Imagine being trapped in a dream, unable to awaken, unable to find your way to reality. Let that dream have at its core a traumatic loss. That is the nightmarish experience endured by Dominic Cobb, the central protagonist (hardly a hero) of Christopher Nolan’s film, Inception. For better or for worse, any viewer who manages not to get distracted by the non-stop action and special effects is also prone to being trapped in this nightmare.
Inception is an action/adventure science fiction, special effects extravaganza film about a man who makes a living defrauding people out of information and in this case planting an unconscious idea, “inception,” by trapping them in a dream that he controls. It is not something that many PANY Bulletin readers are likely to have seen, and I am not necessarily recommending it. I am writing about it here because the director/screenwriter, Christopher Nolan, has chosen to use psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically related concepts to juice up his plot.
The action plot surrounds the efforts of Cobb and his team of “dream sharers” to bring an unwitting suspect, an industrialist named Fischer, into a dream of their creation in order to plant in him the subconscious idea that he should break up his late father’s corporate empire. In doing this they must create layers of dreams and must utilize and endure special effects of all kinds while battling an often nameless army of opponents, Fischer’s “resistance.”
The world of this film is much like ours except that the technology exists to cause people to share dreams while under heavy sedation. We are told at one point that “dream sharing” was developed by the military for “a training program where soldiers could strangle, stab and shoot each other, then wake up.” ( Whoopee!)
Cobb is doing this for money, but this job is special because his client, a rival industrialist named Saito, has offered to pull strings so that Cobb can return safely to the United States, where he has been wanted for a major crime, to be reunited with his children.
In the midst of this plot, Nolan has imbedded a mini-psychoanalytic process. Cobb must overcome the effects of traumatic loss, must come to an acceptance of his loss and of his guilt and grief before he can accomplish his task relatively unimpeded.
Throughout the film, Nolan displays at least a rudimentary awareness of psychoanalysis. The central premise of the plot is that in dreams we work in close proximity to unconscious processes, giving someone like Cobb a powerful tool to tap the mind of an unwitting adversary and even to plant an idea that will control his behavior. Other psychoanalytic concepts such as defense and resistance also play a part, the “resistance” in this case often being concretized in the form of dream people, “projections” of the dreaming victim’s mind, who do battle with those trying to control his mind through the dream.
The film deliberately plays with our sense of reality, capitalizing on the natural confusion of reality and fantasy in dreams, and in a more subtle way, on our confusion of reality and fantasy when we are watching a film. It does that from the outset with an opening that challenges us to follow its logic as the scenes change between dream sequences, with some- times disparate elements. In the very opening scene, two children playing by the water’s edge somehow enter into a violent drama in which a man is washed ashore and confronted with the end of an automatic rifle being wielded by a military man. But the uncertain boundary of reality and fantasy is brought in more explicit- ly a bit later, when Cobb is recruiting a young
woman “architect” to be the architect of the dreams he needs to construct for the inception. Cobb is starting to explain to the young woman, Ariadne, what her role will be. “This is where I need you. You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream and they fill it with their subconscious.”
Ariadne: How could I ever acquire enough
detail to make them think that it’s reality? Cobb: Well, dreams, they feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something is actually strange. Let me ask you a question. You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on.
Ariadne: I guess. Cobb: So how did we end up here? Ariadne: We just came from the a … Cobb: Think about it Ariadne, how did you
get here? Where are you right now? Ariadne: We’re dreaming? Further in the dialogue we have been following, Cobb recognizes a real place. Cobb: I know this bridge. This place is real,
isn’t it? Ariadne: Yeh, I cross it every day to get to the
college. Cobb: Never recreate places from your memory. Always imagine new places. Ariadne: You gotta draw from stuff you know,
right? Cobb: Only use details, a street lamp or a
phone booth, never entire areas. Ariadne: Why not? Cobb: Because building a dream from your
memory is the easiest way to lose your grasp on what’s real and what is a dream.
Ariadne: Is that what happened to you?
Cobb: Listen, this has nothing to do with me, understand?
Ariadne: Is that why you need me to build your dreams?
The answer to that question will prove a bit
more complicated, but the point is clear. Since dreams almost always present themselves in our consciousness as reality, how do we know we are dreaming? We generally don’t know that we are dreaming until after the fact, when we wake up. Have you ever had the experience of recalling something and then realizing that it must have been in a dream?
