Inside the Dreams of Inception
Have you ever been dreaming and then wake up only to realize that you’re still dreaming? Have you ever started to drift off to sleep then a sudden movement or the feeling of you falling abruptly makes you wake up? If either of these things has ever happened to you, then you’re on your way of starting to understand the mind-boggling movie Inception. People dream to create a reality that they wish to have. Dreaming is part of a human’s subconscious mind, which keeps them going everyday. If we weren’t able to dream then we wouldn’t be able to create cures for diseases, overcome war, and see past the challenges in the world or in our own lives that we may be facing. It’s only when our dreams and reality get mix together to the point that we can’t tell the difference between the real world and our dream world that problems may occur. When our conscious and subconscious mind get confuse that’s when, for example, fanatics of movies such as Avatar believe that Nav’i people from the movie are real and they learn the Nav’i language, dress up like a Nav’i, and surround themselves around a fictional movie as if it were real. They dream themselves into an alter reality that isn’t real, but to them is real. The 2010 film Inception goes in depth into the interchanging between reality and dreaming and what happens when you get lost between the two. I will be doing a Narrative and Ideological criticism to explain the epic tale of Inception.
Inception came out in 2010 and is writing and directed by the same mastermind behind the films Memento, The Dark Knight, and the upcoming film The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan. The film has an all star cast featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur, Ellen Page as Ariadne and Marion Cotillard as Mal. Inception was a mega hit at the box office bringing in over 820 million worldwide with its state of the art effects, mega cast, and intriguing storyline. The success of the film didn’t stop at the box office, it went on to win numerous awards including, four Academy Awards and six Critics Choice Awards.
Before I start my criticism on the movie I’ll begin with an explanation of narrative criticism. Professor Walter R. Fisher introduced narrative criticism to the communication theory (DeLara). A narrative is a story and narrative criticism breaks down that story to gain meaning of the artifact. A narrative can be seen in a variety of artifacts including, films, interviews, television, songs, and documentaries. There are four characteristics that define a narrative. First, the narrative must have at least two events that occur. Within these events there’s an “active” which is expressing an action. An example of an active would be a cat meowing at the mouse. Or there’s a “stative” which is expressing a state or condition. An example of a stative would be the mouse was scared of the cat. The second characteristic is the events of a narrative are organized by a time order. The order can be chronological or there can be flash backs, but there must be a beginning, middle, and end to the events. The third characteristic is the story must a depict change or a cause and effect relationship to the events. The last characteristic involves there being a unified subject. There must be a main subject or meaning for an artifact to be considered a narrative. To understand the complexity of the story behind Inception I’ll be explaining it through a narrative criticism.
When I first walked out of the movie theater after seeing Inception the only thing I could think of was what did I just watch? And Am I dreaming or is this reality? On the surface the story of Inception may just be about dreams within dreams and trying to implant original ideas into someone’s subconscious, but beneath that surface Inception can be seen as a metaphor about how movies are created. In my narrative criticism I’ll be deconstructing how Inception is a metaphor for how movies are created.
Movies start from an idea and usually it’s the simplest idea where movies originate from. For instance, the character E.T. was based off an imaginary friend that Steven Spielberg had as a child (“E.T.”). The idea of the 1982 movie TRON was inspired after the director saw a demo of CGI and the first video game Pong, which he then combined the two ideas together (Alex). It’s from the simplest ideas that movies start to evolve into characters, plots, than scripts and storyboard until it unfolds into a movie. For that idea to be able to blossom into a film it takes a team of people to make it possible. Each person involved in the making of a film has their own specific job that they have to do for a movie to be created.
In Inception what the main character Cobb and his team are trying to do is plant a simple idea into the head of Robert Fischer so that one day he’ll break up his father’s company that he inherited. Movies are made to entertain us, to give us a feeling of excitement, joy, horror, etc. They’re also created to give us perspective, make us think differently, give us new ideas and through these new ideas allows us see the world differently and create a new reality for ourselves. In Inception, by Cobb and his team planting the idea that Fischer’s father wanted him to be his own man and not to just live for his father; that new simple idea will evolve into Fischer seeing the world differently, which will one day cause him to break up his company.
