Inception: A descent into the self

Introduction

From Steven Soderbergh and Darren Aronofsky to Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and Christopher Nolan, the list of filmmakers who have distinguished themselves as masters of a particular genre or as creators of high-concept films is remarkably short. The list is much shorter if we include only those whose films are a consistent and conscious attempt at translating high concepts into film format. Here, Nolan tops the list. If it can be concisely put, though it be as ludicrous a task as trying to understand a Nolan film on the first watch, then it may be put this way: His movies are themes that bring into expression the mechanics that lay beneath the thick veil of reality.

His stories aren’t really fictional but almost didactic or educational; the fictional part is rather those things we deem real—the characters, their names, the locations. Contrary to my experience with most films, those things seem expedient, secondary in any given Nolan project. Important as the casting choices are, the locations, and the spectacles in a Nolan film, it’s never these that carry the film like most high-budget blockbusters. Concepts like dreams and dream layers, inversion, and time dilation, when told through a story, seem to magnify more than distort or caricature reality.

The Concept of Recursion

This shows most clearly in "Inception," which I think is an eloquently told account of an idea which most of us appear to have absolutely no concept of—recursion. Recursion is commonly defined as the process of defining a problem (or the solution to a problem) in terms of (a simpler version of) itself.

A stupid question, isn’t it? Everyone knows that reality, as our own experience directly testifies, is linear. And although science is fast embracing new frameworks of time, it always seems to put them on the lucid end of the theoretical spectrum, as if to balance out those of gravity, evolution, and relativity, designating them to far away regions of space, as far away as can be from the familiar sense reality, never considering that these almost fictional temporal frameworks are part and parcel of our own, just layered beneath that which we like to think of as linear, which is just a synonym for normal or familiar. Einstein’s relativity unveiled one of perhaps many of these frameworks, and there’s a reason why his discovery is often likened to those people from the Platonic allegory who emerged out of the cave to see reality for what it is.

Recursion is often thought of as a mathematical concept, with examples such as the Fibonacci sequence being thrown around, but it’s more so the pivot around which revolves all modern achievements in computer science and technology. As a matter of fact, it’s a framework as crucial and revolutionary to this field as Einstein’s relativity has been to physics. It‘s one of those ideas that seem hidden on the surface, or as one would say, a good concept for a movie, or one of those things that you’d see in an Escher painting or a trick image on your social media feed, but on a closer look, is shown to be more real than anything. Douglas Hofstadter, who has a whole chapter on it in his popular book "Gödel, Escher, Bach," describes it as:

“Stories inside stories, movies inside movies, paintings inside paintings, Russian dolls inside Russian dolls (even parenthetical comments inside parenthetical comments!).”

These are just a few of the charms of recursion, he follows

It’s true, as Hofstadter holds, that sometimes recursion seems to brush paradox very closely. For example, there are recursive definitions. Such a definition may give the casual viewer the impression that something is being defined in terms of itself. That would be circular and lead to infinite regress if not to paradox proper. This is because a recursive definition never defines something in terms of itself but always in terms of simpler versions of itself.

This is what’s depicted in "Inception"; the mechanics are entirely built on this. Dreams are structured in layers where each successive layer represents a deeper level of the subconscious. Time functions differently in each layer: the deeper the level, the slower time moves relative to the layer above. Five minutes in the real world can equate to an hour in the first dream layer and exponentially more as one goes deeper.

The thing is, what we observe in the movie is not exclusive to dreams; reality is very much structured this way. Events and situations take place within contexts which transcend them, and those contexts within larger contexts, and so on. To understand a particular situation, we usually try to put it into perspective, i.e., search for the context that overarches this situation. Think about it: if you’re writing an essay, the words which form the sentence that you write seem immediate; the average typing speed is about 55 words per minute—that’s a lot of words. The writing process seems instantaneous and present by comparison to the essay, in relation to which time appears to move much slower. Now, your typing speed of 55 words per minute, if compared with the relative production speed of an essay or blog, the gap immediately appears quite large. No matter how exceedingly fast your typing speed is, this law cannot be changed because the writing process itself that involves those minute transitions from word to word are themselves instantiated by whatever the topic or object of the writing happens to be.

