Are We Dreaming?
Spoiler alert! I’ll be talking about all aspects of the film Inception in this post. If you haven’t seen it yet, then you may want to watch it before reading further…
I’m always on the look out for resonances which return me to the truth of the dreamlike nature of our experience. It’s why I love Inception, Christopher Nolan’s exquisite creation from 2010, an oldie by today’s metric of the rapacious present. With its dream heist chicanery, Inception delivers a jolt, shocking us from our parochial complacency. For a moment, the motor of incessant projection is arrested and we realize that nothing is quite as solid as it seems.
Memory shoots with a wily lens. Images from one night, twenty three years ago, are as sharp as some from the past few weeks. It was a muggy summer evening in Oxford, the night before a challenging Greats paper on Thucydides. Suddenly I knew with complete clarity that further study was a fool’s game. I closed up my books with a silent apology to the great master and fled for the sanctuary of a friend’s living room. Someone was talking excitedly about a film by a new director. “It’s called Memento” he said. “You have to see it!”
To this day, I credit the brilliance of the film with the sharpness of my writing the next day. However, I never did ask the name of that director. It wasn’t until several years later, watching Batman Begins, that I put two and two together. These were the offerings of one Christopher Nolan.
I first saw Inception on a plane. Almost a meta-drama, but not the best place for viewing the complexities of the plot and the mind blowing set pieces. Or for appreciating the fantastic score of Hans Zimmer. Since then I have seen it many times, watched it almost inside out and come to develop a deep affection for it.
Inception, set at some point during the near future, tells the story of a world where large corporations use dream manipulation technology developed by the military in order to extract secrets from rivals while they sleep. A highly talented ‘extractor’ Dominic Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is hired by Mr Saito, an immensely powerful business magnate, to assemble a team for a super heist of staggering complexity. Crucially this undertaking involves inception, the notion that one can plant an idea in the dreaming target’s subconscious, which will irrevocably change their behaviour, thus ensuring the outcome the client requires. As we will later discover, Cobb has a secret and sorrowful history with inception. It’s also important to note that Mr Saito offers Cobb the possibility that he will see his children once again, should he successfully complete his mission.
Such a setting allows Nolan to create a scenario involving three levels of dreams, all designed by Ariadne, Cobb’s dream architect. This paves the way for tremendous fun and visual shenanigans. We have shared dreaming, dream totems such as the infamous spinning top, dreams within dreams and Limbo, the vast space which one can fall into and become lost, as time dilates and memory disintegrates.
To capture the full experiential range which Inception encompasses, it’s helpful to have read the short story, The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges which Nolan cites as an influence. This tale of a sorcerer who washes up on a foreign shore, dreams a boy into existence and in the final end discovers that he too is part of someone else’s dream echoes throughout the film. It’s poignantly present in the opening scene where Cobb washes up on a deserted shore.
The contrasting movements of time are a wonderful aspect of the film. My favourite way to remember this, is to turn to the movie’s opening. The scene on the deserted shore begins the film and then concludes the action of the heist, twelve minutes before the movie’s end, although we cannot know this on a first viewing. Cobb washes up on the beach. When he regains consciousness, the very first thing he hears and sees are his children, one of his constant memories throughout the film. Then he falls unconscious once more and is found by a Japanese guard. He awakens again in a fortress sitting at the table with an old, old man who recognizes his spinning top. The old man says, “I know what this is. I’ve seen one before. It belonged to a man I met in a half remembered dream. A man possessed of some radical notions.”
Then we cut to the action of the film until we return at the end, to the very same scene. Of course now we know exactly where we are. We are in the world of Saito’s Limbo where he had fallen only moments ago, after dying in the third level of the dream. Cobb has, as promised, come to rescue him. The jolt we are given, when we see Saito’s age, although only moments have passed, and how both men struggle to differentiate dreams from reality is a powerful thing. Apparent reality here but in another world these dreamers are drowning in that van which hit the water, in another they are sleeping in an elevator rigged to explode and in another they are sleeping on a plane. This is why, I think, the beginning of the film is better the second time around. We know where we are and thus can fully appreciate all of the echoes of dreams. The ground we are standing on is only a mental projection. Saito’s beach is a figment of his own mind.
We are all growing old, our world seems as real to us as Saito’s Limbo does to him. When he says “I’m an old man” we feel that he is. There is an emotional truth to the scene that is essential to its effect upon us. In order to get that kick, that shock, we have to believe that Saito is old. And believe we do, yet he merely dreams. And so, when we know the end of the movie we finally understand the beginning. We see the aged Saito, a life of years, measured in seconds. A dream eternity but that’s just it, a mere dream. We are given that jolt that shocks our one track mind, hurtling along with all of its imprints, into stillness, for just one fragment of a second.
Inception is a film of incredible visual beauty. One could watch it for this alone. All of the dreams have a clear vivid quality, no surrealism here. Characters are always sharply dressed. We have fast trains, planes and bustling cityscapes, Tokyo, Paris, Mombasa, LA and the echoing silences of the crumbling empty cities and deserted shores of Limbo. Nolan’s dreamworld allows for audacious architectural departures. We think immediately of the Rue Cesar Frank, folding back on itself, one of Ariadne’s dream creations.
It’s also a film full of contagious fun. The repartee between members of the crew is a delight and the ebullient mood is best exemplified by Tom Hardy’s shape shifting character of Eames. Think of the chase scene in Mombasa with Cobb. Jumping into Saito’s getaway vehicle, Eames says, “So this is your idea of losing a tail?” Or consider how he is always joshing the cerebral Arthur played by Joseph Gordon Levitt. Trumping Arthur’s handgun with a bazooka, he says, “You’ve got to dream a little bigger darling.” As Tom Shone comments, he catches ‘exactly the director’s mood- frisky, flirtatious, playful.’ In fact Nolan himself has also pointed out how the entire heist genre is somewhat analogous to movie making.
However, dreams or no dreams, Inception is no simple heist movie. Tagged at every point to the progress of the heist is the true emotional heart of the film, the tragic backstory of Cobb, who committed inception on his beloved wife Mal, heartbreakingly played by Marion Cotillard, and lost everything as a result. He is wanted for his wife’s murder, although in fact she committed suicide and thus is unable to return home to Los Angeles to be with his children. Consumed by guilt, Dom’s dreaming mind is haunted by his wife’s projection. She is a sabotaging force, who appears at crucial moments, thus creating an inherent instability in the entire project. In this way, the heist narrative is infused with an additional dose of unbearable tension. Dimension and depth are added to the whole enterprise by the undeniable strength of the emotional bond between Dom and Mal. He keeps her alive in the prison of his memories, wonderfully represented in the terrifying elevator scene where Mal, trapped in the final night of her life, appears to Ariadne as an avenging demon.
Dom and Mal’s tragedy is a narrative of the devastation which good intentions can wreak, of love, loss and guilt. Even as we dream our dreams, memories haunt us and in the end we have to let go of all that which we cling to. When Dom is finally able to say goodbye to the memory of his wife we feel every iota of his grief over the loss of a shared lifetime as he says, “I miss you more than I can bear, but we had our time together and I have to let you go.”
With all of its elements, Inception stands tall as a film that can be watched and rewatched. Like a prism it can be viewed from any angle and some colour will reflect the light. We can simply allow its impressions to wash over us or enjoy its tricks of time. We can engage with the continual play and questioning of the dream versus reality or sit for a moment with Cobb as he gazes at the faces of his children and endlessly muse over that ending…
To conclude with my favourite poet of the moment,
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:- Do I wake or sleep? (John Keats)
