Everything in the world exists in a balance, one cannot exist without another, but both are vastly different from each other, like opposites. Such opposites lie on each side of a metaphorical, abstract boundary, like a boundary between truth and lie, good and evil, right and wrong, man and machine, past and present, reality and dream.
At some point,
both elements become so closely linked that they cannot be differentiated.
In other words, these abstract notions become subjective for everyone.
The concept of erasure of boundaries, specifically dreams, and reality, is applied in the movie, Inception (2010). The plot centers around Cobb, a thief who can walk into people’s dreams and change their thoughts. He is also a master of extraction (getting information out of a person’s subconscious) and Inception (planting an idea in someone’s mind).
This rare skill has made him a lot of money while attempting corporate
espionage, but he is also a fugitive of law because he was blamed for the death
of his wife, Mal, who committed suicide but framed Cobb for murder. Cobb is
given a second chance by Saito, who offers to get his charges dropped and make
it possible for him to return home if Cobb plants an idea in Fisher’s mind. But
while attempting to get into Fischer’s mind, he faces his worst fear and enemy,
his subconscious.
Inception is a constant shift between reality and dream, with the events of both instances merging into one another so much so that one cannot distinguish between them both. The major physical representation of the element of reality is a ‘totem’, an object that allows the dream-walker or dream-weaver to remain conscious of their reality and reminds them that they are in a dream so they do not get lost in it.
Each
person has a totem; for Cobb, it is a spinning top, which belonged to his late
wife, and when he spins it, if it keeps spinning, it shows that he is in a
dream, but if it falls, it means that he is in the real world. It shows that
even those who walk into dreams can forget if they are in a dream or
reality.
This movie expands on the concept of a dream within a dream, going as far as to develop three further dream stages originating from a single dream. When Cobb and his team go into Fischer’s mind, they climb three levels into his subconsciousness. Saito is shot and is on the verge of death, but Cobb keeps taking him from one dream stage to another so that he can survive.
The deeper they go into a dream, the more time they have because their brains work faster, giving them more time to live while only a few minutes have passed in the real world. At the end of the movie, when Cobb meets a now old Saito and says that “someone from a half-remembered dream” (2:15:52), to which Saito says, “impossible” (2:16:00). At this point, only minutes have gone by in the real world, and Cobb is still a young man, but it was decades for Saito in his dream. Saito has accepted his dream as a reality, but Cobb says, “I’ve come back, to remind you of something… that this world is not real” (2:16:20 – 2:16:40).
Saito then realizes that he has spent decades in
a dream, as he sees Cobb’s top has not stopped spinning even once and that he
had made a promise to Cobb that he needs to fulfill. Cobb says, “Come back so
we can be young men together again” (2:17:06), which shows that they will come
back to reality when they both die in this dream. What has once been a reality
for Saito, in which decades of his life have gone by, is now a dream, a state
of Limbo filled with fragments of his memories and subconscious.
Cobb was once an ‘architect’ himself, a person who used to draw the details in the dreams in which he then pulled his targets when they slept. He and Mal used to explore dreams, making their own world inside a dream, filling it with the projections of their subconscious. During one of those experiments, they go so deep that they become stuck in their own dreams.
Decades pass, and they build a life for themselves in that dream and get old together, while their young bodies remain sleeping in the real world. Cobb knows and accepts the fact that this is only a dream, and when they die here, they will get up in the real world. But Mal does not want to leave their dream world, so they spend a long time there. Cobb realizes that Mal has hidden a secret somewhere and has forgotten about it. That secret lies in a house in their dream, a house built from Mal’s memory of the time when she grew up in the real world.
Cobb finds a safe in that house, and in that, he finds a top, a totem, which belongs to Mal. That top represents Mal’s reality which she has locked away and forgotten while living a dream, but Cobb spins that top. This shows that Cobb has planted an idea in Mal’s mind, ‘inception’, when he spins the top because if the top keeps spinning forever, Mal will realize that they are living in a dream and need to wake up to their real life.
After much time, when they are old, they decide
that they need to die to live their real lives, so they lie on a railway track
and die together. But when Mal wakes up in the real world, where they have
children, she starts believing that even that world is not real and keeps
telling Cobb that they need to die to go back to their reality, to which Cobb
declines, but Mal commits suicide, wanting to go back, and die.
The viewers cannot differentiate between both these instances, between reality and dream, which remain even after the movie ends. The last scene shows that Cobb spins the top on the table but runs away to hug his children and does not wait for the top to stop spinning, as if he knows, or wants, his children to be his only reality. The movie ends on the frame of the still-spinning top, which falters for a bit, and at that same instance, the movie ends.
This shows that
even if Cobb believed his meeting his children was his reality, the viewer
never comes to know the truth because, for them, the spinning motion of the top
stopping marks the end of a dream, but that never happens.
The above-mentioned analysis explains the erasure of boundaries in the movie Inception and shows that the notions of reality and dreams are so intertwined with each other that even the characters cannot differentiate between them.
