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.