Film review: Inception Seth D. Baum and James E. Thatcher Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University Journal of Evolution and Technology -
Vol. 21 Issue 1 – July 2010 - pgs 62-66 Are you in control of your
own mind? Are you currently awake or dreaming? Does the narrative of perceived
reality necessarily follow a linear, sequential path? To what extent do other
people play roles in our perceived realities distinct from the environments in
which we exist and interact? How deeply can we manipulate the mind of another
person? What ethical issues does such manipulation raise? These questions,
which have both deep philosophical and urgent practical significance, are all
raised by the recent film Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010). In
this review, we develop these questions both as they appear in the film and as
relate to the world we perceive as being real. Inception is a very dense
film, raising more major ideas than we can discuss here. For example, we do not
discuss the resilience of ideas within our minds or the power of the
subconscious; the latter topic is among those covered in a separate review
(Rinesi 2010). In our review, we will give away much of the plot (so please be
warned), but also offer topics for consideration that deepen the viewing
experience. Inception’s plot revolves around a technology that permits groups of people to
undergo shared dreaming experiences. At least some participants in the dream
worlds can perform sophisticated, intentional actions, including the following
of plans developed pre-dream. Using this technology, a high-level underground
business has developed to extract valuable information from target individuals.
“Extraction,” the removal of information, is explicitly contrasted with
“inception,” in which an idea is inserted into the target’s mind during shared
dreaming. Inception, meant to alter the target’s waking behavior, is presented
as a risky, cutting-edge technique; challenges include getting the idea to
stick as well as inserting it in such a way as to appear to the target to be internal
in origin. Overcoming these challenges requires the perpetrators – shared dream
participants – to become deeply embedded within the target’s psyche. The film’s plot involves an
effort to perform inception. The target is the heir of a multinational energy
corporation; the team performing the inception is hired by the head of a
competitor who can no longer effectively compete. The competitor, Mr. Saito,
wants the heir to break up the company he inherits. The team itself has a
quirky composition customized for the inception task: a thief, a background
researcher, a forger, a chemist, an architect, and the industrialist. The thief
(Cobb) is the team leader, an experienced dream leader who refers to himself as
the best extractor in the world and is also the only one with former inception
experience. The background researcher is tasked with understanding the target.
The forger, beyond simple document forgery, can skillfully fake the identities
of people with whom the target is even intimately familiar. The chemist
develops serums suitable for regulating the shared dream process – and the
waking from it. The architect designs the built world in which the dream takes
place. Finally, the industrialist is the head of the competitor corporation; he
insists on participating to confirm that the job has been done. In order to
successfully perform the inception, the team must execute a challenging series
of deceptions. To achieve this, the team layers dreams within dreams. A total
of three layers are planned, each deeper in the psyche than the previous; a
fourth layer is improvised when the plan meets glitches. The hierarchical structure
of dreams within dreams raises the profound philosophical question: how do you
know when you’re dreaming and when you’re awake? For the film’s target, and
even occasionally for team members (and also the audience), it is hard to tell
the difference between dream and reality. After all, the target has to be
convinced he is in a dream (which is itself within another dream). Furthermore,
the film contains some ambiguity regarding what, if any level, was reality. The
top level of the dream-within-dream hierarchy is presented to the viewer as
reality, but, similar to the classic film Dreamscape
(dir. Joseph Ruben, 1984), there is reason to suspect that even this top level
is a dream. The film remains ambiguous on this matter, and appropriately so, as
this ambiguity highlights the ambiguity we must face within our own lives about
what actually is real. The ambiguity about whether
our perceived realities are indeed real is a topic of ongoing debate within the
philosophy literatures on epistemology and philosophy of mind. A classic
thought experiment in this realm is the brain in a vat (Brueckner 2006; Putnam
