Inception (film): a Review and an Argument

Intro

I have to confess (as is pretty my my MO on this blog) to this post being a bit more than a standard review. It's more like (as is most of my stuff) my review that I liked a movie and some details and then an idea I based in it or saw in it or somehow connected with it and how that idea plays out. My basic review is that I loved the movie. I have also loved the the fact that Nolan has pretty much stated "no sequel," just as I am glad that Pixar has stated that about Wall-E and other movies of theirs ... "no sequel."  In order to remember the thing of "distinct beginning, middle, and end of an arc that wraps out well" it is important to have movies that stand alone and don't get sidetracked by sequel-itis. Nolan's brother, Jon, did the same thing with Person of Interest: he didn't go for loose ends that left things open for a rebirth, fizzle now and pick up a 6th season down the road. Like his brother Chris, Jonathan Nolan thinks like a movie writer who can write a strong stand-alone with a good strong arc and a clear, meaningful ending.

The Basic Initial Review

There are many great things about the film: I was totally gripped by the pathos of the "come back with me and we can be young men again together" (paraphrase), but that may also be a particularly male theme and reaction. So, I will confine my post to the major conceptual content I find to be the core.

My basic initial idea on Inception, beyond the basic review of "loved it, loved it, loved it, awesome film, awesome characters, awesome dialogue, awesome themes," revolves around the idea of dreaming as emblematic for the psychology of what we do in thinking and interpreting our world and whet yields psychologically healthy interaction in that context. It is centered on the line that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) gives Ariadne (Ellen Page) the first time he meets her (and is giving her the test of making a maze in under a minute that can't be solved in under a minute). He draws that diagram for her with the two half-circle arrows and says something like "we are continually receiving and constructing our reality." This holds not only for dreaming but also for our waking encounter of the world and people around us. This is an idea that involves both philosophy (particularly epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge) and psychology. We do not simply receive an accurate static and thorough picture of the world around us, particularly the people in our lives. We receive a certain amount of data that is ambiguous at times, and we then construct the picture ourselves. 

If we are healthy in doing it, we are open to new data we receive correcting our incomplete at best, faulty at worst, conception of the other person. This is accented in Cobb's final interaction with his projection of his wife right before he finally lets her go. He says that this projection was the best he could do, but that it is poor, that it cannot compare to the real her with both all her foibles or eccentricities and all her little bits of beauty that would break into his world from the outside, from the real living her, if she had continued to live. That's the model of "right action" according to the film (as I read it): don't try to control the other person by pinning them down to the constructions you make of them; let those constructions be open to revision by new data in actual encounters with the real them outside yourself.

As I will say below as well, in the section on "different goals," I think this is part of the sapientia ("wisdom") of the film, the theme: it shows us that we should be open to the new data that adjusts our picture of the other person (see my post on Whiplash for the my basic setup on sapientia in relation to techne and scientia)

"Dream Think"

I'll say a word here about the issue of "dreaming" in the film as emblematic of waking interpretation of our encounters with others in real life, bringing in a concept I came up with on my own a few years before the film even came out. I think this concept helps explain why a movie like this can be seen as dreaming being emblematic for conscious thought because it says that there is a real place in which we cross over and meld the two. "Dream Think" is my term for processing dream material right when waking up from a dream, when you're still in that muddled state of "awake" but on the borderland of "asleep."

In 2007 I had hypomanic episode during my first spring in NYC and doctoral studies. It actually hit right during the three weeks known as "paper season" and I turned in 35 pages on a 20-page assignment ... I was feeling grand (immediately after, at the three-week checkup, the doctor who had me on the SSRI that gave rise to it pulled me off that med because that is dangerous, and I am very grateful for being in the hands of a skilled doctor at that point).

