Psycho-Analytical Context for Inception

Rating: 8/10 (19 July 2010)

The thing about making a movie is that it presents to the filmmaker the delicious opportunity to plant an idea in the viewer's subconscious, bypassing cognition and appealing directly to the subconscious through emotion-evoking symbolism. The idea of a subconscious was first proposed by Freud, who argued that it acted as a sort of "referee" or super ego between those things the reptile brain tells us to do and those things society tells us to do.
Perhaps no man came to understand the implications of Freud and how his notions of the subconscious might be exploited for the purposes of creating propaganda better than Ernest Dichter, a Vienna-trained psychologist who became very famous for applying persuasive symbolism into television commercials. Among Dichter's more notable achievements was suggesting to the Betty Crocker Company that when a woman bakes a cake, she is subconsciously procreating, and that the act of pulling a cake from the oven was equivalent, on a subconscious level, to taking a baby from the womb. Dichter suggested to the executives at Betty Crocker that they should require that an egg be personally added to their cake mixes so that, when baking a cake, a woman would be offering her man a symbol of her fertility.
Are you laughing? So did the executives at Betty Crocker. All the way to the bank. As did the executives at Ford, who agreed with Dichter that men treat sedans as wives and convertibles as mistresses.
While much of what Freud thought about personality and motivation turned out to be bogus, the one thing that continues to stand up to the test of time is Freud's notion of dreaming and the meaning of symbols in dreams. Symbolic imagery is used so frequently today in films, television and commercials that we process the meanings routinely. We know, for example, that the fireworks exploding behind that scantily-clad Victoria's Secret Model are not really fireworks. We process their true meaning emotionally and intuitively through a process the psychologists call the "peripheral route to persuasion."
Filmmakers are very aware of the peripheral route to persuasion and use it to feed us propaganda on a regular basis. Most of the time we don't mind because it is propaganda we agree with, such as we should treat our families better or be more concerned about the disadvantaged and poor. But what about the more controversial filmmakers? Isn't Michael Moore, for example, attempting to plant in the minds of his audience the notion that capitalism is inherently flawed because it is based on greed and heartlessness?
What if the filmmaker could bypass the whole process of making a movie and just hook up some keen electronic gadget to himself and another person, crawl into his or her subconscious and plant the idea in the deepest, darkest part? That is the premise of Inception. While on the surface the movie is about crawling into dreams and planting ideas, it could easily be about movie making itself, because in the end the character Cobb and the director Christopher Nolan are in the same business. In that respect, this may well be Nolan's most personal film.
While some have compared this movie to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I think Inception would make a great complement to a double feature together with The Stunt Man (1980). Inception borrows the "film within the film" concept, puts it on steroids and applies it to dreams. In the end, it could easily be a movie about making movies that are themselves about movies.
For those of you insisting on explanations, yes, I think the whole damned thing was a dream. But, like Mulholland Drive and Lost it's a death dream in which Cobb is working out the regrets and sins of his life. What I saw was Cobb's purgatory, and by the end of the movie Cobb's subconscious was able to work out a lot of issues, and he got closer to heaven.
Or maybe it was just another movie with an intentionally-ambiguous ending designed to provoke us. What worries me is what Nolan might have planted in my head while I was watching it.