The Inception of Inception
Inception is an original science fiction action film released in 2010, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of the 21st century. This was hot-on-the-heels of his critically-acclaimed and hugely successful The Dark Knight film in 2008, which made over a billion dollars at the box-office and is still widely considered to be the greatest comic book film of all time. The success of that film gave Warner Bros. studios so much confidence in Nolan that they gave him the license to do whatever film project he wanted before getting to work on the final Batman installment. And lo and behold what he took on was a completely original, high concept, big blockbuster film that wasn’t based on any existing franchise or IP and was marketed solely enough on the name of its director.
Interestingly, Nolan already had the idea for his Inception film for nearly a decade, since the very beginning of his filmmaking career, but he decided to put it on hold so that he could further hone and improve his filmmaking craft, which he exactly did with his studio-backed big-budget Batman films. Can you imagine, The Dark Knight was just “practice” for Christopher Nolan so he could make the movie he REALLY wanted to make? Inception ended up making over 800-million dollars at the box-office and was praised by critics and audiences alike for its complex yet entertaining script about dream infiltration with a terrific ensemble cast lead by Leonardo DiCaprio.
As director and screenwriter, Christopher Nolan wanted to cinematically explore the nature of dreams, the unconscious, and lucid dreaming as well as more speculative concepts such as dream sharing, dream space and dream time. In the film, the success of the protagonist’s mission requires going deep into the subconscious mind of a subject, to the point of dreams within dreams within dreams and so on. The dream spaces that are carefully constructed in each dream layer have to be designed in such a way as to reflect the verisimilitude of reality. Anything that deviates from what is real — like something as drastic as bending the laws of physics or as subtle as the inconsistent texture of a floor rug — can alert the dreamer that, indeed, this is all just a dream. Otherwise, for the dreamer, what appears to be reality carries on.
And so it is for us as well, that often when we are dreaming we don’t know we are dreaming until it is that we finally wake up. Such is the wholly immersive experience of dreams that, when we are in the midst of it, we easily mistake it for reality. An age-old philosophical question is how do we know for sure that the life we’re living now is not just a mere dream? Indeed, the film leans into this very idea up to its final shot where a spinning top — a unique token used to determine what is reality for that specific dreamer — continues to spin until the screen cuts to black, leaving the audience wondering if the events of the whole entire film was just another dream or not. The meaning to this ambiguous ending has been debated and theorized by fans over and over again, but one thing is true: Inception’s engrossing exploration of dreams and reality continues to captivate audiences with its immersive filmmaking and engaging storytelling.
Cinema Experience as Dream-Like
Legendary filmmaker Orson Welles, director of the classic film Citizen Kane, once described cinema as “a ribbon of dreams” — that is a ribbon made of celluloid, threaded through the projector of our collective unconscious. He wasn’t the first filmmaker or critic to make the connection between films and dreams. Since the beginning of the invention of cinema itself, film theorists have argued that films have indeed a dreamlike quality to them.
Author Robert Eberwein, in his book Film & the Dream Screen, described how the very process of viewing a film “replicates activities associated with the oneiric or dream experience.” French surrealist Andre Breton further suggested that film viewers enter a state between being “awake and falling asleep”, what French filmmaker Rene Clair called a “dreamlike state”. French philosopher and literary critic, Roland Barthes, even observed how after a film ended viewers were in a state of feeling “sleepy and drowsy as if they had just woken up”.
Even Pope Pius XII in 1955 met with representatives of the film industry and spoke about the immersive power of film where he described that “the viewer moves in the actor’s world as though it were his own.” The Pope compared it to the dream state, where the difference is, instead of visions and images of dreams coming from the inner world of the dreamer, they come from the screen to the spectator.
Indeed, Hollywood has always been coined as the Dream Factory, especially when movie studios have been cranking out living fantasies and nightmares like Star Wars (1977) and Jaws (1975) experienced by filmgoers all over the world. In the world of Inception, creating and sharing dreams is very much similar to the collective experience of watching a film. In this sense, much like the protagonist and his team of dream thieves, Nolan is creating a shared collective dream experience through filmmaking.
