When I wrote about Rob Bell last week, I said I was "late to the party." I guess when you review a movie that has been out on video for at least several weeks and was the #1 movie in theaters months ago, you could say I arrived at the party when the dip is gone and the drinks are warm. Still, I have some thoughts about how the ideas of Inception relate to our own understanding of reality.
This is not really a movie review, though. This post is really for people who have already seen the movie or intend never to see it (it has lots of spoilers). I am not necessarily recommending the movie (it is really violent in places, has some language issues, and there aren't really any strong positive characters), but I did enjoy it. Director Christopher Nolan has a knack for producing thought-provoking movies that raise interesting questions about human nature and how we cope with the world around us. The ideas in Inception relate directly to both the Christian hope and the lie of the devil in Genesis 3...
In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio's character (Cobb) has a job where he invades people's subconcious through dreams, where (at least recently) his job has been to steal people's secrets. One time, during one of these jobs with his wife Mal, they are stuck in a deep dream state called "limbo" where time in the conscious world is slowed down exponentially. There, he and Mal are the gods of their world, creating the world to their specifications and living eternally, it seems, together. It is a beautiful world, but it is not real, and they have a real family and children in the conscious world. As Cobb tries to convince his wife to go back, he finds that she has lost grip on reality, that she has forgotten their world is a dream. When he finally gets them to wake up (through a "suicide" in the dream world), Mal refuses to accept the conscious world as real, and ends up killing herself in pursuit of "reality." After that tragedy, Cobb cannot enter any dream on any of his jobs without "Mal" showing up. We learn that she is a projection of his guilt over her death, but she always meets him with a very powerful temptation: abandon reality and live with her forever in this dream world.
This temptation echoes the temptation from Genesis 3, where the serpent tells Eve that to taste the fruit of knowledge is to become "like God." In the dream world Cobb shared with his wife, they were co-creators. They were able to construct homes and experiences from their memory, moving seemlessly from cozy childhood homes to luxury buildings. "In the real world we have to choose," Cobb says, "not here." But they lost sight of what was really true, that their god-like powers are an illusion, and they are destined to wake up and find all of it gone. In the same way, in the midst of our rebellion against God, we have lost sight of the greater spiritual reality (greater not because the physical world is less "real" but because it is so temporary) and go about building our lives apart from God that will all disappear in a moment when this physical life ends.
Furthermore, when it is Mal tempting Cobb to return to this world they created, she is tempting him to cling to a world that is even more artificial than the world that he left. The temptor is not even really Mal; she is only a projection of Cobb's memories, memories that are defined by his guilt and so box her in as a one-dimensional farce of the person his wife truly was. In the same way, part of the temptation to become our own God and Creator is to use people for our own purposes. One of my psychology textbooks in college insisted that one central tenant of healthy relationships is this: "love is selfish," that a relationship is only healthy if your own needs are being met. In other words, relationships are useful, because they are a mutual exchange: I agree to meet your needs and you agree to meet mine. If that unspoken social contract is broken, therefore, the relationship is unhealthy and you should abandon it. This "love-is-selfish" tenant is true when your highest aim is "self-actualization"--when you are your highest purpose, when you are your own god.
The Christian hope is, to a large degree, freedom from slavery to self that comes from our rebellion. Through the cross, we are reconciled to God and freed to live with Him and to Him. Our eyes are gradually opened to the reality of His world, that we are created to be His and that our true "self-actualization" comes from realizing and fulfilling our role in God's eternal plan and purpose. We are freed from selfish love, because we can trust God enough to love as He loves, knowing that He will provide our needs and we don't have to bargain with others for them.
One question the movie raises is whether it is better to choose to believe something pleasant that is not true than to face reality in all of its pain. We are not even sure, in the end, if the movie's happy ending is reality or another dream. Some people might equate the denial of reality with religious faith, but I really believe that the opposite is true. People hold on to mythology of their own god-status, clinging to the illusion of control in an uncontrollable world, pretending to grasp with their minds and to explain the unsearchable, and suppressing their soul-cry that points them to the reality of God and eternity. The result is slavery to vanity and the cravings of our animal nature. And since they know in their hearts such smallness will never stand in the presence of the great Creator, they suppress the idea and deny such accountability exists.
One day, the veil that this physical world places over our understanding will be removed. We will all sleep in death (or see the sky rolled back at the return of Christ) and when we wake up, this world we created for ourselves will have vanished, and its memory will fade like the memory of a dream. Only what we built alongside God in Christ will remain. We will stand before God and give account for our lives. For some, this moment will be one of unspeakable terror as everything they know as real is gone and their rebellion and smallness is brought into sharp focus. For others, we will, at long last and through a lifetime of struggles, be home. The face we long to see that will finally be revealed is the face of Jesus... and who else? Who else will greet us there? Who else will turn and run to embrace us and welcome us home, like Cobb's children? It will be those people that Christ has freed us from ourselves enough to love. They will share in the inheritance of eternity with us because we loved them enough to help them awake to the reality of God through Jesus Christ.
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