Inception — The Beauty of Christopher Nolan’s Storytelling
I used to watch movies for one purpose, and one purpose only: entertainment. To me, a movie was like a book, but with less thinking involved. No flipping pages, no interpreting words, no attention to the subtleties of plot or character development (I had never even heard of character development). No, when I walked into that movie theater, I wanted to sit down with my bucket of over-buttered popcorn and let the screen take me for a ride. And when it was all over, I wanted to stumble out with a smile on my face and an excited buzz ringing in my head. That was all a movie did for me.
And then I watched Inception, and everything changed.
Inception, written and directed by the legendary Christopher Nolan, was the first movie I had to watch more than once to understand. In total, I’ve seen it 4 times, and I am only just beginning to scratch its surface. You see, this is not just a movie. This is a film. This is a story, with layers of meaning and emotion and truth waiting to be peeled back by the viewer. To my 10-year-old self, this concept alone was mind-blowing. Inception showed me what storytelling could be, and it instilled in me an appreciation for the sheer amount of thinking that goes into crafting such an intense and profound film.
Now, this script took Nolan nine to ten years to write, and it would definitely take a very long time to unravel all of its complexities. But I would like to start this unraveling process by picking apart some of my favorite concepts from the movie, analyzing their implications, and constantly praising Nolan for his genius.
*Spoiler alert*
- Extraction, Inception, and Human Nature
The plot of the film revolves around a man named Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a professional thief who makes his living stealing corporate secrets from the subconscious of high-profile targets (also known as extraction), which he does through the use of an experimental military technology that allows people to enter each other’s dreams. Cobb and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are hired by a powerful Japanese businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) to assemble a team for a seemingly impossible job: inception.
I think it is important to note here that even though this film is famous throughout the Internet for popularizing the concept of a dream within a dream, inception is not the concept of a dream within a dream. This is a common misconception. Rather, inception is the act of planting an idea in a someone else’s mind, so deep in their subconscious that they believe they came up with the idea themselves.
In this case, Saito’s main business competitor Maurice Fischer is dying, and Saito want’s Cobb and his team to convince Fischer’s son and heir, Robert (Cillian Murphy), to sell the company after his father’s death.
Even at this point, I am already impressed with how Christopher Nolan was able to take a simple idea and turn it into an intriguing plot. It was not enough to just ask the question, what if we could explore other people’s dreams? As a writer, he knew that this concept was just the beginning, and if he really wanted to hook the audience’s interest, he needed to expand on the possibilities that this kind of technology would open up. Thus, we have extraction, and we have inception.
Extraction and inception may seem like confusing terms, but they are really just different versions of two fundamental sins that humans have been committing for millennia. Extraction is stealing — the extractor takes information from the target’s mind for personal profit. Inception is lying — the target is not necessarily being fed false information, but they are being conned into thinking that they came up with the idea on their own, which is extremely powerful.
This concept could have been explored in many ways (I can envision an animated Disney rendition putting a more positive spin on dream-exploring and finding yourself, etc.) but I think that by bringing up a darker side to human nature, the film actually comes off as more relatable to the audience. Nolan is implying that there will always be bad people in the world who do bad things, and if this dream-sharing technology were to exist in the future, it would not be long before those people figured out how to use it to facilitate their crimes.
2. Limbo
One key concept to understand about dreams, and dreams within dreams, is the passage of time.
In a dream, one’s brain functions at about 20 times the normal rate, allowing time to pass more quickly for the dreamer than it does in the real world. If you enter a dream within that dream, the effects are compounded. The farther down one goes, the more time one has to work with. So for this mission, a few hours in the real world would give the team a week in the first-level dream, 6 months in the second-level dream, and up to 10 years in the third level dream.
This prompts the team’s architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), to ask the question on everyone’s mind: “Who would want to be stuck in a dream for 10 years?”
But it gets worse than that. As Cobb reveals, it is possible to dream so far down that you wind up on the shores of your own subconscious, an unconstructed dream space called Limbo. It is the dream past which no other dream can be dreamed. Cobb came here once, with his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). In reality, their bodies napped for only a few hours, but in Limbo, they had what seemed like an eternity to let their imaginations run free. They constructed a whole city. They had children. They lived like gods and grew old together.