The other thing that happened was that I was dreaming rapid-fire, and I was recording them right after waking. What I noticed, and what gave rise to this theory, was that the details actually came to me and came into clarity in the actual writing down. Just to give a little detail on this type of dream recording for analysis in talk therapy, what you pay attention to the most is the tone and associations: if the hues of light in a room remind you of one place in your childhood and the shapes of walls and door and hallways etc remind you of another, there is probably an emotional connection between them for you, maybe one that you hadn't realized before, that they both connect to an emotional issue for you, of if there is a person in the dream that is not decidedly one person whom you know but reminds you a little bit of a couple different people, those people in your life are probably connected to the same emotional issue for you (and usually that emotional issue shows up in your dream reaction to the dream person). It was those details that were being kicked out of my brain while recording dreams, and sometimes new little segments and plot elements were materializing.

This is what gave rise for me to the idea that, even though you're officially awake now, your still sort of dreaming because that part of your mind that operates in overdrive while dreaming, making free associations between peoples and places based on the emotional elements with which they both connect for you, that part is still operating right after you wake up, which is why, if you want to "remember" a dream best, record it right away because that is when you have the most conscious access to the part that made it ... and is still making it in those minutes when you have just woken up. This is what I call dream think and I offer it here as support for the statement that it is legitimate to see dreaming and its active construction of pictures as a particularly good analogy for what we do in "conscious thought," and that statement then buttresses my position that what this film examines about dreaming is a valid path for talking about waking interaction with the external world and others.

An Objection Observed and a Difference in Goals

I watched Inception once with a friend and his wife, and she had the objection that she did not think the movie did a fair service to mothers because what Mal (Cobb's wife) does in going down into dream space for so long without her children, without wanting to share with them, without being concerned about taking care of them, is not what a good mother would do. In a moment, I will give my response to that objection, but first I would like to note that I am immensely in her debt for raising it because, without hearing it, I would not have come up with the fuller reading that I describe below, which I think is a much richer reading.

My rebuttal, though, is that we are operating on very different ideas of what the goal of the film is or should be. My friend's wife is looking, I would say, for a role model to be provided, that that is the sapientia she looks for in the film. While I would agree that it is often a more important question than is taken into account by some, especially because viewers/readers of a certain age will look for role models, this is only to say that it might be a good idea to make sure of the maturity of your young viewer before they go watch (a prudent idea anyway when it involves a film that contains suicide), to get a feel for whether or not they can process the difference between role-model thinking and criticism thinking (which is what I am about to say I think the real sapientia of this particular film is ... not that there is not a thoroughly legitimate place for role-model films, but that I think there is also a legitimate place for the criticism, in the pejorative sense of the word, model).

What I think the real goal of the film is is criticizing what it portrays Cobb as having done (to be described below), and I think the sapientia of the film is the moral "try not to do this." Ultimately, the project of the film is about Cobb himself, not Mal, although his interaction with her is central to what the film is saying about him. I think that, at the end of the day, the films sapientia is about learning from regrets, rather than about providing concrete, positive role models.

I also think it is about accepting forgiveness and healing, as well as accepting the natural consequences and living with them, especially the ambiguity.

The Final Reading and Review

The Hidden Inception:

My new reading, on top of and in addition to the one above, is that the issue is what was incepted into his wife's mind and that there is a hidden, deeper inception that is not mentioned. The film is clear about the one that is the "how I know inception is possible ... I did it before": he places the spinning top in the safe and it is always there deep in her mind bothering her because its continuing to spin means the world she is currently operating in is a dram and is not real. When he finally reveals this and puts it into propositional ("thought") form, it is "your world is not real."

However, I would argue that there is a deeper inception, one that is an experience but that could also be put into propositional form. For this, I have to go to the details I examine in my post on Pixar's Inside Out. But I should clarify that I am not claiming any "source relation" between the two films in either direction (although, as I say in that post, being as Inception was 2010 and and Inside Out was 2015 and given certain striking similarities in what I will call the "landscape" in the two, also detailed more in that post, and psychology as a common topic, I would not be surprised if Inception was a bit of the inspiration for certain aspects of Inside Out). For one, for "source relation" to be of advantage in my argument here, the historical situation would have to be reversed: Inside Out would have to be the earlier film, which it isn't.

