This past Saturday night, I and my neighbor ventured forth and saw Inception. If you have yet to see this film and you don’t like to read any spoilers before seeing a film then you may want to stop reading right now. Otherwise please continue.
I was captivated by the story and the images were amazing. Paris rolling back on itself makes the process of creating realistic CGI look easy. Why can’t you just take an image tell it to bend in a given way. If the world outside my window were to roll up I would no longer be surprised since I saw it happen in the movie. Needless to say if the images on the screen don’t impress you then please have your eyes checked.
There were two things about the film that struck me hard when I saw them. The first was a line that Cobb has where he is talking to his wife and says that he must move on since she is only a projection of what he remembers about her and not the real thing. In fact the line is almost a direct quote from A Grief Observed. This is quite the line of dialog and it slips by almost as an after thought. Yet for Cobb it must be a huge revelation. The woman who haunts his dreams is only a dim, cobbled together version of the woman who was his wife. The funny thing is that Nolan didn’t have to state this truth to tell his story. All Cobb really needed to say was that he had to move on because he knew his wife was dead. But Nolan is not one to let a big chance at true motivation pass him by. Cobb is a thinker and he must have concrete reasons for his actions. The projection of Moll in his mind is just that, his own projection and not the real Moll.
The second thing that struck me was the end of the film. The last image is causing quite a stir and it doesn’t take much searching to find many theories about the end of the film. Most boil down to two. Cobb is back in real life or Cobb is lost in limbo and has chosen to live the lie to get what he wants. In some ways it’s funny that these options are set against each other. They don’t have to be. The connection to C.S. Lewis is his statement that should Christianity prove to be lies of the poets and so forth then he will happily choose to believe this lie than believe any other truth. That admission is very shocking if you read a lot of Lewis. Especially when set next to his statements about valuing the reality of his wife, Joy.
But I don’t think Lewis is being contradictory. And neither is the movie. If anything, the movie boldly enforces the notion that the reason we have dreams (any fantasy for that matter) is because we have some innate idea, an inception, that the real world isn’t all there is to this life. Or at least that there are parts of this real life that are hidden and not normally accessible. God is very real, just like a dream, but that doesn’t mean he is knowable, just like a dream.
Like Cobb I am powerfully drawn home and like Lewis, if that home is only a dream or myth then I’ll take that over reality any day.
This is story telling at it’s best. Christopher Nolan takes his time and shows the discovered truth. Thankfully his top still spins.
