Inception and Leonardo DiCaprio's Scary Ideas

Warning: the following post contains significant spoilers about the movie Inception. Those still interested in seeing this film should consider themselves forewarned.

Then again, the movie's been out for a month. If you were planning to see it, you proably would have seen it by now. So quit bitching.



The trailers for Inception portray it as a typical summer blockbuster.

In the film, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaptrio) is an extractor. By entering other people's minds as they dream, Cobb is able to steal their secrets from them. Along with his partner-in-crime Aurthur (Gordon Joseph-Levitt), Cobb is the best there is at what he does.

As the film opens, Cobb has infiltrated the mind of Saito (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese business man in search of a skilled extractor to attempt a very dangerous mission.

He wants Cobb and Aurthur to break into the mind of Robert Fischer (Killian Murphy) and perform a different act -- that of inception.

Simply explained, inception involves implanting an idea in the mind of another human being. The idea is ultimately meant to make that individual act in a manner the implanter desires.

Fischer's father, Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite) is dying of a terminal disease, and will soon inherit the family energy conglomerate. Saito explains that Fischer's conglomerate will soon put all of its competitors out of business, leaving them with a complete monopoly on the global energy market.

Aurthur is immediately skeptical about inception. He insists it cannot be done.

But Cobb knows differently. He did it once before to his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). After having spent 50 years with her in a limbo dream state, Mal convinces her to wake up from the dream by implanting an idea in her subconscious mind -- the idea that the world in which she lives isn't real.

Of course, Cobb only wants her to doubt the reality of the limbo dream state. But upon waking she cannot shake the belief that she is still dreaming, and kills herself believing she'll wake up -- but not before telling the police that Cobb has threatened her life, hoping that he'll choose to kill himself as well.

At face value, Inception seems to be a typical summer blockbuster, with an atypically complex plot.

With the assistance of Aurther, Saito and the rest of his team, Cobb leads Fischer through three separate levels of dreaming -- a dream within a dream within a dream -- to confront his father. Fischer has been led to believe that a safe in the dream will contain a will that would break up his father's company.

When Fischer opens the safe, it contains the will -- and also contains a child's windmill. Clearly, the windmill alludes to renewable energy, and may have been inserted into the script upon DiCaprio's influence (DiCaprio is widely known as a proponent of renewable energy).

In order to understand how this particular details colours the ideas of Inception in a sinister manner, one has to go back to The 11th Hour, a documentary film DiCaprio produced.

The ideas contained in The 11th Hour -- hinging around reconceptualizing human design to be less wasteful -- are, on their own, less than threatening. But when one weighs that idea using the ideas of Inception as a counter-balance, they become rather alarming.

Reconceptualizing human design is a perfectly and remarkable unthreatening idea, so long as it's done voluntarily.

However, the ideas implanted in Fischer's mind violates his free will. He may break up his father's energy conglomerate willingly, but only because his mind has been violated and twisted to someone else's ends.

Saito insists that the world depends on Fischer deciding to break up his company. But he has an ulterior motive: if Fischer doesn't agree to break up the company, Saito will lose his own company, and lose his own wealth and power.

Saito dresses up his self-interest in benign platitudes, but his self-interest cannot be denied. And it's in serving is own self-interest that he ultimately violates the sanctity of Fischer's mind in order to compel him to act against his own self-interest.

Cobb has his own self-interest at heart -- his desire to return home. He dresses that self-interest in his children's need to have their father in their lives, but his self-interest is undeniable. In order to puruse his own self interest Cobb, too, violates the security of Fisher's mind and compels him to act against his self-interest.

Moreover, while the film explores the moral dilemma as it pertains to Cobb implanting the idea that ultimately led to Mal's suicide, it never addresses that moral dilemma as it pertains to the manipulation of Fischer.

In fact, in the film's closing moments, Fischer is seen smiling contentedly. The implicit suggestion is that the act of inception waged against him by Cobb and Saito has helped him make peace (however artificial it may be) with his father.

In a real-world situation, this would all be purely hypothetical. The rational impulse is to suggest that acts such as inception cannot actually be done.

However, the truth is that they very much can be done. Moreover, they can be done to broad portions of society. Enterprising leftists have long found the means to commit subtle acts of inception -- a matter that will be discussed in a post in the near future.

Those Mean, Mean... Conservatives?

Certainly, one the most-anticipated summer films of 2010 is going to be Christopher Nolan's Inception.

Following 2008's The Dark Knight and continuing Nolan's collaboration with Michael Caine -- who appeared in both of Nolan's Batman films as well as The Prestige -- the film promises to deliver the kind of mind-bending sensory bonanza, coupled with deep storytelling, that Nolan has become famous for.

In advance of the film's release, however, some of the film's stars have taken the film's premise -- the prospect of implanting ideas in other peoples' minds -- as an opportunity to air their political views.

