Appreciation of the multilayered filmmaking of Inception
Inception is a 2010 movie directed by Christopher Nolan and starring DiCaprio.
It was probably my younger self's favorite movie. I loved to dissect every detail of the world that the movie has built for itself, distilling all the rules and figuring out what the clues and implications were.
Thinking back to it -- and having read more about what other people have thought about it -- at the time I missed some of the broad strokes.
Like any great piece of art, it can be admired and appreciated for different reasons while looking at different levels of detail.
The broadest stroke is: the movie Inception itself is an attempt to plant a seed, an idea into the audience's mind -- just like the characters in the movie do to the subject.
Of course, the idea that “maybe we can't tell whether what our senses perceive is reality” isn't original to the movie. In the movie world, the 1999 film The Matrix touched on the same notes a decade earlier. In philosophy, Plato's Allegory of the Cave touched on the subject around 375 BC.
What entices an audience, though, is a mixture of how new the idea is to the audience and how well the idea is packaged in the context of the audience's lived experience.
In this sense, The Matrix came just at the right moment when the personal computing boom was at full throttle transforming society. In other words, a mixture of techno-mysticism, retro-futurism, and doomsday-ism, with the atemporal appeal of Plato's Cave, was just what struck the right chord with the audience at the time.
I digress. In Inception, in the movie world, the characters are tasked with planting an idea into the subject's mind. In Inception, in the director's world, the movie is tasked with planting an idea into the audience's mind.
For the in-world idea to be successfully planted, it can't be too complex and it can't be obviously suggested. The in-world subject can be told “believe this”; they must come to consider and accept an idea as if they've arrived at it themselves.
Mirroring that, the movie director never tells us what the audience should believe: there are only suggestions and clues; no conclusions. This is the storytelling maxim of “show; don't tell” brought up to 11 and turned into the whole concept of a movie.
I appreciate that this film can be understood at various levels: at one level, one can analyze the in-world consequences of the stated in-world rules regarding dreams, experience, reality, limbo. At another level, one can understand how the director and screenplay were designed to do the same thing to the audience as the characters do to their subjects. At yet another level, one can appreciate how earlier influential movies that entered the public consciousness may have played a role in this one.