|
A peer-reviewed
electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 21(1)
– July 2010 |
Film review: Inception
Marcelo Rinesi
marcelo.rinesi@gmail.com
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 21 Issue 1 – July 2010 - pgs
60-61
http://jetpress.org/v21/rinesi.htm
The protagonist of Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan,
2010), Cobb, leads a team of thieves with the unlikely speciality of entering
people’s dreams and extracting information from them. Cobb is not a criminal by
choice; he faces a murder charge that makes it impossible for him to apply his
skills of dream architecture and exploration in a legal way, as well as barring
him from entering the
Of course, the job will turn
out to be more dangerous than expected, and Cobb’s personal baggage, which is
very much related to the murder he has been charged with, complicates matters
further. During the movie we discover that Cobb and his wife spent fifty years
in a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream he refers to as “Limbo” (subjective time passes exponentially faster
the further you go down the rabbit hole). During that time his wife forgot or
chose to forget the oneiric nature of the reality they were experiencing, and
the only way Cobb found of convincing her to return was to plant into the
deeper recesses of her mind the idea that the reality she saw was a dream, and
only by killing themselves inside the dream they could go back to reality. This
was, indeed, an inception... and it ended catastrophically for them, as the
idea was still influencing Mal after they woke up, prompting her to kill
herself while framing her husband for her death. Not only was Cobb forced to
flee the United States leaving his children behind, but the relentless
persecution inside his dreams by a vindictive “Mal” (a projection of his
subconscious guilt) made dreams a dangerous place for him.
The movie glosses over any
technical difficulty in accessing other people’s dreams. The main difficulty
lies in keeping the target unaware that they are in a dream, while always knowing yourself whether you
are in a dream or not. Like professionally paranoid career con men, Cobb
and his team are always suspicious of the reality they find themselves in. The
key to both recognizing and escaping dreams is physicality, in the form of
material objects with specific signatures of weight and balance that other
dream architects would find impossible to replicate, and in the wake response
of in-dream physical impact or drowning. Matter and force, the physical world,
is the only lifeline they have to get back to reality (labyrinths are often
mentioned in the movie, and it’s no coincidence, in one way or another, than
the latest addition to Cobb’s team is a young architect called Ariadne).
But there’s a subtler, more
familiar form of dream the protagonist of Inception
finds himself trapped in. Although aware that the “Mal” that appears in his and
other people’s dreams is ultimately a projection of his subconscious, he refers
to her and interacts with her as if she were his wife. Although seldom in such
a literal way, most of us do carry inside ourselves ghosts of people we have
lost, some of them not at all happy with us, and the climactic moment of the
movie happens when Cobb is finally able to see that the woman inside his dreams
is not his wife, and, if not let go of the guilt, at least let go of his
fabrication of her ghost. Inception
offers no certainty in ontological terms; despite its obvious similarity with The Matrix,
there is no absolute ground level of reality accessible to either the
protagonists or the viewers, and even the existence of such a reality is left
undecided. However, in the emotional counterpart to this argument, the movie
takes a definite stand on the difference between Mal and Cobb’s dream and
nightmare of her. In a way reminiscent of other movies like AI, the “reality of the real” is put in
doubt, but not the reality of love and the loved one. Perhaps to question both
at the same time would be too unsettling.
Time itself deserves a separate
mention. Although the exponential speedup of subjective time while in the
shared dream state is used very effectively as a narrative device and to
underscore the psychological danger of Limbo (where minutes of “real time” are
experienced as decades of isolation), none of the potential implications and
uses of this extraordinary fact is explored any further. This is
understandable, given the potential complexity of the issues raised, but
nonetheless frustrating. Time is a key element of both our perception of
reality and our experience of ourselves, and the way in which the movie moves
between different realms of subjective time is at least as powerful a premise
as the (certainly much more visually appealing) ways in which movie characters
manipulate the perceived architecture inside dreams.
Ultimately, the movie itself
is a dream, a shared unreality that it’s not so much a logical exploration of
its premises as a visible manifestation of our ontological anxieties. As
humans, and even more so as technology-using humans, we show a remarkable
capability to immerse ourselves in increasingly sophisticated symbolic worlds,
from books to online games to stock markets. At times, if not most of the time,
these worlds feel the only real ones. There’s no need to postulate Matrix- or Inception-like technologies to observe that these worlds are
becoming richer and more complex, and that we are spending more and more of our
lives in them. This is not necessarily a new or negative development (reading
still being one of the most effective technologies of both Virtual Reality and
inception), but it’s not surprising to find ourselves worrying at times about
the depth and nature of our dreams.