Suggested soundtrack for this essay: Erik Satie "Gnossienne No. 1-6" for most of it, and then Philip Glass "Powaqqatsi" for the last 4-5 paragraphs.
Perhaps when you clicked the link to this essay, you were still expecting a simple review. Or maybe, you were expecting a clever analysis of Inception that would put the film in its proper sociocultural context. The more inventive of you may have even assumed that I would just rant endlessly on topics that are only somewhat related to the film. I'm afraid to say that it is the latter of you, dear readers, who would be correct.
Inception nearly made me lose my mind. As I perceive it, it was another orchestrated attack on my psyche by one Leonardo Di'Caprio. Seriously, what is with this guy? Starring in Shutter Island and Inception, and releasing both in the same year? It's as if this man, this dapper Hollywood multi-millionaire goon, forever young and well-groomed (with his makeup and hair products), has an agenda to make me and JUST little old Buddha me question my eggshell reality with his warped films. I left his last two films feeling like I was walking into a frightening alien world (which he would have been delighted to hear, I'm sure). After Inception, my hands were honestly shaking as I put the keys into the ignition of my car to leave.
My mini-nervous breakdown actually began the night before I saw Inception. I was playing at my piano, tickling ivory and ebony (from the bones of dead elephants, keepers of wisdom), when my fingers started playing a scary chromatically colored minor key song of their own creation (as is their wont, as anyone who tries to write songs understands that it isn't a conscious effort). I was inspired, for some reason, to try and read an Edgar Allan Poe poem over the ominous notes. It was then that I chanced upon Poe's A Dream Within A Dream for the first time. I must have spent a half-hour trying to make the poem fit with the song before I gave up and ate a bologna sandwich (pickled bologna with pepper jack cheese). Needless to say, I liked the poem very much.
The next night, as I nestled in a cozy plush theater chair of Mass Production (what kind of mass?), imagine how startled I was when the phrase "a dream within a dream" emanated from the screen not once, not twice, but many, many times. To be fair, I did know that the movie was about dreams beforehand (although I honestly believe that I had no notion of the convoluted dreams within dreams concept it would explore). You could say that the whole coincidence was the product of some kind of subconscious projection on my part that could be traced back to me watching a trailer for the film. I happened to read a poem and was drawn to it because I somehow knew subconsciously that it was related to the movie I was already planning on watching the next day. Whether it was a projection or not (but the film was), I still think the whole incident qualifies as being an example of "spooky action at a distance", to borrow a phrase from Albert Einstein (and, thus, giving my ideas instant credibility).
I would say even more so after I realized that the similarities between the film and the poem did not stop with that phrase. The entire poem reads as if it could have been the deepest, innermost thoughts of Di'Caprio's character, Dominic Cobb. In Poe's poem, the narrator laments a lost love from a surf-tormented shore. He knows not what plane of reality he and his lover had lost hope on, knowingly only they had ultimately lost it. Sweetly or maybe morbidly, he kisses her farewell. Where is he going? We are never told. Perhaps he is going to kill himself. Or, he could be leaving her to go deeper within his dreams, the escapist fantasyland of his own insanity. Anyone who has watched the movie can make the connections between Inception's plot and the poem without my help. I hope, anyway, for my sake more than your sake.
Understandably, my psychically intuitive senses were piqued (abilities of intuition inherited from my European ancestors, who had spent much time honing them in the chaotic realms of Dionysus). The door to my mind and soul ajar, I watched as the film put all of my preexisting paranoid fears into a disconcerting context. Finally everything made sense. I mean, what happened is that everything in fact stopped making sense, which was the only thing that made sense in the first place.
For the whole of my all too brief life, I have had a deep fascination with coincidences. I feel as if my life has been guided by events too perfect in their alignment to be mere happenstance. Chances are, you too, in your life, have been guided by events intelligent in design and uncontrollable in their power. My personal belief is that these events are coordinated by otherworldly forces to subconsciously influence the directions we take in our lives. For better or for worse I can't say.
What Inception has done is made me realize that coincidences could be used by higher powers to implant our minds with ideas, to bring us towards a desired action (or "inception", as the film refers to it as). For example, I once had a dream where a Blue Cloudy Sprite tried to transmit me melodies telepathically, as they should be transmitted. As the transient piano keys floated and flitted in front of me, I struggled mightily to play the transcendental melodies. Did someone invade my dream? When I think I dream, is that just another level of the dream I'm already in? Does that mean people could be invading my subconscious while I think that I'm awake?
"I don't how to play this," I told the spirit, and He/She in His/Her infinite wisdom didn't say anything but gently, kindly nudged me awake, like I was a babe in a manger.
