Inception

So, I watched 2010's Inception with my beloved brothers. We had all meant to watch it over the summer, but we just never got around to it (when you live 45 minutes from the closest movie theaters, you don't get to go as often as you'd like). So it finally came out on DVD and we watched it while eating brownies and trying to remember all the places we'd seen parodies of it so we could watch them afterwards (I still haven't looked those up). It was directed (and written and produced) by Christopher Nolan and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

So, Inception features this group of dream thieves. They go around people's brains and commit thievery. It's pretty awesome. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has got a bad past, but whatever. Dream thievery. Awesome. They are hired by a man to do a job. Not a thieving job, though. He wants them to perform an inception, planting an idea into someone else's head as opposed to the more regular taking of ideas. This is apparently far harder than it sounds. A group is gathered to convince a guy that what he really wants to do is break up his father's business empire. Really, the whole movie is a corporate espionage and caper flick all rolled up in a big ball mind screw. Though I don't think I found the movie as hard to follow as some people? I don't know, I think I followed along pretty well.

Inception features a whole lot of motifs running throughout the entire thing. These motifs include:

• trains 
• stairs
• elevators
• falling
• straight lines
• hallways/paths
• glass/windows
• mirrors
• breaking of glass/windows/mirrors
• water

Not to mention the general themes of dreams and the questioning of reality. Most of the movie is spent in some sort of dream. There is either Saito's (Ken Watanabe) dream, the various training dreams, or the various levels of Richard Fischer's (Cillian Murphy) dream. There are moment when we think that we're in reality when we're really not, making the idea of reality ambiguous throughout the film. At one point, Cobb is talking to a new dream architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), and their scene is crosscut with a scene showing Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) setting up inside a warehouse. Cobb and Ariadne start in one location and end up at a cafe after the cut. While this might just be a normal transition to show that time has passed, the whole thing is called into question when Cobb asks how they got to the cafe, a question that Ariadne can't answer, making the dream that they were in apparent. With such a normal part of movies being pointed out and questioned, it brings to the front how unnatural the cut really is, and allows every cut to be examined and question. It also raises the idea that the whole movie is dream and reminds us that no movie is real.

For a movie covered with straight lines

it is completely obsessed with circles and infinity. Cobb has Ariadne draw a maze, but she only creates the right one when she makes it a circle

All the dream walkers have a totem, an item that only they know all of the properties of, that they can use to see if they're in a dream or not. Cobb's totem is a small top; if he spins it and it never stops, then he knows that he's in a dream, showing that dreams are unending, and that real things have a clear beginning and clear ending.

Another example of infinity are the infinite staircases Arthur creates in his dreams.

These still fit the visual motifs of straight lines and staircases, they are still infinite. Arthur explains, however, that they are a closed circuit, used to create the idea of a bigger space than actually exists. So this infinite space is false, creating the idea of a space that doesn't exist, unending and unchanging. Which is kind of depressing.

Of course, the whole movie is kind of circular. The movie starts with Cobb washing up on the shore of limbo and talking to old man Saito and we then go to a flashback that lasts the entire movie to describe how Cobb got to that point. We start with this image and we repeat it, creating a circle within the narrative.

The last image we actually see in the movie is Cobb's top spinning and about to topple, but we cut away before it actually does. Cutting away creates an ambiguity of whether or not Cobb has actually escaped the dream or not.

(Personally, I think he has. The top was about to topple, which it wouldn't have done if it were the dream world.)

I'm going to leave off with a couple of shots of Arthur and Eames (Tom Hardy)

and Arthur and Ariadne,

because I love them most.