"Inception"'s "Perception"....

Tonight, we went to see "Inception", a post-modern, anti-realist movie that had several "messages for me" :). These messages were on human development, human experience, and human memory. The characters as "social constructionists" were not beyond their own human limitations, or ability to remove themselves from thier own pasts, fears, and ability to cope with human experience. These 'leaders' found out that their experiment had real consequences in a real world which did not necessarily result in "good outcomes". Humans are, after all, a subject of their environment, and not objective of it.

On the level of human development, the main character has a hard time removing himself from the past guilt and responsibility of exposing his wife to ideas that seeded in her paranoia and real mental illness. Her "leap of faith" sent her to her death and was based on irrationality and not the real world of experience. His "ideal" was his wife's hope of growing old together, which had been dashed upon the reality of  his wife's real and actual suicide. It was not just, the "symbolic". From that time on, his wife's memory and hope haunted him and prevented him from entering another's reality. He kept projecting his own guilt and anxiety into another's experience. "Faith" in experience was challenged. His life had been defined by faith in the ideal. And 
"the" ideal always remained a hope, but never a reality.

The main character grew to know that the ideal world of "growing old together" or "living happily ever after" was after all a childish hope. He had coped with his dis-illusionment with 'splitting his personality'. In the end, the "wise old man "was re-united with his "youth" of adventure. This time, "the leap of faith", was not based on irrationality, but a realization of the paradox of reality and the real world of human experience. The main character had grown intellectually to embrace a rationale of hope, recognizing the limitations of the choice to commit to a certain viewpoint.

Another character found that his fear of never attaining his father's acceptance, because he kept pursuing the image he imagined his father had for him, was a baseless fear. His 'ideal" was based on a misconception of his father's real intent. He rejected what he really had needed and wanted all along; acceptance, and hope of realizing his own person. He came to find out that his father had saved his childish "toy" and his father had made provision in his last will and testament for accomplishing his hope of attaining his own ends. He was freed from his fear of never measuring up.

The "social constructors" became aware of how their creation and distortion of other "realities" had real consequences in a real world, another's world. This is where the reality of human experience cannot make judgments, or rationalization about another's life, as an "ideal". There is only human experience, human hope and human choice, which makes for a human reality.

I think the movie was a little less developed than "The Matrix", in my personal opinion, but that might have been a conscious decision on the producer/writer's part, as part of the dis-jointed post-modern story about human reality.....