Inception

What do I want to say about Inception? Phew. It's hard to even start.  Inception resonates with so many themes of reality, dreams, representations as alternative realities, that I'm so fascinated by this summer.   The confusion of reality and dream, reality and representation are pressing concerns in our contemporary moment, as we experience our lives increasingly through the artificial realities provided by the Internet, film, TV, literature, and video games.

Like Cobb’s journey into dreams within dreams, Inception brilliantly operates on multiple conceptual levels.  First, Inception is about the nature of our dreams, their relationship to our reality, and the driving power of our conscious and unconscious minds. In Inception, the characters can access and travel to the dream state, not only individually, but collectively.  Hooked into the shared network of dreams, the team can not only access other’s dreams; they can actually construct dreams in the shared space.  This network of artificially induced dreams (read: alternative realities) seems analogous to the network of Internet communities and cyberspaces. Through the creative imagination of a dream architect and the perception of the dreamer, a dream space is created. The alternative reality of the dream seems as real as living reality. For Cobb’s work of extraction and inception, the dreamer must not realize that they are in a dream; the blurred lines of dream and reality become indistinguishable. Cobb’s team must construct a dream that tricks the perception; yet, in the vivid dreamscapes they create, the team risks losing their own “grasp on what’s real and what’s a dream.”  To prevent this psychic disorientation, they all carry totems, individual physical objects that provide a tangible way of connecting back with reality. The sensation of the totem in Cobb’s hands provides his way back to the tangible Real. The film seems to ask viewers, what will be your totem in the world of artificial alternative realities? If we begin to live and perceive through the digital world, what is our connector back to the Real?  What is our totem?  

 As Cobb explains, the access to dream sharing lies in the gap between a mind’s creation of a dream and its perception. This gap in the mental architecture allows Cobb’s team and their dream technology to enter and manipulate the dream creation and alter what the dreamer perceives. Cobb’s team is able to manipulate a person’s sense of reality through the dream space, an alternative reality created through a blend of the architect’s imagination and technology. The combo of an artist’s imagination and technology that represents a version of reality.  This sounds like art. In Nolan's story of dream manipulation, we have another story, one about our contemporary relationship to representations of reality, like film itself. 

The conceptual puzzle of representation and reality Christopher Nolan constructs is, for me, the most fascinating aspect of Inception. What’s real? What’s a dream? How is Cobb’s construction and manipulation of reality any different than the alternative realities created and circulated by film, literature, and art?  What’s a film? What’s reality?  To return to an idea from my post on 3D technology, I wonder how the vividly crisp CGI images in Inception can momentarily cause viewers to lose themselves in the film, like Cobb loses himself in the dream.  Are there moments that our minds forget we are watching a film, a technologically produced alternative reality?  Do we ever think the film is real?  Nolan’s Inception raises questions not only about dreams and reality, but about our relationship to film’s alternative reality. The film itself is a process of inception, introducing and embedding an alternative reality in the viewer’s mind.

Inception warns against the dangers of losing our touch on reality, against the manipulation of dreams, against losing ourselves in the alternative realities that technology can provide. The film elegantly comments on the relationship between the creation and perception of artificial dream realities, while providing a vivid alternative reality in itself for viewers to get lost in. What is our relationship to these alternative realities, to dreams, to drug states, to representations, to art?  Inception dramatizes contemporary concerns about how we understand the Real and the artificial, themes which resonate far beyond the realm of dreams.  

Image Credits: Inception Poster