Inception takes place in a world where the military created a training program called dream sharing which allowed soldiers to shoot, stab and kill each other so they can feel the pain but then be able to wake up. Movies are created to allow us to envision what aliens, trolls, zombies, vampires, etcetera look like, and through these visuals it creates us to have feelings of happiness, sadness, joy, excitement or any other feeling that the visuals may cause you to have. It isn’t until the movie is over that those feelings that we had throughout the movie subside, just like in Inception it isn’t until you wake up that the feelings that you’re having in your dream go away.
The characters of the film and the specific roles that they have are a key component to my thesis of why Inception is a metaphor. Each character represents main contributors that are needed for a film to be made. Cobb, the leader of the team, the mastermind behind how everything is going to work represents the director of a film production. A director is the leader that brings a movie to life from his envisions, ideas, and thoughts with the help of others. Cobb is the leader of making inception work with the help of his team that he’s assembled. Mal, who is Cobb’s dead wife that keeps coming into the dreams, represents the ideas, interest and personal experiences that a director puts in their film. For example, Spielberg took his imaginary friend from childhood and created it into the character E.T. just like Cobb keeps bringing Mal into the dreams because of the regret and guilt he had for doing inception to Mal, which caused her to commit suicide.
Ariadne, the architect who creates the world of the dreams represents the scriptwriter of a film. “ They don’t actually come into the dream. They just design the levels and teach them to the dreamers.” This is what Cobb says to his father when he is describing what the architect does. A scriptwriter of a movie usually doesn’t take part of the production of a film unless otherwise noted. What a scriptwriter does is create the foundation of a movie such as the story, the scenes, the dialogue, and the setting. Then the scriptwriter gives their story to the directors and from there, the director and other team members create the movie. In Inception Cobb describes the process of how a scriptwriter’s story turns into a movie as, “You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their subconscious.” A general explanation of this quote is, you make up the story, we make it into a movie and then the audience sees it.
Arthur, the point man that’s Cobb’s right hand man and gets everything set up and does all the research before they attempt inception in the film represents the producer of a movie. A producer is the person that makes sure the whole production of a movie runs smoothly. They are the person who solves any problems that may occur on set, knows about everything before a movie starts shooting, etc. A producer is like a manager who oversees the whole production of everything that’s going on. In Inception, Arthur does all the research about Fischer before they go into his dream, he teaches Ariadne how to create worlds, and during inception he stays on the second level of the dream, ties everyone together to get ready for the second kick, and he prevents projections from interfering while the other team members go deeper into Fischer’s dream.
Eames, who plays the forger in the movie, represents the actor of a film. Eames’s job is to turn into different people throughout the dream including the role of Fischer’s Godfather, Peter Browning. Eames studies the real Peter Browning to see how he speaks, acts, walks and talks before he goes inside Fischer’s dream so Fischer will believe that the character Eames is pretending to be is the real Peter Browning. An actor’s job is to embody a character and make that person so believable that when we watch a movie we aren’t seeing the actor’s reflection, but the reflection of the character. A great scene from the movie that captures Eames changing into character like an actor would is in the scene when Eames is changing into Peter Browning. While Eames is looking into a three-sided mirror, from one angle of the mirror we’re able to see Eames’s reflection as himself and from a different angle were able to see Eames’s reflection as Peter Browning.
Yusuf is the chemist of the team who creates the concoctions, which allows everyone to go into a deep enough sleep that they’ll have enough time to create inception. Yusuf’s character represents the technical guys involved in a movie. The technical guys are the people who create the special effects, mechanics, and engineering behind a movie, just like Yusuf invents a sedative that will allow everyone to sleep for a long time, but still be able to feel a kick when created. Saito doesn’t have a name for his part in Inception, but he is the one who has the all the money. Saito’s role is to provide the money and expenses for Cobb and his team to be able to create inception. Saito’s character represents the investors and production companies that invested their money into a film for it to be created. The final character is Fischer, the target. Fischer is the one who Cobb and his team are trying to implant an idea into. Fischer plays the role of the outsider looking in, who is discovering the dream as it takes place. Fischer represents the audience of a movie. In a movie, everything that the director, producer, actor and everyone else from the team do is so that they can create a movie that the audience will believe. For an audience to believe a movie, they have to let go of reality and allow themselves to go into a different world, which they choose to believe is real in order for new ideas to be created. In Inception, Fischer has to believe that what’s going on in his dream is real for Cobb and his team to be able to plant the idea of his father wanting him to be his own man, which will then eventually cause Fischer to break up the company. This point brings me back to when I mention fanatics of films. Film fanatics allow themselves to believe the world the movie has created for them is real, that they learn the ins and outs of the movie and recreate their own ideas of reality to parallel with the ideas of the movie.
