Movies Referenced or Echoed in Inception

Among other things, Inception is a visual essay about the history of movies. In a lot of ways, Inception is a super movie, seeming to somehow reconcile many eras and themes of film history. Since it is about movies being the shared dream of our culture, evoking as many classics as possible is inevitable and necessary; and the film does without any overcluttering. As I stated in the preceding post, if we are to take the stance that Dom is a regular man dreaming this story, then he likely has seen a lot of movies and his mind then uses the imagery but twists it around but in a way that means something to him personally. Some films are directly referenced while there are others that are only echoed, likely Nolan's own knowledge coming through subliminally. As Dom says to Ariadne, never use an entire memory, just details here and there.

So here is what is no doubt only a partial list, with some comments.

2001: A Space Odyssey - the aged Saito, whose aging effects seem quite similar to those used on Keir Dullea, certainly evokes 2001 as he does that partial turn toward the camera in the very beginning of the movie; several other instances.

Don't Look Now - the element of not being able to see the children's faces, the Venice-like imagery, and use of butcher knife.


Psycho and Halloween - also evoked by the butcher knife.

Planet of the Apes - Imagery of the beach with crumbling structures on it.

Royal Wedding - Fred Astaire dances on ceiling, same effect used for Arthur's fight scenes.

The Shining - one of several films suggested by the solitary structure amidst snow. Also, the scene in which Cobb questions Fischer in a washroom is similar to the scene of Nicholson talking to the ghost of the previous caretaker.

The Manchurian Candidate - The entire sense of unreality; for me, Cillian Murphy's character specifically reminds me of Raymond Shaw, a cold rich young man who is stripped down to his emotional core the story progresses.

Raiders of the Lost Ark - Cobb's chase through Mombasa. Eames evokes Indiana Jones as well as several other film antiheroes, most notably James Bond.


On Her Majesty's Secret Service - The snow fortress and the action surrounding it.

Night of the Living Dead - Projections move like zombies, attacking dream invaders.

Where Eagles Dare - Again, the solitary snow fortress, and it is probably not an accident that during these scenes the film's ominous theme is sometimes played with electric guitar, evoking Clint Eastwood's westerns. This level represents that anti-hero phase of action films.

Star Wars - the scene of Cobbs recruiting Eames to his dream team in a seedy bar, similar to hiring Han Solo.

The Matrix - Most especially Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wirefighting scenes.

The Maltese Falcon - Cobbs having to "let go" of Mal at the end. The old fashioned elevator. I would not be surprised if the actual origin of Mal's name is a shortening of Maltese Falcon - the stuff dreams are made of. Mal of course fits several apt interpretations as will occur in art.

Angelheart - also that old fashioned elevator which took Mickey Rourke to hell at the end; descending into a mythical underworld via elevator just as Dom goes down into the deepest and darkest levels of his own psyche.

Birth of a Nation - suggested by the masks and pillowcases worn over heads in certain scenes.

Casablanca - Cobbs is trying to get "letters of transit", as it were. As everyone was in Casablanca.

Hell in the Pacific - the confrontation between an American and a Japanese man.

Bridge on the River Kwai - same as above. Some dialogue the same.

Superman - The flying scenes.

Reservoir Dogs - The heist feel in general. People shouting at each other, back at a warehouse meeting place, about how things went wrong. And mostly, the scene in which Cobb himself narrates a memory as it is being shown happening, similar to Tim Roth's undercover cop story.

Phantasm - some imagery and the dream theme.

Blade Runner - The case the equipment is carried in, among other elements.

It's a Wonderful Life - The idea of returning home and feeling peace in his life, especially in the case of the version I think of as Dom the Architect, in which he is dreaming most of the story and working out frustrations over what feels like a failed life, and in which Ariadne is then the Clarence, if you will. More later on Ariadne-as-angel.

Wizard of Oz - This is a good argument against those who feel that the entire thing being a dream invalidates the movie, as it is quite well accepted in this classic. In the Dom the Architect version, as he looks around at the other passengers on the plane, he may in fact be saying what Dorothy said, about having the strangest dream and you were in it, and you, and you...

Batman Begins - It's hard to not be reminded of Rhas Al Ghul's fortress in the snow scene, as well as the others named above. Also, when Cillian Murphy has the pillowcase put on his head, suddenly he is like the Scarecrow again. In fact, several of the films done by the actors themselves seem to appear, as in the case of...

Titanic - Leonardo DiCaprio looks on as water suddenly deluges the villa.

Lathe of Heaven - this was a made for TV movie based on a novel by Ursula K. LeGuin that Lukas Haas, playing Nash the "original dreamer" in the early scenes, appeared in, in which he was a man who was able to change the world through his dreams.

