INTRODUCTION
The 7th film in my
comprehensive analysis of The Films of Christopher Nolan is the mind bending Inception Nolan’s first original work since his first film Following, Inception took over 8 years to write. Initially conceived as a
smaller film, Nolan soon realized that if he was going to tell a story about
the intricacies of the mind, and the ability to navigate it, that he needed a
much wider canvas (and budget) on which to paint. From all accounts (the producers and the
director himself) Inception, as a potential film, was always in the background,
a labor of love that Nolan would work on during or in between other
projects. When The Dark Knight reached the box office record of 1 billion dollars,
Warner Bros. (the studio that has been Nolan’s most frequent studio
collaborator) gave Nolan’s Inception,
considered by them to be his “passion project”, a green light as a reward/thank
you. With multiple academy award nominations (including best original
screenplay for Nolan) and a win for Wally Pfister’s cinematography, this
“gamble” paid off for the studio both critically (86 % on Rotten Tomatoes) and
commercially bringing in a whopping $825,532,764 at the end of its box office
run.
PLOT
To stop a monopolistic energy
company, a rival competitor (Ken Wantanabe) hires Dominic Cobb (Leonardo
DiCaprio), a thief specializing in an esoteric form of psychic espionage to
plant an idea into the C.E.O’s (Cillian Murphy) mind in order to break up his
company. Tempted by the chance to return home after the death of his wife
(Marion Cotillard) Cobb assembles a team that includes: A point man (Joseph
Gordon Levitt), a forger (Tom Hardy), an architect (Ellen Page), and a chemist
(Dileep Rao) for their most difficult job…Inception.
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
“What is the most consistent parasite? ...an idea.” –
Cobb
Inception
is
a rich complex film with as many layers of social and psychological analysis as
there are layers of the dream state.
While the film often tends to identify itself as purely psychological,
blurring the lines between wakefulness and dreaming, examining how we process
loss and pain through dreaming (a form of dream therapy), and solidifying the
importance of belief. Looking at the
film sociologically though, we can see a number of themes that touch on the
social constructionism, the presentation of self, Socialization, and an allegory
to filmmaking.
“What is real is real in its consequences.”-
W.I. Thomas
Theme I: Social
Constructionism
Social
constructionism has its origins in both the sociological theoretical
perspective of Symbolic Interactionism and the earlier philosophical idea of
Pragmatism. The basic idea of Pragmatism is that what individuals consider to
be reality does not exist in any concrete space. Rather, reality is actively
created by those who live within it.
Symbolic Interactionism focuses on the individual within society having
the ability to interpret reality through the use of symbols. Symbols are
objects in social reality, both tangible and intangible, that have expressed
social meaning (Blumer 1969)[1].
These symbols are created and maintained through social interactions and
observations. Each different social setting or situation carries with it its
own set of rules and norms (and therefore a different reality) causing a type
of “shock” as the individual moves from one situation to another.
For Berger and Luckman (1966)[2],
the collective understanding and adherence to particular language, rituals,
belief systems, norms, and values shape the reality of both the individual and
the group. Therefore, the individual living within society is an active
participant in the development of both the collective consciousness of a group
of people, and her/his own perception of the world. This is because as we try to interpret and understand the rules and
norms of reality by interacting and observing other people, by that very same
action we are creating reality. This is because our actions in society are
observed and analyzed by others for their own understanding. To them, our
actions become social messages to regulate their own behavior. This is what Berger and Luckmann (1966)
allude to when they identify “society as objective [and] subjective reality”
(p. 47-183).
