"Inception" as Film Noir

“Inception” explores a fictional phenomenon in which trained individuals can enter someone’s subconscious while he sleeps and extract or plant ideas in his mind. Dom Cobb learns the tragic effects of performing inception when he and his wife, Mal, accidentally trap themselves in a dreamlike state for what seems like decades and he puts the idea in her mind that their dream world is in fact the real world. When they finally wake up from their slumber, Mal is convinced that the real world is false. She struggles to convince Dom that, if they kill themselves, they will wake up in what she perceives as “the real world”. Dom remains firm, and Mal tries to manipulate him into killing himself by giving him an ultimatum. She tells other people that he is abusing her, and reminds Dom that if she kills herself, and he doesn’t do the same, people will inevitably think that he murdered her. When Dom does not comply, she kills herself, forcing Dom to flee the United States and leave his young children behind. In Europe, Dom makes a living using inception to perform corporate espionage. He gets an offer he cannot pass up when Mr. Saito agrees to help Dom return to the United States if Dom can infiltrate Robert Fischer’s subconscious and convince him to break up his late father’s energy conglomerate. With the help of his business partner Arthur, an architecture student named Ariadne and a host of other characters, Dom arranges to infiltrate Fischer’s mind during an airplane flight. Although the group is repeatedly hindered by Dom’s dream projection of Mal, who strives to undermine their operation, they ultimately succeed—although the audience must question whether Dom actually escapes slumber when he returns home at the end of the movie and appears to still be in a fake realm.

Mal (or Dom’s projection of Mal) serves to enhance the movie’s film noir ambiance by acting as a traditional femme fatale. She repeatedly tries to undermine Dom’s operation, betraying him at every turn. Dom ultimately must kill Mal after she inhibits him too many times, affirming the film noir ideology that women are scheming individuals with alternative motives and that men ultimately must put them back in their place.