Inception: The Myth and the Minotaur

Box office returns would suggest that if you are reading this you’ve already seen Inception, Christopher Nolan’s latest summer-blockbuster-meets-high-art release that tells the tale of Cobb, the dream pirate, and his team of sleepytime co-conspirators. While Inception passes itself off as a psychological thriller, it is also a new kind of apocalypse movie, one that forgoes warfare and natural disasters and instead speculates about the other side of Apokalupsis, the Greek invocation of the “unveiling of what is hidden.” Inception poses metaphysical questions it’s generally easier not to ask ourselves like, “what is the nature of existence?” and, “how do we know our reality is the real reality?” and since the film has gunfights on skis and CGI demolition the ideas within it may seem new, but a few thousand years of movies and myth suggest that the idea that our reality is veiled from us is an imprinted part of the collective human experience rather than Hollywood’s latest gimmick.

While Inception purports to deal explicitly with dream worlds and the subconscious, there is just cause to assume these dream worlds can stand in for any manifestation of alternate reality. As Nietzsche pointed out, dreams are the blue print for our concept of alternate reality: “In the ages of the rude beginning of culture, man believed that he was discovering a second real world in dream, and here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a division of the world.”

Directors have taken this division and run with it since the earliest days of cinema, but always with the lesson that realities apart from our own are dangerous. Inception does nothing to refute this notion, as evidenced by the damaging effects dreamcrashing has on Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his family. Dorothy Gale, who dreamed up her journey through Oz, exclaims a resounding, “There’s no place like home!” upon waking and the natural order is restored. (Cobb, of Inception, similarly, pines for home.) But it is easy to forget that by the beginning of Return to Oz (1985), Walter Murch’s sole directorial endeavor, Dorothy is so obsessed with her invented dream world that Aunt Em has to send her to a doctor for electroshock therapy. A dream world turns into a nightmare in Abre Los Ojos, and then, perfunctorily, in Vanilla Sky, and the protagonist of The Science of Sleep is crippled in the waking world by an overactive dream life.

Since the movie screen is just another layer of dreaming between the story and the audience, Nolan’s uncertain ending is asking us to question whether we live in the real world or if we are likewise doomed to wander the corridors of the nether world for an eternity. This unsettling concept recurs often enough in the canon of human history to indicate that this fear is interconnected with consciousness itself, exposing our innate terror of God and our feeling of vulnerability to the parts of the cosmos we don’t understand.

Ingmar Bergman touched on this idea in his 1968 film, Shame, about husband and wife musicians living in Scandinavia at the time of the German invasion. After being subjected to a series of humiliations and abuses, Eva utters to her husband, “Sometimes everything seems just like a dream. It’s not my dream, but someone else’s, that I have to participate in. What happens when the one who dreamt us wakes up and feels ashamed?”

In 1940, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote “The Circular Ruins,” a fable about a man who devotes his life to dreaming in order to build a dream-man who can live even when its creator is awake. When the old man finally succumbs to death he makes this discovery: “With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.”

Both of these twentieth century examples are incarnations of the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic (c. 380 B.C.E.) wherein Socrates compares the unenlightened human to a prisoner chained inside a cave, watching shadows on a wall and believing those shadows are the whole of reality. But the twenty-first century has hailed The Simulation Argument, a theory that is gaining popularity through the support of a school of Oxford-based thinkers who calculate the likelihood that we all live in a computer simulation. The concept postulates that technology is advancing at such a rate that computer programmers will soon be able to simulate consciousness. Once this happens, it will be possible to run ancestral simulation programs, similar to that of The Matrix, at which point there will be no reason to assume we aren’t simulations ourselves operating inside a computer interface. It may sound silly, but in reality (whatever that may be) the Simulation Argument is one of the more logic-based philosophies of existence we’ve come up with, and, like all metaphysical theories, it is impossible to either prove or refute. After all, who can demonstrate conclusively that we actually exist in the real world? Why are we so suspicious that we are not in the REAL reality, and why is that even important to us since it is, after all, so irrelevant?

Alas, the only way we humans have found to work through these ontological questions is through story. Dreams and psychedelic drugs do their part, but when all is said and done, these experiences boil down into stories as well. By that token, going inside a dream within a dream is akin to telling stories within stories, and, as BananaWho discussed in A Serious Man: A Never-Ending Story this kind of story-in-a-story structure has its roots in the centuries-old One Thousand and One Nights, in which each level of story removed is meant to bring the reader closer to Allah.

