Last week, Father Barron saw the summer sci-fi blockbuster which has recently been the subject of many an interpretive analysis, Christopher Nolan's Inception. Read his review below.
The sleeper (pun intended) hit of a rather weak summer for movies has been the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle
Inception. One reason that it has done so well is that many people have been returning for a second or third viewing, most likely so that they can get some inkling of what’s going on. The film is, to say the least, confusing. It has to do with a team, led by DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, who specialize in the invasion of people’s dreams so as to extract hidden information from their unconscious minds. As the movie opens, a wealthy client approaches Cobb with the novel request that instead of extracting an idea, he implant one in the mind of one of the client’s business rivals: hence the “inception” of the title. If I were to rehearse the details of the plot, we’d be here all day; suffice it to say that in order to pull off this implantation, without the subject’s being aware of the ruse, Cobb has to open up an entire series of dream worlds: dreams within dreams within dreams. As the film unfolds, the characters move back and forth between these universes and it’s never entirely clear to the viewer (at least to this viewer) precisely where they are and, to riff on Aretha Franklin, “who’s dreamin’ who.” ...
Robert Mixa reviews the new science-fiction thriller, Inception, which is stirring up interpretive conversation among movie-goers across the nation. Here, Robert offers a philosophical commentary on the underlying themes of this psychological blockbuster.
Have you ever awakened from a dream that seemed so real you had a hard time distinguishing it from reality? Sometimes our dreams seem so real that we are unaware of our dreaming. However, most dreams have an illogical, disjointed plot, making it possible for us to identify them as dreams. A significant feature of dreams is that they are constructed from the contents of our memory that are infused with emotion. The most emotional memories emerge from the subconscious mind with a force so powerful that it affects us in reality. For example, when waking from a dream in which a beloved person, whom we hurt, appears, we often awake feeling the horror and raw emotion of that encounter. So dreams affect reality and vice versa, making it sometimes hard to distinguish the two. More than simply entering into the ocean of the subconscious mind with full control, Inception demonstrates how vulnerable we are to the latent creatures of our subconscious, making the dream world a labyrinth in which we are hunted down by the Minotaur of our memory...