Spoiler Alert! If you have not see this film, you may not want to read this review.

What makes a movie a “Buddhist?” movie? There’s been some talk recently about Christopher Nolan’s film Inception and its relationship to Buddhism. A good case has been made that the movie looks honestly at the way that the human mind works and the way it deceives itself. Other writers have said the film is anti-Buddhist since it hinges on the hijacking of another person’s mind.

What exactly makes a work of art “Buddhist?” Images of Buddha? Could be. That would be a visual cultural clue, but sometimes culture and spirituality get confused for one another. A shaved head does not make one a monk. Or does the exploration of the inner mind make a work of art “Buddhist”? Could be. But lots of films (most of the Hitchcock filmography, for example) have dealt with psychological issues without making any reference, explicit or otherwise, to Eastern traditions.

Nolan creates layers to get deep. Layers within layers, possibly without end. The main character Cobb (played lightly and effectively by Leonardo DiCaprio) is a skilled extractor. That is, for a fee he is able to steal information from the mind of another. When the wealthy businessman Saito proposes that Cobb flip the process and implant false information in a rival, Cobb accepts the challenge. But he’s done this before.

Guns, MC Escher, lucid dreaming, mountain fortresses, and Edith Piaf ensue. Cobb’s dead wife haunts his mission, threatening to sabotage not only the inception but the lives of Saito, Cobb and his team. She exists mentally because Cobb is clinging to regret and the suspicion that he can’t successfully pull off an inception. When he and his wife lived for decades growing old in a dream-world, we watch them building vast mental environments. These are the places in which we see Cobb beginning to understand that there will always be another layer below, another layer he might fail to take into account. In the end, inception itself is flipped to become self-deception. What is self-deception but the planting of false ideas in one’s own mind?

Nolan’s storytelling achievement is substantial. It takes a true master of cinema to successfully communicate any mental action in a motion picture; by nature, it is a visual medium and by nurture, you might say, cinema has developed as a purely naturalistic form. Even in a science fiction or fantasy film, what you see is exactly what it’s supposed to be. A unicorn is never anything but a unicorn. Only the most experimental of filmmakers up to this point have attempted to exit filmic naturalism. When Stan Brakhage glued moth wings directly onto celluloid, that was meant to be you.

Once the idea reaches the culture at large that a movie is “Buddhist,” it becomes difficult to dislodge that idea. Inception is not any more Buddhist than The Shining... but that’s not to say it isn’t Buddhist either. The Matrix too served as a metaphor for a Buddhist view of reality and delusion, although Inception takes it a step further with an invitation for the viewer themselves to participate in the enlightenment. Are dreams as “real” as reality from the perspective of the mind? Is life itself a dream? If so, who is The Dreamer? Like all great art, the audience is asked to interpret for themselves, knowing all perception is personal; The Matrix strives to be good; Inception strives to be great.

Ultimately, the foremost allusions to Buddhist philosophy in Inception are the radical ideas that “reality” is not what it usually appears to be and our minds have ingenious ways of fooling themselves, no matter how big the house-of-cards. Has Cobb merely created a world of illusion for himself to exist in? That too shall pass. Nolan wisely leaves us wondering, knowing that in art the questions are far more important than the answers. Allowing that open ending to remain open is perhaps its purest expression of Buddhist philosophy.

Inception is a film of rare intelligence that leaves ample room for speculation.

Dillon Wallin
Dillon Wallin is a writer from the Twin Cities who also periodically works in the film/TV industry. He admires the Dalai Lama, Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer, Dogen, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kornfield, Jack Kerouac and many, many others.

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