Inception: Half-Mad to Dream
This entry is only for those who have seen the film: Contains spoilers and information that people who have yet to see the film may not understand.*
In the latter part of the film, there was a poignant scene that triggered something I read about the way we remember our deceased loved ones. When Cobb and Ariadne entered the 4th level dream to retrieve Fischer they find Cobb’s deceased wife Mal. Mal desperately asks Cobb to stay with her, but he said something incredibly shrewd toward his shadow of a wife. I can’t recall the exact words, but he said something along the lines that he can’t stay because she’s not Mal. Mal was unique, spontaneous, and had imperfections about her that he knew would never exist in the Mal he created. During that scene, I felt it came straight from the pages of C.S. Lewis’s book, A Grief Observed.
Following the death of his wife Joy Gresham, Lewis felt selfish and angry for focusing so much of his energy on the effects of his wife’s death on him. Rather he felt it should have been more focused on her suffering and how she would miss out on the joys of life from such an early death. Lewis remembers the joys and pleasures of his wife, but quickly realizes a flaw in such a resolve. He had created from his own memories of what Joy was like and molded her into his own being.
In a purely objective sense, it seems hopeless to trust our memories for factual events. In class, we recently discussed about memory retention and we learned that episodic memory (retention of information about the where and when of life’s happenings. E.g., what happened on your first date), combined with emotion increases the likelihood that an event will be remembered later. In a general sense, sometimes when a person is in a highly emotional state, logic becomes overrated and thrown out the window when trying to express what is happening to us. Is it safe for us to remember objectively or trust those memories we remember in our highly emotional state? Take dreaming, I know sometimes I can wake up highly emotional from a dream that felt incredibly real. What if the dream was built upon actual memories, and emotions were intertwined in both events. Or have you ever dreamt about a place, only to see it unfold later in reality? Is that Déjà vu? Who’s to say years down the road, we can recall accurately what reality is and what was merely in our heads?
I feel movies like inception have the potential to be a bit overwhelming because of such ideas. Like a resilient parasite, ideas can rewrite all the rules right?
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