Inception (2010) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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If you can dream it, be it!

Inception was the film that put Christopher Nolan on the map for the average movie audience. Prior to this, he was a director of some superhero films, which many people don’t pay attention to. Inception garnered commercial and critical praise and has allowed him to continue making the films he wants to make.

First Impressions

Leonardo DiCaprio is a man who has the ability to control people’s dreams. In this way, he’s able to control their reality. The trailer is filled with surrealistic imagery of characters floating or flying while trains run through the middle of a street and ocean waves erode a preposterously tall city. Things seem precarious, but Leo assures someone that he’s completely in control. That may all be a matter of Inception.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) takes a meeting with Japanese businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe), offering his services in teaching defense against extraction–the ability for someone to steal ideas from another person within their dreams. Suddenly, it’s revealed that they are already inside his dream, having gotten to Saito inside his secret apartment. They are attempting to procure a trade secret for their employer, Cobol Engineering. A new reveal shows this to be a dream within a dream, as Cobb, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and their architect Nash (Lukas Haas) are actually on a train hooked up to a machine that creates shared dream spaces. Later, Saito realizes what has happened and approaches Cobb with an offer: provide inception into his business rival’s son. In exchange, Saito will pull strings to have Cobb’s criminal record expunged so he can go home to America.

Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), son of business magnate Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite), stands to inherit his father’s company shortly after his father dies. Saito wants Cobb to implant the idea in the younger Fischer’s head to break up his company, allowing Saito global domination in the market. Cobb tells Saito it’s nearly impossible to achieve inception, but he’ll do it for the chance to see his young children again. Cobb travels to Paris, where he meets with his father-in-law Miles (Michael Caine) in search of a new architect. Miles recommends Ariadne (Ellen Page), who has enormous natural creativity and talent in building the spatial mazes needed for the shared dream space.

As Ariadne and Arthur work on the design of the dream space, Cobb picks up their forger Eames (Tom Hardy). They are chased out of town by security agents for Cobol but are saved by Saito, who now wants in on the job. In order to perform this inception, Cobb realizes they will need to create a dream three-layers deep, or a dream within a dream within a dream. They seek out a new chemist, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), who has his own formulation of the original drug created by the military. They will need approximately 10 hours of dream-state in order to perform the work of planting the idea in Fischer’s mind. Saito reveals that Fischer is scheduled to fly from Sydney to Los Angeles in a few days. Ariadne discovers that Cobb can’t help but bring the avatar of his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), into any dream he partakes in. She believes he needs to tell the others of this danger to the plan.

On board the airplane, Cobb and his team sedate Fischer to keep him under as they all enter the first dream state provided by Yusuf. It’s rainy in Los Angeles (since Yusuf forgot to pee prior to falling asleep) when they attempt to abduct Fischer. They need to be careful because Fischer’s subconscious has been trained against extraction. The other characters in his dream are projections of his subconscious, and they attempt to protect him from being abducted. Normally, dying in the dream state awakens the participant, but due to the sedation, death will put the person into Limbo–the shores of one’s subconscious, where they could live out their entire lives, since time works differently in dreams. Saito is shot during the abduction, and the team moves into level two of the dream: a hotel.

Arthur is in charge of this level of the dream. Since Fischer’s subconscious is wary of these intruders, Cobb uses a ploy called “Mr. Charles.” They pretend to be members of Fischer’s “security force” in order to get Fischer on their side. Eames pretends to be Peter Browning (Tom Berenger), Fischer’s godfather and executor of his father’s estate. Cobb convinces Fischer that Browning has kidnapped him and that they need to go into Browning’s subconscious in order to see what he’s planning. This puts Fischer firmly on the team, as they drop into a third–and deepest–level of the dream, a snowy mountain fortress. In each of the dream-levels, the dreamers are primed for a “kick,” the automatic startle reflex one has when falling, in order to wake them back up. They miss the first kick in the Los Angeles level when a van carrying them crashes off a bridge. In the Hotel-level, Arthur rigs an improvised kick in a weightless environment.

