Inception [contains spoilers now]

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21

Hmm… if I ever watch Inception again, I’ll look for the Odyssey in it. Brother, Where Art Thou was much more fun, though.

Odysseus, known for his cunning, is also linked to his father as one who knows the art of thievery or has the mental mindset and capacity of a thief. This is mentioned in Book One of Plato’s Republic as Socrates is taking on his first opponent, Polemarchus, regarding the question of justice. Polemarchus’ argument is that Simonides was correct in saying that the repayment of a debt is just. As the dialogue progresses, and Socrates tears this idea apart, it evolves into the problem of how a just man determines exactly who is a friend and who is an enemy in order to figure out how to make a proper repayment (meaning good to the friend and evil to the enemy) because of the problem of appearances. A good man can sometimes appear to be evil, and an evil man good. The problem of justice also extends into the area of money and praxis as Socrates notes that justice is only useful when money is useless, meaning you want a just man to safeguard it for you; but it’s not the just man you call on when you need to spend money on something useful, but instead the specialist who knows about that thing you want or need: the physician for a healthy body, the musician for a working lyre, the art of the soldier for a shield, the pilot for a ship, and so on. Once justice has been deemed useful only when things and money are useless, and useless when they are useful, Socrates then turns to dissecting the nature of the practical specialists, who end up being the kind of people who are experts not only in keeping things useful but also must be able to do the opposite and see the other side. He notes that “he who is most skillful in preventing or escaping from a disease is able to create one,” and that “a good keeper of anything is also a good thief.” When Polemarchus agrees to this notion, his argument is well and truly lost.

Socrates alludes to Homer and Odysseus in this argument as a crowning shot. He says:

[i]Then he who is a good keeper of anything is also a good thief?

That, I suppose, is to be inferred.

Then if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing it.

That is implied in the argument.

Then after all the just man has turned out to be a thief. And this is a lesson which I suspect you must have learnt out of Homer; for he, speaking of Autolycus, the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, who is a favourite of his, affirms that he was excellent above all men in theft and perjury.[/i]

Even in our modern day, successful businessmen and con artists work with this mentality. You literally have to “be” your enemy to know him and defeat him. Since Cobb’s goal was to literally steal another man’s mind and life and change it for his, Cobb’s, own ends, then Cobb was indeed like a modern Odysseus, crafty and cunning while also having those seemingly loveable and admirable characteristics of the good family man and leader of men who look like the good average white American male. Tom Hanks would have played this role twenty years ago, same type, same look. But like Socrates, I have to ask: was justice served? Well, Ithaca did need righting; and the hero’s journey does require an acquisition of skill and cunning or else just dumb luck, and I don’t think we’d like or admire a dumb naive hero who basically made it purely on luck. Also, I think we like to see the good guys from our side, that is the American “Ithaca,” win one for us and our sense of tribal security and ability to prosper. So it’s a double-edged sword: what might be seen as good and just for one side, is evil and unjust for the other. That’s why I think justice is seen as fairness and balance in the mythical core of society: the scales of justice over the courthouse entrance in this life, or the scales of Osiris weighing the heart against a feather in the afterlife, for instance.

However, I sometimes wonder if tribal boundaries and notions will work any more in a global society. That’s another side to Inception that makes it difficult to watch as well. Boundaries seem to disappear for the criminal Cobb but appear to be very important for the Cobb freed from extradition fears. Not only that, but in the world of corporations, there are no boundaries. Saito can use and manipulate them at will. So maybe Inception is really his story and that is the real lesson. The rest is just a dream filled with illusions that take us through boundaries and out of them then back again with no sense of what “getting there” really means.

22

Brilliant brilliant post and analysis - jaysus philosophy of film eh!

