A Story Within a Story

“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”

Time. Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film, Inception, much like Nolan himself, is deeply concerned with time. Indeed, the final montage in the film is scored to a haunting song titled “Time” by Hans Zimmer, and this is not without purpose. Many of Nolan’s films—Memento, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet—are chiefly interested in telling stories that deal with time in an unconventional manner. According to Mieke Bal in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, “a fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events” (159). In other words, a fabula is the raw, chronological data contained within a story. Throughout Inception, Nolan weaves together time and narrative, intertwining the two, to demonstrate how they intersect in the telling of a story.

In many ways, Nolan’s approach to filmmaking and storytelling plays fast and loose with this definition of Bal’s, often resulting in thought-provoking and unique cinematic endeavors that take many creative liberties with how audiences interpret time and chronology. In this way, Nolan’s film, Inception, serves a twofold purpose: firstly, it is a master stroke of cinematic entertainment while, secondly, also serving as a visible representation of how narrative works. Indeed, concerned as Nolan may be with the innerworkings of time in Inception, he is far more interested in story—namely, how do we as people interpret and experience story? What do stories mean and how do they work? How do time and narrative impact one another? To answer these questions well is no small task for image-bearers: “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, He has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Because Nolan is made in the image of God,—though he is not a Christian—he has a sort of transcendent curiosity embedded deeply within him. As is the case with many of his films, Inception dares to ask some imposing questions of reality, questions that are quite obviously important to Nolan himself—“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Proverbs 25:2). Indeed, if Interstellar is to be considered Nolan’s treatise on the subject of time, then Inception should rightly be considered his final word on story.

By employing the film’s central premises regarding dreams and time, Nolan is able to divide his story into multiple levels of narration, giving a greater idea of how this narratological framework looks when visibly displayed and how it relates to time itself, all the while maintaining the audience’s utmost interest. However, before journeying further, it is imperative that some context is given regarding the film’s plot and the various premises at play within it so that the narratological concepts can be better observed and understood.

In the world of Inception, technology has progressed insofar that people can enter the dream world and experience it as though it were a physical dimension. Taste, pain, death, and love—all of these can be experienced in the dream world as though they were taking place in reality itself. However, because mental constructs can now be physically represented through the dream technology as though they were physical, this means that mental assets such as secrets, memories, and desires can likewise be stolen. In Inception, this kind of mental theft is called “extraction” (00:03:20). The film’s protagonist, Dom Cobb, specializes in this type of dream theft.

Very early on in the film the audience is introduced to extraction’s twin concept, called “inception.” With inception, ideas are not stolen, they are implanted—something Cobb says is extremely difficult to do, almost impossible (00:19:30). However, when a billionaire energy mogul makes him an offer he cannot refuse to plant a corrosive idea in a rival businessman’s mind, Cobb accepts, and he and his team begin planning for the reverse-heist (00:20:30). In this reverse-heist, Cobb and his team enter into the dream realm with the man they are planning to plant an idea in, and in order to make this idea seem “genuine”, they must not only hone the idea down to its simplest form but layer the idea in multiple dreams within dreams (00:50:30). Or, for the sake of narratology, stories within stories. Each dream, or level, is presented as its own reality, taking place within the larger frame of narrative, but serving its own individual purpose, nonetheless.

Nolan’s direction and clever writing make wise use of common knowledge regarding dreams to explore not only the human mind, but narrative itself. Inception’s unique concept provides the perfect canvas upon which narrative embedding—or narrative levels—can be explored, understood, and visibly demonstrated. Indeed, each dream is treated as a story within a story, or a narrative within other narratives, each with its own location, conflict, and narrative arc. Furthermore, these dream sequences fit within the definition of narrative embedding because each dream is not only self-contained, but contained within the dream proceeding it, given that in order to enter into one dream one must first be present in the dream before it. This lines up well with Bal’s definition of fabula, or story, as something that is both logical and chronological (159), given that the dreams (narrative levels) operate on a basis of forward motion and reason. The relationship between the primary narrative and the embedded narratives in Inception is represented in the following diagram:

In Inception, as outlined in the diagram, there are five main levels of narration, or dreams, that one must be concerned with. Like most narratives that explore narrative embedding, there is the frame/main narrative as represented by A, this being the core reality that all the other stories and narratives are contained within. Bal puts the concept this way: “the narrative text constitutes a whole in which, from the narrator’s text, other texts are embedded” (51). In this case, the core reality, or “real world”, of Inception can be considered the narrator’s text, while all the other “texts”, or dreams, are those which are embedded. In Inception, given it is a film, the frame narrative serves as the main diegesis (the primary story), and it occupies most of the runtime of the film (roughly an hour and five minutes), whereas the other narrative levels comprise the other half of the film. In the above diagram, the frame narrative is contained within a thick, bolded line, which is meant to indicate that nothing can enter or exit the primary diegesis.

Perhaps I can illustrate with a thoroughly Christian example. Imagine that the thick, bolded line in the diagram represents the boundaries of reality as established by the Lord God: everything that is true and factual—Heaven and Hell, our world and all others, and every being that God has made—exists and is contained within this border that God has prescribed. There is nothing outside of reality proper, not even God—He is reality, the very nucleus of it. Anything beyond Him and the thick, bolded line He’s drawn around His world is complete and utter nothingness.