The infiltration of the snow fortress requires Fischer to get a secret from Browning’s subconscious, but Cobb and team are actually trying to implant the idea that Fisher Sr. hates his son. All is going well until Mal shows up and shoots Fischer, dropping him into Limbo. Cobb feels they failed, but Ariadne suggests that they can enter Limbo and have more time to save Fisher and Saito, who has also died from his wounds. Cobb reveals to Ariadne that he once caused inception on Mal, leading her to believe that her reality was fake. She committed suicide in the real world, believing she would awake from the dream state. Cobb and Ariadne find Fischer in Limbo just as the kick occurs in the levels above. Cobb stays to search for Saito and helps him back to reality, reminding him of the promise. The idea is firmly implanted in Fisher’s subconscious as they all awaken on the plane in Los Angeles. Cobb is allowed to enter the country and finally visit his children. He checks on his totem to ensure that he is in reality, but becomes distracted seeing his children instead.

“I think positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We all yearn for reconciliation, for catharsis.” – Cobb

History in the Making

Inception firmly set the bar with director Christopher Nolan as a preeminent maker of science-fiction films. It was his second genre film, after The Prestige, and he explored new ground with his idea of the reality of dreams. It was also his first film that was more universally recognized with awards (or at least nominations). While his first major film, Memento, was recognized with nominations for Best Original Screenplay, Inception was more widely praised with Best Director and Best Picture nominations. It won four Oscars for more technical categories while taking home the Best Original Screenplay from the Directors Guild Awards. This public recognition for Nolan’s work only confirms what fans of his work had already known: his films are extremely smart and contain high-quality production values.

Nolan had a streak between 2006 and 2020 with every other film he directed being a sci-fi film. They were interspersed between his Batman/Dark Knight trilogy and his next award-winning film, Dunkirk. He started with The Prestige (which is a non-standard sci-fi film, as discussed in my article on that film), followed that with Inception, then the polarizing Interstellar, and finally Tenet–which is the most interesting time travel film created. Each of these films cut new territory in the genre and gathered more and more fans of Nolan’s work, which allowed him greater freedom for the films he really wanted to make, like Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.

This film is as much about the creative process as it is about the nature of dreams and the subconscious. Articles have mentioned how each of the characters fulfills a role in the world of filmmaking. Many have rightly compared Cobb to a director of a film, but more specifically in this case, he’s Nolan himself. DiCaprio’s hair is styled like Nolan’s, as is his whole look, which makes this feel like a more personal film–not that Nolan has ever pushed someone to kill themselves, mind you. With that idea, DiCaprio controls and directs the events of the film and the characters while not being responsible for everything. He allows the others to do their parts, which he apparently trusts them with. Arthur, who is a long-time friend of Cobb’s, acts as the producer. He organizes the space, the people, and the necessary tools to get the job done. Saito could also be looked at as a producer, but he is more of the person with the funding. That could be a producer, but more likely a studio. He has the idea, and he funds the people to pull it off. Ariadne (and Nash before her) is the production designer and the screenwriter. She creates the worlds that the subject will inhabit–both visually and philosophically. She helps the rest of the team get into their characters. Eames becomes the actor, taking on the role of playing other people apart from himself in the dream world. First, he plays the role of Browning in order to convince Fischer that something is amiss. Then he plays the blonde woman sitting with Fischer on Level Two. Yusuf is a hard one to place into the cast. He might be considered a projectionist. He administers the drugs to Fischer, which allows him to be ready for the story to unfold in front of him.  Which finally leaves Fischer as the audience. He is guided along a storyline by the “crew” and has little to do other than watch the events unfold and become emotionally invested in the story playing out.

Genre-fication

The core idea of Inception is a dreamworld that is shared by multiple people at the same time, which is also indistinguishable from reality–at least at the moment. It’s not the first film to deal with people connecting to others’ dreams and subconscious. Some popular examples include Dreamscape, Paprika, and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. These films all deal with the monsters that come through the subconscious to torment the dreamer–whether those are self-induced demons or outside forces. Inception deals with the idea of rewriting memory via a dream state. This altering of the subconscious to affect the conscious shares similarities to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is about a device that erases portions of one’s memory that are too painful to remember. That film deals with the fine line where the conscious and subconscious merge, affecting the day-to-day reality of the individual. Inception also deals with creating a false, shared reality that brings to mind two other sci-films from the previous decade: The Matrix and Dark City. The worry that we are living in a reality that is a simulation of some kind or someone else’s dreams made real is a troubling and often debated philosophical puzzle.

