Inception Essay

If Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) from Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception were to make a speech, it might begin with, “I have a dream within a dream within another dream…” Continuing threads on subjectivity versus reality, time, and memory, many of which were seen in his 2000 film Memento with the backward storytelling and memory loss, Nolan makes the ambitious attempt of capturing and rendering dreams on the screen where the subconscious and conscious mingle in action-packed chase scenes, zero-gravity fights, and in guilt and haunted memories. In the end, he effectively exploits the myriad of possibilities that the dream device offers while carefully backing the story up with logic so as to not descend into total chaos. Inception is also a commercial

While his issue is hinted repeatedly, in one of my favorite scenes of the movie when the master extractor gets extracted himself, the viewer finally learns about Cobb’s secrets as Ariadne sneaks into his dream and enters the eerie elevator of memories. Each floor is a different snapshot of his past with his wife, Mal, and their children. These are moments that he regret, and dreaming is the way for him to relive them. Cobb shows Ariadne the last time he saw the back of their kids, while Ariadne runs back to the elevator and goes down to the basement, to Cobb’s deepest secret. It would be unfair to spoil a scene like that, but one cannot help but to be engrossed in Cobb’s guilt. The elevator is a clever self-reflexive metaphor for the space-time compression and distortion of films and dreams alike. These memories within the elevator come back to haunt Cobb and Co. throughout the film, and Mal, especially, acts as the femme fatale who often messes with Cobb. The development and resolution of Cobb’s guilt in the dream is the subplot of Inception that adds a touch of film noir and emotional significance to the