Arrival of a Train at La Coitat - This early film showed a train arriving at a station, and it is significant that trains appear so often in Inception, especially when the train suddenly appears on the first level of the dream. It crashes into consciousness just as one can picture the impact of seeing this fim in theaters would be in 1896; for many viewers it would have been the first film they ever saw.

I will likely add to this post as others become apparent.

Addressing the Apparent Lack of Surrealism in Inception

My use of the word "apparent" is key.

One of the most common, and unfortunately most prosaic, and ironically least imaginitive, criticisms of Inception boils down to it not being surreal enough. People wandered in to the film expecting that Nolan would use all the CGI at his command, or at the command of his wizards, to outdo or at least try to match all the surrealist filmakers such as Bunuel. That we would have random, free association transforming images thrown at us and not be greeted with the hard-edged sense of reality that the film actually does have.

However, the movie actually is quite surreal. Granted, we are not given certain images which we know from our own dreams, such as that, while speaking to someone, they turn into a puppet version of themselves. But here's the thing. In life, if we were speaking to someone and they suddenly turned into a puppet, we would be more than surprised, to say the least. But when such an event happens in a dream, usually we are not surprised because our dreaming selves know why it's happening or at least provide an explanation so fast that it is not surprising to us.

A statement the film implicitly makes is that when we are having dreams, their reality is hard edged. A dream is not surreal while we are having it. While in the dream, we do not perceive them as strange, as the main character Dom Cobb says while he and Ariadne are are sitting at the cafe. This is partly a sort of "tell" to the audience from Nolan why it is we are not being given random weird images. It is probably no accident that we are, shortly after that, given one of the most overtly strange images of the film, which is when Ariadne, portrayed by Ellen Page, now aware she is dreaming, begins to mentally fold the city they are in on itself. Here's what does not happen: Cobb and Ariadne do not flee in terror. Instead, Cobb stands there very calmly talking to her about it. This is supposed to happen, just as in a dream, when something odd happens, it is supposed to happen. In this way, Nolan has triumphed in one way over the surrealists. While they may show us bits of their dreams, Nolan has made the film like having our own dream because, just like Cobb and Ariadne, we accept that it is going on. We realize that within the film, Ariadne is in a dream and that Cobb is teaching her how to manipulate it, or at least supervising. And in the larger sense we as the audience, who are having this shared dream of watching the film, know that they do it with effects. No one is really saying, "My God, how can that possibly happen? Did they actually fold a city over itself like a building buritto?" And so we have accepted an image which, a hundred years ago, would have been impossible to produce in a moving form.

There are many interpretations of the film; whether or not Cobb is dreaming the entire time, if it becomes, at some point, a dream, if he is still dreaming at the end, etc. But for the sake of this particular post, let's go with the interpretation that the entire thing is a dream, as we know them, until we see Cobb wake up in the plane, and looks around at passengers in a flight who may or may not be known to him, that he has cast in this dream he just had as we often cast people we know or don't know well into roles in our dreams that seem strange when we wake up but which we accept completely while within the dream. This is one version of the story that simply makes it easier to discuss, but I believe Cobb could still be dreaming, because Nolan is playing with the fact that a movie is not real. And I also believe that Cobb actually is an extractor, and that such things can happen - but only in the same way that I believe a flux capacitor can make time travel possible and that the Millenium Falcon possesses a hyper drive to travel through space.

But for this theory, we can look at the fact there is little dialogue after the wake-up, not much more than the immigration official who approves Dom's passport, which is a partly scripted exchange in real life, and so there is nothing to take away from the sense of the natural in this sequence after the final wake-up, as Nolan knows that movie characters will always speak in a slightly different way that we do in our real lives.

All right, so Dom is just a guy waking up on a flight to Los Angeles, almost certainly from Japan. I still glean several things about who he might really be from his dream. This version of Dom is an architectural engineer. Thus the incredible concern with buildings and the stability of structures, the repetition of earthquake imagery that is always given a different explanation for why it's happening, the frequent appearances of bridges, and the recurrent theme of precision and coordination. This also provides an explanation of why Dom carried a top. It is an exercise among engineering students to design a top for what it can teach them. Spinning a top on a surface is also a good quick way to tell if it is level. We might surmise then, that "Dom the Architect" carried this souvenir of his younger days possibly to remind him of what is was once all about, and maybe to have a quick way of checking if a surface is level, and in his dream has managed to give it an incredible significance. He has also probably taken a sedative to help him sleep on the flight, contributing then to the intensity of the dream and the frequent mentions of sedative in the dream, and its effects.

I will probably expound more later on what I think this Dom is like, but the main purpose here is to address the seeming lack of surrealism in Inception. Dom the architect-engineer is probably a very precise, and literal minded man - we are not being made privy to the dreams of a fantasy novelist. At most, he probably likes to watch action movies, and probably has seen a lot of movies in general, and has soaked them up for his sleeping mind to plunder for imagery. Things get weirder as the dream goes further, even as Dom loses his inhibitions, surrendering to deeper and deeper states of consciousness.