But what about people who spend much of their times in dreams? At one point in the film, we see people who live much of their days in an induced sleep/dream state. We are told that the dreams have become their reality, with allusions to drug dens, opium smokers, lotus eaters.
Is it possible to be so driven by our fantasies that we lose reality? Any analyst knows that that is not only possible, but to some degree ubiquitous, the basis of transference, the basis of neurosis.
For Cobb and his “dream sharers,” a device is needed to help hold onto reality, a device that will become important for the viewer as the symbol of the blurring of the two. Each of them has a “totem”,1 an object with a specific weight, balance and characteristics known only to him so that he can test if they are caught in some- one else’s dream.
Cobb’s totem is a small metal top he can spin. It had been first chosen by his wife. She’d spin it in a dream and it would never topple, just spin, and only if it toppled would she know that she was in reality.2
Of course, if you live in a world of dreams, in which fantasy and reality co-exist on a relatively equal basis, the reality of those dreams will be affected by your own unconscious conflicts. That is the problem faced by Cobb, and the real reason that he cannot create the dreams him- self, but must find someone like Ariadne.
Specifically, he must resolve unfinished work of grief and guilt before he can succeed with Fischer and get back to his children.
Cobb’s unconscious conflicts are evident from the very opening of the film. The film begins with a bearded Cobb being washed ashore on a beach. We hear the voices of children and when he looks over, there are two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand by the water. He tries to call to them and they run off. Immediately, he is faced with the barrel of a rifle held by a Japanese guard, and in the next scene he is being brought to meet an elderly Japanese man for interrogation.
The presence of the children is incongruous and jarring, almost reminiscent of those scenes they show before films to warn us to turn off our cell phones. If this were the report of a patient about his dream, we would be curious about the presence of the children in the midst of another story.
The story soon flashes back from the confrontation between Cobb and the elderly Japanese man to a series of dream sequences, a jumble of back and forth scenes confusing to the viewer, through which we gradually discern that Cobb and his team are using a series of dreams within dreams to extract information from Saito, a Japanese industrialist. But here, too, there is an intrusion. In the midst of a dream taking place in a Japanese castle, Arthur, Cobb’s co-conspirator, interrupts a discussion they are having about getting Saito’s information from his safe to ask, “What’s she doing here, Cobb?” referring to an attractive woman standing by a railing on the castle rooftop, looking out at a roiling sea below.
Cobb tells Arthur to go back to his room, that he would take care of the rest, to which Arthur replies, “See that you do. We’re here to work.”
The woman asks Cobb, “If I jumped, would I survive?”
He answers, “With a clean dive perhaps. Mal, what are you doing you here?”
“I thought you might be missing me.”
Cobb answers, “I am, but I can’t trust you any more.”
A moment later, as he is tying her to a chair, she says,
“Tell me, do the children miss me?” “You can’t imagine,“ Cobb answers her. As the scene develops further, Mal turns on
Cobb, interfering with his plans, shooting Arthur, not to kill him because that would wake him out of the dream, but to hurt him.
As with the children, Mal’s presence appears to be out of place, incongruous. We do not yet know who she is, but we will soon learn. She appears again in a scene in which Ariadne is attempting to construct a dream. Mal appears from a crowd and attacks her, stabbing her, in this case killing her and indeed waking her from the dream. In answer to her wondering who that was, we soon learn, from Arthur, that she is “Mrs. Cobb.”
Ariadne, the novice, is the unlikely psychoanalyst who probes Cobb’s unconscious to get to the traumatic memory, questioning and interpreting in a manner reminiscent of Freud with Dora. As she learns more about Mal, she begins to question Cobb about her.
“Arthur told me she passed away.” He tries to change the subject: “How are the
mazes coming?” Ariadne begins to describe the dream levels
she is building, but Cobb interrupts, “Don’t tell me. Remember you only want the dreamer to know the layout.”
“Why’s that so important?”
“In case one of us brings in our projections, we don’t want them knowing the details of the maze.”
“You mean in case you bring Mal in. You can’t keep her out, can you? You can’t build because if you know the maze, then she knows it, and she’d sabotage the whole operation. Cobb, do the others know?”
“No, they don’t.”
“You gotta warn them if this is getting worse.”
“No one said it’s getting worse. I need to get home. That’s all I can care about right now.”
Ariadne persists with her questions: “Why can’t you go home?”
