The Lost Unconscious: Delusions and Dreams in Inception
Author(s): Mark Fisher
Source: Film Quarterly , Vol. 64, No. 3 (Spring 2011), pp. 37-45
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2011.64.3.37
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Inception synthesizes the intellectual and metaphysical
puzzles of Memento and The Prestige with the big-budget ballistics of Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008).
The synthesis isn’t always satisfactory, the problem being the
prolonged action sequences, which come off as perfunctory
at best. At points, it’s as if Inception’s achievement is merely to
have provided a baroquely sophisticated motivation for the
oddly half-hearted chasing and shooting. An unsympathetic
viewer might think that the entirety of Inception’s complex
ontological structure had been built to justify clichés of action cinema—such as the ludicrous amount of things that
characters can do in the time that it takes for a van to fall
from a bridge into a river. Blogger Carl Neville complains
that Inception amounts to “three uninvolving action movies
playing out simultaneously” (theimpostume.blogspot.com/
2010/07/inception-takes-long-time-get-going-and.html).
“What could have been a fascinatingly vertiginous trip into
successively fantastic, impossible worlds, not to mention the
limbo of the raw unconscious into which a couple of the central characters plunge,” Neville argues, “ends up looking
wholly like a series of action movies, one within the other: ‘reality’ looks and feels like a ‘globalization’ movie, jumping from
Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa to Sydney with a team of basically
decent technical geniuses who are forced to live outside the
law, making sure there are lots of helicopter shots of cityscapes
and exotic local colour. Level one dream is basically The
Bourne Identity . . . rainy, grey, urban. Level two is the Matrix,
zero gravity fistfights in a modernist hotel, level three, depressingly, turns out to be a Seventies Bond film while the raw Id is
basically just a collapsing cityscape.” The “level three” snow
scenes at least resemble one of the most visually striking Bond
films—1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service— but it’s hard
not to share Neville’s sense of anticlimax. Rather than picking
up pace and ramping up the metaphysical complexity, the
film rushes toward its disappointing denouement. The elaborate setup involving the “dream architect” Ariadne (Ellen
Page) is summarily abandoned as she is told to forget the labyrinth and “find the most direct route through.” When Ariadne
and the film accede to these demands, it’s as if the imperatives
of the action thriller have crashed through the intricacies of
Nolan’s puzzle narrative with all the subtlety of the freight
train that erupts into the cityscape in an earlier scene.
Neville is right that Inception is very far from being a
“fascinatingly vertiginous trip into successively fantastic, impossible worlds,” but it’s worth thinking about why Nolan exercised such restraint. (His parsimony couldn’t contrast more
starkly with the stylistic extravagances of something like Peter
Jackson’s The Lovely Bones from 2009, which aims at the fantastic and the impossible, but ends up CGI-onanistic rather
than lyrically oneiric.) One initially strange thing about
40
Inception is how undreamlike the dreams in the film are. It’s
tempting to see the Nolan of Inception as a reverse Hitchcock
—where Hitchcock took de Chirico-like dream topographies and remotivated them as thriller spaces, Nolan takes
standard action-flick sequences and repackages them as
dreams. Except in a scene where the walls seem to close in
around Cobb when he’s being pursued—which, interestingly, takes place in the film’s apparent reality—the spatial
distortions at work in Inception don’t resemble the ways in
which dreams distend or collapse space. There are none of
the bizarre adjacencies or distances that don’t diminish that
we see in Welles’s The Trial (1962), a film which, perhaps
better than any other, captures the uncanny topographies of
the anxiety dream. When, in one of Inception’s most remarked-upon scenes, Ariadne causes the Paris city space to
fold up around herself and Cobb, she’s behaving more like
the CGI engineer who’s creating the scene than any
dreamer. This is a display of technical prowess, devoid of any
charge of the uncanny. The limbo scenes, meanwhile, are
like an inverted version of Fredric Jameson’s “surrealism
without the unconscious”: this is an unconscious without
surrealism. The world that Cobb and Mal create out of their
memories is like a Powerpoint presentation of a love affair
rendered as some walkthrough simulation: faintly haunting
in its very lack of allure, quietly horrifying in its solipsistic
emptiness. Where the unconscious was, there CGI shall be.
In an influential blog post, Devin Faraci argues that the
whole film is a metaphor for cinematic production itself:
Cobb is the director, Cobb’s partner Arthur (Joseph GordonLevitt) the producer, Ariadne the screenwriter, Saito “the big
corporate suit who fancies himself a part of the game,” Fischer
the audience. “Cobb, as a director, takes Fischer through an
engaging, stimulating and exciting journey,” Faraci argues,
“one that leads him to an understanding about himself. Cobb
is the big time movie director . . . who brings the action, who
brings the spectacle, but who also brings the meaning and the
humanity and the emotion” (www.chud.com/24477/neverwake-up-the-meaning-and-secret-of-inception/). In fact, as a
director Cobb is something of a mediocrity (far less accomplished than Nolan)—as Neville argues, Fischer’s “journey”
takes him through a series of standard-issue action set pieces,
which are “engaging, stimulating and exciting” only in some
weakly generic way. Significantly and symptomatically,
Faraci’s hyperbole here sounds as if it might belong in a marketing pitch for Cobb and his team; just as when Cobb and
the others eulogize the “creativity” of the dream-architecture
process—you can create worlds that never existed!—they
sound like they’re reciting advertising copy or the script from
a corporate video. The scenes in which the team prepare for
Fischer’s inception might have been designed to bring out
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the depressing vacuousness of the concept of the “creative
industries.” They play like a marketing team’s own fantasies
about what it does. Inception is less a meta-meditation on the
power of cinema than, more interestingly, a reflection of
the way in which cinematic techniques have become imbricated into a banal spectacle which—fusing business machismo, entertainment protocols, and breathless hype—enjoys
an unprecedented dominion over our working lives and our
dreaming minds.