You could write a hundred words per minute but only produce two articles a week.If it’s a book, then it may take you two chapters a month, depending on the length of the book, but you only produce one book a year, which is very uncommon for most. Dreams, as depicted by Nolan, especially the final act of the movie, articulate this.

The deeper the characters dove down the layers of a dream architecture, the more ‘unconscious,’ uncertain, and unpredictable things became, the more unfamiliar the landscape grew. This is the source from which the biggest challenges that the characters faced stem. In the language of "Inception," these challenges take an immunological form rather than the innocuous ‘uncharted territory’ that psychology treats. The unconscious reacts in a hostile way, producing antibodies in the form of ‘projections’ or dream figures that attack intruders.

But this could easily be answered by way of the laws of recursion; the deeper layers, as per Hofstadter’s definition, are simpler versions of the upper layers. The simpler something is, the vaguer and less defined it is, which is another way of saying that it’s general and as such wanting of definition. Simplicity is often erroneously confused with easy or finite, but this is where the inclusion of recursion flips the script. Here, the simpler something is, the more variety it contains, the higher the number of interpretations which it could bear. Occam's razor was specifically sculpted to deal with this problem. In a real-world scenario, this simplicity, which in the movie defines the deeper layers of a dream scenario, are contexts, the variables of which are relatively more numerous than the upper layers.

This means that the things which the characters are to account for in order to pull off their objective successfully are orders of magnitude more numerous and less predictable than those which they’ve originally drawn their mission upon. Thus, there will emerge things which, from the character’s viewpoint, are entirely arbitrary and paradoxical. Usually here, the ‘thinking cap,’ i.e., ‘reason,’ is suspended, and instead, notions like divination and intuition, which are comparatively less reasonable and more resistant to proof, are resorted to. But this is all relative. It seems here that divination equates to ‘acquaintance with the deeper structures or wider contexts of things.’

Psychological and Philosophical Foundations

The wider the scope and, by extension, the number of variables involved in any given layer, the more ‘subconscious’ it is; the narrower, the more conscious. The extraction process requires that the extractor has such a degree of access to the subject’s mind as to know the contextual basis of every event. Only here would it be possible to make the unconscious conscious, but this is impossible. Jungian concepts aren’t exactly alien to Nolan films, as we see among other instances, the concept of Jungian archetypes cited by Scarecrow in "Batman Begins." Even the idea that the unconscious can generate projections that are hostile, though experienced by many clinical psychologists, is a uniquely Jungian association.

Add to this dream architecture and location and their significance to the subject. In "Inception," the architectonic side of the dream landscape is the extractor’s main tactical approach, often used to manipulate and stupefy, but not always without error. Central to all of this, in fact, the defining element, is the structure of time as a defining element of the dream landscape, as it is of Nolan’s filmography: "Memento," "Interstellar," "Tenet," etc. The non-linearity of time is expressed so concretely that in more than a few instances it appears in diagrams drawn by characters ahead of some important or final act of the movie; as if to say that the success or failure of the protagonist hinges on how well-adapted he is to this notion, which the first three-quarters of the movies is spent building up.

The experience we get here is so exceptional (inceptional, if you will), cinematically, that its closest analogue are the eureka moments of scientific enlightenment and discovery. The examples here are abundant and somewhat establish Nolan as a modern filmmaker by contrast to a Ridley Scott. Think of how hyperbolic geometry grew out of Euclidean space or special relativity from classical mechanics; it’s not a coincidence that those two epoch-making events pertain to time. It captures a similar sentiment to that which Einstein expressed in relation to quantum theory: the more successful it gets, the sillier it looks. Einstein-Rosen bridge, Penrose Stairs, Escherian objects—experiences which, were they not commonplace in today’s science, would have been considered psychedelic.