“Because they think I killed her.” After a pause, he thanks her. “For what?“ “For not asking whether I did.” Later, Ariadne sees Cobb dreaming and
enters his dream. She goes down an elevator and finds Cobb talking to Mal.
Mal asks him, “You remember when you asked me to marry you?”
He answers, “Of course I do.” “You said you had a dream.” He finishes the thought, “That we’d grow old
together.” “And we can,” she tells him. We do not fully understand this brief dialogue as yet, but we can feel the grief as Cobb and his image of his dead wife talk about the dream of growing old together. This is rein- forced a moment later. Mal and Cobb become aware of Ariadne’s presence. As he pulls Ariadne away, they find their way to a scene with his two children. She asks him, with the analyst’s understanding that the dreamer creates the dream, “Why do you do this to your- self?”
Cobb answers, “This is the only way I can still dream.”
“Why is it so important to dream?” she asks.
“In my dreams, we’re still together,” he answers, capturing the essence of the mournful dream wish to return those who are lost, to return to happier times.
Ariadne comes to a realization, “These aren’t just dreams. These are memories. You said never to use memories.”
“I know I did.”
Ariadne interprets, “You’re trying keeping her alive. You can’t let her go.”
“You don’t understand. These are moments I
regret, memories that I have to change.” Ariadne will not let go: “Well, what’s down
there that you regret?” He still defends against answering that,
instead taking them to the house he shared with Mal and the children. He shows Ariadne his two children, James and Philippa. He explains that he wants to reach out to them, but they run away.
“If I’m ever going to see their faces again, I’ve got to get back, in the real world.”
Relentless, Ariadne pushes the basement button in the dream elevator, taking her to a hotel room, in disarray, where Ariadne meets Mal directly. Mal asks her what she is doing there.
Ariadne maintains her analytic stance despite obvious anxiety: ”I’m just trying to understand.”
Continuing the theme of loss, Mal says, “How could you understand? Do you know what it is to be a lover, to be half of a whole?”
Ariadne answers, “No.”
Mal offers to tell her a riddle. “You’re waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don’t know for sure and it doesn’t matter. How can it not matter to you where that train will take you?”
Cobb finishes the thought, “Because we’ll be together.”
Mal reproaches Cobb for bringing Ariadne there.
Ariadne asks Cobb, “What is this place.”
He answers. “This is a hotel suite where we used to spend our anniversary.”
With Freudian intuition, she asks him, “What happened here?”
She is pressing to get to the traumatic memory behind the grief and anguish being expressed, but Cobb takes them away, Mal beating against the elevator grate, imploring him, “You promised! You said we’d be together. … You said we’d grow old together!”
Kept short of the final goal, Ariadne makes one last interpretation at this point, “Do you think you can just build a prison of memories to lock her in? Do you really think that’s going to contain her?”
And so we must wait for another session, but not for long. Ariadne soon finds another opportunity to pursue her analysis of the dreams.
As they enter the dreams with their intended victim, Fischer, they meet resistance, an army of defenders fighting back, and Saito is shot. The others propose that if he dies he’ll wake up, but Cobb says if he dies in such heavy sedation he’ll end up in limbo for a lifetime.
Ariadne asks him, “When were you in limbo?” She keeps at him. “You might have the rest of the team convinced to carry on with this job, but they don’t know the truth.”
“What truth?” he asks.
“The truth that at any minute you might bring a freight train through the wall, the truth that Mal is bursting through your subconscious, and the truth that as we go deeper into Fischer, we’re also going deeper into you, and I’m not sure we’re going to like what we find.”
She presses him to tell her what happened to him and Mal in limbo. Cobb explains that they were on a job creating dreams within dreams and got lost in the depths in a dream that felt like fifty years. They kept their sanity by building a world there. Mal decided to forget that their world wasn’t real. When they got back out of the dream, she seemed ok at first.
“I knew something was wrong. Eventually, she told me the truth. She was possessed by an idea, this one very simple idea that changed everything, that our world wasn’t real, that she needed to wake up to get back to reality, that in order to get back home, we had to kill our- selves.”
We move to the traumatic memory. Cobb arrives at the hotel room where they celebrated their anniversaries to find the room in disarray.
He finds a top, sees that the window is open. He looks out to find Mal sitting on the opposite ledge.
Mal: Join me. Cobb: Just step back inside. Mal: No. I’m going to jump and you’re coming with me. Cobb: No, I’m not. If you jump, you’re not
going to wake up, you’re going to die, remember? Just step inside and talk about this, please.
