Inception

As many of you know, I published a book on “faith and film” a few years ago during college. I basically argued that all good stories borrow from the ultimate story of the gospel. Hollywood has no ideas of their own; they have to borrow from the true and final origin of all drama (for a scholarly treatment of this subject in combination with the development of Christian theology in biblical studies, see Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine on the RealApologetics.org Recommended Reading). Indeed, it was a simple application of presuppositionalism; unbelieving worldviews can only borrow from the Christian worldview since God made everything. And in the last third of the book I added an apologetic twist, which put the movie-viewer in their place at least as a creature before God. Unless you are a Christian, you cannot account for bondage, the villain, the savior, redemption, the beauty, and all the other major themes found in epic stories.

I haven’t really touched the subject since. And I knew that I had hardly scratched the surface with regards to this area and our culture. But, it was a joy gaining a new friend at a coffee house in Sioux Falls a number of months ago who has a more keen eye for the big screen. Cory Kitch has competently taken over the field even as he ministers to the flock as the Associate Pastor at Central Valley Community Church in Hartford, SD. He regularly reviews movies from a uniquely Christian (Reformed and Presuppositionalist at that) perspective on his blog Nothing New Under the Sun; his whit and sarcasm also keeps it fun. So, if there is ever a movie-review blog online worth reading, it’s his.

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Let me begin by thanking Real Apologetics for asking me to contribute my take on Christopher Nolan’s newest cinematic effort, INCEPTION.

The summer movie season is not supposed to produce movies like INCEPTION. Summer Movies are about thoughtless, stupid eye candy. It’s a season that often marks our local movie houses with giant transforming plot holes…ahem…I mean robots and vampires that fall in love with mediocre actresses.

Then, as soon as summer is over, we get a lot movies that Hollywood thinks are important, thoughtful and award worthy but are really about as much fun as renewing your driver’s license or riding a bicycle with no seat.

That is, until someone like Christopher Nolan comes along and proves to be a regular Hollywood paradox; a director who can produce eye-candy that is also, genuinely thought provoking.

I’ll start by urging you to see this film before you read anything about it. I’ll try to be as general as I can be, but there are some SPOILERS ahead. You’ve been warned.

INCEPTION takes place in a world where you can enter other people’s minds, share their dreams and even steal their secrets. Leonardo DiCaprio is Dom Cobb, the leader of a rag-tag group of secret-thieves who’ve made their living by looting secrets from high and mighty corporate types, like Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe), and selling them off to the highest bidder.  But what happens if someone like Mr. Saito decides to hire you, not to steal an idea, but to plant one in someone’s mind instead? That is INCEPTION on the surface.

Christopher Nolan explicitly intends the first layer of this film to be a metaphor for the theatrical experience. Just as Cobb and his crew of dream thieves hack into their target’s mind in order to plant a life changing idea, so the filmmaker crafts an idea to be transmitted and implanted into the mind of an audience. On this level, INCEPTION is very much about the power of ideas and how easily they can infiltrate a person’s thinking.

Whether he did it on purpose or not, Nolan has stumbled across something that is affirmed from the very beginning of the redemption narrative. Look, for example, how easy it was for Eve to believe that, by eating what she was commanded not to eat, she could actually become like God. Look how easy it was for Adam to disobey God once the idea takes hold in his mind that disobedience did not, in fact, lead to death but resulted instead in divinity. It takes roughly two sentences. One idea and their entire world is corrupted.

Who Needs Inception? We Have Incarnation!

It takes another sort of inception, a Superior Architect, to reverse the damage that was done with a single idea. St. John describes this “inception,”

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth… And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:14, 16-18)

He also describes the mission of this “inception,”

“He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:10-13).

An idea, communicated through words, corrupted the world, subjecting it to futility and then came The Word to redeem what was corrupted and lost.

Subjectivity = Captivity

In yet another level this film is about perception, specifically our own personal, relative, subjective perception. Inception is a movie that is difficult to interpret and it’s designed to be that way. It is constantly keeping the audience on their heels as they try to discern what is real and what is not. Everything we learn in the film is subjective and open to interpretation. Until it’s not…but then it “ends” leaving the film open to even more interpretation and debate!

The ending is what most people are talking about after they see this movie. It is an ambiguous ending at best and this has frustrated many viewers. I can understand that. I like definitive happy-endings as well, but maybe, just maybe the point is that you’re supposed to be frustrated by the ambiguity, even the subjectivity of it. What if the ending is ambiguous because you’re supposed to push against the idea that you can’t know what is or isn’t real.

James Harleman of Cinemagogue has pointed out what is so frustrating and desperate about treating life and reality as something that is subjective. He says that Subjectivity is Captivity. This is the plight of both Dom and Dom’s ill-fated spouse. Subjectivity and relativism drives them mad with depression, confusion and guilt and there’s no escaping the damage, no escaping the maze. What is needed for both of them is for someone, outside the maze, to infiltrate and rescue them.

That’s where the most important character of the film (in my opinion) enters and begs for some examination.

ARIADNE: The Mistress of the Maze

Ellen Page plays, Ariadne, the newest addition to the “dream-team” (Yes. I’m just as embarrassed about that pun as you are). I think the character of Ariadne proves that Nolan intends his audience to reject the notion that reality is relative.

The name Ariadne has quite a history in Greek mythology – a history rich with alternate versions of her story. Apparently the Greeks were as fond of rebooting franchises as Hollywood is now. Skimming the variations of myths about Ariadne reveals that she was known, not only as the Mistress of the Maze, but also as the one who gave Theseus the red string he needed to get into the Labyrinth, kill the Minotaur and find his way out again.

What does this have to do with Inception? So glad you asked. Dom is a man that is desperately trying to relieve the guilt he feels over the death of his wife. His method for doing this is locking a piece of her away in his subconscious so that he can build a perfect dream world for them to inhabit forever. A great plan if reality really was subjective and relative. But, if reality is actually objective then it would stand to reason that Dom’s pursuit would mark his life less by freedom from guilt and more by confusion and self-destruction.

Oh, what a surprise! That’s exactly what his life is like.

Ariadne is in this movie for one reason and one reason only. She is there to be an advocate for reality. She’s there to tell Dom, and us, that we can’t possibly conjure our own justification or absolve our own guilt out of thin air. She is there to affirm that the distinction between dreams and reality is not a false dichotomy. She’s there to give Dom his red string, so he can begin to find a way out of his maze. Because of Ariadne’s wisdom Dom finally acknowledges that if he’s ever going to be free of his guilt, he’s got to quit trying to justify himself. He’s got to quit feeding his fantasy world as if restoring what was lost in his own dreams will count in reality.

Cobb to his “dream” wife: “You’re a shade. Your the best I can do but you’re just not good enough.”

We never really get the satisfying answer we want when it comes to Dom’s redemption, but that’s ok by me because we, the audience, leave Dom right where a lot of us might be. We realize that, ultimately, we need help to be justified. We need help to kill our Minotaurs. We need help to be saved. We need intervention. We need foreign righteousness. It’s not enough to simply realize that we’re helplessly lost in a maze of guilt and sin. We need a redeemer. We need a redeemer who will do more than give us a red string. We need a redeemer who will spill his blood and sacrifice his life in order to take the punishment we deserve for our sin.

“I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus…who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (I Corinthians 1:4, 8).

I don’t imagine that Nolan intended for Inception to point to the Incarnation, the need for foreign righteousness or the maddening futility of relativism but that is the direction to which Inception’s finger inevitably points.