Inception

I know it's lazy of me, but this really won't make any sense unless you've seen Inception. Sorry!

There are two ways to read Christopher Nolan's Inception. One is to take the characters on their somewhat-confusing, often-garbled literal word. In this case, the film is the story of a band of extractors carrying off an elegant reverse-heist and winning their leader's passage back onto his homeland.

The other examination of the film, one suggested at several points throughout the runtime (most obviously by the not-really-ambiguous-at-all ambiguous ending) is that the entire film is a dream, orchestrated for the benefit and/or deception of Leonardo DiCaprio's bereaved Dominick Cobb.

With each of these possibilities comes a devastating array of flaws. For as cool as the movie can be in sporadic spurts, it doesn't hold up to any serious investigation.

If the movie is to be taken literally, it is so full of plot-holes, garrulous exposition and spatial incoherence from the micro- to the macro- that it can be described as nothing less than a mess. For example: if a van plowing off a bridge can upset a twice-removed dreamworld with an avalanche (which, by the way, hurts nothing and nobody and in no way sets back our heroes' plot), why does it not distort the gravity of that dream-level in any other continuous way as the van continues its plummet? This can be called nitpicking, but the film is rife with such gaps in logic.

Here is a two-and-a-half-hour movie in which approximately forty-five minutes (a generous estimation) is dedicated to the supremely nifty set-pieces promised by the trailer and by Nolan's previous work¹. The remaining 1:45 is entirely backstory and set-up. Probably the entire first hour of the movie is mired in exposition², which only makes the eventual descent into the dreamworld an ultimately relieving incident. You can hear Millhouse asking: "When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?"

But even with all this set-up, for every tidbit of diegetic logic underlined and set forth as a 'rule', there is a lazy smudge of hokum we are asked to swallow simply because in two-and-a-half-hours Nolan couldn't come up with anything better. If extraction is a profession with so many fascinating rules and how-to's, couldn't we be supplied with a reason or method behind Eames' ability to seamlessly transform into other people within the dreamworld (and he can do this for the sake of both the aware and the unaware). Oh, and Yusuf concocted a sedative that doesn't affect the inner ear? That's all you've got? But it doesn't wake you up if you're rolling down a hill in a big clunky van? Give me a break.


Finally, from a narrative point of view³, the rules that the film does go to such lengths setting up are all instantly expendable. We are presented with several exciting ticking clocks and increasingly dire stakes, but they are all reset at the behest of a poorly-plotted third act. Initially, they have to complete the inception before the van goes off the bridge, otherwise they'll miss the "kick" and they won't wake up. But when they miss this opportunity, Cobb announces that they now have until the van hits the water a good 30 dreamworld-minutes later.

After Saito is shot in level one, we are told that they have to finish the job before he dies or he'll be irretrievably lost in sub-conscious limbo that will destroy his conscious self when they wake up in Los Angeles; later, after Saito 'dies', Cobb simply finds him and rescues him.

We are told over and over how the feeling of falling will wrest you from the next level down, but only in the sub-subconscious dystopia of Cobb's failed marriage will a fall from within the dream wake you up from the level you're in.

Now, in the course of the film, five characters are seen descending into that messy fourth-level state: Cobb and Mal in their flashback, Saito and Fischer when they die in the third level, and Ariadne, with Cobb again, going down to rescue Saito and Fischer. Of these five, only Mal is unable to recover from the shock of regained youth after forty years in the soup. Cobb tells us this is due to his own inception rather than her mind turning to mush.

Saito and Fischer have been sent here by death one level up, and we might fear that to rescue them will only result in that hypothesized insanity once they wake up to reality. Ariadne is, of course an amateur (on the surface) and handles the improvised descent into a stranger's deep subconscious like a professional⁴, hopping right back out once her task is done.

If we are to accept any stakes at all from the meat of the film's story (that is: the carrying-out of the eponymous inception), we have to dread that death in the dream will result in a vegetative coma once woken. Yet we see time and again that this was an idle threat.

And why, by the way, do all five end up in Cobb's limbo world? This is where we come to the second reading of the film:

Every frame of Inception, with the possible exception of the Mal flashbacks⁵, takes place within the head of a character we never see awake⁶. The clues all point to this, from Cobb's refusal to look at his children's faces to the wise old (ethnic!) sage in Yusuf's basement suggesting that the dream-sharers partake in their addiction not to sleep but to be woken up. Who is Cobb to suggest a difference between reality and dreams?


From the repeated suggestions of a dream-sharer's inevitably tenuous grasp on reality to the explicit inability of Cobb to ever actually spin his top (he's always dropping it or pocketing it because he doesn't want to get caught losing his grasp), Inception consistently points to the idea that this whole thing is a dream. If we decide we want to view the film this way, what actually works is that all these plot-holes and all this illogic can be instantly forgiven: it's all a dream, and there are no rules in dreams, no matter how often it might be suggested that there are.