I am simply using my observations about Inside Out to try to explain what I think is a valid point about feminine psychology that impacts my reading of the Inception (and I am REALLY hoping I don't tick off female readers, and I am trying to tread, not lightly [which can all too often be condescending and arrogant], but concisely and conscientiously, so as not to do so ... not just not to get busted, but not to do it in the first place).

In that post, I basically say that I think certain elements, particularely the mother's lead emotion being sadness, point, by way of the issue of postpartum depression (as a general thing that always happens to some degree or another, rather than the specific cases of actual depressive episode of this type), to the conclusion that becoming a mother gives rise to a fundamental shift in psychological self-conceptualization for women. Where that goes for here is that the "hidden inception" of which Cobb was guilty directly interacts with mother-identity and produces a profound psychological dissonance that leads to Mal's suicide.

Basically, because she was already a mother at the time of the central dreaming act (down enough dream layers that a couple hours turns into 50 years by way of the dream-time mechanism that the film establishes as part of is "physics") she goes into that act after already having her self-conception so radically changed and now centered around being mother to her children. What Cobb incepts is an experience, although one that I will say can be put into propositional form. The experience is fifty years of growing old with him down there without it involving all the things that defining living life as a parent: teeth under pillows, highschool graduations, first loves, first losses, first jobs, marriages, grand kids, and many others. This experience would be greatly dissonant with the self-conceptualization as a mother she already has at the time she enters that dream state, and I think it is at least between the lines that this dissonance yielded her break with reality in which she committed suicide (how consciously or not on the part of the film makers it is placed between the lines, I am not sure, but that doesn't keep it from being real).

The possible propositional form that would encapsulate this experience is the same proposition Cobb actually statedly incepted, but applied elsewhere. When he put the top in the safe still spinning, the idea he says it incepted was "your world is not real," meaning the world they had created together down in the deepest dream space. But when he put the experience in her of growing old without it involving her children, he also incepted "your world is not real" applied to the "world" of her being a mother of her children

The Manipulation:

So, if the experience is so dissonant, and if we are not going to necessarily impugn Mal as a bad mother (or the film makers as presenting a bad role model), how did Cobb get her to do it? The manipulations I am about to describe are hypothetical (although I will give a detail with the first that makes me think it is more possibly intentionally there by the film makers), but I believe they are entirely plausible, maybe even probable, within the frame world created in the film. I mean them as part of the defense that, while we're not looking to Mal as a role model, it does help this reading to not impugn her, to see her choice as understandable for a young married mother, even though it is revealed later to have been very inadvisable.

Both of the two that I will detail now are things that I think it is plausible to guess that Cobb may have manipulated to get Mal to do the 50 years with him. He admits that he was the one pushing exploring the dream-within-a-dream construct (I always wonder if there is a hat-tip to Princess Bride in that, or maybe even an allusion to the marriage/family itself idea presented in the fact that the impressive clergyman gives his classic homily in the context of a sham wedding).

Before detailing them I also have to add (and hope I don't really piss any women off) that women are more empathetic by nature than are men. At least most tend to like being supportive by liking their husband's friends and worlds. I'm not saying at all that it's a bad mark if a woman is more independent in the "liking" department or more disposed to a situation of "you have your hobbies and crowd and I have mine ... but we love each other's company and being married to each other," just noting what seems to me like a general tendency that makes Mal's actions understandable as a wife and mother. I think the empathy may also help explain why, by the end of the 50 years, he is the one who has to do the inception to break her out of the dream world because she is the one who has become attached. Sticking with the mother issue ... women are much more adaptable than men (and much stronger really) and able to accommodate, even accommodating another human being inside their body for nine months (I love that FB meme that has the kid say "you're invading my personal space" and the mother saying "you invaded mine for nine months").

