Meditations And Nolan's Inception: Film Analysis

Descartes, French philosopher and father of modern western philosophy, wrote Meditations on First Philosophy in order to question common knowledge and the world around him. Similarly, Christopher Nolan’s inception questions these very same topics. Both works cause their audiences to question what they know and what is real. The topic of dreams and reality are prominent throughout Descartes’ Meditations and Nolan’s Inception.
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, specifically Meditation I, Descartes questions different “falsehoods that [he] had accepted as true in [his] childhood” (Descartes 12). He reflects on the fact that everything that he knows is based on these so called falsehoods and realizes that he must start from the beginning in order to achieve true knowledge. Descartes writes about the senses and how they can be deceiving. Although he states that they can be deceiving, generally what is perceived through the senses is true and can be trusted. He then moves on to discuss dreams and how what we think of when we dream comes from our
In the movie the protagonist Dominic Cobb has to undergo the task of inception itself. Cobb’s main job in the movie is to go into the minds of the people in the world around him and extract different types of valuable information. Once Cobb’s actions are revealed, a man by the name of Mr. Saito gives him the chance to save his own life. Since Cobb’s activities are illegal he is being looked for by the police, but if he helps Saito and succeeds then he will be granted his freedom. Saito’s objective is to plant an idea in the mind of Mr. Fischer Jr. in order to make sure that he does not become more powerful than him in the business world. Throughout the movie Cobb faces challenges as a result of the memories of Mal; his dead wife. Mal seems to haunt Cobb’s mind making it difficult for him to distinguish between the real world and the dream