inception: three levels and philip k dick

Straight off, my prejudice: I'm a Nolan fan from way back. The care he takes with detail, story and psychological exploration (Memento, Insomnia, the Prestige) seems fascinating to me and possibly unmatched among working directors.

WARNING: TONS OF SPOILERS AHEAD

Here's a basic summary of the plot: Cobb (DiCaprio) is a specialist in the art of entering a person's subconscious through their dreams to extract information. He does this for a living, but he's on the run from some vague, disgruntled ex-client and wants out. Extraction is not a feat which can be achieved alone; an extractor needs a team: he has a right-hand man (in this case, the lovely Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a dream-architect who builds the details of the dream-world, a chemist and a forger (who doesn't forge papers; rather, he morphs his appearance to impersonate someone else in the dream-world, perhaps an intimate of the subject's). Saito (the intriguing Ken Watanabe) hires Cobb not to extract but to implant an idea deep in a dreamer's mind: for vague but convincing ethical reasons, the son and heir (the wonderful Cillian Murphy) to a mega-billionaire (the underused Pete Postlethwaite) must be convinced to break up his father's empire. In return, Saito will give Cobb the one thing he truly desires: reunion with his children, from whom he has been banished since he was set up by his suicidal wife (Marion Cotillard, playing the same tense, neurotic beauty she did in Public Enemies) to look like he murdered her. In order to implant the idea, the team has to go three levels deep into the fellow's subconscious; in order to do THAT, they induce a group-dreaming using sedatives and a fancy machine, then in the dreamstate induce another, using sedatives and a fancy machine... you get the idea. Why do sedatives and machines work on a dream-level as they do in reality, when you and I both know that if you dream of sitting at a computer trying to work, the mouse and keyboard seem not hooked up and any words which appear are nothing like what you're trying to type, and if you swallow poison, chances are good you'll continue unharmed? That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked it. Let's put it on hold for a minute and come back to it. Also, notice how often I'm using the word "vague". It's important, and we'll come back to it.

A crucial thing to know about existence on these particular dream-levels is that if you are killed on a shallow level you wake up; if you are killed on, say, the third level down, your consciousness is lost and you spend a near-eternity wandering confused in the ramblings of your underconscious world, having forgotten that it is not reality. Another important thing to remember is that although the dream- architect is ostensibly the one who designs the world down to each detail (how? and how do the others manage to curb their own impulsively creative tendencies? well, it's vague), powerful emotional content buried in another person's subconscious can wreak havoc there, as Cobb's does, conjuring freight trains that barrel down the center of city streets and a dead wife who follows him from one dream to another specifically to louse up any plans he might have. Why is Cobb the only one whose subconscious wreaks any havoc? Yes, he's sicker than your average pup, but everyone's got submerged crap. Why doesn't anyone else's undealt-with psyche-stuff show up, even in small ways? That is a very good question, and I'm glad you asked it. We'll set it aside and come back to it later.

Meanwhile, through the unfolding of a visually stunning and ambitiously innovative story, the team navigates the three levels of non-reality while managing to solve Cobb's problems with his dead wife and successfully plant the idea which will, ostensibly, save the world. Then, they escape back into reality. Or do they?

I'm not being glib about this. This movie is a lot of fun. During a good half of it, granted, Nolan is wearing his Action-Guy hat and that makes me yawn some, but it's an old problem between us, a not-unheard-of dynamic between me and old Chris (I find Batman Begins a big snooze-fest, apart from the sound of Christian Bale's voice, which exercises some kind of eerie mystical power over me). But even in the Action Movie part lay things I loved: specifically, Gordon-Levitt's fistfights in zero gravity, which were delightful.

And let's dismiss right now all the moaning back and forth you'll hear about the Matrix: "it's a cheap rip-off; it's nowhere as good"... Whatever, dude. The only thing it's got in common with the Matrix is a mutual fascination with Philip K Dick and his exploration of the various levels of existence channeled through the medium of the action film. In fact, the movie it's most like is Shutter Island, since both tell the same story: a man, traumatized by the tragic loss of his family due to a devastating action by his wife, goes to intense psychological lengths in attempt to keep at bay the devastating truth and halt his own creeping sense of guilt. The rest is window-dressing.

