience lets out a groan.

When you really think about the

worldview that was just preached to us in a very impacting, exciting, emotional and thrilling

manner, we should be shocked. Christopher Nolan was able to make everyone say, “That was

awesome!” about a film that tells us that there are no moral absolutes; no way you can know

anything; no objective reality and that suicide is an option, though Nolan balances that by showing

just how awful it would be in a “real” world. Still we are left wondering, does Nolan uphold his

worldview? Well, while the ending might invert his main thesis “there is no reality”, the majority of

the film affirms it.

I’d like to point out another inconsistency with Postmodernism. Nolan, in an interview with Script

Magazine, said, “… subjectivity is key to my cinematic approach and it has to start with the writing

– the structure, the point of view.” Yet the very process of writing a screenplay requires

objectivity, rules and guiding principles based in truth and logic; all of which are incompatible with

Postmodernism. Then, to even be able to show us this idea that there is no reality, the filmmaker

must assume objective reality: a real one in contrast to the false one, a true world and the illusion

of the dream world. By simply showing that Dom is stuck in a dream world, you are forced to

admit that there is a real world distinguished from that. Postmodernism will contradict itself,

ultimately because it is so wrong!

For all its excitement, good acting, and incredible score by Hans Zimmer, “Inception” is dangerous

and is something we should be weary of. The Christian worldview and faith, in contrast has

certainty. Our beliefs are not dependent merely upon emotion and feelings; and nor are they

devoid of reason and knowledge – we can know about truth and reality because we believe in an

infinite, unchangeable and reasonable God who created this world and revealed His Truth and

wisdom to us in His Word. Let’s pray that God will open people’s eyes to watch films, no matter

how cool and complex they are, with wisdom, caution and discernment “so that we may no longer

children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human

cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” (Ephesians 4:14)

Reviewed by: Isaac R. Arthur, filmmaker and student at Blue Banner Media

What is postmodern about Inception?

Baudrillard's theory of hyper reality where there are dream worlds that look like reality within dreams.

Disrupts linear structure - the beginning is the end and flips between layers of dreams

Mixes up time and space reality - as time is different in the different layers of the dream

Self-referencing - plot within plots and always referencing back to original "reality"

Rejects Jameson's theory that Postmodernism is "depthless", characters are complex and develop throughout the film. The plot develops and raises the question what is reality? The ending adds to the philosophical questioning by not clearly establishing whether Cobb was dreaming about returning to his children or not, the top is left spinning on the table however screen goes to the credits so the audience don't see it fall. Postmodernism is usually against interpretation but the ending is enigmatic which leaves the audience questioning; the reality portrayed in the film with Cobb returning home, the reality portrayed in the film - is the director hinting to the audience that it is fictional, hyper real story, or whether life itself is "real" in the sense is life actually just a dream and we wake up when we die, like Mal believed.

Christopher Nolan (director) plays Inception on the audience through the soundtrack of Edith Piaf "Non, je ne regrette rien" being mutated, slowed down the deeper the characters are in the dream levels. The music feels distant in the 3rd level as if the audience are in the levels of dreams too - that the film is in fact a dream, playing on the fact that when the audience stop watching a film they almost feel disorientated having been drawn into the story and world that is portrayed in the film.

It requires an engaged audience who are able to intellectually understand the plot. So in some ways it can be seen as elitist. However it has grossed $825 million which shows that it does appeal to a mass audience. It is able to mix mass culture of Blockbuster effects with a deep, complex plot.

On Inception by Christopher Nolan

By Chris Fletcher — Published on June 4, 2012

Tags: film, postmodern fiction

Published in Issue 28

When I first saw the teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film, Inception, the sight of

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a bespoke suit grappling with a similarly well-dressed man in a

hallway gave me a sense of déjà vu. As soon as the gravity in the hallway shifted and the

grapplers fell to the ceiling, I knew that the movie it reminded me of was The Matrix, and I

settled into a defensive posture. My love for The Matrix burned bright and hot in my

freshman year of college, but that love began to cool as soon as I discovered David

Cronenberg’s Existenz hidden in its shadow. Released three weeks after The Matrix, Existenz

explores similar thematic terrain with less CGI gloss and more guns that shoot teeth as

bullets. Because many people prefer their virtual realities to follow a clearly explained

internal logic, weird films like Existenz always lose out to films like The Matrix. Weird takes

too much effort. I like weird.

