Inception, a brilliant and entertaining film, continues a trajectory begun by many others of the past decade or so (Nolan’s own Memento, Dark City, The Matrix, Strange Days, etc.). These films blur the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, the (mis)remembered, or the purely mediated, and Inception is no exception, which makes it, frankly, not exceptional, at least in that respect. In fact, once I recovered from the confusing first 20 minutes, I grasped the concept fairly easily, having been trained for it by some of these other films, and sat back to enjoy the ride.
To get an idea of the complexity of the film, check out this infographic by Sean Mort, which is a stab at outlining the dream levels of the film:
I might quibble with the top level being called “reality” instead of perhaps another layer of Cobb’s dream, and I might watch the film again and realize I am completely wrong. Having seen it only once, I am unclear about whether Cobb is dreaming in the outermost level, but here’s the thing: I don’t care.1 Either he is dreaming or he’s not, but I expected that to be in question, and, frankly, would have been mildly disappointed if it were not.
Some have pointed out the film’s similarity to a video game, and some have posited a generational divide in understanding or liking the film (Henry Jenkins is in the middle of this debate, as outlined in this post), but I can’t help thinking about Inception as a film about film making and spectatorship. This may not seem particularly insightful as first blush. Apparatus theory is well known for treating film as a dreamspace, and the dream metaphor abounds in theory and in casual descriptions of the medium, so it makes some sense that a film about dreams might also be about film itself. I would make the same argument about Waking Life, for example. Indeed, Nolan himself confirms both the video game parallel and dream-as-filmmaking motifs in a recent Film Comment interview.
The reason I don’t really care about the outermost shell of the film is that, even if there is an exterior reality for the characters (for Cobb, in particular), what does that mean for us, the viewers? The whole thing is a construct; as the dreamspaces are constructed by Ariadne, the film’s premise, mise en scène, etc., is constructed by Nolan and everyone else who worked on the film, so the question is not about the lines between reality and the “subconscious,”2 of the characters, but between the film world and that of the spectator. In what respects do we, as spectators, inhabit the dreams of films, and to what extent does the cinema inform our imagination? Where is the line between what we want to think of as reality and the barrage of media images we sustain daily?
So, in addition to being a film about filmmaking (and video games, and dreams…), the film is asking some fundamental questions about what we do when we go to the movies, and to what extent this activity is embedded in the ways in which we imagine and experience every other aspect of our hypermediated lives. It is safe to say, at this point, that there is precious little distance between images, narratives, and ideas produced by others, mediated and shown to us on screens, and the lived, personal reality to which we believe we have privileged access. These screened images have become an inextricable part of that reality, to the extent that it makes little sense to distinguish between the two. Like others before it, the confusing, layered narrative of Inception brings this false dichotomy to the foreground.
- which is not to say I won’t see it again and try to figure out more precisely what is going on. It is just not that important to understanding the narrative devices. [↩]
- an unfortunate term I wish would disappear from pop culture in favor of “unconscious” [↩]