It was a month before Christmas, the birth of Jesus, Son of God. On his birthday, I opened a box wrapped in candy cane paper. It was a Yamaha keyboard. Since that glorious day of pure white snow, I've been almost a slave to music, one of many man and woman army working diligently to build a pyramid out of sound for the Pharaoh's pleasure (see Radiohead: "Pyramid Song"). I honestly believe that music is a way for supernatural entities to communicate with us. Was it not my keyboard that delivered me to Poe's poem? And not so coincidentally (sorry, it was a coincidence, I suppose), music was used in Inception by Cobb and others to send messages between different dream states, or levels.
And what to make of these dream states? Christopher Nolan, Inception's writer (and producer, and director, and caterer, I'm guessing), puts forth the idea that the people your subconscious projects into its dreams are more one-dimensional than real people. This, too, worried my fragile super-ego (my Id is fine, thank you). I feel like the reasoning skills of people are too flimsy. I find that the connections they make and the justifications they use for them are fanciful at best. Surely, there must be scientists and mathematicians out there who reason strongly, but I never actually meet them. I just know the average American, and their delirious sense of reason is beginning to make me feel that I must be in a dream, or hell, or on very the precipice of hell, peering below at the fire and brimstone and suffering, Jonathan Edward's sinner in the hands of an angry God.
Which now brings me to my most insidious conclusion, that ideas are being incepted in my dream, or someone else's dream that I'm trapped in, to convince me to kill myself so that I can escape this dream and move back (or forwards?) to a higher level of existence (which relates to darker experiences I won't share here, and again relating to Poe's poem). That is how Cobb and his wife, Mal Cobb, escape a shared dream. Of course, you, the reader, are most likely a projection of the dreamer. Consequently, you will try to convince me of the validity of the dream world. A dream can only exist when a dreamer believes that it is real. Once a dreamer realizes that a dream is fake, it becomes something else (and then, usually, you wake up). I truthfully had to drink myself to sleep after seeing Inception to calm down.
Strange coincidences involving dreams and media has become a motif in my life. The first time I smoked salvia with my cousin, he put on a Japanese animated film called Paprika while I was tripping (it was a mild trip, so I could still make out the images on the television screen). As he did this, I became convinced that he and everybody else was out to torment my mind. Somehow, I felt that I existed separately from them, not just in the sense of being a different person, but in the sense of being a completely different kind of entity. As you can probably almost guess, I later found out that Paprika's plot is about dreams taking over reality. Of course, I had to see it while smoking salvia, the drug that made me start questioning reality (and how and why is that drug still legal, given our government's stance towards psychedelic drugs?). I have many more stories in that mold, like the time I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and thought that aliens had guided me to it. For the sake of brevity, I won't divulge all of the sordid details. All I'll say is that this time is serious.
It's funny, while I was writing this (over about 3 days, not because I was creating a masterpiece, but because I'm lazy), I had a spooky drunken conversation with a friend of a friend. He started telling me that nothing was real, and that we could do anything we wanted if we just believed it could be true. This man wasn't what you would typically perceive as a lunatic, either. He was a very popular young hipster, with suspenders and hair and a waistline that I'm sure a girl would kill for. He was ranting about subconsciousness and the idea of universes existing within molecules, as dreams within dreams. Was he a projection of my own subconscious? It reminded me of how my mom used to tell me that God could move a mountain for you if you wholeheartedly believed He could do it (I mean, you could do it). Was she a projection, too?
I had to laugh. We're all just crazy, aren't we? And here we are, all Prometheus-like, trying to steal the flame from the gods. I took my lighter, made in China, and lit a cigarette. I watched the flame burn slowly, illuminating my shoes, made in China. I thought about my dad's explanation of his Buddhist beliefs. We are all, according to him, One, part of a larger Godhead, who fractured himself, broke himself up into these shards we call Us so that could experience the joys of life as we know it. Or, you could call us projections of His subconsciousness. One day he will wake up and all will return to one, the Grand Universal Consciousness. The gods and goddesses, as Buddhists know them, are evolved beings that urge us forwards, to Nirvana. They incept us with ideas by taking "spooky action at a distance". These Far East thoughts, made in China, were like a mirror image of what I had been thinking.
Here we are, all the same, all subconscious projections of a Grander Being, moving towards he same conclusions in the most supernatural of ways. Me and that guy are just dumb saints, dumb prophets, or dumb priests, moving unknowingly towards realization. If only I knew what it was. Does it mean that I really should kill myself? Or is it a metaphor, or a Zen koan, urging me to kill my ego, that ugly ragged doppelganger hanger-on following me around with his ever-present storm clouds?
Uh. Turn me on, dead man.