Considering that half of Inception takes place in the dreams of one or another of its

characters, it is surprising that it is not weirder than it is. Inception could easily have been a

Freudian affair with little id-people springing up from the unconscious to cavort with

Leonardo DiCaprio, the kind of film the audience leaves saying, “What the hell was that all

about?” Christopher Nolan is not a student of the David Lynch School of Ambiguous

Filmmaking, however. Nolan says that ambiguity in a film “has to come from the inability of

the character to know—and the alignment of the audience with that character” and that an

ambiguous film “needs to be based on a true interpretation.”

The upshot of this is that Nolan won’t let anything he doesn’t understand into the film. There

must be no surplus in the story, nothing unaccounted for in the narrative. If you leave the

theater scratching your head over whether a spinning top fell down, it’s because Nolan wants

you to scratch your head over it. Indeed, getting his audience to pore over his films in search

of the “true interpretation” seems to be something he likes to do. His second feature was

Memento, a hip, postmodern calling-card of a film; it was universally loved for its non-linear

storyline by the kind of film-watchers who love—nay, need—to sit in front of their

televisions and mash buttons on the remote until the hidden “watch in chronological order”

feature is selected.1 Even though all this calculation makes Nolan seem a cold, Kubrickian

filmmaker, he’s more of a Hitchcock, playing his audience like a fiddle. Among his

features—Following, Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight,

Inception—Nolan has racked up 141 award nominations of one kind or another.2 He clearly

knows how get people on board with his vision.

But just because there is no surplus in Nolan’s vision, that doesn’t mean that there is no

surplus in his films. It is provided by the viewer, who, along with the protagonist, must

confront the ambiguity of not knowing how everything fits together. In Inception, Dominick

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) spends a lot of time explaining the events of the film through

expository dialogue with other characters. This is a side-effect of Nolan’s style of

storytelling. None of the characters is allowed to say, “Who the heck knows? It’s a dream for

goodness sake!” in response to a question about the mechanics of a dream, so everything

must be explained more than once. And, boy, does the audience owe those dim characters a

debt of thanks.

In the world of Inception, dreamers are able to share the same dream through the technology

of the PASIV device (an aluminum-sided suitcase containing narcotics, IV cables, and dosage

meters), and Dominick Cobb and his team extract secret information from unsuspecting

victims by conversing with their dreaming selves. At an unspecified point before the events

of the film, Cobb and Mal got stuck in Limbo (“raw, infinite subconscious”) for what seemed

to them like fifty years—long enough to convince Mal that their shared dream was reality.

Cobb’s first inception came when he convinced Mal that the dream world was not the real

world. He explains the procedure in the film as follows: “I broke into the deepest recess of

her mind, to give her the simplest little idea. A truth she had once known, but had chosen to

forget. . . . That her world was not real. That death was a necessary escape.” When Mal

finally awakened from Limbo, it became apparent that Cobb had performed inception on her:

even when awake she was convinced that she was dreaming. In flashback, the viewer sees

Mal kill herself, hoping to wake up. As a result of her suicide, Cobb is haunted throughout

the film by a dream-projection of Mal.

Mark Fisher writes in Film Quarterly that “in Inception, as in late capitalist culture in

general, you’re always in someone else’s dream, which is also the dream of no one.” (Of

course, Fisher most likely sees capitalist culture at work in his Alpha Bits.) Cognitive

biologist Christof Koch writes in Nature, that “even weeks later, [Inception] leaves me with

the queasy feeling that perhaps we too are merely dreaming.” A social theorist sees culture at

work, a cognitive scientist watches the film through the precariousness of perception—

Inception seems to be a kind of Rorschach test. Hold its shifting dreamscapes before a

reviewer for two hours and twenty-eight minutes, and then ask her what she sees. Her answer

will tell you more about what is important to her than it will tell you about the film itself.

Richard Corliss offers an interesting variation on this theme when he says that Inception is a

film about filmmaking. Unlike, say, Inglourious Basterds, which shows characters going

through the process of planning, filming, cutting, and screening a film, Inception has to be

interpreted in order to be seen as metafiction. Corliss thinks Inception is about the movies

because he’s a film critic for Time. He’s seen so many films, broken them down into their

constituent parts so many times, that he could probably do it blindfolded. I’ll bet he dreams in

movies and wakes the next day to critique them. And so, for him, Inception becomes a movie

about the process of making movies.