The problem becomes that the film is about something entirely different than the 'first level' story of corporate inception with which we're presented. And lest I sound as though I'm against subtext, let me underline that what sucks is that [one] Nolan is entirely obvious and heavy-handed in regards to this being a story about Cobb losing his wife and, subsequently, his mind, and [two] that story, as it's told here, is derivative and shallow.

Nolan has proved his abilities as a plotter and storyteller, and no matter how much a misstep we might deem Inception to be, I simply can't write it off as the mediocre heist drama it is on the surface. We have to give Nolan at least a little credit: there has to be something more to this movie than meets the eye, and that's why I'm positive that Nolan's 'prestige' here is the not-quite-explicit idea that the entire thing takes place in Cobb's head.

I think Inception is about a man (Cobb) who has lost his mind for one reason or another (probably 40-odd dream-years inside his own subconscious) and who has become—we are never shown this—the vegetable we're warned might be the fate for Saito or Fischer or anybody else. In his comatose nightmare, Cobb longs to be reunited with his family, but because he blames himself for his predicament, he won't let it happen on any level of his reality.

We see this in Cobb's refusal to look at his children, even as they pop up around corners as often as the projection of his demonic wife. And by the way, they do make an appearance once in the film's purported reality: early in the film, Cobb's children call him in his hotel room in Kyoto. How on earth could they find him there but through the twisted logic of a dream?

So Cobb is a sad tomato⁷, and this is where Michael Caine comes in. It's not coincidental that the last human expression seen in the film is Caine's knowing smirk as the camera tilts downward to a cut-to-black off Cobb's spinning totem. Caine's Miles is the man behind the actual inception of this story's title. He partners with Ariadne (and the rest of the ensemble may be projections of Cobb's subconscious or members of Miles' team) to bring the vegetative Cobb some happiness within his eternal dream state. This is why every character, four levels down, shares the dreamworld Cobb created.

You know what? This is kind of a nice idea. Unfortunately, Nolan bogs himself down in endless retellings of Mal's fate and a lot of sci-fi gobbledy-gook that serves only to clash with any actual pathos at the heart of the thing. It reminds me of another big-budget project from a director that didn’t really know where to go after the biggest success of his career.

My prediction is that Inception will go down as Christopher Nolan's Vanilla Sky: a star-filled oddity of premise that goes over or under most heads and runs on a difficult-to-swallow mixture of sentiment and hardcore sci-fi world-building. Despite its flaws, it will earn a devoted following for whom either the emotions or the ideas (occasionally both) work on a personal level, and that cult will hold it up as one of their favorite movies. Ever.

See, I suppose I don't have a problem with liking Inception so much as I have a problem with the idea that it's anywhere near as mindlessly fun or exciting as it purports to be. I like Vanilla Sky and would be like a bully lashing out if I mocked anyone for it. But what I can admit about Vanilla Sky is this: it's hokey and it's over-the-top, it's a good half-hour too long and I can understand why you might end up chuckling at it.

Inception, which is essentially the same story (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy loses mind, boy goes on dramatic twist-ending nightmare-bender to convince his sleeping mind that he still has her), is easily (from the score alone) twice as self-important as Vanilla Sky, as over-long as Shutter Island, as convoluted as Mullholland Drive, as knowingly-slick as anything Nolan has ever done. For many it's going to strike a chord.

Everyone else will chuckle.

1) And by the way, for as cool as these forty-five cumulative minutes can be, they really only leave more to be desired in-and-of-themselves. Nolan's team constructed an entire rotating hallway in order to depict Joseph Gordon-Levitt leaping from wall to ceiling amidst fisticuffs with subconscious henchmen, and he uses this practical effect in exactly one uncut shot that lasts long enough to register. Mere seconds. Unforgivable. Anybody who ever wants to show a hero doing battle with henchmen in an enclosed space needs to go watch Oldboy. [back]

2) Ellen Page's performance is awful enough to deserve more than a footnote, but I don't really want to bother. It's bad enough that Ariadne is so clumsily-written and contrived an audience surrogate, all "What does this do?" and "How does that work?". But to give this flimsy, hollow role to an actress of Page's meager caliber is just infuriating, especially when she's next to powerhouses like Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. [back]

3.) If A.A. Dowd is reading this he might as well give up here and post his comment about how I am a "slave to narrative". [back]

4.) Or rather, she handles it like a bemused starlet confronted with a series of wildly ridiculous interactions and paper-thin 'wow' moments: a "human network", if you will? [back]

5.) The flashbacks, now; not Cobb's memory-based reconstructions or subconscious projections. Obviously, in a film like this it isn't always possible to tell the difference. [back]

6.) This is DiCaprio's Cobb, but since we never see him and the world takes place in his dream, it would be pointless to label him as the same character, with the same appearance and personality. [back]

7.) In New York Magazine, David Edelstein derisively mocked the character's name, referring to Dom Cobb as "dummkopf", which, incidentally, means "stupidhead." Several characters here have winkingly relevant namesakes, the most cloying of which has to be Ariadne, the girl who bestowed Theseus with a ball of yarn to help him navigate the minotaur's labyrinth. Despite being played by the unparalleled Cillian Murphy, Fischer might as well have been called "Cipher". [back]