My absolutely, no-question, full-on favorite thing about this film is the ambivalent ending. IS the top wobbling? WILL it fall? Has the word "reality" been stripped so clean of meaning by the time the top is set in motion that the question itself has no relevance? This is exactly why I love Christopher Nolan.

That said, I have a few beefs. A big one is aural. What's with the bombastic soundtrack almost constantly intruding? Had there been silence, or ambient noise... Think of the possibilities! The soundtrack of dreams! Think of the soundwork that Gus Van Sant has done in recent years (Last Days!) and imagine if Nolan had used something like that... a different tonal register for each different level of dream, perhaps? Ah! How eerie it might have been. Instead, he focuses (very well, very ably indeed, there is no question) on the visual, and the sound is tossed to the overweening composer guy, as it so often is these days in action films. It happens all the time, and every time I'm hugely disappointed. I tell you, hardly a day goes by that I don't long for the deep silences and natural sound of early-'70s cinema. Ou sont les neiges d'antan, you know?

My other big whinge is that the dream levels are far too stable. Yes, they can be manipulated by external forces (the lack of gravity when the van in another level in falling into the water) and by conscious choice (the dream-architect's job), but never once during the film did I think, "Yes! That's like in my dreams!", as I have in David Lynch works, for instance, or in that final episode of Buffy season four, when the scoobies are haunted in their dreams by the First Slayer. Personally, my dreams are constantly shifting. Even when I have a tentative grip of lucidity and consciously cause a change -- like making myself fly, for instance,-- the change never lasts, but turns into something new. The one constant is a shifting ground. If I try and read a book, the words shift in front of my eyes. If I'm waiting at a bus-stop and the thought occurs to me that I'm at the wrong corner, you can be damn sure the bus is about to pull up to a different corner and I'm going to be running after it. A single thought changes everything. Although I wholeheartedly subscribe to the notion that dreams are filled with messages from not only underconscious but superconscious and extra-conscious sources, the truest words I can use to sum up my dream-life are CONSTANT RANDOM SHIFTS. In short, my biggest disappointment about this movie was that I never believed I was exploring various dream-lives of various characters...

And that brings me nicely round to my main point, which is that I think (although I am open to discussion on the matter) that the only way the story ultimately makes sense is if it's ALL happening inside Cobb's head, from beginning to end, from before the opening shot, the whole shebang, the entirety of the enchilada. As in, he's already stuck in that lowest level of the dream-life when we come in on his story. It reminds me of Alex Garland's novel Coma, a short book tracing the mental meanderings of a comatose guy, which were a chillingly convincing semi-circular interaction with memories, overheard snippets from the doctors and nurses by his bed, and hallucinations in which he is driven, sometimes desperately, towards a vague but important goal which is continually frustrated and confused. Maybe the story we're seeing is Cobb's and Cobb's alone. He is like a man in a coma, and we are stuck in the widening circles of his hallucinations, his memories and his strivings. Perhaps its apparent stability comes from the closed nature of the world; the dream is an endless loop, without hope of waking. My theory is that every person in Inception is a projection from Cobb's subconscious as he fights to find his way up to a reality which has retreated so far away that he might no longer recognize it if he saw it. The only piece of true memory we see is that blurry, slow-motion, recurring image of the kids playing with their faces averted from him.

Think about it. It explains why nobody else's subconscious projections matter: they have none, being Cobb's own projections. It explains why the physical laws of one level of reality apply on each deeper level of non-reality: because it's all the same level, really, all happening on the endless racetrack of Cobb's unstill mind. It explains the vagueness of so many of the plot-points: the details are not, at last, the point for the man who is desperately combing his own mental labyrinths for a lucrative escape route. And it explains the question at the end about whether we are, in fact, in reality. We are not. The escape is illusory; he is trapped, but perhaps it has ceased to matter. Perhaps he can find joy anyway.

Philip K Dick, master-philosopher and godfather of multiple levels of experienced reality, returned to a pattern of three basics in his works: the Seen, the Is, and the Ought. The Seen (in his novels, as well as in life itself) is always illusory, and must be stripped away in pieces before one finds the Is. Only when one comprehends the true Is can one begin to contemplate changes necessary to create the Ought. In Inception, eveything we see is illusion. The entire action of the movie is Cobb's ongoing attempt to strip the Seen away and find the Is. It's the only way I can convince the story to hold together properly, and it's too enjoyable a story to reject just because the ends are too slippery to stay tied.