For me, Inception is a movie about choosing between competing realities, about trying to

believe in something that one is unsure of. Like Corliss, this reading is based on my

experience; unlike Corliss I don’t have an easily explainable reason for this reading. There

are lots of reasons to think that Cobb is obsessed with making sure that he is not dreaming: he

continually spins his reality-testing top to make sure he is awake. He says he wants to be in

the real world because his children are there. But I’ve spent countless hours trying to figure

out how to argue in the other direction. I believe Inception is a film about Cobb choosing to

believe in his dreams over the waking world. I used to think I knew why this interpretation

was important to me, but now I’m not so sure.

2004

I am about five years behind on The Matrix. This is because movies were a controlled

substance in my house growing up, and I wasn’t all that rebellious. In order to be rebellious,

you have to believe that it is a possibility. You need someone to model it for you. I was

homeschooled. My parents were my role models. The feedback loop worked in their favor.

I was going to catch up on movies while at college, by golly, and I was going to start with

The Matrix. The problem was that I chose a college where an “R” on a movie actually meant

it was restricted. I had to get off campus to watch what I wanted (remember, rebelliousness

had not been modeled at this point). As a freshman, I have no contacts in the outside world.

The university is my world, and it has skyways, so chance encounters on the street aren’t

likely.

Enter Brent. “Uncle” Brent is 27, lives on my floor, owns a car, and is going home to Green

Bay over Easter Break. I told him that me watching The Matrix was the point of us spending

12 hours in a car together. Brent is a saint. If he hadn’t have been game, I would have had to

make friends with someone else who owns a car. (He also puts up with me buying a bag of

fruity marshmallows at Piggly Wiggly and getting them all over his back seat.)

I am born again. I see through pair of Matrix-colored glasses—skin-tones take on a greenish

hue and lines of code are intermittently visible racing across the surface of tables, tracing the

curves of flesh, dropping from the sky on rainy afternoons. With evangelical fervor, I hit

campus after break extolling the virtues of the virtual. No one gives me the time of day. The

Bride has just killed Bill, and Neo is old news.

I respond to indifference by turning inward. I read as much as I can about The Matrix. In

2010, I will use the Internet to do most of my research, but in 2004 I walk a mile through the

desert of the real (downtown Minneapolis is pretty much a wasteland, those darn skyways

again) to Borders and pick up a copy of The Matrix and Philosophy. On the second page is a

reference to Jean Baudrillard. He quickly becomes very important to me.

In an early scene of The Matrix, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation appears as a

hollowed out book. Later in the film, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) welcomes the proto-

Neo, Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), to “the desert of the real,” while gesturing at a

television depicting the ravaged landscape outside the Matrix. This desert of the real is

referenced by Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation just after he relates Borges’ one-

paragraph story “Del rigor en la ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”).

In the story, cartography in the Empire has reached the point where maps are scaled in a

perfect one-to-one ratio to the territory they cover. Thus, the map of the Empire blankets the

Empire. Once this map is made, people realize that it is useless, and they let the elements take

care of getting rid of it for them. Baudrillard writes that

if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting

across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the

deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

In The Matrix, the only real left is the barren slag-fields Neo sees on the television. The

Matrix is the map. According to Baudrillard, those of us in the real world have reached this

state of rotting reality because “[s]imulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being

or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

The territory no longer precedes the map . . . it is the map that engenders the territory.” How

can the map create the territory? Doesn’t the Matrix just mimic the world circa 1999? Maybe,

but The Matrix, the film, contains computer viruses who wear sunglasses and look like Hugo

Weaving. You can bet that if computer science and AI reach the point where a virtual world

like the Matrix is possible, that hackers will create viruses that look like Hugo Weaving. The

map engenders the territory, and I am obsessed with the idea of hyperreality, with the

precession of simulacra.

2010

I am in graduate school, and I see Baudrillard’s stages of the sign everywhere and at all

times. One of my favorite hobbies is regaling my wife of two years with tales of unraveling

the secrets of the image. This means one of her favorite pastimes is doing something else

while I play the regaler. Once I had switched over to a B.S. (Baudrilliard Studies) in English

from a B.A. (Bad At) in Youth Ministries during my junior year of college, I tried to work

Baudrillard into every assignment.3 Did you know that you can give a successful PowerPoint

presentation in a Celtic Spirituality class on how the Celts’ way of life mirrors Baudrillard’s

concept of The Dual Form? Or that Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange

Mountain and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening are both better read with Baudrillard at hand to

interpret them?