I loved all the Plato dialogue stuff - thanks jonquil

I presume you remember the parable of the Ring of Gyges in the republic - maybe the corporations actually have that ring now and can do what ever they want…

oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/ … gyges.html

kp

23

Thanks for posting that link to Plato’s allegory of the ring. Great reminder of how the cloak of invisibility can act as such a great corruptive influence in a society of laws where people actually operate on self-interest. It’s a very cynical view of society and individuals, and in my view there is no hope either for justice or a just person if everyone in the society operates on those principles. But as Adam Curtis showed us in The Trap, what happens when some people act altruistically by nature? That apparently throws such a kink in the works that the whole self-interested system breaks down. For example, there would have been no need for Cobb to steal another man’s life and mind for his own selfish interests if Saito had acted altruistically and made that phone call at the beginning. But then Fischer’s company would have grown into a megalith furthering its own selfish ends at the expense of many people, which would of course also include owning governments and politicians wearing that ring of invisibility making them unaccountable to anyone. Then of course, I wonder whether Saito engineered the whole thing, including Cobb’s nightmare life and dream manipulation from beginning to end.

There are no easy answers here, eh?

24

Bah easy answers!
Sure that’s why philosophy/psychology are such fun!

kp

25

I watched the film with my friend Pratim and we discussed it very critically. Both of us had similar views about it. We think that Inception contains some important as well as very interesting ideas which can be used as genuine cinematic experience. Dream world always has been very vital subject for prolific film makers down the ages from Federico Fellini to Woody Allen. Christopher Nolan also deals with this sensitive subject in his latest film. Let us have a look on the plot of the film.Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), along with point man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), are on an extraction mission within the mind of a powerful Japanese businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe); a form of corporate espionage through dreams. Pain is felt in dreams, but death results in awakening. Cobb carries a totem in the form of a spinning top which originally belonged to his deceased wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), to determine whether he is dreaming or awake, which spins unceasingly or topples, respectively. The extraction fails due to the intervention of Mal, whose memory haunts Cobb’s mind and sabotages his missions. Saito reveals that he is in fact auditioning the team to perform the act of inception: using dreams to implant an idea. He promises to have murder charges against Cobb cleared so that he can return to the U.S. and visit his children, in return for the mission’s success.The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), son of Saito’s terminally ill corporate rival, Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite). The objective is to convince Fischer to break up his father’s empire. Cobb recruits Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger who can change appearance inside dreams, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a sedative chemist, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), a student whom he and Arthur train as an architect to design dream worlds. When the elder Fischer dies in Sydney, Saito and the team share the flight with Robert Fischer back to Los Angeles and drug him. They enter Yusuf’s dream, a rainy downtown area, and kidnap Fischer. However, they come under attack by Fischer’s trained subconscious projections, and Saito is badly injured. Due to the strength of the sedatives and multiple dream layers, death will result in the person going into limbo, a world of unconstructed dream space, for a seemingly indefinite time. Cobb reveals to Ariadne that he spent years with Mal in limbo, where they shaped their own world and lives. After waking, Mal remained convinced she was dreaming and committed suicide, persuading Cobb to do so by incriminating him in her death, but he instead fled the U.S. and the murder charges.Eames changes into Peter Browning (Tom Berenger), Fischer’s godfather, to extract information from him. The team then enter a van and are sedated into Arthur’s dream, a hotel, where the team convinces Fischer that the kidnapping on the first level was orchestrated by Browning and that he must enter his godfather’s mind to determine his motives. They in fact enter into a third level, Eames’s dream,where Fischer must break into a snowy mountain fortress to reveal the planted idea. To wake and protect the team, a member stays behind at each level with synchronized kicks: Yusuf driving the van off a bridge, Arthur crashing an elevator containing the team’s bodies in a zero gravity sequence, and Eames detonating explosives in the mountain fortress.Fischer is killed by Mal and goes into limbo. Ariadne and Cobb follow him down and confront her. There Mal attempts to convince Cobb to stay in limbo by making him question reality, referring to events that occurred while he was awake. Cobb reveals that he had originally planted the idea in Mal’s mind to wake, making him indirectly responsible for her suicide. She attacks him, but Ariadne shoots her. Cobb remains in limbo to locate a now dead Saito, while Fischer and Ariadne return to the mountain fortress where he comes to the conclusion that his father wanted him to be his own man. Cobb eventually locates an aged Saito and tells him that they need to return to reality. He suddenly wakes on the plane to find everyone up and well. Saito honors their arrangement; Cobb enters the United States and finally returns home to his children. Cobb spins his totem (top) to test reality, but is distracted by the reunion as the top begins to wobble.The film starts genuinely promising to be more and more interesting. But at the end the film appears to be utterly confusing making it sure that the director himself becomes helpless in that confusing world. The film as a whole appears without any essence and definite sense. The film again proves that in the art of cinema THE DREAM WORLD needs to be handled very carefully and needs the master makers like FELLINI to do justice with the idea.

