Two days ago, Christopher Nolan released his newest nine-hundred to his already astonishing batting average.  This is a man who started with Memento, allegedly took that movie on tour to raise funds for Batman Begins, cleansed his comic-palate with Prestige, swung hard again with The Dark Knight, and now brings us Inception.  It doesn’t take long to notice a heavy-hitter while witnessing that kind of consistency in making great movies, and so when an original idea digs into our minds – shared dreaming – I trust him with pruning and nurturing that idea to completion.  This is the new Memento/Prestige. And the Inception movie meaning illuminates a ton of his other films.

For starters, can we define inception meaning? What is the meaning of inception?

In the movie, Cobb and Arthur “extract” information for corporate espionage via shared lucid dreaming tech. They invade a target’s mind to extract info. But a guy named Saito, their target, wants to layer dreams and hire Cobb for “inception.” If we define inception meaning based on the film, then the meaning of inception is “to implant an idea into a person’s subconscious.”

Of course, we could pull the basic definition of inception from the dictionary to learn a bit about the word itself. I’m borrowing from Wiktionary here:

English Definition of Inception

Etymology

Late Middle English, borrowed from Latin inceptiō, from inceptus, Perfect passive participle of incipiō (“I begin”).

The layering sense derives from the 2010 science fiction film Inception, in which a team of people infiltrate someone’s subconscious mind, proceeding through several layers of dreams with the goal of causing someone to incept an idea.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɪnˈsɛpʃən/, /ɪnˈsɛpʃn/

• Noun

  inception (countable and uncountable, plural inceptions)

  1. The creation or beginning of something; the establishment. quotations ▼

     From its inception, the agency has been helping people obtain and properly install car seats for children.

  2. A layering, nesting or recursion of something. [from 2010s] quotations ▼

In that way, I suppose the inception movie meaning has shifted the dictionary definition of inception, for now words containing -ception mean “to put something inside.” If you’re looking for the inception movie meaning as a sort of harbinger of the way cinema affects etymology, look no further than here — subscribe to receive articles like this:

Table of Contents

• For starters, can we define inception meaning? What is the meaning of inception?
• English Definition of Inception
  • Etymology
  • Pronunciation
• THE MOVIE:
• Inception Movie Meaning: Plot Review
• Inception Movie Meaning:Inferno
• Inception Movie meaning:Concerning Kicks
• Inception Movie Meaning:Purgatorio
• Inception Movie Meaning:Paradiso

THE MOVIE:

If you haven’t seen the movie, go see it at a theatre with dang good speakers.  Few movies these days persuade me to spend the $14.50 – $18.00 it takes to get my wife and I out to the show.  This one did.  What follows is a low-shelf literary analysis of the entire flick, so I’m assuming if you continue to read, you have watched the movie in its entirety, and are okay with reading intimate details about the plot.  I’m not responsible for spoiling the ending, so consider yourself warned!

In this post, I’ll work through the dramatic shift in Molly’s character from an angelic sweetheart to a demonic accuser.  We’ll work through the questions of the basement elevator levels, of grief, and of Cobb’s web of lies.  Yes, cobweb – those things that inhabit empty minds.  Also, why all the escorts?  Why the kick?  And why on earth don’t we get to see that little spinning top, Cobb’s totem, fall at the very last shot?

Inception Movie Meaning: Plot Review

We start with a crash-course in shared-dreaming, a training technology developed by the military so that soldiers can “punch, stab, and choke each other” without the side-effect of death.  An underground group of very talented people called, “extracters” have learned, and perfected, the art of getting inside someone’s dream, engineering the dream into a sort of labyrinth so that the subconscience cannot fight off intruders, and extracting the information there by suggesting the idea of a safe where all the information is kept.  Once there’s a safe, then they just break in.

Shortly thereafter, we learn about a concept called “inception” which is quite simple: the opposite of extraction.  With inception, we plant an idea into the mind we intrude.  This may seem ridiculous, but consider this scenario:

We’re in college – you, me, and my highschool sweetheart named Nancy.  I get inside your dreams, go down deep enough, and plant the idea that you can’t take care of her like you want.  That idea germinates, grown, explodes out, and when you wake up, you break up with her so that I can have her once again.  That’s a nice version.  In the movie, they’re dealing with the heir of a C.E.O – the emperor of a giant energy firm.  Another C.E.O., a Chinese man, holds auditions for extracters, trying to find any who can manage inception.  None can, because they all think it impossible.