In grad school, things aren’t much different. Where the phases of the image might be, I fit

them. Where they aren’t, I have a hard time paying attention. For me, they stand out clearly

in the relationship between The Lord of the Rings and The Stand (Stephen King’s “American

Lord of the Rings”), so I write a paper about it. It seems to work for my professor, so I keep at

the project of finding the seeds of the hyperreal in everything.The problem is I don’t really

know why the project is important. Maybe I should just quit and find something more

remunerative to turn my attention to. After all, who’s going to pay me to sit around and think

about Baudrillard all day long?

Near the start of Inception, Saito (Ken Wanatabe) offers Cobb the chance to return to his

children in the United States in exchange for planting an idea in the mind of Robert Fischer

(Cillian Murphy), the owner of a multinational energy company. Saito hopes that this

planting of an idea will lead to the breakup of the company, which threatens to overtake

Saito’s company. The only way for the idea to take is to perform “inception” on Fischer, and

Cobb is the only dream-extractor ever to have performed it in the past.

Inception requires the gradual buildup of the idea in the subject’s brain, so that subjects

cannot trace its genesis. This gradual condensation is accomplished through multiple dreams-

within-dreams. At each level, a different part of the idea is planted, until, in the final level,

the subject owns all of the ideas introduced by the extraction team. These dream-levels echo

Baudrillard’s stages of the sign:

1. The first level of the dream takes place on busy city streets. As the analog of the first stage

of the sign, “it is a representation of reality.” It’s a copy but a faithful one.

2. The next level takes place in a hotel. Cobb admits to Fischer that it is all a dream, but hides

the fact that he is a fellow dreamer, pretending to be “Mr. Charles,” a subconscious projection

of Fischer’s. In this way, Cobb “masks and perverts a basic reality” the way a second order

sign does.

3. This level takes place in a snowbound mountain fortress hospital (!): the kind usually

occupied by the main villain in a James Bond movie. Movie-like, the third level “masks the

absence of a basic reality.”

4. Dying under the kind of sedation necessary to reach three dream-levels will send dreamers

into Limbo. Limbo is not a level, but as an “unconstructed dream space.” Anything can

happen there; it is a “pure simulacrum.”

Arthur goes on to describe Limbo as “raw, infinite subconscious” with “nothing there but

what was left behind by anyone on the team who’s been trapped there before.” We learn in

the film that Cobb and Mal were trapped there for about 50 years. Trapped in the hyperreal

for a lifetime. No wonder Mal thought she was still dreaming when she woke up and Cobb

spends so much time talking with a mental projection of her.

Through the lens of hyperreality, Inception is about the blurring of two worlds: the dreaming

and the waking world. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur,Baudrillard says of The

Matrix’s version of hyperreality that

Sadly, the mechanism is roughly done and doesn’t arouse any trouble. Either characters are in

the Matrix, that is in the digitalisation of everything. Or they are radically out of it, as it

happens at Zion, the city of the rebels. Actually, the most interesting thing would be to show

what does happen at the joining of these two worlds.

Unlike Neo, Cobb and Mal do not know for sure where they are at any given time. Maybe

Inception fulfills Baudrillard’s wish to see hyperreality portrayed in film. Maybe the ease

with which the stages of the image can be overlaid on the dream levels means that Limbo

really does represent the hyperreal. Maybe, just maybe, Cobb is not haunted by Mal, but by

the hyperreal in the guise of Mal. Maybe Inception reveals a truth about the subject’s relation

to the hyperreal. Maybe I’m reading what I want into the film.

1995

I am 11 years old, and I often stay up reading late into the night. Three nights ago, I read

Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. When I finished it, I dropped the

book into the gap between my bed and the wall and tried to forget I had read it. I couldn’t

sleep when I finished it, and I can’t sleep now. After few nights of tossing and turning, I

dredge it up, rip The Mysterious Stranger from the other stories, and throw the loose pages

away. When shoved between two hard covers on the shelf, the thin Dover paperback doesn’t

look much the worse for my mutilation, and I sleep better at night. When I go back to the

book later, its deflated look and the memories associated with it will cause me to throw it

away.

In Twain’s unfinished novel, the eponymous stranger, Satan (the nephew of the Satan),

appears to some boys from a village in Austria during the “Age of Belief.” Satan wows the

boys with the ability to breathe fire into a pipe, creates a dog the size of a mouse, and

materializes grapes and oranges in their pockets (and makes no jokes about bananas, either—

surely this proves he is an angel). Soon he takes to creating a castle full of hundreds of tiny

animated people. I skipped to the end once Satan began to kill the little clay people he’d

made by pinching them between his fingers. In the final paragraphs, Satan reveals just what

has been going on since his arrival:

“You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that

they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious

of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are

all present; you should have recognized them earlier.”

