Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION Wouldn’t Exist Without These Three Movies

A hacker, a programmer, and a potential murderer walk into a bar on the thirteenth floor

Inception is about the coolest kind of heist. Instead of doing the heist yourself, you convince the mark to do the job for you. All legal, all by the book. And there’s no connection to you, because according to the mark? It was their idea.

They’ll believe it was their idea so much that if you told them what really happened, they’d call you a liar.

All because you planted an idea into another person’s subconscious. You manipulated them better than a Taco Bell commercial. You made them think it was THEIR idea to order drive-thru at midnight.

They’ll never know it was YOUR idea.

Bad news, though. Well, depending on your point of view, it could be good news.

What you’ll never know — or wouldn’t if not for this article — is that it wasn’t your idea, either. The idea came from that amazing segment at the end of the Philip DeFranco Show with footage of the new Taco Bell Defy.

But from another point of view…does that make a difference?

When does anything really begin? There’s talk that the universe began in a vacuum — not an exact state of nothingness, but a quantum realm where what was possible then became.

It’s possible there was a universe before ours. It’s possible what we think of as a universe only existed this once. It’s possible there will be a different emergent state of existence after ours. It’s possible that all of those things are both possible and are happening all at once — but the manner in which we experience consciousness limits our perception to this one plane of reality.

Metaphysics, man. Once we stop taking our own premises and assumptions about reality for granted, we can have a lot more interesting discussions about movies.

Like how if you look at one of the most original, iconic, still-debated movies of the day, you’ll find that they owe their genesis to the stories that came before them.

Take, for example, Inception. I’d argue this is Christopher Nolan’s most accessible film beyond even his Batman trilogy.

Which isn’t to say that the awe and wonder of those Batman movies didn’t carry over into Inception. How could they not when Inception was filmed on the same set used for Nolan’s Batman films? Those locations included “Arkham Asylum, the Narrows and other Gotham City landmarks [that were] still standing, waiting for the inevitable third Batman film” that became Nolan’s next project.

“I think ours is of an older school, ours is more of ‘The Matrix’ variety and the concepts of different levels of reality,” Nolan said. “The whole concept of avatars and living life as someone else, there’s a relationship to what we’re doing, but I think when I first started trying to make this film happen it was very much pulled from that era of movies where you had ‘The Matrix,’ you had ‘Dark City,’ you had ‘The Thirteenth Floor’ and, to a certain extent, you had ‘Memento’ too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real.” — Christopher Nolan, “Inception’ breaks into dreams”

Just so, the landmarks of the story inside Inception shares landmarks with other films that are laid plain to see by Christopher Nolan’s quotes.

Here are the three movies he says inspired Inception.

THE MATRIX

It’s no wonder Nolan owes a debt to The Matrix. That too is a movie that utilized not just psychological puzzles on a massive scale, but could be just as easily said to match Elliot Page’s 2014 description of Inception as “a summer film that evokes literature and architecture in an era when other directors seem to be tilting toward a video-game aesthetic.”

PS. Get your own spinning top totem from Amazon. Just don’t let anyone else touch it!

DARK CITY

“I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze,” Nolan said to the LA Times back in 2010, just a few months before Inception released in theaters over a decade ago.

“Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don’t want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it’s frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting . . . I quite like to be in that maze.”

PS. Get the Blu-ray of Dark City so you can see the movie (mostly) as Alex Proyas intended

PS2. See also: Kiefer Sutherland Improvised Audition In Bar, Snatched Cult Classic Film Role (it was totally this one)

THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR

In the same interview with the LA Times, Elliot Page described Inception with words that echo the influence The Thirteenth Floor had on Nolan’s latest film.

“There’s a tangible realism even when it gets crazy, and somehow that makes the jeopardy feel more real,” Page said. “It’s like reading a Haruki Murakami novel — it’s fantasy, but instead of feeling like some strange surreal world it feels very honest. The emotional spine of the story is there too, which is the key to his movies. There’s the big scale, but the sincerity isn’t left behind. The story is complicated but never confusing.” Elliot Page, “Inception’ breaks into dreams”

The movie doesn’t have the budget or the spectacle of The Matrix. It doesn’t even have the budget or spectacle of Independence Day (it was produced by that movie’s director Roland Emerich).

But while that may explain why it didn’t make as big a splash, it also explains why I’ve come back to this one more often than any of the sequels to The Matrix. The ultimate questions it asks about reality — and whether there could ever be a level we awaken to that’s definitely “true” in the way we pursue — are what I so desperately hoped would be answered in The Matrix: Revolutions.

How else could the Wachowskis explain Neo having powers in the real world except to say hey, didn’t any of you film lovers stop to wonder if the real world was just another Matrix?

PS. Go here to watch it on Prime Video

FURTHER VIEWING Hooooooooly…

This fan-made trailer perfectly blends The Matrix and Inception. What if the machines had a different plan? One that depended on us buying into a heist to betray our own minds?

FURTHER READING Y’all writers and musicians better check out my offsite article at Script Magazine: “STORYTELLING HACKS: The Music Method and The Christopher Nolan Method”

In music, numbers rule everything. They articulate the mechanics behind hit songs written by people who can’t read a single note. And they describe a secret strategy to storytelling that’s worked for songwriters since we began humming the songs we wish we could forget. It’s a secret strategy that could make the difference between selling your story or watching it waste away in limbo.

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