Screen Machine

Review: Inception

Inception operates at the cutting edge of contemporary narrative comprehension, spectatorial skill and processing speed: a position that will diminish, without fail, over time.  But for now, raising this bar is a film that incites as much contempt (or at least, misunderstanding) as devotion. Observing the crowd at yesterday’s late night screening, one was equally likely to spot neighbours talking as those sitting with shocked, hand-covered faces. There were equal parts distracted shuffling and whiteknuckled seat-grabbing. This is a film guaranteed to polarize.

All in all it follows through on a very simple concept: the idea that at some point in the near future we will be able to enter the dreaming minds of others, a technology developed to allow deadly military training without consequence. The plot itself follows the plans of a team constructed by haunted, master ‘Extractor’ Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) to implant a certain idea into the head of wealthy industrial heir Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Calling upon an ensemble cast (including Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe and Michael Caine) the film itself enacts its own ‘inception’ – the thought implanted: film-as-dream.

This is indeed an old, and perhaps clichéd notion: yet Inception presents it with a twist. Instead of the solitary state of regular dreaming, through the use of technology a collective dream state can be reached. We must consider the film itself one such state, arising not from the thoughts of the few but those of the many, indeed the all: our collective unconscious. Like the dream, cinema involves the processing of shared motifs, or im-signs (as Pasolini was fond of calling them): cultural memories, traumas and memes which grow in our minds like a cancer, which we spread between one another as a disease.

It is no coincidence that Cobb’s ‘totem’, his assurance of reality, is the spinning top: for this is precisely what human history proves itself to be. Indeed, despite the many social advances since Freud’s time, many of his favourite images and archetypes are littered throughout this film. The ‘Woman’ takes centre stage, the rejection and incompleteness of her idealisation ultimately reaffirming that old Lacanian adage: “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” (there is no such thing as the sexual relationship). Two faceless children, a younger brother and older sister, drive the plot forward: the film-work reaching out towards their individuation, their rebirth before an all-too-grateful father. Meanwhile, and perhaps most significantly – given the emphasis on oneiric uncertainty and godlike power – the image of the Other-as-horde (which the film refers to as ‘projections’) manifests our greatest fears that, ignoring the three or four individuals we count as ‘friends’, the world outside our sphere of confort can be overrun at any moment; that a stranger’s sideways glance is an intent to kill. Paranoiacally, we still fear the gaze of others, their ability to pierce our transcendental place beyond: we still believe that only those people known are truly rational.

Yet perhaps historically this is all simply an embodiment of the continuing terroristic ideology of our time. Because of its underlying honesty, Inception is truly one of the greatest blockbusters to be realised this decade.

Peter is currently completing his honours year in film and television at Monash University, writing his thesis on the history of zombie films and their interpretation.

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