Satan’s actions throughout (he is kind and soft-spoken with the boys, but kills his little

creatures with a horrifying indifference) unsettled me to the point that finding that it was all a

dream was a release of sorts. But it wasn’t just Satan’s visit that was a dream; his episode, he

explains, was merely one dream among others:

“I am perishing already—I am failing—I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone

in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for

you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable,

indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free.

Dream other dreams, and better!”

The possibility that someone somewhere could actually believe what Twain wrote unmoored

me. Limitless solitude in shoreless space? How could dreams make that reality any more

livable? How could you dream better dreams once you knew them for what they were?

* * * *

At one point, Cobb asks Mal, “If this is a dream, then why can’t I stop this?” Presumably, he

is referring to the fight they are having over whether they are dreaming or awake. Mal

answers with, “Because you don’t know you are asleep.” Later, after Mal jumps to her death

in an effort to wake up, Cobb desperately tries to dream other dreams—better dreams—in

which his wife is still alive. When Ariadne hooks herself up to the PASIV device Cobb uses

to dream on his own at night, she sees a series of dreamed locations connected by a cage

elevator. Cobb explains the significance of the locations when he says, “These are moments I

regret. Moments I turned into dreams so I could change them.” He seems to think that if he

can get the Mal-projection to realize that she is not really Mal, she will go away or at least

stop throwing monkey-wrenches into his dream-extractions. The problem for Cobb is that it

just doesn’t seem to be working.

Why, then, does he keep dreaming of her? Dreamers have the ability to think their projections

out of a dream, as Yusuf (Dileep Rao) does in a scene cut from the shooting script. In a worst

case scenario, Cobb could shoot her and she would die, at least for that dream. It seems that

Cobb’s conception of a better dream is one in which Mal exists, regardless of how awful she

acts.

* * * *

After I read The Mysterious Stranger, I asked my parents how I could be sure that they were

real, that I wasn’t just imagining them. Before the words were completely out of my mouth,

I’d come to the realization that their answers wouldn’t cinch the deal. There was no way to

tell if they weren’t just my mind feeding me what I needed to hear. Maybe my encounter with

Satan in the pages of Twain was my way of telling myself that I was asleep. I knew one thing

for sure: in order to keep functioning, I needed to believe that my parents were real beings in

their own right. Strangely enough, their reassurances to that effect helped me believe they

were. I knew very well that there was no way to know, but all the same, their belief helped

me believe.

2012

In his essay, “I Know Very Well, But All The Same,” psychoanalytic critic Octave Mannoni

revisits Freud’s concept of Verleugnung (“disavowal”) as it relates to belief. He tells the story

of when one of his patients was mistaken for a visiting poet and told that he was invited to

Mannoni’s office for a drink. When the client arrived for his scheduled analysis, he told

Mannoni, “I knew it was a joke, the drink. But all the same, I am awfully happy. . . Especially

because my wife, she believes it.” According to Mannoni, “[w]e are so accustomed to it that

the formula, ‘I know very well, but all the same,’ does not even seem that surprising to us.”

Through this formula, we are able to maintain beliefs in things we have disavowed. As long

as there is a dupe, a gullible other, who will believe for us, we can cope. Mannoni believes

that this formula explains quite a few things:

The need to “mystify” children with stories of the Stork and Santa Claus,

The practice of going to church “for the children,”

The enjoyment of coincidences,

The avoidance of omens,

The value of reporting false news.

To the list above I would personally add the following:

The need for going to church in general,

The habit of going to school,

The value of reading Baudrillard.

The truth is, I switched from Youth Ministries to English because I took a class where we

read C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and Chesterton and realized that if I was going to remain a

believer in a world I’d in many ways disavowed, I needed gullible others who’d clearly

thought through what they believed, who didn’t seem gullible. I kept going to school after

graduation for the same reason. I needed two sets of dupes to do my believing in two

diametrically opposed realities for me. And I needed Baudrillard to remind me that even

smart people sometimes believe in crazy things—crazy things that might just be true.

While Cobb never goes so far as to say “but all the same,” he does enough in the following

exchange with the Mal projection to get the ball rolling:

Cobb: They’re not real, Mal. Our real children are waiting for us—

The children run off. Cobb opens his eyes.

