Inception: The Dream Is Real

Christopher Nolan’s Inception has emerged as one of the most favorite film of millennial nerds. The uniqueness of the film lies in the fact that it features in the list of indie mind bending thrillers and top-grossing mainstream sci-fi films at the same time. On one hand it is in league with movies like Predestination, Primer, The Man From Earth, etc. and simultaneously enjoys following like Star Trek, and superhero films.

Since the day of its release, Inception has been analyzed and re-analyzed time and again. Its world and characters have long been subjects of debate, not to mention the cliffhanger climax, which have provided nerds with ample mental boners.

But what I feel keep missing the discourse is why Nolan finds this story worth telling. What is the moral of this story. What is the dream world really about? Does it have a real-world counterpart? Is it possible that it exists solely for itself and has absolutely no reflection on the pop culture? Of course, it does. It is an expression of an evolved mind and surely it must draw from the world around it.

Christopher Nolan, right from his first film has been known to experiment with storytelling techniques that best suit his scripts. He chose mind-bending non-linear story-telling for his classic Memento which now enjoys a cult following. He revolutionized the superhero genre with his Dark Knight trilogy, and sort of realized their fantastical universe, which a list of filmmakers still dream of repeating.

So I felt it kind of unfair to pass a gem of a movie like Inception to not receive a similar analysis of the hidden message, especially in the kind of story telling Nolan employs.

A few months ago, a study proved that dreams, that form the main subject of Nolan’s masterpiece, have nothing in common with how the movie depicts them. The movie gets the dreams wrong. This compelled to wonder why a perfectionist, who went on to work with an astrophysicist for his movie on time and space dimensions (Interstellar), would choose to be proven wrong for such an everlasting work like Inception.

And I got to the conclusion that the structure of the dream world in the movie is not just writer’s imagination but has hidden meanings to it. I found the movie is a commentary on process of storytelling itself. It explores in detail what stories feel like; how stories must be woven; and how stories can influence viewers or readers and have a lasting impact.

The characters in the film say you know you are dreaming if you can’t remember how you got where you are. This is exactly how stories unfold. We don't follow characters in real time and stories do not follow chronology every time.

The only test that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), the protagonist in the film gives to the new dream architect in the film is to check if the new dream architect can build a maze that he could get lost in, which is exactly what an editor or film producer looks for in a new book or a screenplay. He teaches the new architect to explore whatever they can but also warns her to be careful about going overboard. And when she does go overboard, the world itself comes to kill the architect. Writers, film-makers and editors explore only within the limits of the world they create, otherwise the careless plot holes lead an uninterested audience to give up on the story ultimately killing the writer.

Cobb insists to his team of professionals that inception, or planting an idea into someone’s mind, is absolutely possible provided they go layers deep while building the dream. This in story-telling refers to the details in a story. They don’t say ‘devil is in the details’ for nothing. One is only lost in a story if the story has enough details to keep the mind of the readers busy. Renowned authors like J. K. Rowling, Stephen King and George R. R. Martin became best-selling giants with creative use of details to hook their readers.

Coming to the movie, Cobb’s plan succeeds only when Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) ventures into his overprotected vault of his mind to find for himself what his father might have meant by his last words to him. Robert Fischer plays the reader, or the viewer, who allows story-tellers access to their minds and ideas. Inception of an idea, therefore, is impossible unless the readers find the message on their own accord, and are not spoon fed the purpose of the story. That is the moral of the story sticks only if the reader can’t really find it.

Nolan also sort of cautions the readers to not get lost in the world of fiction, or be stuck in the limbo. The limbo feels very comforting to fans of fiction but wastes away their time and energies. Fiction, according to Nolan, is just like a dream where we are supposed to visit to lose ourselves only to return back. Fiction is for the sake of reality, not the other way round.