There’s three parts to making a film. There’s pre-production which is when a director is hiring his cast, figuring out investments, finding shooting locations, doing research, and figuring out everything before they start filming. Then there’s the filming process, which is when everyone is on set doing his or her job. The director is trying to meet deadlines and all the shooting is done during the filming process. Post-Production is when editing is done, the film is put together, distribution is being worked on, and finishing touches are made to make sure that the film is what the director envisioned. The events that happen throughout Inception symbolize the three processes of the making of a movie.
After Saito convinces Cobb to take the job of doing inception, Cobb begins to look for a team to help him. The team that Cobb brings together represents the film crew that a director would find to work with. The research that Eames and the other team members do before they go inside Fischer’s dream symbolize the research that the director, producer, actors, and other crewmembers would do in pre-production before they start shooting. When Cobb and his team go inside Fischer’s dream this parallels with when a film production begins to start filming. Everyone is on set doing their job, just like everyone is in the dream doing their job. For each level of Fischer’s dream the team only has a certain amount of time to get everything done. The same happens during the filming process of a movie. There are always deadlines that a film has to meet and within those deadlines the director has to get all the shots that he needs for the film. In the film Cobb tells Eames that he has an hour to convince Fischer that there’s a combination number that he knows to open his father safe. Eames is mad because he thought that he was going to have all night to get Fischer to talk. This scene happens all the time during the filming of a movie, when the director has less time than he expected to get a scene shot because of different problems that have occurred. Inception’s post-production set of events is when Cobb finally lets go of the idea of Mal. I’ve explained before how Mal represents the ideas and personal interest that a director brings to the film. When Cobb finally lets go of Mal, it’s like he is editing out ideas or scenes that don’t go along with the dream. A director does the same thing in post-production with film footage that doesn’t go along with the movie.
This film goes in a chronological order with a few flashbacks with Mal and Cobb together, but my main focus for this criticism is on the amount of time. “In a dream, your mind functions more quickly, therefore time seems to feel more slow.” Cobb explains this to Ariadne as he teaches her about dream sharing. This is a significant quote because when you watch a movie an entire week can happen within twenty minutes of watching a film. Movie time goes faster than real time just like in Inception one hour in dreamtime is only five minutes in real time. The same is true when Cobb and his crew go inside Fischer dream. In real time they only have ten hours to create inception, but in dreamtime that gives them a week.
Cobb explains inception as, “a seed that we plant in this man’s mind will grow into an idea. This idea will define him. It may come to change everything about him.” By Cobb planting an idea into Fischer’s subconscious it will one day affect his entire life. Movies are ideas, worlds, characters that directors give to the audience so that they can manifest their own ideas and thoughts. Sometimes a movie can change a person’s life or have some sort of effect on them, and sometimes a movie can be meaningless and end up in the back of their brain or what in Inception they call limbo.
On the surface Inception doesn’t seem like a movie that would be about how movies are made. At first I had a hard time believing this metaphor because I thought the movie and story was to complex to just be about how movies are created. After I thought about it the entire movie is about, the simplest ideas manifesting into complex effects. Once I grasped onto that idea, it was Cobb explanation about dreams that really pulled me to my conclusion. When Cobb is talking to Ariadne he says, “Well, dreams, they feel real while we’re in them, right? It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” Then he goes on to say, “You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on.” It made sense to me after hearing Cobb say those words and paralleling them with my thesis about the film actually being about how movies are made, that the dreams that he is speaking about are actually movies. When you watch a movie for those two hours the characters, worlds, locations and conflicts that ensue the audience believes it’s real. It’s only when the movie is over that the audience comes back to reality and realizes that the majority of what they watched couldn’t happen in real life. This is exactly what Cobb explains about dreams. Then there’s also the quote were he talks about ending up in the middle of a dream. When a movie starts you end up wherever the movie takes place. When a movie switches scenes the audience is always in the middle of whatever is going on. This is just like in Inception whenever you’re dreaming.
