Some Thoughts After Seeing the Movie Inception

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT>

Fascinating little movie. I expected to like it because I enjoyed the Matrix, kind of liked Stay, really enjoyed Identity up until the cop-out ending (“oooh, be careful, he’s still out there!”). I like movies where the writer/director plays with our sense of reality. Inception does that very intentionally. And it does it well. You have to pay attention (maybe too much attention?), but I think it pays off.

What I wasn’t expecting was the subplot. DiCaprio feels himself responsible for his wife’s suicide due to a doubt he planted in her mind about whether or not she was in reality or a dream. Toward the very end of the movie, he is in a deep-dive into his subconscious, where he has been “seeing” her on a regular basis. She knows that this trip may be the one in which he lets go of his guilt about her suicide, so tries to convince him to stay there with her. (“She” being his subconscious projection – go see it, it’s a very cool movie and I’m not going to try and explain it all here.)

The thing that hit me while I was sitting in the theater is this: what a temptation it must have been for him to stay down there. Down in his subconscious where she was still alive. He had something to pull him back – his two kids in the real world – and ultimately he does return. At least that’s how I read the ending. The director leaves it ambiguous and there’s a lot of discussion posts on the Internet about what a clever lad he was and how it questions how we look at reality. Christopher Nolan has only done a few movies, like Insomnia and the Dark Night, but it appears clear that he likes to play with our heads. Personally, I felt like it was a cop out. I’ve been trying to figure out why. Part of me wants to be really impressed by what he did – wow, a meditation on the nature of consciousness and dream states – but I think that this movie came off more like a thriller and I wanted a better, a more solid ending. I wanted diCaprio’s character to get his happy ending.

The next post is very probably a big part of the reason.

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