Inception

I was persuaded by my three daughters to watch Christopher Nolan’s newly-released sci-fi extravanganza Inception, not my usual kind of movie but what the hell?

Written, produced and directed by Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, and Cillian Murphy, the plot sees Di Caprio as Dom Cobb, plundering the dreams of others to get information or, now here’s the rub, to instill an irresistible idea into the mind of a dreamer to change the course of history.

Entering the labyrinthine dream worlds, where reality is literally turned on its head, brought the usual sense of vertigo, not unpleasant if a little taxing.  The cast was excellent and the storyline just complex enough for the average games-playing teenager.  However, where did Nolan get his grasp of dreams from?  His own nocturnal mind wanderings? 

Ok so having Di Caprio bedevilled by a dream adversary may match a few familiar nightmares, but aren’t most of our dreams both bizarre and unexciting?  Two daughters owned to having dreams about pulling their own teeth out (one threw them at their old teacher, the other, now toothless, was beset by regret).  Another daughter confessed that hers often centred on having no clothes on.  Methinks perhaps overdue visits to the dentist and a new critical boss might account for all three.

Development of Inception began, we are told, a decade in advance when Nolan wrote an 80-pager about dream-stealers. He worked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight before getting down to the dream theme and the film finally premiered in London on July 13, 2010

Dream or reality seems to have been a familiar storyline down the years and which of us as kids didn’t write the archetypal essay that finished , painfully, ‘and then I woke up and it was all a dream?’

Of course, our dreams have provided grist to the mills of many psychologists and philosophers.  There’s Sartre with his ‘category of the unreal’,  the mental state we enter when living in our imagination , whether merely daydreaming , fantasising or in our dreams.  And we will all be familiar with Sigmund Freud’s theory that dreams are a representation of often repressed unconscious desires and thoughts, most of them, it seems, symbolising sexual organs!

Well, it seems we must try harder, for in Inception only the brightest and the best can become dream world architects, creating the complex and confabulating levels the most amazing dreams exist in. Otherwise, we will just have to continue to dream about pulling our own teeth out!

This film won’t have you pulling out molars, or your hair for that matter, but according to the offspring, it came a bit too close to Di Caprio’s previous ‘Shutter Island’ for ten years in the melting pot.

Patricia McCloughlin

Posted Tue, 07/20/2010 - 10:10 by Tricia