What The Matrix Had That Inception Doesn't

Everyone is so blown away by Inception that nobody seems to have noticed a huge omission: an explanation of the dream-sharing technology. Why not?

We create the world of a dream. We bring a subject into that dream and they fill it with their secrets. – Inception

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. – The Matrix

When I saw The Matrix, it turned my world upside down. My experience of day-to-day reality changed; I felt like I understood how people worked and how I worked for the first time; my world was now shaped by the notion that we are all just slaves to a system which we can’t see. After watching Inception twice, I wanted to feel the same way, but I didn’t. Maybe it's because I’m older and there are more layers to my experience now. But Inception did give me a good philosophical jolt, and I’ve sure been thinking about the film a lot.

Critics position Inception atop the heap of the psychological-action genre, as it obviously draws from films like the Bourne series, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and, most significantly for me, The Matrix.

Across the blogosphere, there’s no shortage of debates about the plot points of this film. What no one seems to be talking about – and this is less a spoiler than an observation – is the striking absence of technology in the movie. Even its most basic premise – the characters’ ability to enter other people’s dreams – is never explained, technology-wise. Unlike The Matrix, which nearly buckles under the weight of a technology-driven plot, Inception has none.

Instead, Nolan focuses purely on the psycho-social experience of shared dreaming. He doesn’t explain how it works, he just asks the viewer to assume some people are trained to enter others’ dreams with the aid of sleeping potions and a wire attached to the wrist. The scene that comes closest to explaining the mechanism of shared dreaming features a basement full of sleeping dream addicts.

I’m surprised by the fact that our iPhone-obsessed public conscious isn’t up in arms over this omission. This gadget-loving society, you’d think, would reject such a complex film not driven by futuristic gadgetry. The Matrix shook up viewers by creating a tight technical framework to support the action-packed philosophies and perspectives on reality. Since the release of the first Matrix movie in 1999, a lot has changed; that was a time when we were blinded by the purely technical potential of the internet and the ability of machines to solve our problems and make life better. The Wachowski brothers built a fiction in which our entire reality is crafted by machines and we have been severely duped.

Since that first phase of the internet crashed, a new notion of being online has emerged: a notion built around the social web, Web 2.0, a computer world designed to facilitate social interactions. We are living in an technical era in which the great excitement about the power of technology comes not from what the machines can do but what the crowd can do with the machines. It’s about capitalizing on what was until now an ethereal exchange between people – about capturing and analyzing and expressing the data of our social fabric. This evolution of the web is about how people connect and share and create.

It’s at this cultural juncture that Nolan steps in and says we don’t need machines, we don’t need technology, per se; the experience we crave comes from people and imaginations and the complex interactions of our subconscious. Twitter, Facebook, and the Web 2.0 world are designed to hide the workings of the machines and sate our desire to explore these social experiences. When it comes down to it, we are all just a bunch of dreamers, sharing our dreams in a basement and Facebook is that basement.