Inception and Philosophy

Because It's Never Just a Dream

David Kyle Johnson, William Irwin, David Kyle Johnson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118168912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A philosophical look at the movie Inception and its brilliant metaphysical puzzles

Is the top still spinning? Was it all a dream? In the world of Christopher Nolan's four-time Academy Award-winning movie, people can share one another's dreams and alter their beliefs and thoughts. Inception is a metaphysical heist film that raises more questions than it answers: Can we know what is real? Can you be held morally responsible for what you do in dreams? What is the nature of dreams, and what do they tell us about the boundaries of "self" and "other"? From Plato to Aristotle and from Descartes to Hume, Inception and Philosophy draws from important philosophical minds to shed new light on the movie's captivating themes, including the one that everyone talks about: did the top fall down (and does it even matter)?

• Explores the movie's key questions and themes, including how we can tell if we're dreaming or awake, how to make sense of a paradox, and whether or not inception is possible
• Gives new insights into the nature of free will, time, dreams, and the unconscious mind
• Discusses different interpretations of the film, and whether or not philosophy can help shed light on which is the "right one"
• Deepens your understanding of the movie's multi-layered plot and dream-infiltrating characters, including Dom Cobb, Arthur, Mal, Ariadne, Eames, Saito, and Yusuf

An essential companion for every dedicated Inception fan, this book will enrich your experience of the Inception universe and its complex dreamscape.

PART ONE

WAS MAL RIGHT? WAS IT ALL JUST A DREAM?:MAKING SENSE OF INCEPTION

CHAPTER 1

WAS IT ALL A DREAM?: WHY NOLAN’S ANSWER DOESN’T MATTER

Ruth Tallman

Your world is not real. Simple little thought that changes everything. So certain of your world, of what’s real. Do you think [Cobb] is? Or do you think he is as lost as I was?

—Mal

Inception is anything but straightforward. If nothing else, the fact that the final scene cuts to black before we see whether the top falls leaves the movie open to many interpretations. Of course, figuring out whether Cobb is still in a dream is not the same as figuring out the “meaning” of the film. But the two questions are closely related, as are the questions one must ask in order to answer them. It seems that the movie doesn’t give us enough information to settle these questions, so how will we find answers? Where do we look? Is there a single answer? If Christopher Nolan, the director of Inception, told us what he thought, would that settle it?

These questions are not new, nor are they unique to this particular film. Good works of art are usually not straightforward. They challenge us, confuse us, and leave us wondering what we “should have” or “were supposed to” get from them. We worry that we might have missed the point, or misunderstood, or made a mistake in our understanding of the artwork. And when we have these concerns, when we disagree with one another about the “right” understanding of an artwork, quite often the go-to solution is to find out what the artist intended the work to mean. So, many people think, if Christopher Nolan thought the top fell, then we have our answer—the top fell. The idea here is that the artist, as the creator who gave life to the work, is privileged to determine the meaning and proper understanding of the artwork; if anyone has the authority to say, “Sorry, you just got it wrong,” it’s the artist. This position, known as intentionalism, will be discussed below.

But is this right? Does the creator of an artwork have such power over his creation? Let’s look at this question. After considering some views and arguments, I think you will agree that the answer is no. In fact, I think you’ll see that Christopher Nolan would agree as well.

The Major Interpretations

Determining whether or not the top fell at the end of the movie should, it is believed, indicate whether Cobb and Saito made it out of Limbo. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Remember when they went to that basement full of men who shared forty hours of dream-time every day? Cobb tried Yusuf’s heavy sedative, and the dream was so deep that Cobb spun his top in the bathroom to make sure he had come out of the dream. But if you recall, he knocked the top over before it fell on its own. The whole rest of the movie could be a dream!

In fact, the entire movie could be a dream. After all, Mal and Cobb entered Limbo while “exploring the concept of a dream within a dream.” What assurance do we have that when they exited Limbo, they didn’t simply rise into a second or third layer of dreaming—like Ariadne and Fischer did when they exited Limbo at the end of the film? Consider that after Cobb assures his Limbo projection of Mal of his knowledge of reality, she retorts, “No creeping doubts? Not feeling persecuted, Dom? Chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces? The way the projections persecute the dreamer?” Even part of Cobb, it seems, is not really sure the real world is real. Maybe Mal was right. Maybe she didn’t commit suicide. Maybe she woke up.

All in all, it seems that there are four major interpretations of Inception.

The “Most Real” Interpretation: Cobb and his crew exist in waking time except for when we are clearly told they are entering dream states. Cobb’s wife, Mal, is dead, having killed herself as she tried to “wake up” from her real life, which she believed was a dream. The movie ends with Cobb and Saito exiting Limbo and Cobb finally able to return home to his children in reality.

The “Mostly Real” Interpretation: Just like the most real interpretation, except that Cobb and Saito do not fully awake into reality, but into some other part of Limbo or some other dream. Thus, Cobb does not make it back to his children in reality.

The “Mostly Dream” Interpretation: What Cobb thinks is reality is reality, including Mal’s death. However, when he tries out Yusuf’s heavy sedative in his basement, he gets trapped in a dream that is the rest of the movie.

The “Full Dream” Interpretation: The entire movie is a dream, which takes place on several different dream levels, all in Cobb’s head. When Cobb and Mal woke up from Limbo, they only woke up into a layer of dreaming they had created to enter Limbo in the first place.1 They spent so long in Limbo that they forgot, and only because Cobb had incepted Mal in Limbo did Mal think it was a dream, attempt suicide, and wake up. (Perhaps she woke up in reality, perhaps in another layer of dreaming.) None of the other characters are anything but projections of Cobb’s subconscious. Even if Cobb did return to what he thought were his real children, in the real world, he is still only dreaming.2

So which interpretation is correct?