The "Date Night" Principle:

Married couples with young kids know what "date night" is. Parents occasionally need a breather from direct involvement in the hands-on of caring for their kids needs, particularly their psychological needs, and very often it involves the need to go someplace and rediscover a little of their own interaction that was the basis for them getting together in the first place, to focus for an evening on the community of two, which is actually even necessary for the health of the community three, four, five, six, etc because that growing community began with and is based in the community of two, even though each child's life goes beyond it by being new and wonderful and completely unique.

My point is that "date night" is a valid principle, even though a 50-year-long date night is not right, and that becomes obvious in what happens, in the fact that it leads to Mal's break with reality. But date night as a principle is healthy. But, Cobb would argue, we're not actually doing 50 years, we're doing only a couple hours. A woman, being empathetic and supportive (but by no means "weak-minded") and actually wanting date night time with her man, might easily buy this with the thought that "I will be able to adjust back from it" (although here it proves to be an unrealistic expectation).

The " Investigate First" Principle:

A second possibly manipulated means comes from something my friend's wife initially said about a mother's desire to share things with her children, not go off and get lost in enjoying things they might not even share with their kids (and I take her word for it because they have a number of children and she is a wonderful mother to them, her daughters are particularly fun and interesting to hang out with and talk with because they learned from her example of being interesting and interested in a lot of things with them). But the children in this story are young, Cobb might argue, and so we don't know how their minds will react, whether they will be able to re-adapt from dream to reality, so we need to investigate first, right? We need to check it out, even push the limits on it, to test the waters in which we will swim with our children eventually.

This is yet another possible/plausible ploy by which he could have gotten her to do the 50 years.

However it did or did not happen, Cobb got her to do it, and I don't think it is necessary to impugn her character as a mother to explain how. I think there is enough detail in what is there in the film to accept the other plausible explanations. For instance, the fact that when and where she commits suicide is on the anniversary get away that has a strong flavor of "date night" to it, and something like that can be an allusion.

The Cost:

As I hinted at above, I think accepting forgiveness in the form of letting go and moving on, as he does with his construct of his memory of his wife in his head, is part of the theme of the film. But that doesn't erase effects and costs. And Cobb's cost is that top still spinning at the end and then maybe wobbling like it is about to topple ... or maybe just a in off-handed wobble that doesn't stop it from continuing to spin forever. The cost he must continually bear for introducing a dangerous ambiguity that became a dissonance that became a suicide is that he must live in that same ambiguity the rest of his life.

In a college commencement address he gave, Nolan seems to paint Cobb as "not caring" anymore. That's not how I took that scene, or at least I think there are other interpretations that work at least equally as well, and I think, better (and while I don't agree entirely with "new criticism," I do agree with it's eschewing conscious authorial intent at least the core criteria of interpretation ... even as great a mind as a Nolan can get it wrong sometimes, even interpreting what works in his own piece of art). I think that the ambiguity of the still spinning top is Cobb's punishment, or maybe just the natural consequence, he has to suffer  because of what he did. And I think that what Nolan characterizes as "not caring" is really simply accepting that that ambiguity is what he has to bear but not letting it stop him from living what life there might be. It is almost as if to say, "whether it is really my children I am interacting with or not, it is true that it might be my real children, and so, as long as I have to bear the ambiguity of not knowing, I am going to live as if it is really them so that, if it really is them, I have done right by them by being there for them as a father ... and to a certain extent, that is all I can do, so to a certain extent, it doesn't matter whether the top is real or dream because I am going to act the same either way."

