I saw Chris Nolan’s Inception last night, and while it had some weak points, I enjoyed it. It reminded me a bit of Steven Soderbergh’s interpretation of Solaris. Both films deal with the protagonist’s regret and the projection of that regret into their lost loves. While the planet of Solaris is the catalyst for Kelvin’s image of Rheya, Cobb’s projection of Mal haunts his subconscious. Both Kelvin and Cobb are tortured by the suicide of their wives, and both films are about their attempt to hold onto the past. In this way, they create their own reality that seems to trap them.
It’s interesting how this theme continues to be explored, particularly in film. Indeed, both Solaris (2002) and Inception (2010) share a similar theme with the The Matrix (1999) and Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) before that. I might even put Blade Runner (1982) in this list. And while I’m sure there are more, all of these films deal with the idea of the real versus the ersatz, and how we project our images of how-it-aught-to-be onto the how-it-is. Indeed, what is the real? This is a question that has been at the forefront of science fiction at least since the cyberpunks.
In Inception, the brain is a computer to be hacked. The interface comes in a steel briefcase that joins the participants with wristbands. This machine seems to put them asleep immediately, and they all meet in the virtual world of someone’s subconscious. Instead of projecting into a matrix that is out there, the network has become the mind of a single person. As Cobb says in the film, we both create and experience that creation at the same time in dreams. Now that’s computing power. They never explicitly compare the brain to a computer network in the film, but the implication is obvious. Whereas the cyberpunks saw the body as a sack of meat that contained the reality of the mind, Inception privileges the material world and knows the mind is the best access to it.
I can read Soderbergh’s Solaris as a comment on virtuality, perhaps Inception is concerned with genetics. The former seems to caution us about the affect of ubiquitous computer networks (Solaris itself is just a big computer that feeds back what is put into it), and the latter is ultimately interested in how the body is literally affected by technology and ideas.
In fact, the idea seems to become reality. That is the whole idea of “inception” in the film. Like typing a command on a keyboard and pressing enter to activate it: the word becomes real. When our bodies are the computers, this is significant.
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I can’t help but notice within Inception the Homeric theme of coming home. I don’t want to give away the ending, but as Odysseus finds out: a homecoming can be dangerous. Home, especially in all of the films I mention above, seems to represent a comfortable place — where we want to be and where we think we belong. Yet, in these films, and Inception is no exception, “home” is an irrational projection that can trap us.
One of the great things about a home is that we must leave it occasionally to work, to shop, to travel, to grow. It’s the leaving of home that makes it valuable, one could argue. But what happens when you come home permanently? I think this is how both Soderbergh’s Solaris and Tarkovsky’s Solaris end. Each are ambiguous, but each also suggest that Kelvin has made a choice to retreat into a fantasy, rather than continuing to live in a painful world — what we would call the “real world.”
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Check out Inception. I need to see it again to tweak these ideas a bit further.
