Inception: Planting Ideas in Other's Minds

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By executing my earlier proposal on the “text” Inception, a science fiction thriller by Christopher Nolan, I was able to delve deeper into the actual proposal. Inception argues how the mind can be influenced and changed with the smallest thing. The movie as a whole rests on the idea of invading dreams and the mind, hence the name, Inception. The text argues that implanting an idea into someone's mind is the greatest power, since they will believe they generated the idea themselves and act on it. This takes place within both reality and in dreams of the person the “inception” group wishes to invade. A charcoal drawing was created in order to try and represent and argue the idea of Inception.

Inception explores dreams as something that can be changed at will, whether at the owner's will or someone elses. One scene takes place in Cobb's (the main character) mind. He is training a recruit, Ariadne, as “The Architect”, so she could become the one who would build a dream for the victim, Fisher. The invader needs to create a realistic world that is based on what the victim normally does every day so as to allow the victim to think that everything is not a dream. This one scene appeals mostly to our emotions and is incorporated into my project the most. Ariadne starts to playfully change the scenery within Cobb's mind. The setting is originally a small cafe in a busy urban town. She skews reality and twists the streets around themselves until one layer of buildings is folded up and around to stack upon each other roof to roof. Cobb and Ariadne can now walk on “walls” which are actually the ground, but at the same time “walls”. The visual effects of this scene made the text really engaging and was one of the aspects I liked the mo...

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...project. It might seem repetitive, but everything that was put into this project was purposely done to lead up to a look of reality and fantasy, which is why charcoal was used.

I believe that charcoal was a very successful media to portray what I wanted. I say this because I have tried other medias (watercolor, colored pencils) in a smaller scale experiment and they weren't able to argue as well as charcoal had. The charcoal gives the final product a more enigmatic feel to it (although I might have taken it one step too far and given it a theme more like horror). All in all, I believe that this project has argued the main points of Inception that I wanted it to argue. Dreams and reality can look and feel the same as one another. The mind can keep secrets locked up, but (at least in the setting Inception is in) can be easily invaded and succumb to outside pressure.

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