Mal: We’ve talked enough. She kicks off a shoe and it falls. Mal: Come out onto the ledge or I’ll jump
right now. He sits on the ledge opposite her. Mal: I’m asking you to take a leap of faith. He says he must stay for their children. At
this point she explains that she has set him up for her murder, trying to entice him to jump with her, saying that she has freed him from the guilt of leaving the children.
She tells him, “We’re going home to our real children.”
She begins to recite to him, “You’re waiting for a train.”
He screams at her helplessly. “A train that will take you far away.” “Don’t do this!” “You know where you hope this train will
take you. You can’t know for sure.” “Don’t”
“But it doesn’t matter …” “Mal, Goddammit!” “Because you’ll be together.” We see Cobb’s pain as Mal slips off the ledge
and plunges downward. Like a true psychoanalyst, Ariadne interprets
to Cobb, “Your guilt defines her. It’s what powers her, and you are not responsible for the idea that destroyed her, And if we are going to get through this, you’re going to have to forgive yourself, and you’re going to have to confront her, but you don’t have to do that alone.”
And he doesn’t. What follows is the film’s
central plot, the complicated inception. If I attempted to describe it in detail, the reader would be thoroughly confused, something that can be accomplished more easily by watching the film. In essence, Cobb, Ariadne, Arthur, a character named Eames (good at impersonations in dreams), Saito, the Japanese industrialist, and the chemist, Yussuf, operate in a complicated dream that has four or five layers. I will jump to one of the deepest of those layers.
The group is attempting to plant an idea into the subconscious of Fischer, the son who is inheriting his father’s industrial empire. Through a series of devices they take Fischer down to a very deep level of dreamwork, operating against his built-in defenses. At the last level, however, they are intercepted by Mal, who shoots Fischer while Cobb stands by, unable to shoot her. When Cobb finally does shoot her, she dies as well and takes Fischer down to “limbo,” to the place where she and Cobb lived for those fifty dream years. It is there that Cobb and Ariadne confront her and Cobb’s deep-seated conflict.
It should be kept in mind that for the viewer this is just one of many sites of action as the film keeps cutting back and forth to different layers and different characters at what may seem a dizzying speed. The problem con- fronting them is that Mal has shot and killed Fischer at the level at which they need him and Cobb has shot and killed Mal. Eames wants to try to revive Fischer, but Cobb tells him it’s hopeless because he’s down in a deeper level. It is Ariadne, the novice who can solve every- thing who comes up with the solution, which gives the reader a sense of the quality of the complexity and surrealism of the film.
“There’s still another way. We just have to fol- low Fischer down there.”
Eames reminds her that there’s very little time.
She is not fazed. “Down there there’ll be enough time. We’ll find him. Soon as you hear
Arthur’s music start (from another layer of dream signaling the time to “kick” up out of the dream), you use the defibrillator to revive him. We give him his own early kick from below (she’ll push him off a terrace in the lower level). … Then as the music ends you blow the hospital and we all ride the kick back up through the layers.” (If you think you understand this, you’re probably dreaming.)
And so, Cobb and Ariadne descend to a deeper level, the land that Cobb and Mal built in limbo. They find Mal in a skyscraper. As they enter the penthouse, Cobb speaks to Ariadne.
“There’s something you have to understand about me, about inception. An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious, and the smallest seed of an idea can grow to define or destroy your world.”
They see Mal, and she interjects, “The smallest idea, such as ‘your world is not real,’ a sim- ple little thought that changes everything.”
She turns to Cobb, pointing a carving knife. “So certain of your world, of what’s real. Do you think he is? Or do you think he’s as lost as I was?”
Cobb answers, “I know what’s real.”
“No creeping doubts? Not feeling persecuted, Dom? Chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces the way the projections persecute the dreamer? Admit it. You don’t believe in one reality anymore. So choose. Choose to be here. Choose me.”
Dom answers her, “ I have to get back to our children, because you left them. You left us.”
“You’re wrong, Dom. You’re confused. Our children are here. And you’d like to see their faces again, wouldn’t you?”
We can see the children, their backs to our view.
Cobb answers, “Yes, I want to see them up above.”
“Up above? Listen to yourself. These are our children. Watch!” (She calls to them.)
They continue to argue, the argument
reversed from the one we’d seen on the ledge outside the hotel. Now he is for leaving the world they’re in and she is for staying. Reality is beginning to seem relative, only the psychodynamics are real as Mal pushes him.