Clues from the Work

One method used to determine which interpretation of an artwork is “correct” involves an internal analysis of the work—what clues does the work itself offer? Sometimes the work gives us a pretty clear-cut answer, but a blessing and a curse of Inception is its ambiguity. Proponents of the Most Real view will point out that Cobb’s children, Phillipa and James, are played by actors who are two years older in the final scene, and that their clothing is also different in the last shot, lending credence to the view that the children have aged and Cobb really has made it home.3

Defenders of the “Mostly Real” hypothesis will argue that the children may only dress differently and look older because Cobb expects them to, and that his expectations determine the content of his dream. In addition, we never see Cobb or Saito commit suicide in Limbo, and the final sequences of the movie seem dreamlike (the film is very slow and jumps from scene to scene with no explanation). Last, the top seems to spin for much longer than is natural.

Proponents of the “Full Dream” hypothesis will point to the many dreamlike elements that the real world possesses. Cobb himself informed us, through a conversation with the dream architect, Ariadne, that a way to know that you’re dreaming is that you can’t explain how you got to your present location. We see such jumps quite often in the real world, including when Cobb mysteriously enters his father-in-law’s classroom in Paris without opening the door. In this same scene, Cobb’s father-in-law, Miles, implores him to “come back to reality.” Of course, we might be meant to take that as a metaphorical reality check. And maybe Cobb opened the door so quietly that Miles didn’t hear it. But wait a minute—how did Mal get to the ledge across from the hotel room she and Cobb frequented? Are the two ledges connected? Who’s to say? That’s actually the problem, right?4 When two careful viewers struggle with the same data and cannot agree on an answer, chances are that one of them is simply getting something wrong. But that’s not what we’re dealing with here. We’re dealing with thousands of viewers, many of them very careful, repeatedly studying the work and struggling to find “the answer.” Yet disagreement persists. It seems that Nolan simply has not given us enough information to determine “the correct understanding” of the film. Nolan himself addressed this issue in an interview. After acknowledging how many viewers have asked him for “answers” regarding the correct understanding of the film, he says:

There can’t be anything in the film that tells you one way or another because then the ambiguity at the end of the film would just be a mistake. It would represent a failure of the film to communicate something. But it’s not a mistake. I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film.5

What Nolan Says

So an internal analysis tells us that the film is ambiguous, and Nolan says he made it that way on purpose. Yet Nolan claims to have an “answer” to the meaning of the film. He says:

I’ve always believed that if you make a film with ambiguity, it needs to be based on a sincere interpretation. If it’s not, then it will contradict itself, or it will be somehow insubstantial and end up making the audience feel cheated. I think the only way to make ambiguity satisfying is to base it on a very solid point of view of what you think is going on, and then allow the ambiguity to come from the inability of the character to know, and the alignment of the audience with that character.6

Clearly, Nolan thinks part of the magic of an ambiguous artwork is that the audience, like the characters, and like real-life human beings, must decide what to believe in the face of incomplete evidence. A work of art from a God’s-eye view, in which there is no question about how events are to be understood, rings far less true than a work that forces us to make decisions without full knowledge. And this is part of the beauty of Inception. Yet many viewers are still wedded to the idea that there is an answer, a secret to be unlocked, and that the answer lies in Nolan’s intention when he created the work. Even if he refuses to tell us what it was, these viewers feel, since Nolan intended a particular interpretation when he created the film, that’s the right answer and any view that runs contrary to that is incorrect.

Why We Shouldn’t Care What Nolan Says

Again, figuring out the “meaning” of Inception is not the same thing as figuring out how much of the movie is a dream. The meaning question, and how it relates to the dream question, is an entirely different issue. But what philosophers have said about meaning, and how to grasp the meaning of art, can help us determine how to interpret the plot of Inception.

Many philosophers accept intentionalism, the view that the artist’s intention determines the meaning of the artwork.7 But I think that such an approach fails, for three reasons. First, the intentionalist view leaves us with an epistemic (knowledge-related) problem regarding many artworks; many end up either having an unknowable meaning or no meaning at all, both of which are quite counterintuitive conclusions. Second, intentionalism forces us to understand artworks as interpretively static, when they don’t seem to be. Third, intentionalism is inconsistent with the view that the concept of art is a social convention that, properly understood, means that artworks are the collective property of the art world.

The Epistemic Problem

This objection stems from the problem that if the meaning of an artwork is rooted in the intention of the artist, we are left with an interpretive hole regarding many works of art. Nolan tells us that he has an answer regarding Inception, but that he plans to keep it a secret. This means that if Nolan gets to set the meaning of the work, the rest of us will simply never know the “right answer” regarding the way we ought to interpret the film. Now, maybe one day Nolan will crack and give us his answer (I doubt it), but what’s worse is that many artists report that they simply did not intend any particular meaning when they created their works, arguing that their only intention was for each viewer to find her own meaning in the piece (J. R. R. Tolkien made this claim regarding The Lord of the Rings in the introduction to that work).8 Regardless of that intention, if artworks really obtain their meaning through artist’s endorsement, we’re forced to conclude that these works are simply meaningless, because their artists didn’t see fit to give them one. And that doesn’t seem right.

Another problem is that some artists appear to change their interpretive account of their works over time, perhaps because they themselves are unsure of the meaning or perhaps because they perceive some benefit from rewriting their account (maybe to accord with a particular political agenda or to cash in on a new trend). In fact, they may even change their mind about how they think the work ought to be understood, or come to view it in a new way. (For instance, Christopher Nolan claimed in an interview that he never detected the connections between filmmaking and the dream-sha...