Berger
and Luckmann (1966) illustrate this in the following passage:
The reality of
everyday life further presents itself to
me as an intersubjective world, a world I share with others. This
intersubjectivity sharply differentiates everyday life from other realities of
which I am conscious. I am alone in the world of my dreams, but I know that the
world of everyday life is as real to others as it is to myself. Indeed, I
cannot exist in everyday life without continually interacting and communicating
with others. I know that my natural attitude to this world corresponds to the
natural attitude of others…Most importantly, I know there is ongoing
correspondence between my meanings and their meanings in this world, that we
share a common sense about reality…The reality of everyday life is often taken
for granted as reality…It is simply there…I know that it is real. While I am capable of engaging in doubt about
its reality, I am obliged to suspend such doubt as I routinely exist in
everyday life. (p.23)
In the film, Cobb echoes these
sentiments when he explains the concept of shared dreaming; that in the dream a
person’s mind, quite efficiently, creates the world of the dream while
perceiving it at the same time. This is not unlike the way that we exist within
social reality. By living in society we interpret meaningful symbols but then our actions are interpreted by others to help them construct their own
reality. Thus, we are creating (for others) and perceiving ( for ourselves) reality much in the same way we do in our dreams; though
in our dreams, we do not experience the world in a linear fashion.
This scene is interesting because not only does it succinctly explain the way we socially construct
reality, but it suggests that this process can be interrupted or
manipulated. In the film, when a person
is in the dream state, they are vulnerable to manipulation and their knowledge
and secrets can be stolen through a process called extraction. Or, more
nefariously, an idea can be implanted in their head through inception. In social reality, the behaviors of
extraction and inception are performed through the process of Socialization,
the clearest examples of which come from media advertising and the
manufacturing of desire.
Theme II:
Socialization is Inception.
Socialization is the process of
social learning that individuals have to go through staring in childhood and
ending at a person’s death. This is a
life-long process because we do not have the intellectual capacity when we are
children to fully understand all of the roles and responsibilities that we will
take on as an adult. Therefore, information and learning is broken up into more
manageable/digestible pieces, segmented and separated by elaborate “rites of
passage” administered through complex agents
of socialization.[3]
It is this process, and these agents, that shape how we see the world. Therefore
our perception of the world, and our interactions within it can be manipulated.
One of the best examples of such
manipulation is through advertising. It
is the goal of advertising to manufacture desire for a particular product or
service. This advertising is done in a
variety of different ways: through entertainment (making a product feel
exciting and a gateway to a “good time”), through the appeal to the past (usually
using nostalgic images and music to appeal to a person’s childhood/youth) or by
using sex (which is predominantly done by the sexualizing and dismembering of
women’s bodies). This has become so much
a part of our culture that a lot of it has an unconscious effect. Yet, this unconscious effect does not just
apply to our desire for goods and services. Jean Kilbourne (1999)[4]
identifies that when ads are created they do more than just sell products; they
sell values and ideals about what is acceptable and normal in our society. Thus, through a catchy jingle, or a childhood
memory, these subtle ideas about what is sexy, acceptable human value, race and
ethnicity, masculinity and femininity are “inceptioned”
into us; meanwhile allowing us to think that our perception of the world (and
how we think about it) are solely our own.
Theme III: The
Presentation of Self.
“When an individual enters into the presence
of others, they commonly seek to acquire
information about him or to bring into play information about him
already possessed.” Goffman 1959: 1)[5]
The presentation of self is theory of
self-construction. Erving Goffman in his
doctoral dissertation, postulated that if we observe and interact to make sense
out of the world (see above) at some point we realize that others are doing the
exact same thing and looking at us for that information. Therefore, according to Goffman (1959), we
attempt to control how other people see us, to maintain a particular impression
about how we are perceived in the minds of our onlookers; whom Goffman (1959)
calls our “audience” (p.17).
We constantly perform for numerous
audience members for each specific impression we have. Whether it be at home
with your family, out with your friends, or at work, this performance is always
on. In these different spaces we use different language, different mannerisms
we engage in conversations about different things, in hopes to be seen a
particular way by our different audiences.
This process can be so powerful that the performer can “be taken in by
his own act; he can be sincerely convinced he can be sincerely convinced that
the impressions of reality that he stages is the real reality” (Goffman 1959:
17). However, even those of us who are
not taken in by our own performance understand that we don’t perform all of our
impressions at once, there are certain settings for a performance what Goffman
(1959) calls stages/regions.