Filmmaking as Dream-Making
In a Q&A session with Christopher Nolan, first published in Wired magazine in 2018, the interviewer suggested that Inception seems to be a movie about making movies. For example, the French cafe scene where the protagonist Cobb confronts Ariadne about remembering how they got to where they are seems to illustrate how dreams are similar to how scenes are cut and put together in a film. Nolan confirms this relationship between films and dreaming saying: “I tried to highlight certain aspects of dreaming that I find to be true, such as not remembering the beginning of a dream. And that is very much like the way films tell their stories.”
Nolan, in another separate interview with his screenwriter brother, Jonathan Nolan, agrees that the film — and generally-speaking the heist movie genre — “closely parallel[s] the process of making a film. You have a team of people working together. You’ve got a writer, you’ve got an actor, a production designer, a DP.” A prevailing internet theory is that each of the characters in Inception represents a person or role in the filmmaking process: Cobb is the Director with the vision; Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character Arthur is the Line Producer or DP that helps Cobb execute the vision; the prodigious architecture student, Ariadne, is the Production Designer; Tom Hardy’s Eames, with the ability to forge and impersonate identities, is the Actor; the Japanese businessman Mr. Saito is of course the Executive Producer who bankrolls the whole operation; and lastly Cilian Murphy’s Robert Fischer character, represents the Audience who needs to be emotionally transformed by the dream production team.
Interestingly, Inception isn’t the first time where Christopher Nolan has metaphorically commented on filmmaking within his films. For example, in his 2005 film The Prestige, a film about rival magicians, he uses movie magic to make a point about movies. In particular, in the opening scene, Michael Caine’s character explains the three parts of a magic trick — the Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige — which perfectly mirrors the classic three-act structure of filmmaking and storytelling. Caine’s character also happens to be named “Cutter” which is another name for a film editor, where the film heavily uses editing techniques and cinematic misdirection to conceal and eventually reveal the film’s many dramatic twists and turns.
In Memento, one of Nolan’s earliest feature-length films, the scenes of the entire film are arranged in reverse chronological order to reflect the disorientated perspective of the protagonist who suffers from anterograde amnesia, a condition where he is unable to produce short term memories. The protagonist, in his own twisted way, ends up creating his own meaning of all the disjointed memories he tries to preserve, which is similar to how an editor creates meaning from decisively arranging a collection of disjointed shots and scenes.
Incepting For Emotion
“I realized that when you’re talking about dreaming, when you are talking about this universal human experience, you need the stakes of the story to have a much more emotional resonance.” — Christopher Nolan
In the film, Cobb’s team have to work together to create and maintain the illusion of the fabricated dream world and perform convincingly, in order for the inception to be successful. Nolan further explains, “I think that there’s a fairly strong relationship in a lot of ways between what the team is trying to provide for their subject, Fischer, and what we’re trying to do as filmmakers.” A successful inception would in turn affect the dreaming subject so much as to change and define the person in reality — be it a business decision that will hugely impact the global market, or a self-realization that will lead to personal self-actualization, or the development of a fatally new existential outlook on life. The same can be said with the making of a film, where a successful script and film production with a simple yet profound message can effectively inspire and transform a viewer’s life.
The act of inception works best with the simplest idea that evokes a deeply personal and positive emotion. In the past, Christopher Nolan’s films were criticized for being too cold, complex and cerebral with little heart or feeling. As a filmmaker, we can see his growth in Inception, where despite the labyrinthine plot and high concept narrative, underneath it all, at the heart of it, there is a simple idea, an idea about sacrifice and redemption, about doing whatever it takes to be with the ones you love, to heal and move on from the past, to be happy. If we, the audience, feel something by the end of the film, then indeed we have been successfully incepted as well, no less by one of today’s greatest and most innovative dream architects, Christopher Nolan.
