- Spoiler alert -
Cannot agree more.
But what exactly was thrown at us? What happened, really? Let's take a look at the most traditional building block of a narrative - the motif - and see if this tightly constructed puzzle of a movie can be figured out.
The most resounding motif of the movie, as evident in the recurring "wake-up" song Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien and repeated phrases such as "leap of faith", "become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone", is obviously "regret". Regret for lost moments, regret for paths not taken, regrets for wrongs that can never be corrected. This theme is thoroughly explored through the parallel storytelling of two relationships: Cobb and his deceased wife Mal, and Fischer and his disappointed father. The latter relationship reminds me of "Citizen Kane" reminiscing his past on his dying bed (in fact, all the "totems" in the movie serve as a sort of "rose bud", a psychical object that connects its owner to another reality, or a humanity that he/she once knew), while Cobb's relationship with his wife brings to mind "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", where the guy cannot sustain a love and has to let go, only to find that he is overshadowed and gradually consumed by guilt and regret.
When I was watching the movie, I found these two relationships to be intriguing but not emotionally relatable since the other layers of subconsciousness kept interrupting with their pressing actions. For this reason, I can understand A. O. Scott's not-so-favorable review in the New York Times.
However, while I had the same reactions at first, I've come to disagree with Mr. Scott's final remark: "...though there is a lot to see in 'Inception,' there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires."
To explain this change of mind, let me step back and talk about the two main ways to interpret the movie: a positive way and a negative way.
- Major spoiler alert! -
The Positive Way is the way the movie is told: Cobb, thief of secrets of subconsciousness, is offered a job to implant an idea into an powerful industrial heir's dreams, and in completing this job, he will be granted the immigration status to go back to his home country and to his kids. Cobb's attempt to finish the con is frequently sabotaged by the guilt he has for his dead wife in his subconscious.
Straightforward enough right? What is really messed up is the negative reading of the story. I only came to see the movie this way after reading a number of explanations for the movie's ending (an inception?).
The Negative Way is the hidden narration of the movie: suppose Mal, Cobb's wife, is the one who wakes up in the "real world" by jumping off the building, she may be the real inception planter in the limbo dreams of the still unconscious Cobb, hoping to convince Cobb to give up his multi-level dream world and "take a leap of faith" to wake up.
The second interpretation is hard to see at first because the story is consistently told from Cobb's perspective. Because of Cobb's guilt of inadvertently pushing his wife to "death", Mal is seen (by Cobb the storyteller) as projections of his memory and an "sabotaging" force ("Mal" is "evil" in Spanish) against his efforts to reunite with his children in what Cobb determines to be "reality".
And this brings us to the second, less obvious but central, motif of the movie: Any simple idea we choose to consciously or unconsciously adopt in our lives will in time come to define our reality; when these simple ideas steer us into alternate paths, we will inevitably deviate from the "shared realities" or "shared dreams" we create with our loved ones, creating the dilemma of having to choose among realities (the former, shared reality or the new, diverging reality). In other words, the "dreams" in the movie are metaphors of "realities" we create with and within our minds. The story itself is constructed like the paradoxes it keeps referring to: it works one way or the other; it can be the face of an uglg old witch or a fair young maiden; either can be the right answer, though you know that at the end of the day, things don't add up.
And with that the movie reveals one of the grandest pitfall of our consciousness: the human mind, with its imagination and prejudice, is capable of creating the most complicated mazes that guide us to somewhere new or nowhere at all. (Fun trivial: character names Fischer and Ariadne, are likely borrowed from M. C. Escher and Adrian Fisher; the latter is one of the world's leading maze designers).
In this regard, "dreaming" is a powerful metaphor and the true "inception" of the movie. (Naturally, that the movie itself is an inception is not lost among critics). Our mind can free us or imprison us. It can inspire free will or be trapped by an idea (as fortunately or tragically exemplified by Cobb's stubbornness to believe in his own reality).
And this paradox, in my opinion/reality, is the true art of the movie and true genius of the director. -- Why didn't I see this all along? The clues were all in plain sight: the ridiculous B-movie plot, the impossible shifting of geographic location, the all-too-powerful Japanese industrialist, the suspiciously-neat happy ending, the unchanged children imageries... Cobb himself even points out in one scene: "Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange."
Despite all these, I was all too willing to suspend my belief -- the movie ran so fast that it tricked me into accepting its technicalities as well as its realities. Since it asked me: "don't think about the elephant", surely all I could think about was the elephant.
Despite all these, I was all too willing to suspend my belief -- the movie ran so fast that it tricked me into accepting its technicalities as well as its realities. Since it asked me: "don't think about the elephant", surely all I could think about was the elephant.
The movie even plays on its own format. The foundational techniques upon which cinema experiences built upon for the past 100 years or so -- non-linear narrative, scene-cutting signifying time and set change, stream of consciousness -- are all revealed in the movie as tricks (quote: "...you never really remember the beginning of a dream do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on."). And after unmasking these tricks, Nolan is somehow able to offer another dimension to the movie experience. In this experience, the storytelling continues after leaving the theater; the story lives on as we try hard to understand the movie itself.
In short, "Inception" is a flawlessly executed cinematic illusion that reveals the secrets of our reality-bending psyche: perception is reality. Neatly fitting to the premise of the movie? I believe so.
Extended reading:
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