Imagine if you will that you are Dom, the architect-engineer who has finally gotten home after the long flight and you are trying to describe the dream to someone. Since he would not have total recall, most of it being gone by the time he gets to Michael Caine, he might say, "I had the weirdest dream. I just remember I was with a girl that was on my flight and somehow she was able to make a city fold up on itself, she was doing it and I was very calmly watching it with her, almost like I was teaching her how to do it. Then I saw she somehow made a bridge out of thin air, and I warned her about something...for some reason she shouldn't do it...then another guy who was on my flight, it was like we were old friends, even working together, he was fighting a guy in mid-air, but it was like it was expected for him to be doing that...and then I saw him with a bunch of people strapped together, all piled on top of each other and he was pulling them floating down a hall way, because he had to do something, I forget, it was very important...we were also all sleeping in the back of a van that was going off a bridge but in slow motion - I just knew it was supposed to be happening...But it was also like we were in the mountans, and there was a fortress we were supposed to attack...the rich guy I taked to on my flight, who was kind of rude to me, it was extremely important he be brought into it, and we all knew something he didn't...then he was going into a vault that he had to open and there was a guy in a hospital bed in the vault that he talked to, and then he was crying because he found a pinwheel in a safe by the bed...later there were a bunch of houses built into the water almost like Venice, but it wasn't Venice, and I remember seeing one, and suddenly there was a doll house, and I was opening up a safe in the doll house and my top was inside...I started to spin the top, and it was really bad that I did that but I don't remember why...and then I closed it into the safe, which is so strange. Later on I was talking to a woman I kept seeing that in the dream I thought was my wife, but I don't know who she was, and she and I were talking fairly calmly, like she was pleading with me, but suddenly she jumped up and stabbed me, and the girl who was on my flight was on the balcony, even though it was our house which doesn't have a balcony, and when she shot the lady who was my wife I jumped up and asked her what she was doing, and she said 'improvising', and then she kicked the rich kid - he was tied up on the balcony - and I saw him falling, then a building behind her was being blown away by the wind, and then I saw her jump off the balcony. Then I was suddenly in Japan and talking to the guy sitting sort of across from me in the plane, only he was incredibly old, and I had to ask him something, and he had my top and a gun...and then I woke up after that...I might have been talking in my sleep because people were looking at me strangely."

It is unlikely, of course, that a dreamer would even remember that much. But it's a bunch of seemingly random, surreal imagery, only we do not interpret it as such because it is all given context and explanation, even though it the context only works within a film, and so the sort of thing we trust in the shared dream of movie watching.

Going back to Bunuel, he is of course known for Un Chien Andalou in which famously a woman's eye is cut in one of the surreal images thrown at us.

This likely influenced the scene in Terminator in which we see Arnold cut his eye open. Only, we don't interpret that scene as being surreal because we are given the context that this is a robot from the future who has to repair himself. The bold statement that Inception makes is that dreams are like straightforward story movies like Terminator, and vice versa, because we are given an explanation for the surreality - just not one we remember later. However, even with Bunuel we have the explanation that were are watching a movie, even if we have not been show events leading up to the eye-cutting, so we watch it calmly, because we know what it is we are watching.

Up above I placed a picture of Arnold in Terminator. But it's not really Arnold, is it? No, it's the animatronic puppet used for the eye cutting effect, which is fairly obvious to us. But again, we do not act with surprise that he has turned into a puppet, because we have the context of knowing how effects and editing work.

Introduction

It is the belief of this blogger that the 2010 film Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, will rank among the world's great masterworks. While telling an apparent adventure story that is quite easily grasped by most movie goers, the film also contains layered realms of complex symbolology which relate the history of film to the history of humanity, and vice versa. Nolan has dared to treat our psychological terminology as a kind of modern mythology, and told the story of shared dreams. The shared dream of humanity, the shared dream of western civilization, the shared dream of watching movies.

It was Joseph Campbell who, in his important work The Hero With a Thousand Faces, stated that the eternal hero myth was the psychology of ancient people, their way of dividing up the levels of awareness. Their myths came out of the dream state - which is the mind in communication with itself. Campbell also wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, a book which aids the reader greatly in exploring James Joyce's novel about the dream state, and so this blog is named in honour of that book - though I do not for a moment take myself to have anything quite as definitive to say. This is just about me sharing what I see when I watch the film, bringing to bear what literary and film erudition as I have.

The thing about Inception is, it's a fun film. It manages to be an exciting popcorn blockbuster and one of the most expressive art films ever made - both at the same time. It seems to be Nolan's statement that the various levels of film, as they are perceived, from shlock to arty, are all expressions of different levels of man's mind. One does not cancel out the other, they are pieces of a greater whole, which is western civilization and ultimately all of humanity.