“You keep telling yourself what you know, but what do you believe? What do you feel?”
“Guilt. I feel guilt, Mal. And no matter what I do, no matter how hopeless I am, no matter how confused, that guilt is always there, reminding me of the truth.”
“What truth?
“That the idea that caused you to question your reality came from me.”
“You planted the idea in my mind.”
“The reason I knew inception was possible (Cobb is now speaking to Ariadne) was because I did it to her first. .I did it to my wife.”
Now Ariadne enters the dialogue, the questioning analyst, “Why?”
“We were lost in here. I knew we needed to escape. She wouldn’t accept it. She had locked something away, something deep inside. The truth she had once known, but couldn’t accept. She couldn’t break free.”
We see him unlocking Mal’s secret place where she kept her totem and he describes unlocking the truth.
“I planted an idea. A simple little idea that would change everything, that her world wasn’t real.”
Mal finishes the idea, “That death was the only escape.”
We see them lying on train tracks as they recite their mantra about waiting for a train.
Confronting his guilt, Cobb tells Ariadne, “I never knew that idea would grow in her mind like a cancer even after she woke. That you’d continue to believe that your world wasn’t real, that death was the only escape.”
We see Mal falling to her death as Cobb looks on helpless.
She accuses him, “You infected my mind.” “I was trying to save you.”
“You betrayed me.” She urges him to make it up to her by staying with her now “in the world we built together, ”exposing the direction to which his guilt naturally takes him.
At about this time, the “bell rings” for every- one to start to wake up from their various parts of the dream. Ariadne pushes Fischer off a terrace to get him to the next level where he can be revived to meet with the image of his father to plant the idea. She shoots Mal. Cobb tells her to leave, that he has to stay in limbo to look for Saito.
Concerning Mal, he says, “I can’t stay with her anymore because she doesn’t exist.“
Cobb is now ready to resolve his guilt and his grief, ready to say goodbye to Mal for good.
As he holds her, Mal says, “You remember when you asked me to marry you? You said you dreamt that we’d grow old together.”
“And we did.” (In the limbo dream.) I miss you more than I can bear, but we had our time together, and I now I have to let you go.”
We next see Cobb being washed onto the beach as he had at the beginning of the film. Now, we understand his meeting with an elder- ly Saito. He has found him to bring him back up out of the dream. We are catapulted back to the airplane where all the sleepers are awakening. Cobb gets through customs and in the final scene, he is with his father-in-law, watching his children, who are playing outside in the yard.
Cobb takes the metal top and spins it, then runs out to greet his children while we watch the top. It spins, seems to waver as we watch to see if it will topple signifying that we are not in a dream. But before we can know, the film cuts off abruptly, leaving us uncertain whether we were seeing it wobble towards a fall or just an ongoing spin.
Are we lost in a dream, or is this the reality, has he resolved his guilt and grief and reunited with his children? There is actually some debate on the web about this, with some bloggers claiming that they have proof that it was not a dream. The director/scriptwriter, Christopher Nolan, is quoted as saying that the significance of the scene is not whether Cobb is still in a dream or in reality, but that he didn’t wait to watch the top, that he was choosing his reality.
Freud, of course, steadfastly held to the idea that at the core of all dreams are wishes that we are trying to fulfill through the fantasy world of dreaming. In fact, I wrote a paper in support of that idea. (Stein, 1995) If Cobb is indeed choosing his reality on the basis of his wishes, that would be much like dreaming.
Obviously, the answer is left to the individual viewer, but for me the answer was clear. I am inclined to agree with Mal when she argues, “No creeping doubts? Not feeling persecuted,
Dom, chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces?” With the cut- ting to the credits, I was immediately aware that once again I was caught up in a fantasy, a world marked by paranoia, danger, shooting and fighting, but with no real harm done, images floating by too rapidly to register, questions about reality and fantasy that ultimately remind us that we go to the movies to enter a world of daydreams and that even if we get lost in a dream there, it will only last a couple of hours.
1. Perhaps further evidence of Nolan’s interest in Freud. 2. The viewer is moved along too quickly to question the logic, but the totem could only tell the bearer if he was in someone else’s dream, but not if he was in a dream of his own making.
Stein, H. (1995), The dream is the guardian of sleep. Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 64: 533-550.
By Herbert H. Stein
Published in the PANY Bulletin, Fall, 2011