Descartes and Inception

Let’s talk about the recent film Inception. A fairly good movie, it was both critically acclaimed and financially successful. It was billed—both by the director, Christopher Nolan, and the press surrounding the movie’s release—as the next Matrix. It was supposed to have been mind-bendingly deep, “too smart for its audience,” promising to usher in a new era of thought-provoking and philosophically sound cinema.

It didn’t really do that. There are criticisms abound about what the film was and was not able to do, so I won’t focus on that. What I do want to focus on is the philosophy the film DID do right—Descartes’ idea of radical skepticism.

Briefly, let me recap the idea of the film: Leo DiCaprio is a man who can go inside dreams and steal top-secret information. Over the course of the movie, it is revealed that the dream thieves, much like Descartes, soon lose the ability to determine what is real and what is a dream. To help, they carry totems (small trinkets that have unique properties that will reveal whether they are dreaming or not).

These totems, and the ideas behind them are, both on the surface and on a deeper level, reminiscent of Descartes’ theories. First, the characters cannot be sure of whether or not they are awake. This was the starting point for Descartes, and, much like the characters in the film, led to a rejection of the potentially false. This means that both men are able to function in a world that is attempting to deceive their senses.

In the totems, we see the manifestations of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, his one unshakeable principle that allowed him to interact with the world. For DiCaprio, his totem takes the form of a spinning top; for Descartes it takes the form of a principle that only he knows for certain. Both men are able to cling to these as unquestionably true; but whereas Descartes moves forward with his theories, eventually proving the rest of existence, director Nolan is content to remain based in the skeptical, cinematic ground already tilled by The Matrix over ten years ago.