1981). Here we imagine a human brain placed in a vat of liquids containing all
the nutrients necessary for the brain to survive and function. The vat also
contains connections for sensory input to and information extraction from the
brain. The connections are run through a computer which processes the brain’s
thoughts and returns sensory input corresponding to a highly plausible
perception of reality – so plausible that it would be indistinguishable from
the reality we perceive. The question here is, how do we know we are not brains
in vats? A similar thought experiment is the simulation argument (Bostrom
2003). Here, a powerful computer simulation contains simulated minds with all
the complexity of our own. In parallel with the brain-in-vat thought experiment,
the question here is, how do we not know we are a simulation within a computer
program? The simple answer is that we don’t know, and cannot know. While this
idea is more fully explored in the movie The
Matrix (dir. Larry and Andy
Wachowski, 1999), Inception raises the idea that if dreams
can be that powerful – and that manipulable – then we may not be able to know
whether or not we are in one. The hierarchical structure
of dreams within dreams also points to another intriguing theme within the film:
recursion. A sequence of dreams within dreams is itself a recursive phenomenon,
but it is not the only one in the film. Within dreams, recursive time sequences
can appear through the incorporation of memories into dream scenes. These time
loops, the only non-linear movement through time in the film, are considered
dangerous. For this reason, architects are instructed to keep real places out
of dreams so as to avoid triggering memories in dream participants and
particular targets. Likewise, time within the film progresses in the usual
linear fashion. The sole exception is in the character of the thief, who has
select memories of his troubled past that reoccur throughout the film’s many
dream worlds. These memories are moments the thief wishes to “change,” and
their reoccurrence develops a strong subplot within the film while also posing
substantial logistical problems to the inception team. Recursion in the film also
exists across space. The dream worlds are typically designed by the architect
to include loops, so as to limit the extent of the design task, somewhat
reminiscent of the island bubble of The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir,
1998). Indeed, a new recruit, the eventual architect, is initially tested with
the following intriguing task: In two minutes, draw a maze that takes one
minute to solve. (More on the dream world design below.) Dream worlds can even
include infinite staircase loops as popularized by M.C. Escher sketches and
other paradoxes. One such staircase is used strategically in an action sequence
in the film. The film even includes a dream world scene with two mirrors facing
each other, displaying a recursive sequence of reflections of the people
standing between the mirrors. This infinite recursive loop is then shattered by
one of the people between the mirrors – the architect – and as she does so, the
dreamers’ world becomes that of the previous reflection. The mirror scene closes with
a quite different moment of intellectual significance. After peering into the
infinite recursion of reflections, the architect walks up to one of the mirrors
and touches her reflection. This causes the mirror to shatter, with the space
behind it becoming her world, which she then steps into. This moment suggests a
striking commentary on the “mirror stage” developed by French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan (c.f. Lacan 1953). The Lacanian mirror stage is the moment in a
child’s life when the child first recognizes her mirror reflection as being
herself. This marks an historic moment of Ego formation for human beings. The
Ego here is the part of the mind that negotiates between what the individual
wants to be for herself and what the individual perceives that society wants
her to be. Likewise, the individual recognizing her mirror reflection
experiences both her internal cognitive self and her external visual self as it
is seen by others (see also Pronin 2008). Thus, for the architect to shatter
the mirror and step into her reflection world is, from this Lacanian
perspective, a fusion of the self as perceived by itself and the self as
perceived by others – a fully negotiated Ego. That this momentous event occurs
within the space of a dream (on which see Fink 1995, 189) suggests the
possibility, within the realm of the dream, of escaping the psychological
shackles constructed by our waking minds. That such a brief moment in the film
holds such profound significance speaks of Inception’s
immense intellectual density. Another noteworthy line of
thought suggested by the film is in the relationship between humans and the environment.