Not our hero.  He’s in a lot of trouble, and cannot get home.  The Japanese* leader Saito offers him complete amnesty if he can plant the idea – that the boy, upon the death of his father, will choose to dissolve the entire company and not run it.  Like I said, dangerous.

Okay, now that we’re refreshed on the plot points, as if we could forget, let’s get into the inner framework of the movie.  While Cobb is training Ariadne, the young girl finds out pieces of his dark secrets.  Having already seen Nolan’s Dark Knight of the Soul, we know his fascination with dark ideas buried beneath the surface.  Cobb’s dead wife keeps showing up near the end of dreams, when they start to implode, killing off intruders and sabotaging any mission inside.

Inception Movie Meaning:
Inferno

Curious as to the nature of these “major issues”, Ariadne finds Cobb sleeping one night, and goes into his dreams.  She takes an elevator down into his dream, an old elevator with ten number buttons for the levels and a big letter “B” for basement.  Sound familiar?  Here’s my idea: by purging lies out of the depths where Cobb’s issues linger, we bring forth his redemption. Put this in your subconcience for a while:
7  8
5  6
3  4
1  2
B

That’s the keypad on the elevator in Cobb’s dream.  When Ariadne gets to the first level, Moll, Cobb’s wife, nearly kills her.  Cobb rescues Ariadne from that subconscious projection, and takes her to the level where there’s a beach, and to several other places.  Ariadne notices that these places are not dreams, but memories, something Cobb warned never to use in dream world.  This is a man who breaks his own rules a lot.  (For those who know what’s coming, my six-hundred sixty-sixth word was two sentences back).

Down in the basement of Cobb’s mind we find his worst memory – his last anniversary with Moll alive.  Down in the basement where Cobb’s Lucifer (morning star & deceiver) dwells, we discover that his grief and guilt is holding him captive.  If you don’t agree with me about Moll = Lucifer, consider these two points:  Moll (or Mal) means “evil” in latin – Dante’s home tongue, and Molly was a complete angel to Cobb before she jumped off her seat in the sky, falling down to earth.  After that, every time Moll comes onto the screen, we feel terror or evil or something equivalent.

As to the Alighierian levels of hell, there are ten if you include conscienceness, nine if you don’t.  The first level is “limbo” which in the purgatorio stage of the movie is the lowest.  You could say “the top level of hell is the bottom level of purgatory”.  Limbo is the deepest they can go in the shared dream with Fisher.  However, we’re in Cobb’s inferno right now, we’ll get there.  In the movie, we are working less with the external quest (sabotage of Fisher’s company) and more with Cobb’s redemption (dealing with guilt and loss – one of the greatest needs in America).  We have in the elevator scene representations of the Seventh Level – Violence – where Moll keeps running her finger over a knife, of the Fourth Level – Advarice and Prodigality – where Cobb wasted his chance to see his kids, and of the Ninth Level – Betrayal – where Lucifer herself sits on her white throne, surrounded by shards of glass.  Perhaps this isn’t the icy circle Dante intended, but it’s pretty close considering the circumstances.

So in Cobb’s Inferno, we find out three things:  1.  Molly is Satan  2.  Cobb needs redemption from guilt and loss  3.  Cobb needs an escort.  The first two are easy enough to grasp, but the third is key.  One of Dante’s primary motifs is the thought that we cannot do it alone.  We need someone to walk us through it, even if we don’t want help.  I know just the girl.

Ariadne (which has the same assonance as Dante), is his escort.  Her name means “most holy” and her character in greek mythology fell in love with Theseus, and helped him escape the Labyrinth and the Minotaur.  Sound familiar?  “I want you to make me a maze two minutes that takes one minute to solve.”  Or how about, “the dreams were designed as a Labyrinth” ?  Yes, Ariadne is aptly named bridging both the Greco-Roman myth and Dante’s need for an escort.  If you’re Cobb/Dante needing help through hell and then purgatory to get to heaven, who better than Ariadne – the same who helped Theseus escape the Labyrinth?  More importantly, it shows just how lost Cobb is.  If you need Ariadne to help you, you’re in over your head.