SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.I couldn’t get into it in the non-spoiler section, but the opening sequence does a fantastic job of establishing all the key ideas the movie will play with. We know that the children on the beach are Dom’s children and that he hallucinates and sees visions of them in the dream world. It makes sense then that under the motif of creation ushered in by the waves and sandcastles, that both Dom’s delusion and hopes for the future show up – this connection is important.

The dialogue between elder Saito and Dom also suggests that the movie that follows- the cut to when Arthur and Dom are trying to trick Saito- is just Dom remembering what happened up to the moment. Leo’s eyes lighting up in recognition sells this idea – it’s like he’s trying to recall the importance of the top upon Saito’s comment. It’s also telling that the first part of the conversation is happening in Limbo while the latter part is happening in a dream within a dream in the past. Thus the flashback, as a cinematic storytelling tool, ties both the structure of the story to the themes of it – namely the way dreams and reality permeate each other as memories form – our very notion of thought is constantly malleable.

Furthermore, all the major mechanics are established here. The parallel watch sequence demonstrates the way deeper dream layers dilate time to expand it while also drawing our attention to the way reverberations at the higher levels play out at the lower levels. This also demonstrates one of the major themes of the movie, namely that what discordant ties together is intensity in feeling (in this case the explosion of the car is matched by the explosion of feeling in the rioters which becomes an earthquake which shakes the foundation of the world). This is further reinforced by Mal shooting Arthur’s leg, demonstrating that there are consequences in the world – those of intensity in sensory feeling.

The fact that dreams exist after the dreamers die, as evidenced by Dom being able to stay in the world even after Arthur dies, helps set up the groundwork for sequences in the third act and grants the unconscious status as a subject that can persist without a thinker behind it. Finally, the kick to wake Dom up both hearkens back to the opening of him opening his eyes in the crashing of the waves and establishes the mechanic itself.

2. Knowing that Mal is Dom’s projection makes the opening sequence far more interesting to analyze. Despite knowing that Mal will ruin his plans, Dom’s first instinct upon seeing her is asking her to kindly sit still – the conscious begs the unconscious to stop interrupting it despite secretly craving the interruption the latter brings.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Just like he really wants, Mal refuses to sit. She moves and jeopardizes Dom’s plans in more than one way eventually kidnapping Arthur. Dom kills Arthur in response to Mal’s threat to give Arthur the experience of pain via gunshot wound. After doing so he runs off and it’s revealed that he actually has gotten Saito’s plans. It’s curious then that Mal’s response to this is “He was close, very close.” Close to what? He got the secrets, even if redacted, so the closeness has to do with something else. If the unconscious is meant to lead the conscious to some truth about the self, what is the truth that Mal tried to get Dom to figure out? The answer is the point of the movie – experience matters more than the nature of the content that generates said experience. Even though Arthur’s pain is only in the mind, it’s still more impactful to consciousness than “death”.

3. If Mal is the agent of the unconscious, Professor Miles (Michael Caine) is the agent of reality. This is made obvious through his dialogue with his son-in-law where he pleads for Dom to “come back to reality.” It makes sense then that his proxy for Dom team is named Ariadne. In mythology, Ariadne is responsible for giving golden thread to Theseus to help him find his way back after fighting and killing the minotaur. ^[1] The Editors of Website Source: https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Mortals/Ariadne/ariadne.html. (n.d.). Ariadne. Greek Mythology. https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Mortals/Ariadne/ariadne.html Her role in the team is the make the worlds the dreamers go into, tying her role into one of guidance. Thus the movie becomes a battlefield between the agents of reality/consciousness and their attempts to guide Dom to their respective answers.

• 

• 

• 

This is why the framing and sequencing of Ariadne’s dream experimentation in Dom’s mind is so important. As the two walk around Dom’s unconscious, Ariadne conjures up a display of mirrors. The mirrors on both sides of the characters project an infinite series of them – infinite possibilities of what they could be. Mirrors are important in psychoanalysis for it is during the “mirror stage” where the ego is formed. Subjects view the images and identify that image with the consolidation of an ego – a combination of sensations in a certain unity. ^[2] Johnston, A. (2018, July 10). Jacques Lacan. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/. These images are then approved or disapproved of by some symbolic authority which grants them importance.

After shattering the mirrors, Ariadne continues to walk along with Dom. It’s then revealed that the locale they’re in has been built directly from her memory. Dom warns that such a move is dangerous because it can trick people into confusing the dream and real world. These words fall on deaf ears. For Ariadne, pulling images from from places has no bearing on her because she’s able to distance herself from the feeling associated with the places. In other words, she approaches reality with a kind of sterility that absolves it of affective attachment.

Dom isn’t able to do the same and instantly recalls memories of his wife. His tie to reality is “broken” by his intense emotions. Almost as if on cue, Mal shows up and picks up a shard of the mirror that was previously broken. She tabs Ariadne not out of some romantic jealousy, but out of necessity to maintain control over Dom’s inevitable psychological journey – allowing his unconscious to reveal to him a truth he had forgotten that reality seeks to taper over.

Later on, when Ariadne invades Dom’s dreams to see what he’s seeing, she realizes that Dom is living out simulations of memories he can’t get over. Memories lapse into dreams. As the agent of reality, she obviously rejects the practice because giving in to delusion is anti-ethical to being in the “real” world. It’s here where she has her second encounter with Mal. Mal opens with a riddle that starts, “You’re waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope the train will take you, but you don’t know for sure. But it doesn’t matter. How can it not matter to you where that train will take you?”