On the surface, Limbo seems like a paradise. But as Cobb soon realized, when one is down here for so long, it is very easy to become trapped. To go insane.
To explain this, we must look at another important concept of dreams: the distortion of reality. When we dream, we never remember how the dream started. How did we get to where we are? Does this situation necessarily make sense? You see, the subconscious state is much less logical than the conscious, and so we never think to question certain aspects of our “reality” when we enter a dream. It follows, then, that as we travel deeper into the subconscious (i.e. a dream within a dream), we question our reality less and less. By the time we hit Limbo, we will most probably forget that we were ever dreaming at all.
And that, I think, is where the real danger of Limbo lies. It is not just the fact that time here has expanded into decades upon centuries, although that does contribute to the effect. What truly causes individuals in Limbo to go insane, as we see with Mal, is the fact that Limbo has become their reality. In a world free from all rules and boundaries, how does one find anything concrete to hold onto? How does one make sense of anything when nothing is supposed to make sense, when everything is a paradox?
3. Planting an Idea
Cobb and his team want Fischer to break up his father’s company, an idea that Fischer would normally reject as silly and illogical. However, they know that the subconscious is motivated by emotion, not logic, so they need to find a way to translate this business strategy into an emotion. The key to this is connecting the idea to Fischer’s hostile relationship with his late father. But how?
One thing I appreciate about Nolan’s story is that he does not make the challenges easy for himself or the characters. Inception is a very complicated idea to work with, and it would be very easy for a writer in the same position to settle for an simpler plot with easier obstacles for the characters to overcome. But Nolan takes every opportunity to explore and expand on the science of the subconscious and the mind, mentioning concepts that the audience would not have even worried about had they not been brought up. For example, the idea of turning the business strategy into an emotion would never have occurred to me, but after it is explained, it makes perfect sense why this needs to happen.
By adding in these layers to the overall challenge of planting the idea in Fischer’s mind, Nolan not only makes the audience more excited to see how exactly these problems will be resolved, but he also gets us to trust in his abilities as a storyteller. Every time a new inception-related concept is introduced or a new conflict presents itself, Nolan is basically telling the audience, “Look, I know this is getting more and more complex, but just stay with me here, and you will be rewarded with a truly satisfying conclusion that ties all of this together. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”
Back to the plan. Rather than use the family tension to fuel Fischer’s hate for his father and get him to break up the company that way, Cobb explains that “positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We all learn from reconciliation.” They decide that they need to convince Fischer of the following statement: my father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps.
With inception, however, ideas have to be broken down into their simplest form in order to take root in a person’s mind. So, they split the mission into three stages of dreams, each diving deeper into Fischer’s subconscious and feeding him a part of the overall message that he needs to internalize.
Dream 1: I will not follow in my father’s footsteps
Dream 2 (initiated within Dream 1): I will create something for myself
Dream 3 (initiated within Dream 2): My father doesn’t want me to be him
Ah, so this is how you turn a complex thought into a simple emotion. You break it down. Again, I think Nolan is spot on with the way he approaches this challenge. Everything complex is made up of simple components, from the steel beams that hold up a skyscraper to the atoms and molecules that make up our entire world. It only make sense that the problem of inception should be broken down the same way, with a dream inside a dream inside a dream.
This helps the audience better understand the concept of inception, and it shows us that Nolan really does know what he is doing, as he provides us with a simple yet elegant solution to the impossible problem he posed just a minute ago. He not only rewards us for our patience, but he then raises the stakes once again by bringing up the concept of a dream within dream and everything that it entails, grabbing our attention even more.
In the film, Cobb and his team must lead Fischer deeper into the layers of his own subconscious, to understand an idea he never knew he had. In a way, Nolan does the same thing to his audience. He is asking us to take a leap of faith, to dive deeper into the layers of this movie with him and unlock the secret treasures that lie at its core. The movie Inception may be performing inception on us.