The dystopian and utopian nature of dreams in "Inception" (PDF)

Pre-University Paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 15 Punkte, , language: English, abstract: With box office sales amounting to an impressive 828 million US dollars, the 2010 movie Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan, was an instant success for Warner Bros. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that it is currently ranked 69th on the list of the most successful movies of all time. However, in order to understand what distinguishes Inception from a simple blockbuster and what makes it one of the most ingenious movies of the 21st century, one has to delve deeper into its numerous layers.

The screenplay is based on two fictional preconditions. Firstly, the existence of a technology that enables the sharing of dreams and secondly, that this technology became subject to a new kind of crime known as 'extraction', which involves inserting oneself into someone's dreams to gain access to hidden information without the person being aware of it. The movie's protagonist Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is a professional thief known for being the best at the dangerous art of 'extraction', and his team receive a tempting offer from Japanese businessman Saito. They are tasked not with stealing information from someone's mind, but instead with planting an idea into a person's mind, an undertaking known as 'inception'. In return, Dom will be cleared of all his criminal charges, which would make it possible for him to return home to his children. Desperate to be reunited with them once again, he agrees to take on the challenge. Along with his team, Dom needs to convince Saito's business competitor Robert Fischer to dissolve his father's business empire once he is dead. Fischer is drugged by the team and together they enter the dream world. Through different dream levels, each one trying to convey a different emotional message to Fischer, the team dives ever deeper into Fischer's subconscious in order to plant the idea of breaking up his father's business empire into his mind.

Christopher Nolan walks a fine line between presenting a utopian or a dystopian world in his movie. The resulting ambivalence challenges viewers to make up their own mind about what they consider to be morally right and wrong. Since Inception does not foster straightforward black and white thinking, viewers are left floundering in a moral grey area. Instead of a clear demarcation between what we as human beings look upon as good and bad these two opposites begin to fade, which in turn precisely causes that complex and unsettling ambivalence. [...]