These stages/regions are typically
divided into a binary: the front stage/region and the back stage/region. The front stage is given to the name where
the performance takes place, and the back stage is given to the area where the
performance is dropped and worked on (Goffman 1959: 107). Goffman also looks at
the way that social settings are constructed and notices that a majority of the
social world we live in is divided into frontages and back stages. We even do this psychologically, we give a
performance in a particular social setting, but when we leave that setting, or
we are not in front of that audience, our performance (for that particular
impression) is dropped. It is this constant raising and dropping of
performances that may highlight weakness in our own impressions. For that,
Goffman (1959) says we need teamwork and tact.
Teamwork is “any set of individuals who co-operate
in staging a single routine” (Goffman 1959: 79). An example of which could be a teacher and
her/his students creating and maintaining an impression of a classroom to any
outside observer (whom would become their audience). Tact is a set of behaviors that are employed by
team members, or sympathetic audience members, when an impression begins
to fail. Whether this is directly helping to smooth over cracks in a person’s
impression (as a team member might), or to ignoring those cracks when they occur, tact is a number of behaviors
an audience member might use to maintain the overall impression structure. Essentially, tact is used to protect a person’s impression,
because if one person’s impression fails, that puts all of the impressions in
jeopardy.
The presentation of self in Inception are the projections.
Projections in the film are images of people or objects in the dream that are “projected”
by the sleeper’s subconscious. This also includes the way each dreamer
looks. The way each person on the team
looks in the dream is a representation of how they see themselves or how they
want to be seen. Thus through this dream “projection” they are trying to
maintain a particular impression. If you look closely, each character has
subtle differences in their appearance that says something about
self-construction. Most commonly these differences are in clothing and
hairstyle; they tend to be more groomed with more expensive clothes this gets
into what Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “taste”[6]
(which can be used to determine social class positions). It seems however that in order to get at the
socially constructed self of the characters in the film, you need to look at
their totems.
A totem (in the film) acts as an anchor
allowing the dream sharer to know when they are in reality and when they are
dreaming. It is a specific object that is unique to each person that has a
special property which only that person knows about. The way that the totem
acts and/or feels in the dream and in reality allow the dreamer to tell the
difference.
Totems we see in the film and what they
mean:
Dream Reality
Cobb: Wedding Ring Wearing it on his left hand Not wearing it
Mal: Top Spinning
will never stop Will
stop naturally
Arthur: Weighted Die Weighted side not down Weighted side down
Ariadne: Golden Bishop Will not fall correctly Fall on weighted side
Eames:
Poker
chip Multiplies
when rubbed together Nothing
happens
In regards to the presentation of self,
I find it very interesting that Cobb’s totem is his wedding ring and he only
wears it in the dream. Is it because he can only see the projection of Mal in
the dream, and therefore the only place he still feels married? Cobb does say to
Ariadne that “in his dreams they are still together”. I wonder (in the context
of the story) if this started after Mal’s death or if this was his totem before
(because in the film he mostly uses Mal’s). Did he use the totem in the same
way to distinguish reality before? This could also just be a clever way for the
film makers to allow the audience to keep track of whether or not they are
seeing a dream.
Mal is the other great example of the
presentation of self. In the film, we never see the real Mal. She is either
seen in flashbacks where she is depicted as mentally ill due to Cobb’s
successful inception, or she is portrayed as Cobb’s projection of her. Therefore, we are never given a clear image
of who Mal was, all we get is Cobb’s poor facsimile of her, and how he saw her
through what he could glean off of her own impression management.
“I
can’t imagine you with all of your complexity, with all your perfection and
imperfection. Look at you. You’re just a shade, a shade of my real wife. I am
sorry, it’s just not good enough.”- Cobb
While
I find this quote to be beautifully written and hauntingly romantic. I also
think this allowed Nolan to cop out a little bit.
In so many of Nolan’s films haven’t been a
showcase for women. Many of his stories (as brilliant as they are) are about white
dudes with angst. Angst that they have to solve by the end of the film. The one
thing that I can say about Inception is
that Nolan gave himself a creative and plausible way of dodging gender equality
(that does not even pass the Bachdel test) by making Mal’s shallow
one-dimensional “fem fatale” portrayal an important plot point. Additionally,
the character of Ariadne is very important to the team, she is the architect of
the dream space that is better than Cobb, and she acts as Cobb’s confidant. She
is the eyes through which we get to know Cobb.
