“I’d written Inception as sort of a clever-clever heist movie. And heist movies tend to be deliberately superficial and glamorous. I needed him to bring the thing together, open it up to the audience and make it a human story, and he’s done that extraordinarily well.” – Chris Nolan (Director)
Research and Narrative: This Sci-Fi/Action film has inspired me along with photographers due to my idea being about surrealism, dreams and nihilism. The film itself is an interesting concept and has many plot twists that leave the audience shocked and wanting to know more. My own film consists of a similar concept of a dream within reality and my goal is to ensure that the viewer is so emerged within the film that they forget that they are watching the protagonists dream and not their real life. The plot twists are what makes a good film in my opinion hence why I picked inception as the movie that I want to base my project on with influences from other things also. Mental health also links into the film as Dom (the protagonist)is dealing with his own mental issues which impacts on the main plot of the movie and can cause a huge disaster of going into limbo. His poor mental health is caused by his late wife passing away due to the unbearable thought of not knowing what’s real life and what is just a dream, her death take a dramatic toll on his mental well-being as well as her being nihilistic which links into my film and the fact that my film is about what is real and what is just in our imagination. When breaking down the beginning middle and end of this film it start a little bit like this…
Summary: Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief with the rare ability to enter people’s dreams and steal their secrets from their subconscious. His skill has made him a hot commodity in the world of corporate espionage but has also cost him everything he loves. Cobb gets a chance at redemption when he is offered a seemingly impossible task: Plant an idea in someone’s mind. If he succeeds, it will be the perfect crime, but a dangerous enemy anticipates Cobb’s every move. In the film Cobb does succeed to plant the idea into the man’s mind.
More Specifically:
The Beginning: Cobb is dragged to a table with Saito and Saito says something along the lines of “are you here to kill me? I know what this is. I’ve seen one before, many years ago. It belonged to a man from a half remembered dream.” (I think talking about his totem).
The Middle: Dominic Cobb is the foremost practitioner of the artistic science of extraction, inserting himself into a subject’s dreams to obtain hidden information without the subject knowing, a concept taught to him by his professor father-in-law, Dr. Stephen Miles. Dom’s associates are Miles’ former students, who Dom requires as he has given up being the dream architect for reasons he won’t disclose. Dom’s primary associate, Arthur, believes it has something to do with Dom’s deceased wife, Mal, who often figures prominently and violently in those dreams, or Dom’s want to “go home” (get back to his own reality, which includes two young children). Dom’s work is generally in corporate espionage. As the subjects don’t want the information to get into the wrong hands, the clients have zero tolerance for failure. Dom is also a wanted man, as many of his past subjects have learned what Dom has done to them. One of those subjects, Mr. Saito, offers Dom a job he can’t refuse: to take the concept one step further into inception, namely planting thoughts into the subject’s dreams without them knowing. Inception can fundamentally alter that person as a being. Saito’s target is Robert Michael Fischer, the heir to an energy business empire, which has the potential to rule the world if continued on the current trajectory. Beyond the complex logistics of the dream architecture of the case and some unknowns concerning Fischer, the biggest obstacles in success for the team become worrying about one aspect of inception which Cobb fails to disclose to the other team members prior to the job, and Cobb’s newest associate Ariadne’s belief that Cobb’s own subconscious, especially as it relates to Mal, may be taking over what happens in the dreams.
The End: Saito and Cobb sitting together at the table again. Same kind of setup, but this time Saito says, “have you come to kill me? I’m waiting for someone..” and Cobb finishes his sentence by saying “someone from a half remembered dream.” Cobb essentially tells him they’re in limbo and they presumably kill themselves to wake up to reality. Although the ending leaves the viewer wondering if Cobb is back in reality or if he is still trapped in a dream, he can tell due his totem. Dom Cobb’s totem is a spinning tractricoid top that originally belonged to Mal (his wife). Should he spin the top and it topples over, he is awake; if it continues to spin, then he is still dreaming.
Theory of Narratives in Films
When looking at moving image products, it is therefore possible to look for patterns, codes, conventions that share a common features. In other words, narrative theories look at recognisable and familiar structures, that help us to understand both how narratives are constructed and what they might mean. For example, it is clear that narratives are a combination of many individual elements (sound, image, text etc) which are edited (connected) together. Narratives are organised around a particular theme and space and are based in an idea of time. So for example, many narratives (Film, TV, Radio) are usually linear and sequential, in that they start at ’00:00′ and run for a set length. This means that they normally have a beginning, middle and end. “
“A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end” – Aristotle Poetics.
However, as with all creative work, it is possible to break, alter or subvert these rules and are subject to other conventions, rules and codes. For example, narrative media structures (ie film, TV drama, music video, advertising etc as opposed to theatre, drama, live events etc) do not generally play in real time. As such, they employ elision or ellipsis in that some elements are missing. Similarly, time often moves backwards (flashbacks) or forwards (flash forwards) at moments which break the linear sequence. Time can also run simultaneously, in that it is possible to play-out different narratives at the same time: simultaneous or parallel narratives. Narrative strands are even able to be flagged up as something that needs to known (or will be fully developed) later, known as foreshadowing. This raises the concept that the audience are then given some information, feelings, ideas or logic that the on-screen actors do not have access to, which is called dramatic irony. An example of dramatic irony in this movie is the t the protagonists wife still thinks she is in a dream when she is in reality so therefore she jumps ion a balcony to get back to the “real world” and leaves the main character devastated and the audience in shock and dibelief.
Narrative theory can be applied to moving image texts but in many ways, narrative theory transcends a specific media form, such as, film and television and is able to take on a much greater significance in terms of how we organise our lives, our days, our weeks, our years, how we interact with each other, how we organise our memories, our ideas, aspirations and dreams.