26

can you explain the sub plot?

27

Above all i like the way they has portrayed the story over screen.

28

I watched this last night. Very good. But I’ll have to watch it another 3 times to understand the whole thing.

29

you will? why? what didn’t you understand?

30

Just who was dreaming when and why.

31

as for the why, all i can say is that they were all on a mission to implant an idea deep in this guy who was the heir to a large corporation.

32

Yeah, I got that part. It just seemed so confusing as to who was dreaming at the time and why that person was chosen. Plus, they didn’t seem to flesh out clearly reasons why they go into limbo if they get killed in a dream within a dream within another dream. Plus, what was the confrontation about near the end between decaprio and the aged Japanese fellow on that long table?

33

it’s been too long since i’ve seen it.

34

The aged Japanese fellow was Saito who had been shot in one of the dreams and was thus wallowing in limbo (aged Saito), Cobb rescues him from said limbo so that Saito would be alive and well in the “real” world in order to satisfy his end of the deal i.e. getting Cobb back into the States.

But, to be honest, Cobb should’ve just moved his kids to France. meh.

35

yeah, sometimes the motives in movies are just unreasonable.

36

My incomplete take on this was that Saito was to Cobb as Cobb was to Robert Fischer.
I took the story to implicate that Saito was implanting the idea of Cobb’s separation from Mal by the discussion of how subtle a method must be to implant an idea into another person.

So to me, it struck me that Cobb had to implant the idea of separation and closure into Robert Fischer so that the same idea would implant into his own subconscious, so that Cobb could separate from Mal and find closure.

I understood Mal’s interwoven infestation of Cobb’s subconscious, bleeding out from the trapped confines in which he kept her, to be mirrored in the Cobol corporation’s singular grip and impending threat to the world by being the sole energy supplier unless broken up and scattered instead of retained in a singular ownership.

To me, it seemed that the entire story was about liberating Cobb from Cobb and nothing else.

There is a real needless focus on Cobb’s psychological wellbeing by most primary characters involved in the film, and Miles’ convenient requirement to be involved in the first place is littered with nothing but immediate challenges to Cobb’s character and decisions.
On the coat-tails of this, the requirement that Cobb no longer architecturally builds anything contradicts itself when constructs of only his mind start showing up in the dreams, and seems more like a justification to keep Mal locked up in his constructed memories rather than any seeming threat to other individuals.

It would be fitting that the only way to actually pull Cobb out from this self-entrapment would be to get him to think that he was rescuing another person by going deep into limbo to pull them out; only after first letting Mal kill him.

From this angle, how I understood the story to be moving, it was not odd to see Saito so personal towards the end of the show, nor odd to see everyone looking Cobb over in approval.

To me, it seemed quite probable that Cobb’s exile was psychologically self-imposed, not exactly physically self-imposed.
It seemed to me that he was only able to return home (where ever that is in his mind) after first finding his closure and separation from Mal, liberation from limbo, and redemption in self-forgiveness. Only after the Fischer event, where these things take place, is Saito willing to offer papers that will remove Cobb’s exile from home.

I don’t have it all laid out cleanly, as I’ve only just now seen the film once the other night.
But I do see Fischer as the created mirror of Cobb for Cobb to manipulate himself through manipulating Fischer.
Their relationships are very similar in their internal conflicts, and the ideas being planted are more arising of issues in Cobb than in Fischer.

The only other thing I have to add is this:
I’m not so sure that Totem’s are actually real.
Cobb doesn’t have one; he has his wife’s.
That fact alone breaks the rule of how the Totem’s work.
The audience is also not given a Totem, and Saito doesn’t appear to have a Totem (along with some of the others).
Saito, instead, seems to just figure it out in the early scene from feeling a rug that he remembers in his own life…without any Totem.
The only ones that are shown using Totem’s are Cobb, Arthur (who seemed to me like Cobb’s own “Mr. Charles”; he just struck me as an “Agent Smith” kind of character, and seemed to be more of a bodyguard for Cobb needlessly rather than just a partner in work), and Ariadne - who does so at the instruction of Cobb.