However, it does irk me a bit that we never see her build any of the
dreamscapes we see later in the film, or that the majority of the time she is
having things explained to her, rather than doing something.
Theme IV:
Allegory to Filmmaking
Christopher Nolan loves film. Even though his
formal training is in literature, he has talked at great length about the power
of film to transform, allowing for experimental storytelling and an immersive
audience experience. It makes sense then that Inception, one of his most personal films (and original work),
would have a commentary on the filmmaking process.
Doing press for the film, Nolan
mentioned that the main cast represents key roles in the filmmaking
process. Cobb is the director, Mal represents the parts of the director that she or he puts into the film (Cobb’s
children is a metaphor for the film being a director’s “baby”), Arthur is the
producer/DP, Ariadne is the production designer, Eames is the actor, Yusuf is
visual effects director, Saito is the studio executive and Fisher represents
the audience. It is through Fisher’s role that Nolan’s commentary and
filmmaking pedagogy is displayed.
Through Fisher’s actions and the way
that the other characters interact with him Nolan is commenting on the nature
and power of film itself. Like Fisher, the audience is the target for the filmmaker,
to make them believe in a particular situation.
Sometimes this can be heavy handed through the use of exposition and a
common mistake of telling the audience something rather than showing them. Nolan brilliantly parodies this in Inception when the team runs the “Mr.
Charles Gambit” on Fisher making him aware that he is dreaming.
As in the clip, the filmmaking technique to
make the audience aware that they are watching a movie (taking them out of the
experience) is risky. But when it is done properly, as I think Nolan does here,
it can get the audience to go along with
you on the journey, the way that Fisher joins the team in the second level
of the dream state; working with the filmmakers to construct a new situation. Nolan seems to suggest that the
willingness for people to be a film audience presupposes that they are
(usually) on the side of the filmmakers; wanting to suspend disbelief and be
transported through storytelling. This
is similar to Goffman’s use of teamwork to create a social situation (see
above). In fact, the title card at the
end of the film reveals that you, the audience, have just experienced inception
by watching the film. The idea of
the story has been successfully implanted in your head, and no one knows, not
even the filmmakers, how the story will affect you; it could be a minuscule form of entertainment or it could completely change your whole social
viewpoint. For Nolan, that is the true
power of film.
PRODUCTION
Script
As was mentioned earlier, the script
took 10 years to complete. Originally written as a spec script presented to the
studio after Insomnia Nolan opted to
work on it a bit more, fleshing out the dream world by constructing diagrams of
the levels of the dreams and solidifying the rules of this universe. To that end, Nolan only mentions the origin
of the shared dreaming technology once, in what seems like a throwaway line Arthur
says:
“Shared
dreaming was originally designed by the military to allow soldiers to simulate
combat. They could kill each other over and over again without getting hurt.”
As
a sociologist, I find this deeply intriguing. This seems so plausible that it
scares me. It makes me wonder if Nolan is trying to make some type of veiled
social commentary about the military and technology, much in the same way he
gives the same sort of commentary about terrorism, and social class in the
later films of The Dark Knight Trilogy. To
me this statement could be easily applied to the way that the US military uses military
video games as both a recruitment tool, and a way for current soldiers to brush
up on battle tactics, hand eye coordination, and desensitization to violence
and war.
Visual F/X
Like his previous films, Nolan
does not use a second unit. All of the
shots are composed by Nolan and Director of Photography Wally Pfister. To that end, there is a level of consistency
throughout all of Nolan films. There is never a shot or a sequence that seems
out of place or not to Nolan’s sensibilities. In this film, what I found
interesting is the way that Nolan frames the dream world. I can only imagine
how much of a challenge this must have been, balancing the abstract nature of
dreaming with the structure of the film so that the audience isn’t alienated. This seems to be a bit easier for a director
like Nolan who consistently uses a non-linear story structure, which lends
itself to be able to tell a story set in the dreamscape.
Another Nolan trade mark is the
greater use of practical effects over CGI.
