Inception: My Movie Analysis

Inception: My Movie Analysis

A partial fulfillment in Psychology 101

By: Joey D. Bidan Jr.

I

nception is a science fiction film also categorized as a psychological thriller. For me, this film is very intellectual and for those who has not encountered psychological topics yet like, Lucid Dreaming, Shared Dreaming, Dream within a dream or Dream Layers, the subconscious mind and Dream Limbo will not be able to fully comprehend the movie's theme much.

First of all, Inception means the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious. I've heard and watched about these kinds of scenarios in movies were patients are hypnotized so that they will succumb to the hypnotist's idea. For example, you hate drinking coffee and I, the hypnotist will manipulate your subconscious (through hypnotic relaxing instructions)give you false memories so that after you wake up from hypnosis you will believe in yourself that you really love to have coffee all the time. The coffee is the idea and I just implanted it in your subconscious to make it as your own. In this movie, there was no hypnosis done. Instead, the "corporate espionage" team of Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DICaprio) will infiltrate or invade the dream of Robert Fischer, (the heir of a giant company) where he is at his most vulnerable self. In psychology, our subconscious is not within our control and this part of our mind hides our dark secrets, forgotten experiences and kept memories.

In order for the Inception mission of Dom Cobb to be successful, it requires the participants to be asleep and sedated and; all or at least one dreamer must be lucid dreaming. This allows the participants' dreams to be successfully shared through an unnamed military experimental technology. Now for those who don’t know it yet, lucid dreaming means a dreamer is aware that he is already asleep and dreaming. I've already experienced these lots of times by training myself in the real world with signs that will eventually appear in the dream world when I sleep. For example, before I sleep I will stare at the face of my clock for a few minutes. In my sleep, if I see a clock with distorted hands or weird numbers I will become aware that I am just dreaming shattering the dream world's illusion thus, elevating me to a state of lucid dreaming giving me unlimited control of my dream like flying on top of Santo Nino Church or kicking cars passing by Magsaysay Street and a lot more impossible things. This is true and you could try this for yourself too.

Anyway, back to the movie somewhere in the beginning was a scene of Dom Cobb's team already inside of Saito's dream to steal his company secrets from his subconscious mind. But it was a failure since Mal, Cobb's dead wife appears out of nowhere (from Cobb's guilty subconscious) and sabotages the mission. When the team woke up, Saito tells them that he just auditioned them so he will know if they deserved to be in a more difficult mission. He wants to hire them to perform a seemingly impossible mission of...inception. Saito wishes to break up the energy conglomerate of his ailing competitor Maurice Fischer by planting the idea in his son and heir Robert Fischer to disintegrate his father's company. In return, Saito will clear a murder charge against Cobb to return to the United States and his children. At first, the team was hesitant since Inception is theoretically impossible but Cobb says otherwise since he was able to unintentionally do it before which is - on his wife. Now I know that a lot of the audience does not understand the role of Mal, Cobb's dead wife in the movie. For me, her character is the first proof of inception. The idea is a little bit complex and for me to explain it, it has to be step by step and concept by concept.

First, there was the concept of "Dream within a Dream", layers of dream levels which is possible only if you are asleep with a powerful sedative. The movie shows the characters falling asleep even though they are already inside a dream. They have to do this so that the team could implant the idea deeper to Fischer's subconscious. Second, there was the concept of Dream Limbo a consequence of dying if you are already dreaming within a dream. Basically, if you are on the first level of dreaming you will just wake up but if you are dreaming within a dream in a deeper level you will be trapped in a Dream Limbo which would make 3 hours in the real world feel like you are there for hundreds of years already. Third, there’s the concept of "kicks" or Hypnic Jerk in psychology. This is what you experience when you fell like falling in your dream and wake up kicking on your bed. Cobb's team uses kicks like making the van roll to the cold sea; blasting the elevators upward; blasting the Snow Mountains and pushing Fischer from a balcony within Dream Limbo to wake the characters up from one dream level upward then back to reality. Finally, the weird concept of a "totem" which is a small object whose behavior only its owner can predict used to determine whether a dreamer is in someone else's dream. The spinning top is Cobb's totem. If it falls, he will be convinced that he is back to reality.

The film shows us the complexity of the human mind and how we could harness its potentials to do almost impossible things. For me, the concepts it presented are areas of psychology that needs to be researched and rediscovered. But thinking about them would make me consider if in the future inception may not only be used but also abused. Imagine people viewing the darkest, private secrets of your mind. Scary isn’t it?