Inception: My Labyrinthine Analysis

By: Jay
Inception is one of the best films Hollywood has put out in years, and stands out as a diamond in a large stack of garbage.  If the liberals in Hollywood were really worried about the environment, they wouldn’t cloud the artistic environment with so much pollution. But Inception is something else. A film that mystified many, it also became the subject of intense online debates and speculation as to its ultimate meaning. I believe I have cracked it, and I think I cracked its code upon first viewing.  I subsequently viewed it two more times, and collected even more clues confirming my basic thesis. Let’s analyze.

One cannot properly understand Inception without familiarity with the basic concepts of Carl Jung, some Freud, and a sprinkling of esoterica. The esoteric elements coalesce nicely, due to Jung’s emphasis on mythology and archetypes.  I am not here advocating Carl Jung, to be clear. Jung was very much opposed to the basic worldview I espouse, but we must still interact with and decode these phenomena, inasmuch as they are a part of the world we operate in.

What is happening in Inception is just this: the entire sequence is about Cobb himself returning from the abyss of chaos to his true identity, wherein he reaches a kind of personal paradise. Cobb is, in fact, the only character, and the other characters are all “projections of the subconscious,” as he explains to Ariadne in her first test dream sequence. The original clue to this interpretation is in the beginning when Cobb, Saito and his associates are in the room (Saito’s apartment) where the revolution of some kind is taking place outside. Saito recognizes the carpet is not his, and calls Cobb out for keeping him within yet another layer of dream-existence. Cobb tells us later that the projections never attack the dreamer, but the others supposedly perceived as intruders. However, if this was the case, then the revolutionaries should have attacked Cobb and Saito; but they don’t – they attack Nash (played by Lucas Haas), who is supposed to be the dreamer in this layer. And if you note, they never attack Cobb – ever. Read more of this post