Inception: A movie about dreams gone awry

Inception is a movie about dreams that tried to accomplish too much.  Unfortunately I think it overreached and was not quite able to deliver on all the threads that it provided.  So why would I ask you to consider this film – why would I write about it?  I think because it is a film that I thought had great promise.  I assume that you are here because you, too, thought that it had great promise – and you may think that it delivered on it.  I will talk a little bit about why I think it failed as a film – about how the narrative focus got lost, and then I will talk about why, despite its being a failed narrative, it is still a compelling movie.  But I will also propose that there is a danger of the allure of the visual promise of film can interfere with our understanding of how dreams – and movies – work.  Dreams and movies involve using images as symbols – but I think the visual richness of this film and the concrete approach to the material drew us into a story that was more concrete than would have been ideal.

Inception is about dreams.  What could be better fodder for a psychoanalyst’s interests?  And, at its heart, it is also about psychotherapy.  But the psychotherapy is a weird, coercive psychotherapy.  The implanting of ideas in a person’s unconscious, through interacting with that person’s dreams, leads them to change their lives.  This is not unlike what takes place in actual psychotherapy.  There, though, the therapist and the patient work together to think about how different concepts might be integrated into the mind, and therefore dreams, in new ways, so that the person can function more healthily.  But the twist is that not only is this idea being implanted without the person’s knowledge, but it is not a health oriented wish, rather it is a diabolical plot to undermine the other person’s functioning.

The movie’s sci-fi premise is that dreams can be directly accessed through a contraption – and maybe with the help of a drug – and that we can join another person’s mind and then substitute our own architecture of a dream for the architecture of the other person’s mind and dreams.  The resulting dreamscapes that are created on the screen are tremendous.  They are rich, complex, intriguing and powerful variants on reality that feel, well, dream like.  We are privy to vivid but also lucid dreams that are being controlled not by the dreamer but by an outside agent.  They are also dreams that are filled with action filled tropes.  This is explained as the host dreamer trying to get rid of the invading dreamer’s ideas.

The action plot of the film feels shopworn.  It is borrowed from Mission Impossible – both the TV series and the films, Ocean’s Eleven, and a thousand other thrillers that feature a good guy – Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) building a team of specialists to take out the bad guy.  But in this case, the bad guy isn’t so bad at all.  He is the son of an industrialist who has created a virtual monopoly and his father’s rival hires the hero – or coerces him really, to convince the son to destroy his father’s legacy when his father dies so that the competitor can be competitive with the companies.  OK, maybe we can get behind the idea of undoing a monopoly and have an antihero take this down – but we now have too many people’s psyches in play.  Who should we focus on?

The interplay is between the rival industrialist (Saito played by Ken Watanabe) and the industrialist’s son (Robert Michael Fischer played by Cillian Murphy).  We inhabit both of their dreamscapes – or distorted variances of them, following Dom Cobb and his accomplices through them.  Yet neither of them is the person of interest.  We are distracted by them, though.  Their worlds are interesting.  We want to know more – and for a while think we will learn more – about the son – and his struggles and who he is.  We spend the better part of three dreams in his mind – even if the architecture is provided by yet another red herring – Ariadne played by Ellen Page, the architect hired by Dom Cobb to build the spaces.  She is named after the maiden who tended the Minotaur’s labyrinth, she is young and beautiful – and she is the one who gets to know Dom Cobb’s flaw and to help him work to heal it.  One might think this healing would happen through love – and I think it does – but Dom and Ariadne do not become the central love pair in this film.  Ariadne is just another piece of fifth business left on the road side of this complex film.

The central love relationship in this film turns out to be a creepy one.  Dom Cobb had been married to a woman, Mal Cobb (Marion Cotillard), with whom he spent years building a dream scape with endless buildings.  We enter this dreamscape, and there are two qualities of it that are remarkable – the buildings in it are mechanical replications.  It is a massive empty city that is modern and faceless.  It is dead.  At its center is Mal’s home from her childhood.  In it lies the central secret that she is hiding.  Presumably an event – presumably traumatic – from her childhood.  This event, whatever it is, is locked in her inner world, and has kept her from coming to life.  Despite Dom’s love, and despite their having had two children that Dom deeply loves, Mal is drawn inevitably back to the dream world – to the sterile fantasy world and the hidden trauma in it that she has created with Dom. 