In reality, there's nothing particularly deeply provocative in it. Leonardo DiCaprio suggests that BP CEO Tony Hayward should be implanted with some sense of the responsibility he carries following the disastrous gulf oil spill. DiCaprio is entirely correct that Hayward carries a lot of responsibility -- although Hayward is likely as aware of it as he is of the rapidly-climbing bill his company will have to pay in order to clean up the mess.

Unlike DiCaprio, however, Ellen Page (whose last role of significance was in 2007's Juno) seems to approach the question from the perspective of someone who's just been waiting for a high-profile enough role to voice her opinions.

She accuses former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin of needing "a little seed of compassion or some holistic intelligence, and maybe a little expansion of mind".

So to Page, Cheney -- who was Vice President in the administration that delivered billions of dollars in aid to HIV sufferers in Africa -- is uncompassionate. Yet Page delivers her remarks with an affect that would would describe as little more than chilly. There's clearly some degree of malice in Page's words, yet it's Cheney and Palin who are in need of a "seed of compassion".

As she delivers her remarks -- going on to suggest she'd like to "get rid of some of that fear that seems to be creating a lot of ignorance, and thus passing on that fear to a lot of people. And causing a lot of problems" -- Page comes across almost as a junior Janeane Garofalo, whose comments about Tea Party activists were well-received by race-baiting opponents of that movement, and could certainly be said to promote fear of the limbic-brain-addled racists who allegedly dominate that movement.

(Apparently, it isn't the malicious Janeane Garofalo who could use that "seed of compassion" Page rambles on about.)

The political views of Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page certainly won't make Inception any better or worse as a film. But Page's comments just serve as a reminder of the sanctimoniousness of Hollywood liberalism -- where their comments can be as malicious as they deem pleasing, but it's always the other side who are mean.

Is Hindsight 20/20 in the 11th Hour?

Released in 2007 and written/produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, the 11th Hour is essentially a follow-up to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

Like An Inconvenient Truth, the 11th Hour focuses mostly on fear-mongering, trotting out the same old litany of environmental abuses (many of them entirely valid) in order to terrify viewers into supporting the agenda of climate change lobbyists.

Amidst the apocalyptic fear-mongering, Leonardo DiCaprio offers a surprisingly intriguing thesis: that what his film insists is an impending environmental armageddon is actually an unintended consequence of the design humankind planned for the future ever since the human mind perceived the notion of the future.

The Eleventh Hour begs the question of, had humankind had 20/20 foresight at any point in its history, would we have done anything differently?

The obvious answer to this question is yes. If humankind could have together avoided the Cold War or the two World Wars, one would have to imagine it would.

But as it pertains to the environment, one has to imagine that humankind would like numerous missteps back as well. As DiCaprio notes, many environmental catastrophes are not isolated incidents, but very much consequences of how things were done by design.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred as an unexpected consequence of oil producers preferring the speed and comparative low cost of transporting oil via tanker ships to the safety of a pipeline. Even pipelines can be subject to unexpected sabotage when they are run above ground and left vulnerable.

Even in terms of human ecology humankind likely would have rethought the use of materials such as asbestos or lead-based paint if humankind had only been blessed with 20/20 foresight -- consider it something of a "special sense" like David Suzuki speaks of.

Of course humankind has not been blessed with 20/20 foresight. In fact, humankind would be fortunate if its foresight was even 50/50.

A more prescient question is whether or not humankind has -- or can even be expected to have -- 20/20 hindsight on the eve of a predicted environmental apocalypse.

Even deeper questions linger about the extent to which the predicted apocalypse is being exaggerated. Such luminaries of the environmental movement as Al Gore have admitted that many of the claims in his Inconvenient Truth were exaggerated beyond whatever truths (however inconvenient) they could impart.

More recently, the Climategate emails leaked from East Anglia University's Hadley Climate Research Unit have demonstrated that not only have supporters of the man-made climate change hypothesis tailored the peer review process for their own benefit, but have also suppressed their own private doubts about the conclusiveness of their own science.

An illuminating comment comes from David Orr, who peddles the "tipping point" theory (not even the most clever bit of fear mongering devised by this crowd) and notes that humankind is "losing control of the climate".

The problem, of course, is that humanity has never controlled the climate. Such an act is literally incomprehensible.

But the truth of the film seems to be that these particular individuals aren't simply interesting in controlling climate, they're interested in controlling culture.

Many of the commentators in The 11th Hour raise the same old predictable left-wing complaints, and treat the fight against climate change as the means by which they'll culturally transform the world.

In other words, many of these commentators seem to be treating climate change as a weapon in a cultural war.

The ultimate solution, the film's talking heads insist, is to "fundamentally redesign the basis of human design".

This really isn't such a bad idea. But given the film's premise, these people also have to wake up to the reality that if human foresight needs to be fundamentally challenged, people have every right to ask these individuals if their specific vision for the future is the right one for humankind to follow.