Theories on Inception

If you haven't seen the movie yet, don't look under the cut because this is going to be spoiler heavy. If you have seen the movie, please feel free to offer up your own thoughts vis-a-vis what the hell is going on here.

There's plenty of theories out there right now regarding the plot of Inception and just what it all means. My belief is that nothing we see is "real," it's all in Cobb's head. A few reasons why:

* Cobb is the only one who seems to be able to bring his personal projections into other peoples' dreams. Maybe that's because Cobb's psyche is the foundation and every subsequent level of unreality is built on top of it.

* The chase through the market place is shot to make it look like Cobb is running through a maze. The process of designing a dreamscape is described as designing a maze and Ariadne's first task is literally to design a maze that it takes more than one minute to solve.

* One of the consistent questions asked throughout the film is "how did we/you get here?" When Cobb meets Ariadne they seem to enter immediately and seamlessly into a dream - maybe that's because Cobb was already dreaming and the dream he's sharing with Ariadne is actually a dream within that dream.

* The ease with which Saito is able to pull things off. He shows up just in time to rescue Cobb at the market place, he buys an airline in order to ensure the team has a 10 hour flight in which to work on Fisher, he makes a quick phone call as the plane descends and magically Cobb's legal troubles disappear. He's a deus ex machina of a character, too convenient to be true.

* The totems. Ariadne is told that her totem has to be something that's familiar only to her, that no one else can touch. Arthur won't let her hold his because the weight of it is something with which only he can be familiar if it's to be effective, and later Cobb reiterates the importance of this principle when he tries to trick Ariadne into letting him hold the totem she's just created for herself. Now think about Cobb's totem - it wasn't always his. It was Mal's totem and he took it from her. By doing so he destroys her ability to destinguish reality from dream because he's corrupted her anchor. Shouldn't it be corrupted for him too, since someone else was familiar with it?

If it is corrupted then it doesn't matter whether is keeps spinning or whether it falls because it's meaningless as a tool to tell reality from dream. If what the film posits as reality is actually just the first level of Cobb's unconscious, maybe the top stops on that level simply because he believes that it's reality and his subconscious acts accordingly. Similarly, perhaps that's what's going on at the end with his children. He can see their faces now even though the fact that they're wearing the same clothes and sitting in the same positions on the lawn as in his memory suggests that he's still dreaming. Earlier in the film he tells Ariadne that he's been actively trying to "correct" his memories - maybe the film is depicting that process and the true task is actually to plant an idea in his own subconscious that the first level of dreaming is in fact reality so that at least he can have the comfort of believing that he's been reunited with his children.

I'm sure there's more but I think I would probably have to see the movie again to pick up on it. I'm equally sure that there's plenty of evidence to support other theories, so what's yours?

Review: Inception (2010)

* * * *
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe

Thank God for Inception because, other than a couple of smaller movies in limited release, this has been a very uneventful summer for me, movie-wise. Fortunately Inception was worth waiting for, as it's a smart, slick movie that engages the mind as much as the eye.

The story takes place at an unspecified time in the future when technology allows for shared dreaming and shared dreaming allows thieves to break into a person's subconscious to steal information. One such thief is Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is attempting in the film's opening minutes to extract information from a man named Saito (Ken Watanabe). The job is unsuccessful but Saito is so impressed with Cobb's work that he offers him a new opportunity. Maurice Fisher (Pete Postlethwaite), a powerful tycoon, is on his death bed and his son, Robert (Cillian Murphy), is about the inherit his empire. Saito wants Cobb and his team to venture into Robert's unconscious and plant the idea of selling off the pieces of his father's business. Though his partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), insists that it can't be done, Cobb is persuaded to take the job after Saito informs him that he can pull some strings which would allow Cobb to return to the U.S., where he's currently a wanted man.

Cobb puts together a team which includes Arthur, Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger capable of assuming someone else's identity in dreams, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), the architect who will design the dreams. Since inception is more complicated than extraction, the process will involve dreams within dreams within dreams and since each dream level is more unstable than the last, the team also includes Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who can make a compound that will allow them to submerge themselves deep enough to enter the lower levels. The team goes under but almost immediately things begin to go awry. For one thing, Fischer has been trained to fight attempts at extraction and his subconscious fights back fiercely against the invaders. For another, Cobb is dragging along a lot of baggage in his own subconscious that threatens to derail the entire operation.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Inception is a labyrinth of ideas, the density of which makes this a particularly ambitious film. Using Ariadne - who is new to the process of shared dreaming - as a surrogate for the audience, Nolan methodically sets up the rules of the unconscious state in the film's first half and then plunges us into action in the second half as level upon level upon level of unconsciousness first open out of each other and then collapse in. There is the threat that the characters will go too deep, that they'll submerge themselves so far that they'll be trapped in the unconscious indefinitely or that they'll no longer be able to tell reality from the dream state. Both risks are associated with Cobb who has essentially been to the other side and come back, though the things he left behind constantly threaten to pull him back. The final scene is ambiguous and already scores of theories have been put forth as possible explanations; this is a film that is obviously inspiring a lot of discussion and thought and I think that it's worthy of all of that effort.

The film has been described as "cold" by some critics and while I agree that it's cold, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Stanley Kubrick's films are cold and his coldest - 2001: A Space Odyssey which Nolan references here - is widely considered one of the highest achievements in film history. Besides which, I think coldness is entirely appropriate given the subject. If our unconscious is home to our baser instincts and our consciousness is tempered by our humanity, doesn't it make sense that it would get colder the deep you go? Just a thought.

Other criticisms of the film are, I think, more legitimate. There is a heavy handedness in terms of the naming of characters (aside from Ariadne there's also Mal, French for "bad" and the name of Cobb's destructive projection) and aside from Cobb, none of the characters is really fleshed out (though even that isn't necessarily a criticism, depending on your theory about the film). Still, Inception is an engrossing and often challenging film that makes up for whatever weaknesses it might have through the sheer force of its many strengths. I think it's safe to say that with this film and the rebooted Batman franchise under his belt, Nolan has a blank check to do whatever crazy shit he wants for the next ten years at least.