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Inception

After hearing a sermon on our relationship with our heavenly father, I’m more convinced than ever that Eames’ statement is the key theme of the movie: “You have to start with something much more basic . . . the relationship with the father.” The statement appears throughout the movie in a variety of ways. Jesus told his mother that he must be about his father’s business. That statement defined his life and death – doing only what he saw the father doing and obeying him and trusting him no matter what God put him through.

Saito is a father-figure in the Almighty sense; he can make anything happen, and he shows up almost with omniscience to protect Dom. He can buy anything at any time, and he seems to exercise a seeming life-and-death power at the beginning of the movie with respect to the worker who failed. He controls the entire American justice system with one phone call. He tells Dom that he can fix his legal problem but doesn’t explain how, as if he has divine power. Dom’s real father, Michael Caine, is loving but firm, a source of ethics. Yet, he also is forgiving; he kindly meets Dom at the airport at the end of the movie and restores him to his children.

Then there’s the executive’s son who has thought throughout his life that his father can’t stand him & is disappointed with him. But notice that the end of the movie is in his own subconscious, not someone else’s, as occurs in other parts of the movie. Therefore, the man who is his father in the dream is not being played by someone else. This is the real inner consciousness of the son, and his perception of his father (like our perception of our heavenly father?) has been faulty all his life. How do we know this? Because the son has had a conversion experience – he dies and rises again; he’s born again. This time, when he sees his father, he sees the real father, the one who wanted the best for him, like our heavenly father wants for us. That’s why the plan works and why he changes his mind about the business deal – his relationship with his father is restored.

Dom’s story parallels that of the executive throughout the movie. Thus, Dom not only must be restored in his family relationships, by following his father and father-figure, but he also is the person who leads the executive’s son to a true understanding of his father. It doesn’t matter that Dom doesn’t plan it all out perfectly; that’s the sovereignty of God at work, who even uses the wickedness of Dom’s projection of his wife to bring about the death and resurrection of the executive’s son.