The environment here refers to the spaces in which we live, which are not
necessarily full of plants, nonhuman animals, and other “nature” (as in the
term “environmentalism”). The film presents an interesting dichotomy between
the built environment of the dream world and those who inhabit it. The world’s
built environment is designed entirely a priori by the architect and is
presumably uploaded to the dream participants’ minds via the shared dream
technology (which, in the film, is contained within a suitcase in the world one
layer closer to the awakened world). In contrast, people within the dream
worlds (other than the participants) must be constructed by the mind of the
target individual. Presumably this is because the built environment is not an
intimate part of our dreamed experience, whereas other people are – even random
bystander pedestrians. This raises a curious dichotomy between people in the
environment. Why is it that the built environment plays such a starkly
different role in our dreams from that of people, even people who are
strangers? This dichotomy is
reminiscent of the human/environment dichotomy widespread throughout a long
tradition of Western thought. For example, Aristotle (350 BC, Book 1, Chapter
8) wrote, “Plants exist for the sake of animals, and brute beasts for the sake
of man”; similarly, Genesis 1:26 reads “Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the
fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (quoted from Johansson-Stenman
2006, 4). The dichotomy is not, however, a universal human construct – other
cognitive traditions lack the human/environment dichotomy. In much Eastern
thought, for example, humans are intimately connected to the natural
environment; no dichotomy exists. Similar relationships are found in Native
American thought and in at least some modern science, which situates humanity
as within the animal kingdom by evolution and within Earth ecosystems by
circumstance (Bang et al. 2007). This raises the question: would someone from a
different cognitive tradition require the same handling of people and built
environments in the shared dream world? The topics found in Inception are not only of intellectual
interest – they also raise profound ethical issues. Inception is shown to have
powerful, life changing effects. For example, to get the energy corporation
heir to break up his company, the team digs deep into the target’s relationship
with his father. The team’s approach is to subtly reinvent this relationship in
the target’s mind, so that the target no longer aspires to be like the father.
The team thus faces the power to manipulate the identity of another person strongly
and covertly. How should this power be wielded? Is such manipulation a harm to
the person manipulated? What if the manipulation improves the person’s life?
What if the consequences of manipulation to broader society are quite good? If
we ever obtain such capability for manipulation, these questions will need to
be answered. While the technologies
requisite for shared dreams, extraction, and inception may or may not be
possible, similar technologies already exist or are in active development. A
real-world (or so we think) parallel to extraction is the so-called truth serum
used at least occasionally in the interrogation of hostile detainees. Truth
serum is believed to have been used, for example, by Indian authorities upon
the capture of one of the ten Pakistani men who waged a terrorist attack on
Mumbai in 2008 (Borrell 2008). While we are not aware of any direct parallels
to inception, we would be surprised if there are no efforts being made to
acquire such a capacity. The real-world motivation for
acquiring extraction and inception capabilities closely parallels the
motivation in the film: power. The development of the underlying shared dream
technology was sponsored by a military, for the strategic advantages in
training it offered. Similarly, real-world militaries support the development
of a broad range of cognitive technologies, including extraction-like truth
serums, cognition-enhancing pharmaceuticals (Caldwell et al. 2004), autonomous
robotic drones (Lin et al. 2008), and even brain-machine interfaces (Hoag
2003). For better or worse, the profound ethical issues raised by the
possibility of cognitive manipulation illustrated in Inception are of
urgent practical significance. Inception thus raises a
remarkably broad range of issues. Indeed, the film is extremely dense in both
intellectual content and plot structure. It also includes ongoing militarized
fight scenes, resulting from protection mechanisms built into the target’s
subconscious. In our opinion, the fight scenes are a poor excuse for injecting
eye candy into the film and a distraction from its narrative development. Even
without them, the film has a highly dense plot structure, a strong ensemble
cast, and a web of deep ideas, like a heist film with a point. The
militarization struck us as a cheap gimmick to appeal to a broader audience,
and was incongruous with the core of the film. That said, the film overall is
quite enjoyable, and worth watching with the ideas discussed here in mind. Acknowledgments We thank Courtney Thatcher,
Shawn Domagal-Goldman, and Jacob Haqq-Misra for insightful discussion during
the development of this manuscript. Russell Blackford provided very helpful
feedback on a previous draft. References Aristotle. 350 BC. Politics. Bang, M., D. L. Medin, and
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review: Inception. Journal of
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