Inception is the most complicated and challenging film about dreams to date. It asks a lot from the audience in terms of paying attention and intuiting things that are subtle or unsaid. It takes some of the philosophical ideas from other sci-fi films (like The Matrix) and presents them in less of a science-fiction conceit and more of a gritty heist film. It also compares the nature of dreams to cinema, as audiences never know if what they are experiencing in the theater is real. The nature of special effects and cinematography is now at a level that if a film were introduced into our subconscious, we would not be able to tell dreaming from reality. This was also a film that changed the connotation of the word inception for many. By its canonical definition, inception means the beginning of something. That’s why the dream-heist they undertake is not considered an extraction (removing an idea from the person’s mind) but an inception (where they plant a new idea into the mind). But due to the nature of Nolan’s creative visuals and tricky reality warping between multiple dream states, “inception” now refers to something containing something else, or even itself. The suffix ‘ception’ has been used in memes and popular culture to express a repetition of things or events, like a Matryoshka doll that has ever smaller versions of itself within itself.

Inception is also an excellent example of a heist film, which is one of the things that makes the film feel less like a sci-fi movie. It has all the tropes of a classic heist film: the ring leader who is the movie’s primary protagonist, the gathering of the crew–each with their own specialty, the initial attempt at the robbery (which usually goes awry), and the twists and turns that keep the audience guessing about who is on whose side. Strip away the dreams within dreams and this film could easily fill the same structure as an Oceans’ Eleven, or possibly something a bit more complex, like Heat.

Societal Commentary

Rewatching Inception for this article made me realize what a sad film this is. At its center is Cobb, a man who is haunted by the memories of his past as he attempts to continue his day-to-day work. That wouldn’t normally be a problem if he was doing anything other than entering people’s psyche and trying to steal their ideas. But because he brings all his baggage with him when he enters their minds, he creates a danger for both himself and the mark since, in this profession, that baggage can kill. The Mal that is seen in the film is never the real Mal. She is a strong projection from Cobb’s subconscious. As Cobb describes to Ariadne, the real version of his wife died a while ago. They had entered a deep dream together and became stuck in Limbo for a perceived lifetime. Mal had become convinced that this dream state was her reality and denied Cobb’s protestation that they were wasting their life in a false world. He planted the idea in her mind that Limbo was fake, which allowed Cobb and Mal to kill themselves in the dream state in order to wake up (this is the sequence where they lay down on the railroad tracks). Unfortunately, Cobb’s inception worked too well, and that idea persisted back into waking life. She was unable to shake the feeling that she was still living in a dream state, and believed that the only way to wake up to see her children again was to kill herself. This resulted in her jumping from a building and actually committing suicide, for which Cobb was blamed.

Cobb’s guilt stems from destroying his wife’s life (and his own) in such a fundamental way. Mal had come up with an idea on how to tell reality from the dreamworld by the use of a totem. This is a small, personal object which only the individual understands the weight and feel of. This way, one can determine if they’re in someone else’s dream. What audiences don’t grasp is that it’s not a way to tell if you’re awake or asleep but whether you’re living in someone else’s reality. If it doesn’t feel right, it’s not your dream. There’s also confusion over the top as Cobb’s totem. When he and Ariadne are in Limbo, and he explains how he planted the idea in Mal’s mind, Nolan shows Cobb opening the locked safe in Mal’s subconscious and spinning a top that she keeps inside. This was the idea he implanted. He spun her top, which in Limbo would presumably spin forever, and would fundamentally change her perception of reality. This top belonged to his wife, but after her death, he took it as his own. It’s another manifestation of his guilt that he takes the object that was his wife’s tool to confirm what is real and makes it his own.

Inception also deals with the addictive nature of the dream state. Cobb’s guilt drives him into his own dreams and subconscious, which is the only place he can see his wife again. It’s the only way he can still dream, he says. And regardless of whether Mal is antagonistic or depressed, Cobb is still happy to have her in his life. Ariadne finds Cobb hooked up to the dream system on his own, which troubles her. She understands the inherent dangers and tells Cobb he must explain the risks to his partners–which he decides to hide from them. When the group seeks out a new chemist with Yusuf, an elderly man talks of the people who come to their dream-parlor for hours a day to live in a 40-hour  dream state. They don’t come to experience a dream, he says; “they come to be woken up.” Like a junkie seeking his next high, the dream state can become a highly addictive reality, and a substitution and escape from the real world.

