For a change from the political, I thought I’d talk about the film INCEPTION, which I saw last night with my wife. We both quite enjoyed it.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Avert you eyes if you don’t want to know what happens in the film INCEPTION. If you do, however, please read on and feel free to leave your own comments.
Here is my theory:
The whole thing is a dream…Cobb’s dream. And not only is it a dream, but it’s a dream involving a hero’s quest, aka the Monomyth. We know this is Cobb’s dream because of the characters involved. Each fulfills the role of a particular Jungian archetype. The breakdown is as follows:
a) Cobb – The Hero. Cobb seems like somewhat of an antihero. He gets his friends into trouble. He is driven by selfish impulses. He has no qualms with using people to achieve his goals. Yet, none of these things bars him from being a hero in the Joseph Campbell/Carl Jung sense. Moreover, the plot revolves around him, and his story follows the pattern of the Hero’s Journey perfectly. (i.e. call to adventure, faces challenges, gets help from other archetypal characters like the sage, dies, acquires a boon, is reborn, faces and overcomes his challenge, re-enters what he perceives as the “real world” as a changed man.
b) Arthur – The Ego. Arthur is clinical at his job. He is clean-cut, well behaved, and able to do his job without getting into too much trouble. Sure, he’s a bit boring…but ultimately he’s good at what he does. The one time he does appear to screw up is less his fault than it was a result of unforeseen sabotage by Cobb’s unconscious projections. Arthur has all the hero qualities Cobb wants to have; he is all killer, no filler. He also has no emotional baggage.
c) Mal – The Shadow/Femme Fatale. Mal plays a dual role in the film. She is Cobb’s shadow; his base of repressed emotion, particularly guilt and regret. The shadow is projects as Mal because something about her life and death is the greatest cause of the negative emotion. And because Cobb is unable to face that emotion, she plays the role of Femme Fatale…the deadly prize.
d) Saito – The Father. Cobb’s father is in the film, but he doesn’t play the archetypal role of father. That falls to Saito. The Father figure in archetypal imagery is a very dominant one, sometimes almost limitless in power. Saito controls the story. He sets the quest. He pays the bills. He is judge of success and failure. And he has the god-like power to change the world for Cobb all with a simple phone call.
e) Eames – The Trickster. This one is perhaps the most obvious. He changes shapes and becomes other people at will. He even switches genders when he needs to. His entire function was to trick the subject of the mission.
f) Robert Fisher – The Child. Cobb sees much of himself in Fisher, who only wants to please and live up to his father’s expectations. In the scene with Cobb and his father in the lecture hall, there is enough of this yearning to see the relationships between fathers and sons are reflections of one another. But as I said before, the stronger daddy role in the archetypal sense falls to Saito, and since this entire mission is meant to please Saito and earn his acceptance in order to obtain salvation, the parallels are quite striking.
g) Miles (Cobb’s Dad) – The Sage. While he isn’t particularly sage like in the way of Obi Wan Kenobi, Cobb’s father does two key things. First, he is the person who first gave the knowledge of brain architecture and the understanding of dreams to Cobb. Second, he supplies Cobb with a guide and a boon; a secret weapon he will use to fulfill his quest.
h) Ariadne – The Guide/Boon. I’m certain the name Ariadne will escape no one. In mythology, she provided the thread to Theseus, which he used to navigate the Minotaur’s labyrinth without fear, knowing he could find his way out. So in this way she guides him. She is also his secret weapon – Ariadne’s Thread – as he uses her as a supreme architect of the world in which he will complete his quest, and relies on her sole knowledge of his deep subconscious, and her ability to improvise and find variations to solve puzzles – to achieve his goal. In the end, Ariadne does improvise, by shooting Mal and saving Cobb before disappearing.
i) Yusef – The Self. I saved him for last, because in the Jungian model, the other archetypes (ego, shadow, etc) live within a greater shell called The Self. The self, with its composite parts, is who we are as individuals. It is the primary archetype, without which we could not process our world through individuation. Because he is the provider of sleep and is also responsible for waking, he is the link between the unconscious and conscious worlds; and between the inner and outer. He is the facilitator for the other characters to exist within the dream realm, and as such, can be seen as the shell in which the story exists.
So what does all of this tell us?
I believe it tells us that this is Cobb’s story. He is the only multidimensional character, capable of understanding the complex layers of the human psyche. The other characters are mostly one dimensional, and play specific functions within his heroic journey.
But what exactly is Cobb’s story? What is Cobb’s journey? What is the point of it all?
In a word…Cobb’s word…CATHARSIS.
Everything in this film, from start to finish, is a dream. The whole story plays as a loop – like the staircase without beginning or end. In the movie, dreams are described this way too. Furthermore, the use of the totem points to the dream world as well. In the story, each person had his or her own totem – their own link to reality – which was only to be familiar to that person alone. Cobb, however, did not have his own totem…and therefore, did not have his own reality. Instead, he had Mal’s totem, meaning that HIS reality was actually HER reality. And since she is dead – and I do believe she is dead – he is unwilling to accept his reality, and has instead claimed her world for his own. Essentially, Cobb is consumed by his deceased wife…in the emotional, rather than in the zombie sense.
So where does the catharsis come in?
After the mission is finished; that is, after he has reconciled his feelings about Mal and rescued his father-figure (Saito) he is finally able to return his children and see their faces. But as the movie ends, we are led to believe Cobb is still dreaming because of the spinning top totem. I would argue that he is, in fact, still dreaming, and that the purpose of the entire episode is as follows:
Mal, Cobb’s wife, is dead. We don’t know how she died, but we can assume it was suicide…though perhaps not as is shown in the film. He is, of course, torn up about it. He feels responsible and guilty for what happened, and as such, he cannot bear to face his children (in the emotional sense), having in his own mind deprived them of a mother. (Note how Cobb also has no relationship with his own mother). He feels like a terrible father, and is convinced that reconciliation between a father and his children is not possible given such circumstances. However, through his Heroic Journey, Cobb undergoes a transformation. By the end of the trials, having delved deeper and deeper into his subconscious, he is finally able to forgive himself for Mal’s tragedy and he lets her go. He also reconciles with the father figure, Saito, proving to him that fathers can rebuild relationships with their children. He then awakens (from the dream within the dream) to find himself back where he wants to be: with his kids, and at peace. And while we never actually see Cobb wake up to the real world, we can infer that when he does, he will have achieved the peace within his own psyche to be a man transformed.
In short, this entire movie was a dream sequence in which a man, wrought with guilt and suffering under the burden of feeling utterly incapable as a widower-father, seeks peace with his own emotions in order to pick up the pieces and finally begin to live again.
What do you think?
