I watched Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) for the first time this last week. After two viewings and looking at some of the theories that have been discussed on the internet as to the meaning of the whole thing, I think that I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it all means.
One of the most interesting articles I found was at CHUD.com. The author of the article, Devin Faraci, suggests that the whole movie was a dream, including the parts where Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an extractor who performs corporate espionage by penetrating people’s dreams and stealing their thoughts. He goes further to suggest that the movie is an autobiographical work about Christopher Nolan and his work as a director, similar to Fellini’s 8 ½. In this case, Cobb, who breaks into people’s dreams, represents the director. Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is the researcher, represents the producer who sets everything up. Ariadne (Ellen Page), the architect, represents the screenwriter who creates the world that the dreamer will enter. Eames (Tom Hardy), referred to as the forger, represents the actor, who assumes the form of other people in the dream world. Yusuf (Dileep Rao), the chemist, is the technical guy who furnishes the chemicals necessary to create the shared dream state. I would go even further to say that Yusuf is the cinematographer – where the camera is the dream-sharing “apparatus” and the sedatives used to facilitate the dreaming could be considered the actual film in the camera. Finally, Saito (Ken Watanabe) is the financier of the dream (or film) and Mark Fischer (Cillian Murphy) - the corporate guy being targeted - represents the studio system.
With all that being said, the movie is the dream. The shared “dream” is the collective consciousness we all share as the audience, while the dream represents the director’s dream, which he seeks to share with the audience, and the ideas implanted in our minds by the movie represent the inception taking place. Walter Benjamin talks about this concept in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He says that: “thanks to the camera… the individual perceptions of the psychotic or the dreamer can be appropriated by collective perception. The ancient truth expressed by Heraclitus, that those who are awake have a world in common while each sleeper has a world of his own, has been invalidated by film – and less by depicting the dream world itself than by creating figures of collective dream.” The movie, therefore, could be considered a metaphor for the filmmaking process. On the psychoanalytical level, one could say that the catharsis achieved through the shared dream state represents the catharsis achieved for the filmmaker in sharing his vision with the world as well as the catharsis achieved by the masses in the reception of the film as distraction.
On another level, I would suggest that the subplot involving the penetration of the corporate mogul’s dream to implant the idea of the will, which dissolves the corporation into smaller companies spread equally among the investors, could represent the studio system’s control over the film capital and the capitalist exploitation of the medium of film. The will would represent the property relations that Benjamin speaks of, and the inception of the idea to change the will to split up the company could represent the revolutionary change of property relations (redistribution of wealth) that could be attained through the use of film. Benjamin puts forth this idea and says: “there can be no political advantage derived from this control until film has liberated itself from the fetters of capitalist exploitation.” So, Christopher Nolan, represented by the extractor, is using the film (the dream) as a means to reclaim control of the film capital in favor of the proletarian masses through the use of collective consciousness.
Obviously, there are many more levels to the reading of this film, however, I felt like this was one level that hadn’t been explored yet. Analyses of the dream within a dream, and whether or not the whole movie was a dream have been described at length many times in message boards and other blogs. As a result, I don’t feel the need to explain these theories. I do believe, though, after having read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, that Benjamin would have come to similar conclusions.
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