Doing a narrative criticism to find the meaning behind the story of Inception was mind-boggling and challenging. The story is so complex that I feel the characters and the jobs that they have is my strongest defense of why I believe that Inception is a movie about how movies are made. As my second criticism I chose to look at the story itself in Inception. I’ll be using the sub category of ideological criticism, hyperreality postmodernism to deconstruct the story of Inception. Before I do my analysis I’ll explain what hyperreality postmodernism is about.
The general aspect of postmodernism has to deal with any issue after WWII. It’s hard to give a specific definition of postmodernism because the idea is to complex in theory. One of the main contributors to hyperreality postmodernism is Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard explains that hyperreality is when we’re unable to decipher the difference between reality and fiction. This then creates a hyper real, which is when signs become more real than the real. A simple explanation of hyperreality is, “when one blends reality and fiction, and fiction wins out” (“Pulling”). An example of hyperreality would be when a fan of the show True Blood sees the actress Anne Paquin who plays Sookie from the series. The fan would address Anne as if she really is Sookie and talk to her about things from the series as if they were real.
After watching Inception I’ve come to the conclusion that Cobb, the main character is dreaming the entire time throughout the movie. Cobb’s dream has become more real than the real world. He is unable to tell when he is dreaming of when he is awake anymore. The evidence that I have to support my claim is the dialogue throughout the movie, the significance of the totem, the setting, and his wife Mal. The dialogue throughout the movie is critical to my thesis because the explanations that they give and how characters continuously tell Cobb to come back to reality are indications that he is dreaming. There are two different scenes with distinct dialogue, which entails that Cobb is dreaming. Towards the beginning of the film, Cobb goes to his father looking for a new architect and during their conversation hints are revealed that Cobb is dreaming. Cobb’s father says, “you want me to let someone else follow you into your fantasy?” Then he continues to say, “Come back to reality, Dom.” These two quotes give signs that Cobb is dreaming, which then would mean Cobb’s father is just a projection of his subconscious telling him to wake up. It may sound confusing when I say Cobb’s father is a projection of his subconscious and not a real person, but Cobb himself says in a dream, “you can literally talk to your subconscious.” So Cobb’s father or any person that Cobb talks to throughout the film could just be projections of his subconscious. Another clue that’s given away during Cobb’s and his father’s conversation is when Cobb said, “those kids, you’re grandchildren, they’re waiting for their father to come back home. That’s their reality.” The key sentence of this quote is, “that’s their reality.” It’s not Cobb’s reality of going home to his kids; it’s his kid’s reality. What’s significant about this is throughout the film we are never given an explanation of what’s Cobb’s reality. We are made to believe that Cobb going home to see his kids is his reality, but it’s not. Cobb doesn’t know what his reality is because the entire movie he’s dreaming. Cobb’s dream world has become so real to him that the projections that he talks to he thinks are real people. This is exactly what hyperreality is about. When the real becomes more real than the real. Cobb’s projections have become so real as human beings to him that he is unable to tell the difference between actual human beings and just projections of his subconscious.
Another scene that’s significant to my thesis is when Cobb is teaching Ariadne about dream sharing and the rules to manipulating the dreamer. He’s talking to her about how they extract information from people’s dream when he says, “by creating something secure, like a bank vault or a jail. The mind automatically fills it with information it’s trying to protect.” This dialogue plays a big role in a later scene when Ariadne slips into Cobb’s dream. When Ariadne slips into Cobb’s dream the setting looks like she is on an elevator that’s going down into Cobb’s dream. The look of the elevator that Ariadne is on is very dark, and the door of the elevator looks like jail bars. When they are on the basement of level of Cobb’s dream, Mal grabs onto the elevator doors, which causes her to look like she was in a jail cell. The elevator that Ariadne is on and the look of it, is very symbolic to Cobb’s earlier saying about the mind protecting information by creating a vault or jail. What Cobb’s dialogue and the elevator scene reveal is that Cobb is protecting himself from his own real world by keeping his memories locked away in a vault so that he can keep dreaming. Cobb knows that he is dreaming and the only way he knows how to continue dreaming is by forgetting what reality looks like by locking the memories of it away.
