This discussion is not intended to be a detailed review of the movie, but it is a discussion of themes and events in the movie. So I expect it to be a spoiler for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie. If this is a concern for you, I suggest you stop reading here.
I finally saw Inception! It was one of the few movies I really wanted to see this summer, but we never made it. A cheap second-run theater in town had it, so Luta and I went last weekend and finally saw it. The biggest frustration were the people talking to the movie, or in one case about their phone that went off during the movie. But the movie itself was awesome. Totally love it! It’s not as twisty and shocking as some other Christopher Nolan films (like Memento or The Prestige), but I still found it to be challenging. Once again Nolan raises questions of reality, and how do we know what is real? And the whole exploration of dreams and how things impact our dreams, and how we can be in a dream and only kinda know it… Well, I loved it.
But there was an element of the film that I had seen nowhere in trailers. The trailers mention dreams, and stealing secrets, but that’s not what inception is. Stealing an idea is extraction; inception is planting an idea in someone’s mind. Which of course can’t be done, so of course the “hero” of the film claims it can be. So the whole movie is about planting an idea, not stealing one. And the idea hinges upon what I believe to be a key human drive: the desire for reconciliation. Their target has a rough relationship with his father, and so in order to convince the target to break up the company upon his father's death, they plant the idea that his father wanted him to split up the empire so that he could have a chance to build his own. The target tells us that the last word he heard his father say was "disappointed." He mourns his father, believing that despite all he has done his father was disappointed in him. However by the end of the dream layers, his subconscious alters that to being "Dad was disappointed that I tried to be like him, rather than being my own person. Dad was disappointed that I felt forced to be like him, so he wants me to have the chance to succeed and be my own person and not live under his shadow." It is a very powerful moment, when he is reconciled to his father. And as he comes back up the dream layers it sticks in his subconscious.
The desire to reconcile is indeed strong. Not strong enough to convince everyone to do it, but I do suspect that on some level that's what all people want. This should not come as a surprise to Christians. After all, the main thrust of the Bible is that God desired reconciliation with humanity so much, that God was willing to sacrifice God's only Son to make reconciliation possible. It should therefore come as no surprise that we, as God's creation made in God's image, desire reconciliation as well.
2 comments:
The other element of reconciliation, is Leonardo DiCaprio's character 'reconciling' with the idea he planted and the loss of his wife.
You're right, I missed that in this post! The main character is looking for reconciliation, with his children, and with his wife (or at least his memory of her). And that drives the entire film.
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