BY Radheyan Simonpillai
The lights come up and it feels like you’ve woken up from a dream. Were you asleep? Or were you at the movies? Sometimes the distinction between the two is oblique, and riding that fine line is Christopher Nolan’s latest fantasia Inception.
The sci-fi blockbuster stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, an expert dream snatcher who preys on CEO types when they’re most vulnerable: sleeping. Cobb and his team of architects and forgers create artificial dreamscapes in which their marks unwittingly project private emotions and ideas for the taking.
It’s not so difficult to see the parallel between Cobb’s team and that of Nolan’s, or any other filmmaker for that matter. Filmmakers are dream weavers who construct an artificial world from shadows of reality, allowing the audiences to project themselves into this new reality: the cinema, or the “dream factory” as it’s often called. With Inception, Nolan tips his hat at this very historic metaphor. By making a movie about dreams, Nolan is essentially making a movie about movies.
Cinema and Dreams
The relationship between dreams and movies, oneiric theory as it’s called, has been debated since silent cinema by such heady authors as Christian Metz, Jacques Lacan, Jean Louis Baudry, and Roland Barthes. Filmmakers like Jean Epstein have often cited cinema’s dreamlike quality, and we often see directors, from Luis Bunuel to David Lynch, mimic dreams on the screen.
Essential to this relationship is the interpretive qualities of both dreams and movies. Both restructure day-to-day life into a narrative.
The camera records bits and pieces of reality onto a film strip and then the cinema projects the shadows of that reality into a neatly ordered dramatization. Shadows of reality produce their own deceptive reality in cinema, as in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
The psychology of dreams
Dreams function in a similar manner. In On Dreams, Freud argues that dreams produce a visual representation and dramatization of private thoughts and emotions. In On the Nature of Dreams, Jung further elaborates that dreams develop a dramatic structure, with exposition, setting, characters, and plot. There are often conflicts that need resolution, a resolve that may not come if the subconscious can’t fathom one.
Consider the role of both the dreamer and the cinematic spectator. Like the dreamer, the audience rests their heads in a dark room, assuming a passive position as if to sleep. Neither can assume control of what they see, as if they watch objectively. However, in both cases, subjectivity intervenes. Private thoughts and emotions are projected on and identified within the dreamscape. The dream and the movie becomes one’s own experience.
In fact, the dreamer/spectator’s claim to objectivity is a little fickle. Freud would consider the objectivity claim a hypocritical defense on the part of the dreamer, so that they don’t feel responsible for the contents of the dream even though it’s their own. The cinema provides that same hypocritical safety net. The spectator, who identifies with the characters, feels comfortable that they are not actually part of the film, regardless of the fact that they are participating mentally and emotionally. So they enjoy watching gore on screen, but feel safe in knowing that they’re not actually Hannibal Lector.
Finding fulfillment
Both dreams and cinema are consoling escapes that interpret the chaotic strands of real life into a structured narrative that allows the dreamer/spectator to find fulfillment in conflict and to indulge in repressed desires.
The dilemma in the comparison between dreams and movies is that the former is private and the latter is public. However, one might argue that even though an audience shares a movie, every spectator’s experience is private (for proof, just look at how much critics’ reactions to the same movie can differ).
As an industry, cinema tries to bridge this gap, reaching the public by appealing to common private inhibitions. That is why, according to Christian Metz’s The Imaginary Signifier, movies employ identification, voyeurism and fetishism for widespread appeal. The cinema holds many people captive with one generic product, one dream that reels in every spectator’s private thoughts, emotions, fears, and repressed desires.
Dreams and Inception
Inception isn’t the first movie to tackle the relationship between dreams and movies. Freddy Krueger stalked the Elm Street kids in the same plateau, giddily suggesting that movies can still kill you, and The Matrix dreamed up an artificial reality, similar to a long-running movie, that can imprison people.
Inception imagines a future in which people can be manipulated through their dreams, while pointing to a present in which people are manipulated by movies. It’s not coincidental that the dream sequences in Inception look specifically Hollywood-like. In fact, Nolan’s film often takes the postmodernist route and cites previous movies within its dreamscapes: a snowy bullet battle reminiscent of Bond; a fight across walls and ceilings that mimics Fred Astaire’s gravity-defying dance in Royal Wedding.
Cinema’s residue
Consider how the mechanism of both dreams and movies is at play within Inception. With dreams, thoughts and emotions from the subconscious stimulate perception. With cinema, the movement is circular. Movies are an outside stimulus on the spectator’s perception that then leaves a trace memory on the subconscious. The subconscious then stimulates the perception of the movie in return, making it a private exchange.
It’s this exchange that Inception depicts. Cobb’s team, like the crafty little filmmakers they are, present their mark with a dream they’ve constructed. The mark perceives the dream that enters his subconscious, engages with it as if it was from his own subconscious and then projects his private thoughts onto it. This is where Cobb’s team hijacks those thoughts. But Nolan’s film takes one giant step further with the film’s titular heist, when Cobb and his team enter a dream not to steal an idea but to implant one.
Building a following
And there we have Nolan’s allegory to the cinema: it’s not just a consoling escape but also a pervasive influence. Like the dreams made by Cobb’s team, movies can implant ideas into the subconscious, fiddle with ideologies and treat people like puppets.
You only need to look at history’s various propaganda cinemas for proof. Look at how Soviet cinema touted its ideologies, how Hollywood cinema got America infatuated with cowboy mytholog and how D.W. Griffith’s 1915 milestone The Birth of a Nation inspired the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan. These are the “inceptions” of history and Nolan’s film serves as a reminder of that mechanism. Dreams and movies provide an alternate reality, often a preferential one, but one that can pervade the real.
How does Nolan’s film depict this mechanism without contributing to it? It helps that Inception has a postmodernist bent, referring to other movies within the movie in the same way that it depicts dreams within dreams. Like The Matrix, it reminds us that we’re in this very apparatus — the cinematic dream — identifying with shadows on a wall like the prisoner’s in Plato’s cave, projecting our deepest emotions on an artifice and leaving our private thoughts vulnerable to someone else’s influence.
Deconstructing your head
Maybe that’s deconstructing the apparatus. But then again, maybe it isn’t. After all, you wouldn’t be reading this article if Inception didn’t plant these idea into our heads.
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