Inception Essay

Inception Summary
• Dom Cobb, the protagonist of the film, is an extractor. This mean that he enters dreams of others to steal ideas which he sells on to clients.
• Cobb has lost the desire to live in the reality due to entering people’s dream world which caused him to prefer the fantasy world.
• Saito is an authoritative business man seeking to destroy a corporation of high worth. He hires Cobb to incept someone’s mind in exchange for the murder charges that he faces of his late wife Mal to be terminated in the real world. This will allow him to regain contact with his children.
• Saito has his sight set on Robert Fischer, who is the air to his father’s energy business company.
• Cobb performed the act of inception previously on his late

This is a reality which is created though simulation and a reality generated from ideas.
• Hyper-Realism in this film causes the audience to question whether this film is reality or is in fact the fantasy dream world.
• Throughout this film various characters are shown being killed or dying in various ways while living in one dream causing them to wake up in another dream (another level).
• This Hyper-Realism leaves the viewer confused to what is simulation and what is reality while entering the subconscious.
• Architecture, time and physics can all be altered through hyper-reality. This is shown as characters walk through mirrors, can move and grow buildings and can manipulate gravity.
• Time within various dream worlds and reality do not correlate. What may take two minutes in the real world may last for twenty minutes in a certain dream world.

Intertextuality
• This provides sense and meaning to a text by referencing another text.
• The Penrose staircase is referenced throughout the film and is a reference to a famous painting by M.C Escher.
• The staircase elaborates the notion that everything in the dream world is achievable within the architect’s

Paranoia and violence are used throughout.
Identity
• Identity within a Postmodern text is not concrete as they do not have one permanent self but may have many identities.
• An example of this is in the real-world Cobb is seen as being a murderer, but in the dream world he walks as a free man.
• Another example of this is Mal as her persona and identity were manipulated by Cobb in both the real world and in the dream world. She began to inherit traits that could be depicted as ones of someone who has schizophrenia (Lecture notes, Week 3, slide 41).
• One could say that Cobb was in search of his own identity as he had a constant longing to regain the perfect family life.
• It could also be argued that each character had multiple personas as they possessed different roles in each level of the dream worlds.

Simulacrum
• A simulacrum is an undesirable image of the self, a person or an object that already exists.
• Limbo is shown as being a simulacrum as it is the complete opposite from reality and is undesirable to the characters.
• The dream world is also a simulacrum of the real world. It is stage two (the perversion stage) of the four-stage