This movie was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the acclaimed director who first came to my notice with his film "Memento", in which he played with the conventions of narration by progressively delving deeper into the past. It was a fascinating experiment, and he was just as adept in his rebooting of the Batman franchise which had grown increasingly hackneyed during the past few years. He offered us a new and psychologically edgier version that brought to mind some of the flavor of Frank Miller's reworking back in the 1980s ("The Dark Knight Returns"), that seminal series that I remember reading and enjoying so much when I was in the last few years of college.
In this case, we would seem to delve once again into the idea of perception but also obsession. It is try that we all color our realities and are only selectively open to the myriad stimulation that we receive on a continual basis. Apparently what this film posits is the invention of an apparatus whereby the subconscious of two or more individuals can be brought into contact during the dream state, thus opening up windows into the deepest secrets held by each of us, secret that we ourselves suppress and take care not to reveal.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Dom Cobb, a name that seems faintly allusive and assigned to a character who seems to hide a secret of his own. This is evident from the very beginning by the appearance of a mysterious woman who continually seeks to subvert him at the same time that she seems to express tenderness towards him. In reality, she is his creation, his memory, his image of someone who would seem to have slipped out of reality the way that he has, and who continues to haunt him
If epistemology is the science of perception, then it is true that Dom is overtaken by epistemological concerns. He would seem to operate with his own certainties, as he assembles a team to embark on a grandiose project, that what gives its name to the film. Inception involves an act of implantation, an idea that overtakes the other person and convinces him with the imperative of something that is irresistible because it consumes him. It can't help but prove ironic that we viewers come to realize that the implanter is himself betaken by an obsession that seems to obsess him, and is slowly revealed by means of the earnest inquiries of his new assistant, an "architect" (a designer of dream landscapes) recruited in Paris.
As the move progresses, the team descends into layer upon layer of dream landscapes. To the sceptical viewer, however, this can't help but bring to mind many objections. How is it that a technology that is dependant upon a mechanical apparatus can be used in turn within a dream to enter into another layer of reality? How it is that the reality of this apparatus assumes its own reality as a technology and allows them to sink into layer upon layer, delving ever deeper, as if personal symbols and the constellation of codes and patterns that describe each individual at a given time were so penetrable?
I am reminded at times of the idea of memes, that idea pioneered by the biological evolutionist Richard Dawkins to refer to the way in which items of meaning are propagated from person to person until they can assume a life of their own, expanding and evolving as they use human consciousness as a medium. But I am also reminded of the novels of the science fiction maverick of forty years ago, Philip K. Dick, he who wrote such seminal novels as "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (the basis for the movie "Bladerunner"), "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", "The Man in the High Castle" and "Ubik".
In Dick's novels we are confronted with questions regarding the nature of reality. Does it have its own existence, and are we extensions of it, or is it in reality dependent upon perception and the presence of a consciousness that can construct and interpret it, thus bringing to mind a more complex process of interaction? It is almost like the old Zen parable of a tree falling in the forest without any observers. How can we tell the difference? Can we draw such a distinction between the external and the internal?
The answer would seem to pivot on the question of consistency and continuity but, as we see in this film, the narrative progresses from one level to the next with only the flimsiest pretext of preserving this quality. Yes, they are searching for secrets that seem to elude them, in particular, trying to unlock the secrets of a mind (their target) who resists them at the same time that he seems strangely vulnerable. And the film certainly seeks to suggest these novel aspects with a certain Matrix-like intensity that emphasizes the articificial nature of these landscapes, ones that seem to my eyes to be strangely un-dreamlike, despite the surreal aspect of the movie posters that would seem to suggest otherwise.
There is never an element of absurdity or of jarring discontinuity that seems to haunt me when I wake up from a dream. The landscapes, while unusual and at times fantastic, involving as they do fortresses and claustraphic buildings as well as intense chase sequences, seem to be strangely consistent. They are recognizable and ultimately sensical, and that is part of the cognitive optimism that seems to pervade this film. There is no element of irreducible strangeness, other than the obsession that seems to drive Dom as he pursues his quest to implant that idea (you are your own man), a quest that is paradoxical because it is carried out in an articificial manner (it is implanted, after all).
Needless to say, in the dream within a dream within a dream to the fourth level, Dom encounters once again that haunting projection of his dead wife, the wife who served as the object of his first act of inception. She was implanted with the idea that there was another reality, and as a consequence, was never able to believe in a stable reality after this. She was taught to doubt, and she was launched on her own quest that we are led to believe forced her to commit suicide once she was awoken. A viewer must necessarily question whether this is a convenient fantasy, a wish fulfillment that may or may not have taken place, and one in which she always did represent a projection of a split consciousness, a split that characterizes us all.
The excursion into terrain pioneered by the Wachowski film "The Matrix" leads to nonstop action and conflict, and this at times has the effect of jarring us from what could have been a more contemplative film. It seems very much designed to appeal to the young demographic, while offering an additional layer of meaning that should appeal to the intellect. And yet, I am not entirely convinced, and I am left with the idea (perhaps it has been implanted as well?) that this is ultimately a film with a pretentious nature, one that is ultimately a vanity project that is meant to invite critical appeal. It has none of the shocking and mesmerizing nature of another film that came to mind and that has resonated with me since I first read it almost thirty years ago, the classic written by Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", and brought to the screen magnificently by Tarkovsky.
I enjoyed the film, but it didn't really sink into my consciousness. I was not quite convinced, although I continue to look forward to future Nolan films. If anything, I am tempted to go back to my source material, to Dick, to Descartes, to ancient Gnosticism and to Zen parables. The ending seems almost too enigmatically suggestive, and it belabors the point that we are all our own faulty, misled, and endlessly-challenged creations. We create ourselves in an unconscious way, and we may never completely resolve our underlying tension.
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