Similar to the example of Bal’s wherein he makes note of Arabian Nights, Inception can also be considered a frame narrative in that there are multiple stories occurring within the main fabula itself (52). These embedded narratives are represented in the diagram as B, C, D, and E. However, unlike the example of Arabian Nights, the additional levels of narrative within Inception profoundly impact the overarching course of the primary narrative, so much so that the embedded narratives cannot be divorced from the primary narrative without losing the substance of the entire film. As Bal puts it, “the apparently loose relationship between primary and embedded text is relevant to the development of the primary fabula” (53).

Beyond the primary narrative in Inception, Cobb and his team enter four additional levels of embedded narrative, all of which occur within the dream world. Within this dream world, there is the rain-slicked city scape, followed by the hotel vista, then the snowy hospital facility, concluding with Limbo (Inception 01:04:00-02:12:00). What makes Inception such a compelling example of narrative embedding is that all these realities are entangled and contingent upon the primary fabula itself (the frame narrative, reality), while also standing apart as their own narratives, despite at no point ceasing to exist within the all-encompassing frame provided by the primary narrative.

As aforementioned, the primary frame narrative comprises about half of the film’s runtime, and it is during this time that the heist is planned and the main characters are established, with the focalization being upon Cobb himself. Significant time is committed to explaining the “rules” of the world and taking pains to demonstrate how dreams operate in order to make sense of things when the other narratives, or dreams, are introduced. However, once the other narratives are embedded, though there is frequent jumping between them, there is not a return to the frame narrative until the very end of the film once all the additional narratives have been collapsed. Hence why the embedded narrative frame of B is represented by a solid, although thinner, line, drawing to mind the fact that once the audience enters the second level, they do not leave until after all the other dreams have ended, thus returning to the primary narrative.

At a point in the film, Cobb remarks that “downwards is the only way forwards” (Inception 01:10:30). That is, in order to progress further in the story, one must progress further within the story. To grasp the full depth of the primary narrative, one must first experience all levels of narration. As the audience progresses further within the embedded narratives, there is frequent jumping back and forth between B, C, D, and E, but as aforementioned, all these embedded narratives are contained within the structure of B. However, because there are seemingly loose boundaries between the embedded narratives, their narrative frames are represented as having a thin and dotted line, indicating that there is indeed passage between them once entered.

Not only is Inception concerned with narrative levels and how this can be demonstrably explained via the use of dreams, but the film, and Nolan, is very interested in time as well. Cobb explains that the human brain functions at a much higher rate while asleep when compared to wakefulness, resulting in a disparity between how long a dream feels and how long it actually occurs for in the real world (Inception 00:28:30). In the film, the real world to dream time ratio is about 20:1; five minutes in the dream world is roughly one hour in the real world (Inception 00:28:45). This introduces the idea of fabula time as opposed to time span in the context of embedded narratives.

Now, what makes this concept of fabula time vs. the span of time passed even more interesting is that this ratio is compounded as one descends into a secondary dream level, and even more so when one enters a third dream level, and so on. Namely, the fabula time as opposed to the time span varies depending on which level of narration one finds themselves in. In the film, Cobb and his team enter the first level of dreams during a ten-hour plane flight, resulting in one week of dream time at level one (B), six months at dream two (C), ten years at dream three (D), and potentially limitless time once they reach Limbo (E) (Inception 01:09:30-01:10:45). If one considers the length of time presented by the final narrative level, Limbo, this means that the time span over which the film occurs is well over one hundred years, despite all of it taking place in the real world over only several hours. In this way, Nolan toys with not only the narratological concept of embedded narratives, but with how time itself works within those individual narratives.

            In the film Inception, director Christopher Nolan succeeds to not only produce an exceptionally entertaining film, both thematically and technically, but also manages to put rather complex narratological concepts to film in a clear and digestible manner. Rather than exploring embedded narratives as mere narration within a larger diegesis, the film demonstrates the concept of frame narratives via the use of dreams within dreams. Through the exploration of Mieke Bal’s definitions of what narrative and narrative embedding is, one is able to then apply these concepts to the narrative structure of Inception in remarkably complex ways. Indeed, when one considers how well these concepts map onto Inception, it is tempting to ask why Bal neglected to include the film as an example in his book, Narratology. And, more pressing still, the question must be asked of Nolan as to why—in light of his very obvious and very serious fascination with time, science, and the stories that bind them together—he hasn’t yet fixed his gaze and faith on Him who is the Author of all?

“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”

—Proverbs 25:2

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Photo by Lu Quang Do, Unsplash

Author’s Note: This is a slightly edited version of a paper I originally wrote for a class focused on narrative theory during the second year of my undergrad. While it may be somewhat different from the kind of writing I usually produce here, I hope it was enjoyable nonetheless—particularly if you’re as interested in the art of storytelling as I am (and, of course, in anything produced by Christopher Nolan). All truth is God’s truth, and all stories are but a thread in the much larger story that He is weaving, of which you and I, and even Christopher Nolan, are a part.

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References:

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Fourth Ed., University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Inception. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros., 2010.