Mal: You keep telling yourself that, but you don’t believe it—

Cobb: I know it—

Mal: And what if you’re wrong, what if I’m what’s real?

Cobb is silent.

Mal: You keep telling yourself what you know . . . but what do you believe? What do you

feel?

This is, in effect, Cobb on the analyst’s couch saying, “I know very well that those are not my

real children (and by extension neither is Mal or this dream).” It is possible that it is implicit

in the Mal projection’s very existence. Cobb says that what he does is visit Mal every night in

order to change his memories, but they appear to be immutable. He also reasons that he visits

her to soothe her or contain her.

What I wonder is how we really know how she came about in the first place. It is clear from

Ariadne’s tutorial that the subconscious of the mark populates the dream levels and, from a

scene in which the characters discuss the layout of a level, that the other dreamers are able to

suppress their own projections. Cobb is the only one with a rogue projection, and Ariadne

figures it out during a discussion of dream layouts:

Cobb: Don’t tell me. Remember, you only want the dreamer to know the layout.

Ariadne: Why’s that so important?

Cobb: In case one of us brings in part of our subconscious. You wouldn’t want any

projections knowing the layout.

Ariadne: In case you bring Mal in.

While Cobb acts as if he cannot prevent Mal from showing up in his dreams, he could

remove her from the equation if he chose to. He draws a bead on her in the mountain

shootout, and Aridane actually shoots her in Limbo, which seems to have a part in her death

(along with Cobb’s revelation that she is not real).

Simply put, Mal exists because she believes that Cobb’s dreams are real, and as long as

someone believes they are real, Cobb can function. This would explain why every time he

disconnects from the PASIV device, he has to pull out his reality-testing top—the absence of

Mal throws him for a loop.

And if Mal’s immateriality would give us pause (how can Cobb use a dream to believe in

reality?), here is Zizek on that point:

[F]or the belief to be operative, the subject who directly believes need not exist at all: it is

enough precisely to presuppose his existence, to believe in it, either in the guise of the

mythological founding figure who is not part of our reality, or in the guise of the impersonal

actor, the unspecified agent—“They say that. . .”/ “It is said that. . .”

It is not terribly important that Mal is only a dream, as long as Cobb believes in her. And he

does, as we see when Ariadne encourages him to shoot Mal because it is “not really her,” and

he responds by saying, “How can you know that?”

1989

I’m beginning to get the distinct impression that no one outside of our church believes what

we do. I’m supposed to invite my friends to Sunday school, but why aren’t they going

already? If God is real, why are there people who don’t believe in him?

1995

“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no

earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing

exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless

thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”

* * * *

If Cobb was using Mal’s belief to believe in the reality of his dreams, what does he do once

she is exorcised from his unconscious? Is his need gone because he is presumably in the

waking world with his children? His doubt clearly remains as he spins the top in the final

scene. According to Zizek, an object can take the place of a person through “interpassivity.”

His perennial illustration of interpassivity is his VCR (one wonders if one day he will replace

it with a DVR):

Although I do not actually watch the films, the very awareness that the films I love are stored

in my video library gives me a profound satisfaction, and occasionally enables me to simply

relax and indulge in the exquisite art of far niente—as if the VCR is in a way watching them

for me, in my place.

Interpassivity is the externalization of something the subject wants to be doing. The subject

can feel as if they had had done it, without having to do it. And if a VCR can go beyond

merely recording a film to watching it for the subject, maybe a top used to believe in reality

can go beyond merely reflecting the state of reality to believing it for the subject.

Zizek sets the VCR to recording, Cobb sets the top to spinning. Both are recipients of a

profound satisfaction.

2007

“And straightway the father of the child cried out and said with tears, ‘Lord, I believe; help

Thou mine unbelief!’”

2009

I am at a literary gathering in St. Paul talking to the host. A friend of mine mentions that he

teaches at a small Christian college in Minneapolis. He makes a self-deprecating comment

about the challenges of teaching literature and writing to conservative kids, and the host leans

in and sort of mumbles (he’s had a few glasses of wine) something about “those Neo-Nazis”

in a tone of commiseration. I understand the frustration of dealing with small-mindedness as

much as the next guy but Neo-Nazis? Maybe my Sunday school teachers were right. Maybe

we are living in different worlds.

2012

Zizek has his VCR.

Cobb has his top.

