To understand Inception, begin at its inception: Memento

The having the idea of anything in our mind no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world. –John Locke

In all of the analyses of Inception I’ve read so far, I have been surprised to find Nolan’s previous film Memento conspicuously absent from the discussion. The Matrix comes up most frequently, but so too do a number of other films, such as Dark City, Lathe of Heaven, Paprika, and on. To my mind this is odd, for the key to “understanding” Inception, or even just appreciating it as something more than “a fancy heist film that sports some fancy but well trod ideas about the appearance/reality distinction” is to understand the continuity it has with the themes developed in Memento. To see how this is so, let us step quickly through Memento.

In Memento Lenny creates his reality by using information that he has inscribed onto his body, as well as "mementos" that he carries around with him. Using these codes and artifacts he able to construct, repeatedly, in an iterative manner and on an ongoing basis, a narrative that guides him to his ultimate goal: the killing, in revenge, of the man who murdered his Beloved, his wife. Unfortunately for Lenny, it is possible for him to be manipulated by people who are able to get inside his "decision loop." Because Lenny has no memory outside of his physical inscriptions and photographs, anyone who is able to manipulate these objects, either directly or indirectly, winds up altering Lenny’s reality. At the end of the film we reach the beginning of the narrative where it is shown how Lenny is one of the participants in this reality manipulation, as he is revealed to have been manipulating himself, as a third party, fully knowing that he is consciously producing a fantasy for himself, but also knowing that this fantasy will help him accomplish a concrete goal that he wants to accomplish. Fantasy (a false belief) becomes a means to a real end (the slaying of person that he realizes has been manipulating him).

Inception picks these ideas back up, but generalizes them to the point where they become metaphysical. In Inception Lenny's physical mementos are dissolved into pure "ideas," and as such, they become, in a Lockian fashion, the ground of our access to reality. The film makes this explicit as it opens with Cobb discussing “The Idea” as the most powerful force in reality generation (not having the script I don’t recall how he phrases this, he may have called it a “virus” or “parasite” but the crucial point here is that he here lays out the thesis of the film: that a single idea can transform our experience of reality). Here Cobb nodes in the direction of memes, but much more importantly invokes the “Idea” idea, which can be traced back to Locke:

even the most abstruse Ideas, how remote soever they may seem from Sense…are yet only such, as the Understanding frames to itself, by repeating and joining Ideas, that it had either from Objects of Sense, or from its own operations about them.

For the remainder of the film the Idea idea remains lurking in the background, repeatedly manifesting in a variety of ways. The most obvious way that it manifests is as the possibility that all the proceedings are “just a dream.” This is emphasized by the “dream within a dream” scenarios, and by the general acknowledgment that it can be difficult to tell dreams from reality. This latter fact necessitates that each dreamer carry a special token called a "totem" to serve as their anchor to reality; each totem's special attributes enabling its owner to establish whether or not they are in their original frame of reference. Here danger threatens: as in Memento, the loss of the totem (memento) or its corruption will render the bearer of that totem anchorless, adrift without a way to establish their original frame of reference, unable certify that they are really in the “primary” frame of reference, also known as “the real world.”

These epistemic problems are not, however, the message of the film, it is not just one more VR film once more reminding us that it might all be a dream (though obviously it is doing this too insofar as it accepts this as a possibility, as does Memento, though in Memento it is suggested that this is the case only for Lenny, or people in Lenny’s condition, as when Lenny asks, in a moment of anxiety that stems from an intuited sense that he is just making everything up as he goes along: “Is the world still there when I close my eyes?”). Inception, at the meta level, more or less accepts that “it is all a dream.” Therefore, the question becomes: what are the psychological consequences of this fact? What does it mean that we are driven by ideas rather than driven by something called “reality.” The “real” story that lies behind the surface story of the heist, and of the dreams that house it, is the story of “inception”—that is to say, the story of how transformative ideas are generated, and how that generation shapes our experience of the world. We are clued in to the importance of the idea of “inception” precisely by the fact that it is offered, at the beginning of the film, as the opposite of “extraction.” But inception is not the opposite of extraction. The opposite of extraction is insertion, not inception. Yet insertion would seem to be a sufficient category: aren’t Cobb and his team merely placing an idea in someone’s mind? Why not call the movie “Insertion?” Inception on the other hand means roughly “at the beginning of something.” So here we are alerted to the fact that inception has a special import or quality over and above the “mere” insertion of an idea. What is this special quality?

This quality can be found in the conditions required to make inception possible. In both Memento and in Inception the condition is this: one must be able to access the deepest drives of the individual that is being incepted, those emotions that are constitutive of their identity. Once one understands what these driving emotional forces are, they can be harnessed to redirect, or even remake the individual. The emphasis is thus not on the insertion of the idea, but on the fact that the insertion of the idea results in an inception, that is to say, in a beginning, a new identity for the individual who has been “infected” or “inspired” by this new idea. We can see these constitutive forces in Lenny’s drive for revenge, as it is constantly being reshaped to fit new targets; we see it in Fischer’s yearning for both acceptance by and individuation from his father, and ultimately we see it in Cobb’s crushing guilt over the death of his wife, who was killed when Cobb infected her with the Idea idea itself.

In all of these cases the central dynamic is the dynamic of interpretation. We see this very explicitly in the case of Lenny, who is constantly pouring over his mementos, trying to build a picture of his target, John G, a target that morphs over time as various bits of data are added and removed. We see this in the case of Fischer, who agonizes over his father’s last word: “disappointed.” His Oedipal deadlock is finally resolved when he reinterprets this word not as testimony of his father’s disappoint in him, but as his father’s disappointment that he ever tried to be him in the first place, that he is not "his own man."

With Cobb, the question of interpretation becomes more difficult, for Cobb’s condition is tied to the central problematic of inception itself. At this level of the film all the threads come together: in order for Cobb to complete the mission, the mission that will get him back to his Beloved children, he must overcome his guilt over having infected his wife with the Idea idea. The success of the mission, and his overcoming of his psychic deadlock are thus coextensive: he cannot “see” his children until he completes the mission, and completion of the mission becomes the event of confronting his wife who personifies the collapse of the real into the Idea idea. Once Cobb reinterprets his psychic inventory, contained in all the rooms of memories “he cannot change” he is freed from his Limbo, and able to re-unite with his children. In the final moment when Cobb reunites with his children, we are once again reminded that frames of reference are ambiguous relative to interpretation. For Cobb now leaves his anchor behind: having acquired the Beloved, he no longer needs it, but we watch it spin so that we can know if Cobb has really acquired his goal. Will the top spin forever, detached from physical law? Or will it at long last fall to earth, so that we can know he is once again anchored in a world with determinate rules? We are not given this final confirmation, just as we are not shown in Memento if Lenny’s wife was ever murdered, for Nolan wants to inspire us with the Idea idea, which is to say: he wants to leave it open to our interpretation.

To some this will be unsatisfying. Some will prefer Neo’s assent out of the cave, The Matrix teaching us that when we understand The Matrix, we will be able to achieve god-like control (similarly Dark City). Inception (like Existenz) denies us this route, and recommends the view that no final anchor can be found once we find ourselves behind the veil of ideas. If there is an anchor to be found here, it is simply this: to love the objects of our care.

A final note: none of the preceding is intended to function as a commentary on the quality of the film as such. It is simply a quick sketch of the film from the vantage point of its meta structure, in particular as it relates to the themes of Memento. The question of how well the film hangs together at its various levels in terms of coherency, aesthetics, and so forth is another matter, and one that I am not addressing here.