this is stuff you like and for all of the hand wringing I don't think that
human beings are quite post truth just yet. I mean how did you feel at the end
of Inception. I suppose it was released in 2010 so you may be a little fuzzy on
the details so the plot of Inception goeth thusly:
Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt steal thoughts out of
people's heads a businessman called Saito wants to hire them to perform the
opposite trick for him inception invisibly plan to thought in
the head of the heir to a major corporation to get him to break up his
father's empire and be his own man. if they do this Saito claims he will
arrange it so that Dom Cobb can go back to his children. And so they do dreams
within dreams and it all gets very complicated especially because Leo aka
Dom Cobb's dead wife keeps popping up as a manifestation of his guilt over her
death and like messing things up and shooting people. Cobb and his architect
Ariadne I see what you did there movie end up going right down into limbo and after
some shenanigans Cobb wakes up at the end and can finally return to his
children. Right but has he returned to the real world or is this just a comforting
fantasy cooked up by his mind? he keeps a totem with him at all times a spinning
top and he spins it to know whether or not he's in a dream or reality if he's
in reality he spins the top and it falls in dreams it just keeps on spinning. at
the end of Inception he spins the top before he goes outside to meet his
children again and we zoom in and the top wobbles and the credits roll
Inception's ending was emotionally harrowing for me because it refuses to
provide closure it builds the tension between dreams and reality for the whole
of the runtime and then it refuses to release it
how dare it do this thing. It's a really good movie also the sets are amazing . now
a properly postmodern sort which I'm definitely not would feel no emotional
twinge at all at the end of Inception post-modernism is a mid to late
twentieth century movement marked by irony skepticism and a mistrust of grand
narratives...postmodernism is not down with the idea that there's really such a
thing as absolute truth the ideas of moral absolutism and objective reality
are also not really a postmodern thing so a post modernist or anyone who
doesn't get invested in stories would conclude that whether or not the top
fell was immaterial because Dom is with his children and he's happy and surely
that's what or that it's just a movie and so it
doesn't really matter at all and yes it is fairly obvious that doesn't really
matter because it is after all only a movie but because we get invested in
movies as if they are real the ending of Inception really does a number on you
and it's especially affecting because Dom Cobbs entire arc is about the
tension between dreams and reality and whether he will embrace reality as
painful as it is or if he will just take refuge in dreams when we get to the end
of the movie we go to limbo the realm beneath even dreams where a lifetime can
pass without a minute doing so in the real world. Mal, or the projection of
Mal that he has in his head tells him that he knows that reality is a lie and
that she is real but that's not true she's just a manifestation of his guilt
and he has to come to terms with the fact that he bears responsibility for
her death. he has to come to terms with the fact that he planted the idea in her
head that reality isn't real and because he did this at the deepest levels of her
subconscious it is not a thought she can unthink.
and that it was that thought that drove her to suicide and that even if he
succeeds he is going to have to return to a world in which she no longer exists
now we know as does he that we have spent a large part of the movie in reality we
have seen Dom spinning top fall we've seen Arthur's loaded die we even saw
Ariadne making a totem and that's key because for this to work we need to know
that there is a reality that Dom can come back to. For what it's worth I chose
to interpret the wobble as indicative of the fact that the spinning top was going
to slow down and eventually stop because they're in the real world and I am a
sucker for a happy ending - yeah you know it - but the intentional ambiguity means
that you have to make a choice like that you have to decide whether the top spins
or whether it falls. If we accept that a movie is a kind of reality in which
rules apply then either the top was going to fall because it was in reality
or it wasn't because it was in a dream there is theoretically a truth that can
be grasped here either the horrifying implication that none of this is real or
the comfort of a happy ending which makes it tough right because
people are already hugely prone to motivated reasoning and so your answer
probably just reflects your own bias. did you want a nice happy ending where
everything is real or a nice happy ending which is not actual reality or a
horrifying ending where reality is rejected? and since those last two are
the same ending but from different perspectives it makes it even more fuzzy
but when it comes to inception it is just a movie and so it doesn't matter
but in the search for truth more generally motivated reasoning is a
killer. Motivated reasoning is how you get people who believe the earth is flat
looking at pictures of the International Space Station or the pictures the
International Space Station has taken and concluding that no they're all hoaxes
because it's a conspiracy to make us believe that the earth is a sphere
motivated reasoning is how you end up with conspiracy theories motivated
reasoning is how you end up with the da Vinci Code
you'll need to hold that thought until next time but oh boy we're going to get
into it. but that's all for this episode so let me know in the comments did you
like inception or did the hype train that came along with it at the time of
its release kind of sour it for you? did the whole is reality real thing feel a
bit too much like the matrix for you and did you like The Da Vinci Code if so
I've got some bad news about the next episode and as always if you enjoy the
show and you would like to support it then there is link to patreon to the
right of my head thank you as always to my patrons who make this show possible
and I will see you next time for the Sacred Feminine in ininin in in or
something.