It’s no doubt this sense of pervasive mediation, of generalized simulation, that tempts Faraci into claiming that: “Incep
tion is a dream to the point where even the dream-sharing
stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn’t an extractor. He can’t go
into other people’s dreams. He isn’t on the run from the
Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, through
the voice of Mal, who is a projection of his own subconscious.
She asks him how real he thinks his world is, where he’s being
chased across the globe by faceless corporate goons.” The moment when Mal confronts Cobb with all this is reminiscent of
the scene in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) where a
psychiatrist attempts to persuade Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
Quaid that he’s having a psychotic breakdown. But while
Total Recall presents us with a strong distinction between
Quaid’s quotidian identity as a construction worker and his
life as a secret agent at the center of an interplanetary struggle—a distinction that the film very quickly unsettles—
Inception gives us only Cobb the generic hero: handsome,
dapper, yet troubled. If, as Faraci claims, Cobb isn’t an extractor and he isn’t on the run from faceless corporate goons, then
who is he? The true Cobb would then be an unrepresented
X, outside the film’s reality labyrinth—the empty figure who
identifies with (and as) Cobb the commercially constructed
fiction; ourselves, in other words, insofar as we’re successfully
interpellated by the film.
This leads to another difference between Inception and
its Philip K. Dick-inspired 1980s and 90s precursors such as
Total Recall, Videodrome (1983), and eXistenZ (1999). There’s
very little of the “reality bleed,” the confusion of ontological
hierarchy, that defined those films: throughout Inception, it’s
surprisingly easy for both the audience and the characters to
remember where they are in the film’s ontological architecture. When Ariadne is being trained by Arthur, she’s taken
round a virtual model of the impossible Penrose Steps. On
the face of it, however, Inception is remarkable for its seeming
failure to explore any paradoxical Escheresque topologies.
The four different reality levels remain distinct, just as the
causality between them remains well-formed. But this apparently stable hierarchy might be violated by the object upon
which much of the discussion of the film’s ending has centered: the top, the totem that Cobb ostensibly uses to deter42
mine whether he’s in waking reality or not. Many have noted
the inadequacy of this supposed proof. At best, it can only
establish that Cobb isn’t in his “own” dream, for what’s there
to stop his dreaming mind simulating the properties of the
real top? Besides, in the film’s chronology, the top—that ostensible token of the empirical actual—first of all appears as
a virtual object, secreted by Mal inside a doll’s house in
limbo. And a totem, it should be remembered, is an object of
faith (it’s worth noting in passing that there are many references to faith throughout the film).
The association of the top with Mal is suggestive. Both
Mal and the totem represent competing versions of reality.
For Cobb, the top stands in for the Anglo-Saxon empiricist
tradition’s account of what reality is—something sensible,
tangible. Mal, by contrast, represents a psychoanalytic
Real—a trauma that disrupts any attempt to maintain a stable sense of reality; that which the subject cannot help
bringing with him no matter where he goes. (Mal’s malevolent, indestructible persistence recalls the sad resilience of
the projections which haunt the occupants of the space station in Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris.) No matter what reality
level Cobb is on, Mal and the top are always there. But
where the top supposedly belongs to the highest reality
level, Mal belongs to the lowest level, the lover’s limbo
which Cobb repudiated.
Mal conflates two roles that had been kept separate in
Nolan’s films—the antagonist double and the grief object. In
Nolan’s debut, Following (1998), the antagonist double of the
unnamed protagonist is the thief who shares his name with
Inception’s hero. The role of the antagonist double is nowhere more apparent than in Insomnia and The Dark Knight,
films which are in many ways about the proximity between
the ostensible hero and his beyond-good-and-evil rival. The
Prestige, meanwhile, is in effect a film in which there’s a defining antagonism but no single protagonist: by the end of the
film, the illusionists Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and
Borden are doubled in multiple ways, just as they are defined
and destroyed by their struggle with one another. More often
than not, grief is the source of these antagonistic doublings.
Grief itself is a puzzle that can’t be solved and there’s a certain (psychic) economy in collapsing the antagonist into the
grief object, since the work of grief isn’t only about mourning
for the lost object, it’s also about struggling against the object’s implacable refusal to let go. Yet there’s something hollow about Cobb’s grief; on its own terms, it doesn’t convince
as anything other than a genre-required character trait. It
seems instead to stand in for something else, another sadness
—a loss that the film points to but can’t name.
One aspect of this loss concerns the unconscious itself,
and here we might take Nolan’s choice of terms seriously. For
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