The biggest asset used in the practical effects of Inception is air cannons.
Air cannons were used to simulate the destruction of the Paris café, and
the kick that Cobb receives in the beginning of the film. The practical effects team even used cherry pickers
and black screens to track and block out the sun when they were shooting a rain
scene in sunny downtown LA during the summer of 2009.
The greatest example of the use of
practical effects is the gimble used in the rotating hallway scene. Inspired by
Kubrick’s use of the rotating set in 2001:
A Space Odyssey. Team Nolan created a hallway set (simulating the second
level of the Dream, Arthur’s level) that was able to rotate 180 degrees.
Cameras were mounted on the set to give the feeling of the rotation of the
room, while a crane mounted camera was uses to get the stable wide shots making
the action seem like it was taking place in shifting gravity.[7]
When the scene eventually shifts from
rotating gravity to zero gravity Team Nolan broke the sequence up into three
segments; in each segment they used a different rig to simulate the
weightlessness, effectively hiding the camera tricks from the audience. It is
sequences like this prove Nolan and Pfister to be amazing filmmakers and
supports Pfister being garnered with an Oscar for his work on the film. Special mention needs to be given to the
dedication and stamina of Joseph Gordon-Levitt who did the majority of his
stunts in this scene. Gordon-Levitt was
on the rotating set (having to learn a complex fight choreography in the
process) and on each of the three different rigs used in the zero gravity scene
in order to maintain the investment of the audience in the situation.
Music
Once again, Hans Zimmer is charged with
bringing musicality and lyrical life to Nolan’s films. Using the foundation of an Edith Pilaf song
(who Marion Cotillard played in La vie En Rose to win an Oscar) heard in the
film Zimmer constructs this masterpiece:
However
is a common misconception that Zimmer wrote this piece used in the third
trailer
Direction
It is a shame that Nolan wasn’t even nominated
for a best directing Oscar for this film. The film was nominated for a much
deserved best picture Oscar, although I assume this was a political move because
The Dark Knight wasn’t nominated for
best picture in 2008. The directing techniques used in this film to maintain
such a complex story a float while being able deliver spectacular set pieces
needs to be recognized and it consistently makes me angry that Nolan has been
passed over time and time again for much deserved recognition. The fact that Nolan has NOT been honored in
this way, proves to me that American cinema, and the majority of American
audiences, have lost the desire for the filmmaking craft and just want to see paper
thin stories held together by blurry CGI nonsense. YES! I am looking at YOU
Zack Snyder and Michael Bay!
CONCLUSION
This is my favorite, non-Batman Nolan
film to date. It is also one of the most Sociological films I have reviewed to
date. It is a great film with complexity of characters and story that does not
pander to the lifeless idiot masses that are just looking for escapism. Nolan
returns us to the craft of filmmaking that is rapidly eroding through the use
of technology, sluggish box office results, and unwillingness of the audience to
be enthralled. It is my hope, with Interstellar
Nolan will be able to capture the magic of the film in such a way that
ushers in a new era of well-crafted and critically successful filmmaking.
[1] Herbert
Blumer (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. p. vii
[2] Peter Berger
and Thomas Luckmann (1966). The Social
Construction of Reality: A treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge New York:
Anchor Books.
[3] The
individuals, organizations and institutions that assist in the process of
socialization throughout the life course (trajectory) of an individual. They
include: The family, daycare, schools, peer groups, the workforce and the
media.
[4] Jean Kilbourne
(1999). “Socialization and the Power of Advertising” In Seeing Ourselves: Readings in Sociology 7th edition eds.
Nijole Benekrautis New York: Pearson.
[6] Taste is the idea
that through the consuming of products, entertainment and other aspects of
culture, a person can maintain a false impression. The careful
manipulation/display of taste, can result in having a false consciousness to
your actual social position in society.
[7] Geek Aside: The fight choreography that takes place
in the rotating hallway and in simulated zero gravity it excellent. It is full
of practical real world and useful martial arts techniques: the taisabaki
throw, brush, grab strike (aka hand pass) wrist locks and ground fighting front
guard top choke. Bravo!
