“She's So Lovely”...

Sometimes a complex and thoughtful film will offer a clue, often as a throw-away line within a deceptively mundane seen, towards the deep truths and meaning held within the film author's wholly intended expression...

The single most important line in the film Inception, a thoroughly thought-provoking film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, follows Ellen Page's antagonistic inter-subconscious run-in with Marion Cotillard, in one such seemingly mundane scene where Page's character is speaking with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and she asks:

“What was she like in real life?”

Here, Gordon-Levitt pauses before answering, “She was lovely.”

This is the exact point where the entire explanation of the film should come into focus. But before I can explain this, let's take a look backwards at the situational aspects of these characters:

Marion Cotillard is the dead wife of widower Leonardo DiCaprio.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the longtime friend and business partner of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leonardo DiCaprio runs a freelance business, based on his own research and development of invading interfering in peoples' subconscious version of their own 'selves'.

When Ellen Page's character asks the question, “What was she like in real life?”, Cotillard's character would be thus far setup to appear as a confrontational, somewhat unlikable character.

And at this point, if more exposition is required for you to understand what's been set up for the film, then it would be better if you watched the film before proceeding...

Whist in a training session, Page enters DiCaprio's subconscious mind, which is where she ran into Cotillard, who is in a twisted way, acting as a stereotypical jealous ex-wife, is presented as “defending” DiCaprio's psyche from invasion. Hence the aforementioned antagonistic inter-subconscious clash. But if we dig deeper into this allegorical presentation, what is really going on here? With Cotillard's character having already maliciously thwarted at least one of DiCaprio's subconscious business endeavours (and thusly putting the protagonist dream team in actual, physical peril), can we then take a deeper inspection of this subconscious relationship between DiCaprio's and Cotillard's characters and decide, with the information that we're given by Nolan in his own film, that DiCaprio's character is holding some sort of grudge against Cotillard's character – or, perhaps, his subconsciously is more widely seeing her in a negative light? I think the answer to both halves of this question is YES. And again, herein lies part of the key to solving the puzzle of Inception...

Throughout Inception, DiCaprio's and Cotillard's children are involved as a motivational factor – DiCaprio must make it back to America, from France, so that he can reunite with his children – children whose faces are never fully realized within DiCaprio's mind, indicating guilt and regret at being a non-present father, and also indicating DiCaprio's wishes to redeem himself in this regard. So, then, who does DiCaprio's character point his subconscious finger at as being the “bad guy”? His wife and the mother of the children – Cotillard's seemingly aloof character. And this is where the answers and true theme of Nolan's film really start to shine out, if, as audience members, we're willing to dig until we get to this fracted light.

Like any human being(s), becoming the victims of the mundanity of life is a psychological danger that resonates. Falling victim to this is quite severe in the sense that we start to loath our ourselves, our loved ones, and then perhaps start to blame these loved ones for our own insecurities, and our own shortcomings. Like being an absentee father. And like Sidney Poitier said in To Sir, With Love, “Marriage is no institution for the insecure”. So then, we start to build a subconscious reality where we can comfortably shift our blame. The real challenge is to be able to destroy – and to allow the destruction of – this subconscious world. In Nolan's vision, DiCaprio's subconscious world is at least rotting and falling apart, indicating his willingness to accept the idea that he's merely blaming his own wife for his paternal shortcomings.

The character played by Ken Watanabe represents (directly), within his dream-setting, the subconscious-invaded-by-DiCaprio's consciousness (and this explains the opening shot of DiCaprio waking up dazed on a beach, or, the initial “awakening” of his character, both subconsciously and in reality), and he also represents indirectly the symbolic aspect of DiCaprio's own character – if he, DiCaprio's character, doesn't save Watanabe (in essence, himself), then he'll grow old and become lost in how own blame-and-guilt-soaked subconsciousness. Here, Watanabe is the insertion of the objective correlative in Nolan's movie. Or in other words, symbolically speaking, DiCaprio's character is Watanabe's character. DiCaprio is waking up, mentally, in order to be able to wake himself from the deep slumber of his own guilt and inaction.

So then, in the aftermath of this initial “awakening”, we come back to the proverbial ground-floor of Nolan's cinematic puzzle (and it is a puzzle, as Nolan left it “up to the audience” whether DiCaprio's experience was taking place in the real world on in a subconsciously-manufactured reality...) – Constructed in its purely subconscious form, DiCaprio's character, dealing with emotions of guilt, loss, and regret, and avoiding self-realization and the responsibility and results of his own actions (i.e. the neglect of his children), he shifts this blame to his wife Cotillard (whom, in real-reality, is “Lovely”, which is spoken by Gordon-Levitt's character but is also a true notion buried deep within the “defence” psyche of DiCaprio's character). Somewhere outside of the borders of this cinematic tale, DiCaprio's character, finally realizing that this subconscious subterfuge can't last, even in the state of dream, he creates an escape scenario (the action of the film); and following this, he “awakens” on the shores of a finally ebbing dream-tide; now finding himself physically and mentally enabled enough to save the Watanabe character – i.e himself. The final frames of Inception are now just the full waking of DiCaprio's dream-world, the final images before our eyes flutter open to the morning light after a night of dream-epiphany, to an ending that has been hinted throughout Nolan's cinematic vision through flash-forward repeating shots. And although the focus of the story (the dream) was placed on the foggy memories of his children, DiCaprio's ultimate boon, after his own internal redemption (which on all levels of the story's “reality” is what Nolan's film is all about), is that he will likely be able to stand with his lovely wife in his perceived and genuinely desired forgiveness from her.

~V.