[For this first paragraph, I will translate for myself from blogspeak to real life meaning:]*

I know you’ve been waiting a long time for this post /get ready for me to blabber about something you don’t care about/, but now I’ve finally invested the study and thought and energy to write it, so here it is /odds are it’ll take you a couple hours to make heads or tails of it, since I wrote it in fifteen minutes (after reading a plot synopsis) and can’t spell properly/. A lot of people have different theories on the movie /I haven’t done any research on this at all, but I’m assuming there’s a lot of wrong people out there (who aren’t me)/ but I think that there’s a deeper meaning than most casual movie watchers realize /everyone who’s not me is pretty much stupid and doesn’t really know anything about, well, anything/.

[Okay, enough of that. Commence real blog post.]

I would submit that Inception is the defining movie of our generation. As you probably know, I’m not much a movie guy, so it’s not like I have anything to say about acting, or directing, or cinematography, or any other techinical kinds of standards that make movies win awards and such. But when I say that Inception is the defining movie of our generation, I don’t mean that it’s the best. I mean, quite literally, that it defines our generation. (Hah, you didn’t expect me to be that simplistic, did you?)

First off, I think I should probably define who “our generation” is. When I say “our generation”, I’m referring to the general stream of thinking young people (oh, I don’t know, ages 35 ish to teens?), who could be called postmodern in philosophy (though they might deny it), and are generally into being unique and expressive and mostly disillusioned about more or less everything. But also, as they are ready to admit–have an insatiable longing for Something else; they don’t care if it makes sense, or if it’s scientific, or even if it’s believable. They know that humans need Something to hold on to in their souls, even if in their minds they don’t fully think it true.

So here’s my theory on Inception: the main point of the movie–the question you should be left asking–is NOT “does the top fall down?”, or even “is reality just a dream?”, but “what is real after all, and does it really matter if it’s real or not?”. And the answer which presents itself is: “it doesn’t matter what is really real, only that you believe that it is.” Take the concept of the totem, for instance. The characters have these objects which (for some reason unrevealed in the movie) behave unrealistically in dreams, and behave how you might expect them to in reality (if it is indeed “real”). So theoretically, the characters can know if they’re in a dream or in “reality”. Here’s the interesting thing about the totems, though: why should the top keep spinning in a dream, and not fall down? There’s no compelling reason–it’s arbitrary. Dreams (at least in the movie) are exactly like reality, and often the only certainty that the character can have if they are dreaming or awake is the totem. But this surety–this solid rock on which they stand–is completely and undeniably arbitrary. They believe it simply because.

I think what the director was trying to say with this movie is this. True, we can’t really know for certain–beyond the shadow of a doubt–what is real and what is not, what is true and what is false. But unless we believe something, latching on to it with all our strength, trusting it even against the persuasion of our own minds, we will kill ourselves. Because the one conviction which no philosophy can really deny, the conviction that presides over all others, is that of the good of living. Chesterton, far ahead of his time, says in his book Orthodoxy that the question which determines the tenability of a philosophy is no longer “what is true?” but “what is sane?”, or more specifically “what will keep a man most sane by believing it?”. And that is exactly whatI think Christopher Nolan is getting at.

So what do you think? Am I on to something, or way off track?

*Is that a smiley? Or is it just a colon with a closed bracket? I guess it’s up to you to decide what to believe. Or if you should even believe at all.