I have Cobb and his top in my DVD player and Boaz Hagin’s “Examples in Theory:

Interpassive Illustrations and Celluloid Fetishism” in my hand. Hagin believes that maybe,

through interpassivity, films can go beyond merely illustrating concepts, like belief, through a

gullible other and help us believe in the things they illustrate. In short, he thinks films might

be propositioning us. I read this and know that Inception can’t help me believe whatever it is

I currently believe about Christianity and its relation to reality. But maybe it helps me believe

in the way I believe it.

1 His first feature was the micro-budget (as in $6000 [almost invisible, really]) Following. In

the economics of filmmaking, it was a success, earning $48,000 at the box-office. At the

point of its widest release, however, it was in two theaters. It was a perfectly serviceable

calling-card until Memento came along.

2 In contrast, the ambiguous David Lynch has 65 nominations, at least as according to the

Internet Movie Database.

3 The “B.S.” doesn’t really stand for Baudrillard Studies, and it doesn’t really stand for what

it sounds like either (but there is something suspicious about getting out of a taking the

language requirement for a Bachelors in English). What it stands for is Bachelor of Science,

which, looking back at it now, makes sense in my case. I treated finding the stages of the

image in a text as a science. It was as if I thought that just identifying the process of

simulacra moving away from reality was a useful public service.

Chris Fletcher lives in Minnesota and writes creative criticism. He blogs at 10 Billion

Canons.

Image 1: Inception poster.

First of all, Inception is a science fiction movie. Secondly, it is a film that makes extensive use of

special effects, the commissioning of the old tricks to new delusions of digital cinema; a very high

budget blockbuster. Finally, one relies on the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio to tell an intriguing story

from the narrative point of view, complex and sometimes incomprehensible (according to the

decomposition of the linear narrative that is a feature now dominant in contemporary cinema),

which leads to think of philosophical arguments (first of all the distinction between dream and

reality).

Inception has some of the deepest aspirations and plays with philosophical concepts and

contemporary past. Here it tells of a man named Cobb (DiCaprio) who works as a thief of dreams;

is confined in people's minds when they are sleeping to discover its secrets, as in the dream when

our defenses are much lower. A man who lives more in the unreality of those dreams in the reality

of real life, because he has to forget a tragic event that has marked his life. “To carry on the

feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and

novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar [. . .]

this is the character and privilege of genius." (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria

[1817] 1956: 49).

Image 2: Cast of Inception.

Inception is art. “The process of art is to transmit the impression of the object, as a "vision" and

not as "recognition": the art process is the process of estrangement [...] of objects, and the

process of dark form which increases difficulty and duration of perception, since the perception

process in art is an end to itself and has to be extended; art is a manner of "feeling" the object's

"becoming", while the "already become" has no importance in art.” (Šklovskij, 1929). Sklovskij’s

speech is related to art, and it also introduces defamiliarisation; you must draw a clear line of

distinction between the reality of the dream with its more or less evanescent images (but this

could also apply with our perception of reality to which our mind draws from reality that can, at

the moment, serve the economy more or less of our daily lives) and the construction of a film that

requires evidence.

Image 3: DiCaprio.

When the film is concerned with the dream world it does nothing but focus on the peculiarities of

the vision, utilising the pre-eminent film grammar (staging, shooting, editing, sound). Many things

happen in the dream world: a sudden burst of enlightenment, effects special movements slowed

down or speeded up, the absence of gravity, soft focus, etc, and camera movements and styles

that highlight the exceptional nature of the recitatives. The dream, as is often the flashbacks, can

be made with black and white or colour correction in post-production and filters (eg, a soft filter)

or rebuilding dream worlds with computer graphics. But in any case, a dream sequence in the film,

regardless of the aims of the objective (to stimulate the perception or surprise or scare) is always

a sequence to be treated and analysed like any other sequence. There is nothing more postmodern

in a dream, in the sense that when we dream we are not able to reconstruct events, organise

perceptions, and manage maps of reality.

The stories in Inception are trying to pile up, they are neutralised, they multiply, the landscape is

constantly changing before our eyes; we are driving a car yet we are on foot; in a moment a girl

becomes a woman, the dialogue is strangely broken, but really it is nothing and end ups being

nothing... when we awaken. Sometimes an object or objects take shape, and it is possible that

these objects resulting artifacts are so perfect that they highlight their pictorial effect. In practice,

when a person wakes up from a fading dream, however vague, and they have no history and no

"recognition" of the dream, is it still an experience of artistic vision?

