INCEPTION was incredible. Worlds within worlds of dreamscapes. Spielberg had it right when he said that science fiction was his favorite genre, because in SciFi, basically, "you can do anything you want". It's the perfect medium for playing around, and housing a great story.
Underneath Inception is a great story. But my tendency after so much Hollywood viewing is to re-name a film like this Deception. "To plant an idea in someone's head is worse than any Virus, because once planted it can never really be eradicated completely." How true this is, and so can be for this story, and so many others like it. What is that idea? It is simply put, that living here and now is all that is primary and important, and ideas of any other kind of reality lead to delusion, superstition, self-deprecation, and denial.
And what idea was it that was planted so deeply as to cause destruction here? The idea that the life we're living isn't real and that we are only experiencing a reflection of reality, and that something greater lies beyond. So why stay? Why hold on? Why live? Why not just move on and get to that other side?
This sounds so familiar. I harken back to another great pair of films that is really only one film by Wim Wenders called Wings of Desire. There was the original in 1987 by Wenders in Germany, in gorgeous black and white, typical German self-reflective noir and angst, and the later version with Nicolas Cage as the angel in 1998, full living color and characters, the girl played by the stunning Meg Ryan. In this story the angel gives up his precious eternal armor to live a real life, replete with feelings, senses such as touch, and also sadly, death. This picture of the great beyond is one of illusion as well. The eternal state is seen as not really being alive, or having genuine feelings, having a reality that is rock-bottom reality, the real thing. The cold and emotionless eternal void of the afterlife, or the stuff of eternal dreams, in Inception called limbo,"the void" of Star Trek, the bottom in "What Dreams May Come", and in classical literature from Dante, Purgatorio.
DeCaprio's character states that he could not live that way. In returning he and his wife to reality, they awaken what appears to be only hours later than they originally went to sleep, all the while experiencing a full life together in the dream. They had constructed their own dream several layers down, and came back, for her only to find that she preferred the dream, and wanted to stay there forever with him, real or not. What is clear is that his wife did not accept or welcome the present reality and wanted to escape from it at all costs, even denying that it was reality at all.
In the end, the reality of the moment, the today we can call today, calls us back. And so as in Wenders' existential truth, reality is beautiful. The smiling faces of DeCaprio's children are perfect and unimpeachable at the end of Inception, and his spinning top, called the "totem", is a reality check that assures him that this is all not a dream. What could be more perfect to describe the all-important NOW than that of a spinning top with no definitive sides? At the end, it is still spinning, and in cinema space, that means it still is now, in the minds of the viewers. The last image we see in any film can be one of the most powerful images of all, and much like a dream, the part that we remember the most. Don't you mostly remember the last part of your dream, when you awaken, as you must when you walk out into the air outside the theater?