The Science in The Fiction

Have you ever noticed that you can dream an entire adventure in just a few minutes? Inception takes that level of subconscious speed and uses it as a plot device. Arthur explains to Ariadne that “five minutes in the real world gives you an hour in the dream.” The deeper the characters travel into the dream state, the longer their perceived time becomes, which is why a few real-world moments in Limbo become a lifetime. Nolan would use this time dilation effect again, though in the context of real physics, in his next sci-fi film, Interstellar. His use of a different time scale for each level of the dreamer’s reality is something that still puzzles some audience members, otherwise, there would not be so many websites and videos explaining exactly how long Cobb and his team were in the dream.

Not much is said about how the dream-sharing technology was created. Cobb tells Ariadne that “it was a training program for soldiers to shoot, stab and strangle each other.” Of course it was. So many science-fiction conceits stem from something that was a government or military device that found its way onto the black market for use by the public. The squid technology from Strange Days has a similar backstory. As with any technology, there are people who are always attempting to tweak it for their own purposes. There was an initial chemical cocktail that provided the necessary linkage to the dream-sharing machine, but over time, people like Yusuf have developed their own versions of the formula. This allows for greater capacity of people to partake in the event, as well as an enhanced and more realistic dreamtime. Some have also introduced paralytics that allow dreamers to stay under longer, as well as stay asleep as more dreams get layered on.

The only way out of the dreams is to wake up naturally when the chemicals wear off or to use a kick. Most people are familiar with that twitch of musculature that one feels when they dream about falling. It usually occurs just on the edge of sleep. That shock to the dreamers’ reality affects their perceived reality, and they awaken. It’s also possible to awaken when someone is killed in the dream. This rule varies widely within stories. Sometimes, if you die in the dream, you die in real life–as in A Nightmare on Elm Street. It all depends on the story being told. In this case, the reason the characters don’t awaken when killed is that the sedative that is mixed into the chemical compound keeps them asleep, sending them into the shores of their subconscious, aka Limbo. At that point, the kick, or a naturally occurring awakening from their slumber, is the only way out.

The Final Frontier

The end of Inception seems to break a lot of people’s brains. Having returned, presumably to the real world, Cobb is allowed back into the United States (thanks to Saito’s phone call) and goes to see his children. He pulls out his totem, a top, and spins it on the table. But he becomes distracted by seeing his children’s faces and walks away before seeing if the top stops spinning. The camera lingers on an ever-spinning top, which may or may not be wobbling. Most viewers assume that there is ambiguity about whether Cobb really is awake or not. But I don’t believe that’s the case. The question is not whether he’s awake or dreaming but whether he’s happy. This is Cobb’s quote from above about the catharsis of positivity. Just because you’re dreaming doesn’t mean you can’t be happy. In his dreams, whenever his children are seen, their faces are obscured. When Cobb visits home, they both turn towards him, revealing their smiling faces, which is what distracts him in the first place. In his dreams, he is denied seeing their faces due to his guilt. Once he learns to let go of the pain of what he did to his wife, he allows happiness to reenter his world. Whether he’s really seeing his children in reality or only seeing his children in a dream is irrelevant. He has transcended the pain and guilt of Mal’s death and has allowed himself to move on.

Nolan uses a piece of music by French singer Edith Piaf as a motif throughout the film. Her 1960 recording of the song “Non, je ne regrette rien” is about a woman who says that “no, she doesn’t regret anything.” She takes the good and the bad, which are all the same to her, and sweeps them away. It’s a melancholy song, but one that is filled with a healthy mental attitude. This music is used by the characters to signal a countdown to the “kick,” which will return them to consciousness. Since the time on each level of the dream varies, with more time passing per second on each layer down, Nolan slows the song and pitch shifts it to have it permeate the film as part of the film score and the atmosphere of the various dream levels. This is a unique and interesting way to tie together the themes of guilt, regret, dreaming, and reality for both the characters and the audience.

We all create our own worlds for our dreams. Whether that’s the reality within our nightly dreams or the dreams we create that help determine our own reality. Living in a dream is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps someone wants to become a successful musician, so they dream of recording their first album or playing a concert on stage. This idea, planted in their head, allows them to take the necessary steps to becoming the person they envision. Of course, dreams can also be destructive. The guilt or shame of past actions can also color a person’s outlook on the world. The trick is learning to control the ideas that we put in our heads and directing them in positive and fulfilling ways, rather than suffer the negative and regressive things that hold us back. Non, je ne regrette rien.

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