Dream as life: Inception (2010) by Christopher Nolan

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”— Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph & Other Stories 

Imagine a dream. Imagine a wasteland. Now imagine a colossal city blooming into existence within a span of seconds out of the wasteland. Call this city Paris. Now imagine a procession of classical Parisian architecture folding over itself in a gravity defying mirror inversion. Now imagine another dream within this dream with another dream within it. Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is an eye-bending Borgesian dream.

The plot is simple yet elegant. Saito, a Japanese business man, hires Dominic Cobb on a corporate espionage mission to break up the company of Robert Fischer,  the rich and powerful son of a dying energy magnate. 

Cobb’s expertise in the deceitful world of extraction— the art of extracting  secrets from  the dream space— has not only made him a sought after figure in the  field of espionage, but also a renegade on the run.

Saito offers Cobb a chance of emancipation from his renegade world in exchange for accomplishing an impossible “inception”— the art of implanting an idea inside dream to induce a desired act in reality— on Fischer. For this seemingly impossible “inception”, Cobb hires Ariadne, an architecture student, as a dream architect;  Yusuf, a sedative specialist as a dream chemist; and a Eames, as a appearance forger.

The “inception” seems overly simple but there are complications in its execution—the subconscious projections of the subjects in the dream space turn the absurdly tractable dream word into an uncontrollable nightmare, causing the subjects to spawn multiple dreams linked together like a recursive equation.  At the center of this nightmare resides Cobb’s haunting nostalgia for his deceased wife, Mallorie “Mal” Cobb.

While “Inception” lacks brooding on complex philosophical and metaphysical themes, it effectively captures the paradigm shift in how we are thinking about reality in the shifting landscape of technology. We can now envision a reality made up of dreams entirely. While dreams may influence our reality, and may affect our existence— by planting an idea or by performing inception— it is the dream world we are more interested in. Who cares about the real world if the dream world is more interesting, colourful and rewarding than the real world!

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“Inception” as metafiction gives a visual vocabulary to the age old art of novel writing through its conception of dream architects. One can see how the creators work, how fiction comes into being, one can almost experience the jouissance of creation. Novels create realities which may or may not have roots in the real world. The writers, like dream-architects, share the dream space with their readers. 

The film has its flaws as well— the dream world in “Inception” remains too logical, too tractable, too bland, and perhaps that accounts for its lack of profundity.  Compared with Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Nostalghia”, “Inception” lacks poetic value. I guess comparing “Nostalghia” with “Inception” would be like comparing Leonardo’s  Last Supper with Dali’s. 

“Inception” is not a work of genius, it is a work that exposes genius and that is why I love it.