But I also think that that spinning top carries a larger meaning for the viewer who has not even committed Cobb's particular sins, maybe just the fallout of the Fall. The fact is, in this life, none of us are ever entirely out of the woods on anything. That's just the nature of the beast of living in a fallen world, and you have to do the best with it you can in muddling on. There will hopefully be joy at the end, and there can be joy along the way, but you're going to wind up crushing that joy along the way if you try to pin it down and control it (if your wife says "50 years is too long of a date night; it will affect me much more drastically than you because I am a mother" ... listen to her). For this life, you are still always in the state of both receiving and constructing, and you have to be content with a bit of ambiguity on which is which while still trying to move ahead with doing good and engaging others and the world in charity.

Another universal point of the spinning top might also be: you're never entirely done healing in this life.

A Final Caveat:

When I first started picking around on some things about interpreting Inception, I came across a bit of fluff detail that there is a song that plays in the background in the final scene that is from another movie where everything winds up being a dream the whole time, and that this musical allusion means (it was claimed) that this whole movie has been one dream from the start. I don't buy such esoteric cryptic "source relation" thinking as adequate for a good film. A good film is complete in itself in its basic plot. Some source allusions may tease out the identities of certain elements ("Nurmengard" sounds like "Nuremburg" and this allusion hints at the nazi-esque quality of Grindlewald's reign of terror in Harry Potter, etc ... they definitely get more complex than just that, but I think the one under consideration is of another quality altogether), BUT the basic plot itself, when the film/narrative is good, is contained within the narrative itself, not borrowed esoterically from another work.

If the movie purports to be real time at the outset, then, unless the ending clearly shows that to be false, it is true. By this I mean the fact that the movie starts in real time, not whether it ends in real time, because the spinning top at the end could mean that, while he started in real time, he got stuck in dreamtime and is there ever after. The top proves nothing about the opening claim (which it would have to do in order to put the whole film in dreamland).  And any appeal to another film to firmly establish a reading that everything is a dream is, IMHO, complete bunk, regardless of any songs in common and what little nuance the film makers might want convey by those (simple "hat tips" are possible too).

I know that, in Nolan's own statement about the ambiguity, one might be able to say that Cobb's point is to accept the ambiguity and not obsess about it, but a theory that solidly places the whole thing in dreamland then, in that very action, erases the very ambiguity itself. The end of Terry Gilliam's Brazil was depressing as hell, but one thing that it was not was ambiguous ... John Price's character is clearly in lala land (it always amazed me how they totally reversed that movie when they edited it for TV just by removing the last minute or so ... from unambiguously actual physical escape to unambiguously mental break with reality). This theory of the other movie and its song making Inception all a dream from start to finish would not only be equally depressing as hell, it would make the film a much cheaper quality of art than was Brazil, possibly even to the point of calling it ineffectual where Brazil was at the very least effective in constructing its world and its conclusion.

Just for explication, an actual revelation of "you weren't where it was said that you were in the beginning" would be that, by midway through the Matrix, the viewer has clearly been told that Neo's and the viewer's opening belief that he was in the real world, versus the Matrix, was mistaken (there was a question between Matrix 2 and 3 of whether the evidence in 2 led to the conclusion that there is no real world at all, whether the fact that he could control the machines in the "real world" meant that they were still in the Matrix and could never get to any existence outside it ... but the 3rd movie cleared that up ... well, not entirely, in that it doesn't explicate as fully as you would want in sci fi how his organic consciousness evolved so as to be able to control the machines with nothing but air and space as conduits, but it is clear in movie 3 that there is a real world and that they were in it in that scene at the end of movie 2).

Flotsam and Brettsam
(some original ideas that didn't fit so easily into this presentation)

danger of inception (mine: at play in the fields of the Lord)

 And, as with his comments on the dreamer having to, in a sense, own the concept in some way in order for it to stick, he got his wife to own that concept by accepting his argument and proposal to stay down there that long (in dreamtime years, at least). Whether or not it is rational for her to say that it was her idea is entirely the wrong question. She will do it no matter what, in the way that children interiorize tension between their parents and blame themselves, "owning" it.