The dialectic of dream-reality is the central axis on which the film moves, reminiscent to the

studies on contemporary virtuality. Nolan adds this substrate with philosophical attention to the

staging and the narrative, never forgetting the sense of rhythm and a certain amount of action.

The film, in fact, even lasting two hours and a half runs quickly with no downtime and casts the

viewer in the abyss of sound, images, and feelings. Nolan's film is like playing a magician;

hypnotising the viewer who is catapulted into a dizzying stressful visual, auditory, and very

intellectual.

Image 4: Effects.

Like any self-respecting postmodern films, Nolan's film is immersive, wrapped in a bath of

sensations, and at the same time is a reflective film, citing the many different theories and asks to

be interpreted.

Our dreams should acquire their maximum intensity in the limbo that is the place where you can

grow old while still young (the place where you can spend a lifetime while our sleeping body

remains young in the bedroom). Yet in a film that puts the "dream" in the foreground leading us

into a way of "unreal", while asking us to imagine it as reality. And it is curious that Nolan has

chosen (but these aspects are present in excess of his earlier projects; Memento (2000), in The

Prestige (2006) and The Dark Knight (2008)) a script (but keep in mind that he thought this for

many years) that prefers the dream world and with it the sensitive world of vision and, if the

dream becomes lucid, playful. In fact, the playful aspect is typical of some post-modern film and

the narrative structure of Inception does not transgress the rule. What states is certainly

acceptable. What is important to note is how the film attempts to formalise a "way" more critical

(say "not for fun") to see the film and re-building in mind.

We see for example the sequence in which Cobb teaches how to build the framework of Ariadne’s

(Ellen Page) dreams while they are in what looks like a Parisian street sitting at a café table. We

consider that Ariadne is dreaming without realising it and believe it as long as Cobb did not reveal

the truth, thus dragging in a lucid dream. To make her aware of living in a dream world, shows the

explosion of the "slow motion" of roads, buildings and objects at the same time they remain sitting

quietly without damage, because they are not in the real world. Following Ariadne, walking

through the streets of Paris, fold the overlapping part of the city which is below, above the roofs of

the buildings now teeming with the life of another city, a sort of dream-like view of Paris reflected

in the mirror. But in the dream representation is simply that Ariadne has doubled over the city like

a blanket folds in on itself. In fact, the city that is reversed, the landscapes are transformed before

our eyes, but it is also true that the film’s post-modern elements has accustomed us to see similar

changes.

Interesting is the analysis of the sequence of the explanation of the dream world, as well as the

whole discourse on post-modern, formal and ideal. Limbo is not the deepest stage of the dream, or

the place where it is now more distant but it is the representation of man's world need to hunt for

lost and lost an eternity of time to recover its place in the uncertainties of the real. The image of

limbo is not a vaporous Nolan, artistic, evanescent image projected to the knowledge of the

unconscious or at least to even a partial perception (for example, the dream world of Hitchcock's

films in which there are echoes of surrealist cinema of the twenties).

Image 5: Marion Cotillard plays as Cobb’s Wife, Mal.

Perhaps one might wonder why Inception is not even a 3D movie. In fact, it leads to a far more

interesting dimension. The intrusion into the secrets of the soul is a strange noise with addiction. It

is also an observation about the present media: In modern online role-playing games you can

already lose yourself beyond recognition in strange dreams.

“Like a giant cinematic jigsaw puzzle, Inception will keep you guessing right until the very end as it

carries you through to the unbelievably tense climax. If ideas are the future of tomorrow,

Inception certainly thinks bigger and better than the rest.” (Ann Lee, 2010).

Bibliography

Dawson, P. (2005) Creative writing and the new humanities By Paul Dawson. (2nd ed.) USA:

Routledge.

Maciocco, G., & Tagliagambe, S. (2009) People and Space: New Forms of Interaction in the City

Project (1st ed.) USA: Springer

Nolan, C., Nolan. J. (2010) Inception: The Shooting Script (1st ed.) USA: Insight Editions, Div of

Palace Publishing Group, LP

Traficante, C. (2010). Review – Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”.

http://www.icine.com.au/2010/07/26/review-christopher-nolans-inception/ (Accessed 02/10/11)

Lee, A. (2010) Inception review: Unlike any other film you'll see this year.

http://www.metro.co.uk/film/834823-inception-review-unlike-any-other-film-youll-see-this-year

(Accessed 02/10/11