But mostly, the ending to me wasn’t really that much of a tease because even if the Totem fell over…it A) wasn’t Cobb’s, and B) it had been in the hands of Saito; but mostly A, it wasn’t Cobb’s.

If it fell, so what?
If it kept going…so what?

It wouldn’t help by the rule of the Totem that he describes because it wasn’t uniquely his; it belonged to his wife, who now is partially in control of various aspects of his subconscious.
So…how would that Totem ever help him determine if he’s in or out of a dream if Mal (in his mind) can manipulate it since she (in his mind) knows it as well as he does, if not better?

So to me; the ending was not terribly much of a tease.
We don’t ever have anything in that show that is a clear basis of reality by any guidelines listed in the movie.
We don’t have any guarantee that the movie even started in reality to begin with.

Alright, I’m tangenting all over the place.
I’ll just cut it off there.
I look forward to watching the show again.

Oh…one last thought about the show…
The name is really appropriate.
The film tells you jack shit directly.
Instead, it merely suggests concepts that form into ideas in your own mind.
The idea of what that movie is, is something that was subtly suggested into your mind by the film.
The fun part is…no one really must walk away with the same Inception.

37

I was just thinking about this some more and realized that this interpretation would then present Mal as not really dead, but still quite alive.
The projections of her would, instead, not be projections at all; that would be what Cobb believes they are only, blinding the obvious pieces of information to the opposite from his view.
For instance, it would explain the comings and goings of Mal; how she is not always there; as being places where Cobb has locked her away in memory.
These memories would then be places where his defenses would not infiltrate.
If they won’t infiltrate, then these are the only safe places that a real and living Mal could insert into Cobb’s dreams from.
Thereby, Cobb would think that he has a projected Mal trapped inside of his mind deeply, and away from the rest of his mind; deep in his subconscious.

It would then mean that she isn’t really killing anyone; that when she shot Fischer, it was to further her plot - not destroy and foil Cobb’s.
She was actually trying to still wake him up.
When he shot her, he really shot her.
It’s possible that she went to Limbo, but it’s also possible (if the dreamworld represents any reality that Mal lives in societally) that Mal’s sedatives would be low enough to allow her back out when being shot. shrug

In either case, it would primarily mean that she hired Saito to help her rescue her husband after she actually made it back out and not him.
That when she lept off of the building she was right.

That when he hears his children through the phone saying, “When are you coming back Daddy?”, he’s hearing some remnant of them asking him that at some point in reality while visiting him in his coma.

This would also explain why Totem’s seem to not really be needed, but as far as Cobb is concerned; they are absolutely required.
He believes that his Totem’s tell him which reality is the right reality, but doesn’t know what anyone else’s Totems should do and therefore cannot verify if there is an inconsistency of the opinion.
He just assumes that everyone else’s Totems are saying that this is reality just because his does.

And it would reinforce that Totems aren’t really needed, thereby explaining Saito’s lack of one, and require that Totems only needed to determine when Cobb is right; safe.

The spinning Totem at the end; it wobbles, and this would make the question, “Is he going to find out that he’s not in his reality, or still continue on in his delusion?”

What it would require is to think that, though they did not succeed in pulling him back to reality; Mall and Saito were able to pull him to a layer much more closer to reality than his previous reality.
I mean, really…the guy thinks super secret corporate assassin organizations are after him.
And yet he kicks their ass everywhere.

He’s a James Bond in a Mission Impossible dream to continuously go deeper into his own psyche, and hopefully back - he tells himself at least.
For all we know he just continues to dig deeper and deeper into his subconscious by telling himself a new layer is the actual and real layer of reality.
Moving down like a tide leaving a beach; one part up, two parts down.

38

So why, at the end of the movie, do Cobb’s kids appear exactly as his subconscious projections of them? That’s suspicious. Wouldn’t they be older, dressed differently, not in the exact same positions as they were in his subconscious?

39

…unless it IS a dream, as the ending of the movie leaves possible.

40

Exactly, but every other clue tends to point in the direction that he chose reality over the dream world. For instance the last conversation he had with Mal, where he seemed to make peace with her and decide to move on.

dun dun dun…