When Dom and Mal awakened from their dream world (which is often achieved by dying in the dream) and returned to the “real” world, Mal was not convinced that it was real – and she wanted to return to the dream world they created together.  She did this by committing suicide in the real world – inviting Dom to join her.  When he didn’t, she had constructed things so that it appeared that Dom had killed her.  Dom then had to run from the United States and from his children because he was wanted for Mal’s murder and he could not prove that he hadn’t done it.  Saito is able to convince Dom to work for him by promising to “fix” the legal system so Dom can return home.

Dom ultimately must, with Ariadne’s help, say goodbye to Mal, whom he has been keeping alive in his dream world.  I think that this situation is a difficult psychological problem.  It is hard to say goodbye to any love – but it is especially hard to say goodbye to a love that was never really alive.  I think this is particularly hard to do because the lover (Dom) expects that his love will be able to bring his love (Mal) to life.  When that doesn’t happen, when she dies – especially through suicide – it is harder to give up because the basis of the relationship has always been hope – hope that the other will come around.  And the lover has always been psychologically been dead – so her death – or the ending of the relationship – doesn’t feel that different than the state before – she is still dead – and he still hopes for her life.

This kind of relationship – a relationship in which the lover is in love with someone who is dead – or unable to love him or her back in any meaningful way – is one that feels oddly alive when inside it, but from the outside it is apparent to others that the deadly relationship is one that sucks the life out of the lover.  So I suppose that the failure of the relationship with Ariadne to bloom makes some sense – Dom is dead to anyone – except perhaps to his children, to whom he has no access.

It is ironic, then, that in a film about the inner lives of people – a film where we have such vivid pictures of what occurs in their minds – we end up seeing the lives of the dreamers through other people's eyes - in the case of the relationship between Dom and Mal we see it primarily through the eyes of Ariadne.  She ends up being the true therapist in this movie.  She helps Dom realize that his connection with Mal is not one that is sustaining him, but one that is killing him.  By freeing Dom she is able then to help him be able to free Saito, who in turn comes through on his promise to free Dom from his legal entanglements. 

The film ends with a note of ambiguity.  Has Dom awakened from his dream or is he living in a dream world?  Are his children, with whom he is reunited, alive?  Or was his relationship with Mal the real one?  This is not completely resolved – and I think the question that is being asked is ambiguous enough that it allows us to answer it based on our predilections.  Do we think that the internally enlivening relationship with a dead other is real living?  Or, are we in favor of living with real, living, mutually loving others?  This is a weird dichotomy – but the movie suggests that the children can remain in a kind of suspended animation, apparently neither negatively impacted by our absence – even death – and that they wait patiently for us to return.  Of course, this is a dream.  I think that we have to remain engaged in the real ongoing lives of those around us, especially our children, even when we are caught up in the depleting parts of our lives.

I think this movie fails, at least for me, because I think that the dreamers – the writer/producer/director, the actors, and those who were so successfully involved with crafting this film – may have lost track that the film – and the dreams within it – is/are not real, but rather are symbols of something greater.    The movie seems so real – so immediate and so vivid – and so tied to reality.  This movie fails in kind of the opposite way that the first surrealist movies about dreams failed.  Those movies presented dreams in all their craziness – and they were all but nonsensical.  This movie does the opposite.  It explains what is happening in the dreams – and the plan of the dream is so clear – so concrete – that the complexity of the dream does not quite stay open.  I get that the director was afraid of losing his audience, but in the process he may have not allowed them to engage as much as they might have with this very rich material.  He leaves us with a minor mystery - a nagging one - but one that is dichotomous.  Dom is in a real world or a dreamscape.  Real dreams - and movies that mimic them - leave us with many more unanswered questions - and with hints about how to address them.

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