When I think about Inception, its ambiguity always fascinate me and trigger an inspiration for my media practices. I’ve always been one interested in the ambiguity of a film such as Donnie Darko, Looper, Meshes of the Afternoon and Sex, Lies and Videotape which even influenced me to produce an abstract short film in media one as well as On The Frame brief four project.
Inception gives the freedom to its viewers to decide what they want to infer, leading to their own conclusions and respond to how the film “think”. In our week 9 studio Dan had put us into groups to write any thoughts and ideas about the film and this is what we came up with in the poster attached; all jumbled-up-drawings that “serves” as semiotics and messy writings. Inception not only portray the theories and psychology of the human mind, dreams and consciousness but does it in a way of thinking like a human being. With the use of loud heart-thumping soundtracks, matter of cognition with extreme slow motion corresponding to different levels of parallel consciousness (dream within a dream, the deeper the levels the faster we think), mise-en-scene according to different themes and architecture of the dreams and so on, Inception “thinks” and shows us the co-existance of perspectives and that there is no such thing as reality, only a perception (clearly because of different levels of the dream is of different person and also because of the ambiguity of the film’s ending). Hence, Dan set up different true/false statements on the screen and we had to decide where we stand, anywhere in the room, in which we agree to an extent.
“Cobb is dreaming the whole time.”
What an open ended topic which I guess left me question if Cobb is dreaming the whole time, the whole studio time. Someone else mentioned, “Which time?” and how does time actually work in the film where basically the film is an ambiguity especially of the timeframe and plot. We were not exactly sure and perhaps never will be, in regards to where Cobb actually is if he is free of his conviction or if he ended up in “limbo” where he is, in projection, free and went home to see his kids, who looked roughly the same age as what was shown in Cobb’s subjectivity before he got home. So the whole class had this argument. What I’ve concluded though, is that Cobb is not dreaming the whole time even when the shot cuts, not showing if the totem (Mal’s spinning top) does fall at the end of the film. Again, it is the understanding of off-screen space as Frampton pointed out. What is not shown on the frame does make a significant impact on my conclusions.
What we have here are notes and jumbled-up ideas my group and I came up with as we explore Inception.