But what are the real connotations of this? If it’s reality that we seek here, this, I believe, is told on two accounts: one in "Inception" and the other in "Tenet." Here, we’re introduced to a geometry of time modeled on the principles of gravity; two objects still attract each other, but the basis for attraction is not magnetic (i.e., based on the physical properties of objects, their mass or density in relation to another object), but on a little-known concept which appears in quantum mechanics under the name of ‘quantum retrocausality.’ “Events in the future can affect the past. The idea suggests that if an experimenter makes a decision on how to measure a particle in the present, it can affect the particle's state in the past. This notion of time, where future events influence past conditions, could be viewed as a form of dialectical time where temporal causality is not unidirectional but rather bidirectional.”

We can approach this question gradually, in a way which the strong empiricist leaning of modern science would usually deter us from. If a subject, say the protagonist from "Tenet," could by merely lifting his hand catch the bullet on the table on the pretense that he’d dropped it, then insofar as the relation is one between two things external to each other, nothing’s strange apart from the retrocausal mechanism. But there’s a more nuanced relation here that’s inaccessible to empirical science: what actuates the subject himself, what explains that will with which he’s able to lift his hand in the direction of the bullet in the first place? It would seem as if by this question we’re invoking the still unsolved and by consensus insoluble last two thousand years of philosophical discourse on the nature of the soul and free will, but this isn’t the case.

On reflection, the postulate of retrocausality as it appears in quantum mechanics is self-evident with the right approach. This is where one can draw upon the significance of totems in "Inception." Cobb’s top, Arthur’s loaded die, Ariadne’s chess piece—all hint at this (scene parallel between main character and target in depth). We can approach this through the Jungian distinction between the ego and the self.

The self is here understood as the ‘totality’ of the psyche. It’s the central archetype that serves as the repository and organizing principle for the entire personality. It represents the ‘potential’ of the person. It is, in the proper sense, that which actuates the person. In this sense, the person is not an accident of time and place but comes into the world already equipped with a range of aptitudes that define his or her personality exclusively, making them as cognitively unique as their genes make them physically unique. This mental anatomy is as intricate as the physical: not a web of organs and a network of blood vessels and nerves, but cognitive architectures, engrams, complexes, archetypes, and other formations which animate the cognitive side of being and by extension the physical. They are what we see in dreams; that teeming landscape that seems a pale and confused copy of reality is where reality itself is rooted since these are the same structures (i.e., cognitive functions) through which we form the world without. These cognitive structures are more than the half-fantastic, half-psychedelic things which we often think of them as, but meaningful structures, mechanics, formulae, schematics, and equations that are the physics of the dream world, i.e., the mind’s infrastructure.

Now, on the analogy between the mental and physiological domains: if it can be said that the body’s purpose, all its intricate and infinite array of functions and connections, exists solely for the purpose of allowing me to move, then could this not be extended to the mental sphere? Are not the functions of the mind, the patterns of reason, judgment, dreams, reflections, memory, and all the cognitive infrastructure that lay beneath them, likewise existing to allow me to perform an act as simple as that which my body allows with my hand? And does not the fact that we’re able to perform mental tasks at all imply that these mental processes have certain arrangements? "Inception’s" dream engineering drops us right in the middle of this and shows us, through the eyes of Ariadne, a theoretical perspective. What allows me to function, to move my hand, to have thoughts, seems to be that larger self of which movement, mental or physical, is an instantiation—a whole system as it takes hold in a moment. A mere moment could not at all exhaust this whole, but only serve as instances or cases thereof.

This pattern is all too common. Self-preservation, on either the individual or the species level, the action of any member of a species, is predetermined by and is always for the sake of the species at large, even where the action is blatantly self-serving or seemingly at the expense of the group. And so the self stands above the subject as the genus above the member, and it’s by means of the former (i.e., by assigning an identity to the subject) that the species could realize itself through its membership.

