The movie brings to mind the classic story of the man who dreams he was a butterfly and, upon waking, wonders whether he is really a butterfly who is now dreaming he is a man. Inception plays with that theme in a novel and fascinating manner. The movie is confusing and psychologically disorienting, but in a good way. Its dialogue is not full of the boring and mundane cliché-ridden chattiness that fills most movies, but is almost poetically mysterious. 

The movie does have one flaw, a problem that is common in the modern world of easy special effects—the action is overdone and goes on for two or three times longer than necessary. In this regard, it shares a problem with last year’s Avatar, but is actually one step further over-the-top. Despite this flaw, it is well worth the time. 

Why are nightmares full of men?

In the movie Inception, the characters descend through several levels of “the unconscious,” often encountering bad guys shooting guns at them. Although incidental to this movie, it raised the question for us: Why are bad guys almost always guys?

When Dave was a boy, I remember him waking up after nightmares in which unknown men were chasing him. As it turns out, nightmares about dangerous male strangers are quite common.  Indeed, when Michael Schredl (of the Mannheim Mental Health Institute’s Sleep Laboratory) collected systematic data on children’s dreams, he found that over 50 percent of the human aggressors in boy’s dreams were unfamiliar men. By contrast, none of the boys had nightmares about unfamiliar women. 

So “bad guys” are usually guys, and they are often unfamiliar. In one study, students at Arizona State were asked students either to “think of an angry face” or “think of a happy face.” When people were asked to think of a happy face, the majority envisioned a woman, and it was typically a woman they knew. When they thought of an angry face, though, 75 percent of our participants spontaneously thought of a man. Most interestingly, that man was typically not someone they knew—so they were calling to mind not a real person with whom they had had an actual conflict but an ominous Jungian prototype—the angry strange man.

The people most likely to compete with you for status, to annoy you on an everyday basis, to bully you, or to otherwise make your life miserable are much more likely to be people you know. So why do people waste energy on feelings of antipathy toward total strangers, and why do men occasionally end up dead or in prison when they express those negative feelings toward a fellow they would otherwise never see again? The answer is that men are in fact much more likely to be the perpetrators of violence, and that members of other groups are less likely to care about you than your own neighbors and family members (the perpetrators of genocide are the male members of other tribes, not the grouchy ladies down the street).

Our ratings:

Dave: A-

Doug: B+

We reviewed two other movies nominated for Best Picture, and you can see those reviews here:

The Fighter: Slugging Your Way to the Top

Toy Story 3: Vengeance in Disneyland

References:

Becker, D. V., Kenrick, D. T., Neuberg, S. L., Blackwell, K. C., & Smith, D. M. (2007). The confounded nature of angry men and happy women. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 179–190.

Schredl, M. (2009). Sex differences in dream aggression. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 32, 287-288.