Within the same scene where Cobb is explaining to Ariadne how to create dream worlds he starts to panic when small parts of his memory and what he remembers from the real world start to show up. “I know this bridge. This place is real, isn’t it?” Then he continues saying, “Never re-create places from your memory. Always image new places. Because building a dream from your memory is the easiest way to lose your grasp on what’ real and what is a dream.” This dialogue is very essential because it’s a sign that in order for Cobb to keep dreaming he has to keep imagining new places and not places from his reality or memories. If Cobb starts to remember places, ideas, and objects from his memory then he’ll lose grasp on the fact that he is dreaming and not in reality. Hyperreality deals with losing your grip on what’s real and what’s fiction, which is what Cobb is constantly trying to do. He’s trying to hold on to the real that he’s created so that he can’t go back to what’s actually real.
Totems play a key role in Inception. A totem is explained as an object that you have with you all the time that no one else knows. Only the person who has created that totem knows the exact balance and weight of that particular object. Which is important so that when a person looks at their totem they know beyond a doubt that they’re not in someone else’s dream. We learn towards the middle of the film that the totem Cobb has been using is actually his wife’s Mal. This is important for us to know because before, they explained that only the person who created the totem will know without a doubt if they are dreaming or not. If Cobb has been using Mal’s totem then it doesn’t matter if the totem continuously spins or not because it’s not his totem anyways. I would also like to address that throughout the film Cobb is the only one seen using a totem. In the beginning you see Saito spin Cobb’s totem, and we see Arthur and Ariadne’s totem, but we never see them use it. Throughout the film Cobb is frequently using his totem and pays close attention to is while it spins to see if it stops spinning or not, but it the very last scene he doesn’t do that. In the last scene when he spins the totem he neglects it right away to go greet his children and never looks back to see if it stops spinning. His neglect from the totem in that very last scene symbolizes his neglect from caring what’s real and what’s a dream. Cobb uses Mal’s totem so he could neglect his reality and keep dreaming. This is why the movie ends before the audience ever finds out if the totem stops spinning because it doesn’t matter since Cobb is dreaming the entire time.
The last three observations that I found in Inception that allowed me to come to my conclusion are found within the setting of the film. In the beginning of the film when Cobb and Arthur are in Saito’s dream, Arthur wakes Cobb from the dream by giving him a kick. As we watched Cobb get kicked the setting of the film turns into slow motion as we slowly watch Cobb fall backwards into the tub. In dreams there’s always that logic of falling slowly backwards as if the laws of gravity have slowed down. The way that scene was shot gives the sense of being in a dream and slowly falling backwards. There’s also the dream logic of having walls collapsing in on you. In the scene where Cobb is running from the Cobol officers, he runs in between these two walls and the further he runs towards the other side the closer the walls come together to the point that Cobb has to squeeze just to get out from in between the walls. In the film the audience is made to believe that Cobb is trying to get back to his children, and by doing this job for Saito will be his ticket home to see his kids. Throughout the film they show flashbacks of Cobb’s children and what they looked like as he remembers them. At the end when Cobb is presumed to be in reality and is allowed back into America and goes home to see his children, his children are wearing the same exact clothes, are the same age, and are in the same position that they were in when Cobb left them. The only difference this time is Cobb is able to see their faces. If Cobb wasn’t dream the entire time and was in reality, then there isn’t any logical explanation of why his kids would look exactly the same, be is the same position, and wear the same clothes that they were the day that Cobb left unless he is still dreaming.
Cobb’s dream world became more real than his real world, which is why I was able to find signs showing that Cobb was dreaming the entire time. It took me seven times to watch Inception and countless research to come up with my two theses for the movie. Inception is so complex and intertwined that you can come up with a different conclusion every time that you watch it. After doing my two criticisms I still find myself questioning the movie. The first few times that I watched this film I could comprehend everything that was going on. All I knew was that the special effects were amazing, the story dealt with dreams within dreams, and that Christopher Nolan is a genius. Now that I’ve analyzed the film it’s even more fun to watch because I understand what’s going on and it’s opened my eyes to knew ways of decipher the film. Inception is one of the best movies of 2010 and a must see for everyone. These criticisms that I’ve done won’t make sense until you allow yourself to go into the dream of Inception.