Considering one of the biggest film successes of last year, Inception, and the fantastic film released April of this year, Source Code, the concept of accessing a world within worlds has become the most intriguing plot basis in recent cinema.
Inception is about highly trained thief (played by Leonardo Dicaprio) who is able to access parts of the human mind and invade the dreams of others to gain and plant new information. The film shows Leonardo’s character going on his final mission of inception, revealing the character’s personal struggles with the process as his vision of what’s real and unreal becomes unclear. Source Code deals with accessing another world but in a different way as it is centered on a soldier (Jake Gyllenhaal) who must embark on a mission to solve who bombed a Chicago train, by embodying a man who died on the train. The mode of travel in this film is directed to the past although the soldier’s journeys back to the past do not necessarily make a difference in the world of reality – or does it?
The main protagonists of both films fall into states of fantasy within an outer-edged world of reality and as these movies progress the stages at which these characters transition from one state to the other become more ambiguous. This relates to the relationship between fantasy and reality - a necessary combination claimed by American critic Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Realism…risk imprisonment in own narrow worlds…fantasy should not be dismissed in the name of truth, it plays a key role in the enlivenment and transformation of culture.’ By accessing a level of unreality either through dreams or reflections of the past we gain an opportunity to better our understanding of human reality. In one sense, the past and our dreams are modes of fantasy as they do not show what is happening with us at present; however dreams act as a projection of our unconscious mind tapping into issues of reality.
This idea of such opposing forces working together to determine the future of the real world as portrayed in these films presents a great intrigue explaining why Source Code and Inception gained numbers in cinema audiences. The central characters of both films are warned at the beginning that their reality is separate from the unreal worlds they access, however the question of what is real becomes uncertain throughout both films and so relates again to the necessary unison of reality and fantasy – we need both to survive this world.
