Narratology and Deconstruction theory have always been seen as two contradictory theories. Narratology uses time, story and plot to lead the audience to a concrete clear idea or concept, while deconstruction is all about exploring mutiple meanings, and giving text that has more than one interpretation. Inception is a movie which blends these two theories well together. I would like to analyze how the director did that.
Narrative is the main feature of all films. Film is an art form based on time and storytelling. Nolan is a skillful and experienced director. He knows how to use the language of film (that is shots, camera movement, scene) to build up a world and gradually lead his audience to understand the logic inside his world. In general, Inception strictly follows the very classical rules of Hollywood storytelling: introduction, development, climax, resolution, epilogue.
In the introduction phase, the director uses analepsis, or flashback to introduce the main character Dom Cobb, and basic background information about extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state. In the second phase, the director continues to introduce more information and logic rules about his world when Cobb tries to find the best members in his team of specialists, who then prepare to not steal an idea, but plant one . The director uses mimesis to display all this information. Mimesis is a very common technique used in narratology. It happens when the author tries to create the illusion that the characters themselves are speaking. As Cobb finds his team members, he explains all the rules of inception. It is actually the director who displays all this important information to the audience. In the third phase, the climax, all the conflict explodes. The director designed two conflicts, an outer conflict and an inner conflict. The outer one is Cobb and his team members trying to go inside Asher's mind to plant an idea. The inner one is about Cobb himself, his relationship with his wife and his inner struggle. In the last two phases, Cobb has completed his task and finally gotten rid of his psychological struggle. In terms of narratology, Inception is a very resolved and classical story.
However, Nolan is very smart. Despite film relying largely on time-based story, film also is the only media that can break time limit freely. In the film, the director can use flashback (analepsis), flash forward (prolepsis), or omission of events (ellipsis) to tell a story. Different from reality, the time in the film is not sequential or continuous. This is very similar to a dream. Many analysts have called film the art of making dreams. Nolan uses film as a subject to tell a story related to dreams. This is how he plays with deconstruction in his film.
According to Jacques Derrida's deconstruction theory, for deconstructionists, there is no “truth” or “reality” which somehow stands outside or behind language. Truth is a relation of linguistic terms, and reality is a construct, ultimately religious, social, political, and economic, but always of language, of various linguistic registers.
Because in the film, the reality could be constructed as a dream, there is no distinguishing sign to tell the reality from the dream. Nolan set several rules as a standard to distinguish these two. First, in a dream, the subject is always under the attack of the subconscious, that is, the main character is always running away from somebody. Second, in a dream, the totem is fake, is imperfect. In Cobb's case, his gyroscope will spin forever and never stop. In the film, Nolan gradually deconstructs these two concepts. Cobb experienced running away in both his dream and his so-called reality. In the last scene, when Cobb finally came back to reality and reunited with his children, the director's last shot stays on the spinning gyroscope. He didn't wait to display whether the gyroscope will stop or keep spinning, he leaves a big question to the audience. He shows a deconstructive situation where the meaning is ambiguous. The only standard sign to distinguish reality from the dream becomes ambiguous. As Nolan has shown earlier in his film, there is a scene where people gather around only to sleep. "They come to wake up, dream becomes to the reality" （Inception).
It is very interesting that the director repeatedly uses Edith Piaf's famous song "Non, je ne regrette rien" in the film. The line "Hien, Il y a hien"(no, there is nothing) is exactly what deconstruction tries to convey. The concept of nothing is represented as the erased object, or erased "being".
Our idea of nothing is affirmed by our own understanding of the meaning of the word "nothing," and we state nothingness as a being. As Ariadne (one of the characters in Inception) said, she thought that dreams are a visual effect, however, it is more about the feel of it. Life is like a dream: we experienced, loved and felt, and in Inception, you can experience the same thing inside a dream. The author throws an interesting deconstruction question to the audience. Since there is no difference, is it really necessary to distinguish reality from dream?
To Nolan, narratology is only a form. He uses this method to convey the concept of deconstruction. This is how he blends in these two ideas perfectly well. Nolan questions the difference between dream and reality and leaves the audience questioning their own ideas about the two.
