Only a Memory: A Closer Look at “Inception”

By D. Jones
Contributing Writer

Christopher Nolan’s hot new film, Inception, is without a doubt praiseworthy and innovative. Understanding the intricate plot and rules of the film’s world can take more than one viewing.

Leonardo DiCaprio shines as Dom Cobb, a man tortured with the tenuous nature of his own sanity. It’s already been noted that Cobb seems a reprisal of DiCaprio’s role in the earlier Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island.” I’m writing to draw attention to one way in which the two films map out an alarming trend.

For those of you who haven’t yet seen Inception, but are planning to, stop reading now. SPOILER ALERT.

For those of you who haven’t yet seen it and are not planning to, here are some bare-bones plot points:

A man, Dom, destroys his wife, Mal, by planting the idea in her head that reality’s not real and that the only way to “wake up” is to die/commit suicide. In reality (which he has convinced her is not reality, read: driven her mad) she does kill herself. Since she’s dead, the only remnants of her are his memories of her. He can access those memories by dreaming and he can wake out of that dream.

It comes out that he feels guilty that he drove her into schizophrenia and we, the viewers, are led to feel compassion that this man has had to feel so much guilt for so long. Poor guy. Because what we see of her are only his memories of her, we understand that he has no real responsibility toward these images of her.

Ultimately, his objective in the film is to “let her go,” or forget her and stop feeling guilty.

This central character of Mal is a non-character, since she is only someone else’s memory. As a memory, a graft onto the protagonist, we don’t need to feel any empathy for her and we certainly don’t expect her to have the actions and reactions that a flesh and blood character might have.

In a pivotal expository scene, Dom confesses to Mal that he used inception (planting the idea in her head) to drive her nuts. Mal, for an instant, gets angry. “You betrayed me!”, she says, and she’s right, In the next breath, however, Mal is back to trying to convince Dom to stay in the version of reality that houses her, or to stay in his own madness. She is blown away by the new
female interest and Dom escapes back to consensus reality (or does he, but that’s another story)

Why did I want a different ending to this pivotal scene, an ending that would never be made? I wanted Mal to be hooked up and dreaming someplace too. I wanted “You betrayed me” to be followed by Mal belting Dom and waking up back into consensus reality herself, ready to start over.

The fact that, in both “Inception” and “Shutter Island,” it’s meant good box office to make movies about men who have driven women to madness and/or death and who survive and prosper by the time the credits roll, is disturbing. In both films, the female love interest is so non-real that she only exists in memory, that is, in dependent reference to the male protagonist.

It’s hard enough for female audience members to find themselves in the list of characters in Hollywood blockbusters; this makes things more challenging. Why do we suggest that simply feeling guilty about destroying some one else is enough of a punishment and “letting go” of the victim is a heroic solution?

When female love interests in film start to only be important in that men have memories of them, we are all in a nightmare. I want to wake up.

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D. Jones is a Transgender writer, has seen gender from both sides of the aisle, and is interested in examining gender roles and behavior.