Most notably, this dream- or story-layering creates a narrative labyrinth. Mark. Z. Danielewski’s experimental novel, The House of Leaves, is a perfect example of this kind of narrative structure. In his book we follow Johnny Truant, the narrator, who discovers an academic paper written by a blind man about a fictional documentary about a family that finds a labyrinth in their house that they believe to be God’s house. And God’s house is a terrifying place, indeed. The story inside a documentary inside a paper inside a book frames a literal labyrinth that becomes the centerpiece of the book. Sound familiar?

The labyrinth is an archetype rife with meaning from a splay of ancient cultures. Generally, labyrinths were thought to symbolize the pathway to God or traps for evil spirits, so it is no coincidence Nolan employed this archetype in Inception, on his quest to unveil the mysteries of the universe. Within the film, Cobb hires a new “architect” to design the world of the dream. In order for the group to corner their subject and perform the inception they must operate inside a finite universe—a maze. Is it any wonder they find an architecture student named Ariadne (Ellen Page) to design the dreams for their final venture? In Greek myth, Ariadne was known as “the Mistress of the Labyrinth.” She aided Theseus on his quest to slay the Minotaur who was imprisoned in the Cretan labyrinth of Knossos. Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of red string he could lay out in the chutes of the maze to help him find his way out. Incidentally, the Ariadne of Inception is the only one to guide Cobb all the way through the furthest reaches of dreamspace, and she is likewise the only one who knows the truth behind his wife’s death. But how can the Greek myth play out without the Minotaur? There is no bull-headed man-beast roving the labyrinth, but there is Mal, imprisoned in Cobb’s subconscious as a murderous specter who haunts his every dream.

As the myth goes, Theseus and Ariadne were born of the gods. Theseus is credited with building the Athenian empire. Similarly, Cobb and Mal built an entire metropolis in the decades they spent in their own private dreamsphere, which lends insight into Inception’s stringent interest in architecture and building. Just as dreaming is a form of creation, the creative act is actualized through architecture in the film. Thus, dreaming, building, and “inception,” which Merrium-Webster defines as “an act, process, or instance of beginning,” are all forms of playing God.

Nietzsche also accredited dreams as the cause of the human belief in divinity: “The parting of soul and body goes also with this way of interpreting dreams; likewise, the idea of a soul’s apparitional body: whence all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in gods.” Cobb, Arthur, Ariadne, Mal and the whole gang have made careers of toying with humans in the tradition of the Greek deities. They are gods having their way in God’s House. But the Greeks were also proponents of punishment, and given Nolan’s treatment of his previous heroes, there’s little hope that Cobb gets off the hook for meddling so long in a world where he doesn’t belong. After all, the damned character is Nolan’s favorite kind.

Memento, The Prestige, and Inception all have in common that their heroes are two-sided journeymen caught up in endless Sisyphus cycles, and all of them basically deserve their punishment. Memento’s Leonard is either unwilling or unable to escape the psychological affliction that compels him to murder. In The Prestige, Robert Angier, crazed with vengeance and touched by dark magic, kills himself every night to maintain his reputation as a magician. Even Batman’s crime fighting only seems to encourage terrorist supervillains and alienates the civilians he is fighting to protect. Though Cobb obviously never meant to play a part in his wife’s suicide, his ability to win the trust of the Mark (Cillian Murphy) and proceed to manipulate him at his most sacrosanct level belies Cobb’s utter lack of morality. Not to mention ALL of these figures, including Cobb, have dead wives. (For Batman, dead parents and a dead girlfriend.) They are all haunted, doomed, and lonely, but locked into the cycles they set forth for themselves.

Though Nolan tends to pass on the happy endings, his stock is way up as the rare director making big budget studio films that actually resonate with people. Nolan makes use of his understanding that at some level, we all feel we are alone on a circuitous journey, and he appreciates that there are no real explanations for the big mysteries of life, only questions. Just as the Coen brothers shake God’s tree in A Serious Man, Inception is Nolan’s chance to ask questions and rigorously explore his own agnosticism. He expertly draws out the tension between religion (“a leap of faith”) and nihilism, but ultimately, and perhaps cruelly, reminds us that our world may be little more than shadows on a cave wall.

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-Christianne Hedtke