Ariadne can’t fathom an answer because reality requires a defined answer to every question. A journey with no purpose is one that cannot exist in a world where logic dictates all movement. Dom’s answer is that “you will be with the person whom you love,” which is one step further along because it recognizes the way emotions can generate meaning in end of themselves, with no external purpose.

He only figures out the answer in the third meeting between the trio which takes place in Limbo. It’s where he finally reveals to Ariadna – and thus to “reality” – the nature of what he’s done. He’s the one who actually convinced Mal that her world was not real, thereby causing her to end her life. Why did he do so? Because she was too focused in the moment of what they had. Her acceptance of a “non-real” world on the same level as the “real” world was too incoherent for Dom to accept. By planting the idea in her head that the world is not real, he tied her idea of meaning to reality as opposed to experience. It doesn’t matter how much her love with Dom matters because he’s changed the criteria by which she gauged it – from one of emotion to one of “logic”, thereby destroying it.

Before Mal can respond, Ariadne shoots her. The agent of reality can’t risk letting Dom lose himself to the intensity of feeling so she makes the decision to end the unconscious. However, as she leaves its revealed that it’s not really her choice. What sets Mal “free” is Dom’s acceptance of Mal’s initial truth – that what matters is the experience and not the domain. The reason he leaves Mal there is not because he doesn’t love his wife, but because he realizes this incarnation of her is one born from his worst experiences of her – an act of necrophilia that dooms him to a life of regret. In this way, he traverses his trauma. It’s not that he’s killed his unconscious as finally come to understand what it was trying to reveal to him.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

This is what makes the ending sequence so powerful. When Dom gets to the airport, the one there to greet him is Professor Miles, an agent of reality. He guides Dom back home. Immediately, Dom starts to spin his top to confirm he’s in reality. The first time we saw him do this, he had an unloaded gun and was ready to blow his brains out if the top kept going. Before even talking to his children on the phone, he had to ascertain that they were in fact his “real” children. Just like Mal before her suicide, he could only interact with his kids if they were “real.”

However, before he can verify the top’s spinning Miles calls out to the kids to inform them Dom is back. Dom finally looks up to see his children’s faces – faces which had been obscured up to this point by the trauma Dom felt. He rushes out to meet them as Miles leaves the scene. It’s at this point the camera slowly pans over the top stuck in a motion that doesn’t indicate whether or not it’s going to stop. It doesn’t matter whether or not the experience is “real” if it is experienced as meaningful. Reality or dream – the only thing that matters is the emotional intensity inherent in the moment.

4. I think this idea is hinted earlier on when Dom goes to Mombasa to pick up both Eames and Yusuf. Yusuf shows the crew his sleep compound laboratory where multiple people are tied up to dreaming machines to share the dream. The few hours they spend sleeping in real life gives them dozens more in the context of the dream – so many more moments of creativity and vitality to experience. The old man running the maintenance even hints towards Chuang Tzu’s proclamation by asking the group how they can judge what experiences should and should not matter to an agent.

5. This idea of manipulating time for experience is done in a more mechanic heist way during the planning sequences. When Nolan shows the crew having conversations in the dream world, it’s also made clear that doing so gives the crew hundreds of hours of preparation time to come up with all moving parts for their plans. It’s a subtle way to show how the characters use their technologies in clever and innovative ways to solve additional issues.

6. I love the recurrence of trains and how they’re used to tie moments together thematically. The initial excavation attempt on Saito happens on a train where Dom reveals that he hates trains. Later on in the first stage of the inception heist sequence, a train bursts onto the scene controlled by Mal. It’s fitting because Mal and Cobb initially killed themselves in Limbo by getting hit by a train. In the same way Cobb used the train to wake Mal up, she uses the train to interrupt his plans to reveal to him a truth he needs to hear.

• 

• 

7. Many of the sequences involving Mal are actually shot and edited in such a way as to make them scary. Both the scene of her walking to stab Ariadne and her angrily staring at Dom and Ariadne from below give me the creeps. Huge props go to Marion Cotillard who nails the off-kilter stab happy femme fatale character, but the sequences do make me yearn for a Christopher Nolan horror movie.

8. Speaking of Solaris, the main journeys both films characters go through are incredibly similar. In Solaris, Kris is a despondent man who is haunted by the death of his wife, Hari, and unable to find connections with the people around him, including his father. That’s incredibly similar to Cobb who can’t get over Mal and who is unable to connect move forward in any meaningful way. Both men are haunted by projections of their deceased lovers (both of whom committed suicide) ; Mal frustrates Cobb in his nightmares while Hari is given corporeal form by the oceans of Solaris and forces Kris to respond to her. Both characters have radically different decisions in relation to said apparitions, but their eventual decisions both seem to be focused on enjoying experience as it is as opposed to worrying about the veracity of said experience. So as to not spoil Solaris, I won’t spoil the nature of Kris’s decision, but it does make me think that the real nature of Inception’s ending goes one layer deeper.

If you believe, as I have written up to now, that the story is about enjoying whatever “reality” one is in and that that means that we should be happy for Cobb even if he’s only seeing his children in a dream, it raises the question of why it would be wrong for Cobb to then remain with his projection of Mal. Solaris makes the connection between our experience with people and its relation to our experience of people more explicit; are people to us only important because of our perceptions of them or are they important because they exist independent of us? The latter view seems to be the view that’s obsessed with “reality” while the latter feels more in line with the vision of the movie which would suggest that people only matter in our lives in relation to the impressions they make because its those impressions entangling with our conscious and unconscious processes that give our lives meaning.