Thus, the self in this scheme is its subject’s own end. The self transcends the subject; it’s a world or rather the world from the perspective of the subject, his macrocosm—a world to be assembled, charted, conquered, developed. "Inception" brings this idea to full expression by allowing the subject to indwell his own mind, thereby depicting a truth that, in reality, were it not for dreams, would remain totally hidden from us. The self, like the species, is a complete thing, a sort of program. In acting, the subject represents it, but what he represents, or tries to represent to be exact, is the self in its totality or eternity.

Thus, it’s not a coincidence that although it’s a world in itself, we treat it as an individual thing. This is because individuation is a perfected state, and it’s by this perfection that individuation is possible. This goes back to Cobb’s explanation of dream mechanics, specifically where he says that the mind simultaneously creates and perceives its world and does it so well that we don’t even know it’s happening.

This is the movie's way of explaining individuation. Though different from each other, ‘perfection’ and ‘identity’ are here synonymous; individuation links these two together in such a way that the difference is indeed non-existent. If depicted in time, this interrelation would not be an object at all, much like how we’re not aware of our heartbeat or the rhythm of systole and diastole until something happens to the heart that brings it to our attention. It’s because, under normal circumstances, the heart functions as it should and as such frees up a margin of energy for the body to perform other tasks and for the mind to think about things that have nothing to do with the heart.

This is what Cobb explains in this scene. Well explained though the basic idea is, it’s only properly fleshed out in "Tenet," which many argue is similar to "Inception." It’s similar in this respect. Here, we think of the inverted version of a person as the self and the non-inverted as the ego. The same recreative process that Cobb explains is the whole point of the movie and is the law by which the universe of "Tenet" operates. What’s noteworthy is the addition of the ‘future.’ The future acts and influences the present as much as the present the future. The dynamic relation between the self and the ego is most eloquently expressed here. The self is analogous to the future (i.e., the inverted version), and it warrants this position because it can’t be fully realized in the present due to its vastness. Since it’s complete, it could only be represented in a temporal sequence as lying somewhere in the future, standing above the ego as its potential, as what’s being approximated. Unlike Jung, Leibniz calls the self the individual substance; also unlike Jung, Leibniz speaks in the language of metaphysics where the so-called ego, which the model of psychology interprets as an extension of the self, appears here as a momentary action of the self.

“We can say,” he says, “that the nature of an individual substance or of a complete being is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to contain and to allow us to deduce from it all the predicates of the subject to which this notion is attributed.” An ‘accident,’ which plays the role of the ego in his explanation, “is a being whose notion does not include everything that can be attributed to the subject to which the notion is attributed.

“Thus taken in abstraction from the subject, the quality of being a king, which belongs to Alexander the Great, is not determinate enough to constitute an individual and does not include the other qualities of the same subject nor does it include everything that the notion of this prince includes. On the other hand, God, seeing Alexander’s individual notion or haecceity, sees in it at the same time the basis and reason for all the predicates which can be said truly of him. For example, that he vanquished Darius and Porus; he even knows a priori (and not by experience) whether he died a natural death or whether he was poisoned—something we can know only through history. Thus, when we consider carefully the connection of things, we can say that from all time, in Alexander’s soul, there are vestiges of everything that has happened to him and marks of everything that will happen to him, and even traces of everything that happens in the universe, even though God alone could recognize them all.”

G.W Leibniz 'Discourse On Metaphysics' (Section 8)

Thus, whether it’s "Tenet" with inversion or "Inception" with recursion, the underlying idea is the same, only approached from two different angles. In "Inception," it’s the ascendency of the self that’s expressed—its depth, its prowess, its scale. In "Tenet," it’s its time-defying nature, its relation to the present, to the real world, showing how it can bend reality equally as it does dreams.