Facing the Minotaur: "Inception" (2010) and "Aeneid" 6
Author(s): JULIA D. HEJDUK
Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics , FALL 2011, Third Series, Vol.
19, No. 2 (FALL 2011), pp. 93-104
Published by: Trustees of Boston University; Trustees of Boston University through its
publication Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41308566
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Facing the Minotaur:
Inception (2010) and Aeneid 6
JULIA D. HEJDUK
I thought I was earning some Mommy Points
by taking my twelve-year-old son to see a trendy heist movie
with a mind-bending premise and cool explosions. The last
thing I expected was a film that would stimulate exciting insights
into Virgil's Aeneid . Yet like the ancient poet, modern
filmmaker Christopher Nolan taps into a myth of inexhaustible
power, one that expresses some of the deepest and
most uncomfortable truths about the human soul. For both
artists show their heroes entering an alternate reality that
blends the Cretan labyrinth, the underworld, and the subconscious
mind, where they must slay or be slain by a Minotaur
- that perfect symbol of the guilt, desire, and terror at
the innermost region of the psyche.
Freud, of course, thought our unconscious desires were
best embodied in the myth of Oedipus. But in many ways,
Crete offers a more universal psychic model than Thebes:
the Minotaur lurking in the labyrinth touches some of the
same springs, but others too, in an even more compelling
way.1 The monster himself is the product of guilt through
and through: King Minos' refusal to sacrifice a beautiful
white bull to Poseidon, an act of concupiscence with dire
religious repercussions, caused the god to instill in Minos'
wife Pasiphae a desire for the animal. The man-bull born
from their union (made possible by a fake cow contraption
created by master-craftsman Daedalus), beloved by
its mother, was hidden away in the labyrinth (also designed
by Daedalus) where it fed on youths and maidens
imported each year from Athens as retribution for the
Athenians' killing of Minos' son. With the help of Minos'
ARION I9.2 FALL 20II
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94 FACING THE MINOTAUR
daughter Ariadne, Athenian superhero Theseus slew the
beast, followed a thread to find his way out of the
labyrinth, and escaped with Ariadne, whom he later abandoned
on a desert island - yet more guilt leading to more
death. The Cretan legend is among other things a gripping
story about the ongoing consequences of disordered desire
and repression, about locking away the unspeakable
thing whose dark power threatens to devour us if it is not
overcome.
Inception (2010), with its brilliant premise of
lated shared dreaming, provides similarly fert
for Freudian exploration of the psyche. Th
youth Fischer, recently become heir to a co
pire, is haunted by the belief that his emotion
father was disappointed in him. Rival comp
Saito hires a group of con-artists to enter a sh
with him and plant the idea (a process call
tion") that Fischer's father loved him and wish
to establish his own identity by breaking up t
tion. But Cobb, the film's protagonist, fear
pate because of the disastrous experience tha
death of his wife, also a master dream-arch
their decades-long paradisiacal shared dr
took only a few hours in real time), she was u
return to waking reality. By planting the idea
world is not real," Cobb inadvertently cause
lieve, upon waking, that the real world was no
she committed suicide to return to her imagin
Charged with her murder and unable to ret
children, Cobb needs to be freed from the cru
den of guilt over his wife; in the parallel plot,
interwoven, Fischer must overcome the devast
and inferiority complex springing from his r
with his father.
Aeneas must also confront the potentially para
tions attaching to the ghosts of his past. The
Virgil portrays in Aeneid 6, while in some sense
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Julia D. Hejduk 95
sal resting place populated by all the dead, is in another
sense specifically tailored to Aeneas. In meeting the Shades
of Palinurus (337-83), Dido (450-76), and Deiphobus
(494-547) - the helmsman who represents his wanderings,
the lover/wife who represents his chief temptation to abandon
his expedition to proto-Rome, and the fellow Trojan
who represents the war his people lost - he delves ever
deeper into the painful memories of his previous life. Near
the book's end, the Shade of his father reveals the "history in
the future tense" that awaits Aeneas and his Roman descendants
(679- 899). It would be satisfying to conclude, as
many readers have, that these encounters have helped him to
come to terms with his past and prepared him for the future.
But if we examine the encounters themselves more closely especially
the one with Dido - it is far from clear that his
catabasis brings such closure.
Allowing Inception to function as a commentary on
Aeneid 6 brings into focus some troubling aspects of Aeneas'
underworld journey. In particular, Nolan's handling
of Cretan myth raises a crucial question for readers of Virgil
to consider: If the underworld is figured as a labyrinth,
where - or who - is the Minotaur? I shall argue that the
poet, like the filmmaker, has placed at the labyrinth's center
the woman whose suicide the hero has caused - but that
whereas Cobb is successful in metaphorically slaying that
monster, Aeneas is not.
AENEID 61 DIDO AND THE LABYRINTH
on the doors of the temple that marks the entrance
underworld at the opening of Aeneid 6, Virgil famou
picts the story of the Cretan labyrinth, complet
Pasiphae, the Minotaur, and the Athenian youths ch
lot to be sacrificed to the monster. The ecphrasis has
been seen as having numerous thematic connections
Aeneid as a whole and to the underworld in part
Many readers have also recognized the importance of
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96 FACING THE MINOTAUR
legend in Dido's story: like Ariadne, she rescues a hero who
then abandons her; like Pasiphae, she engages in an impossible
love that results in her doom.2 Yet no one has quite articulated
another possible connection: that Dido herself,
who appears at the precise center of Aeneid 6, is the Minotaur
Aeneas must slay. After following the trail of
labyrinthine allusions leading up to Dido's appearance in the
dark wood, I shall consider what the implications of this association
might be.
One such thread involves a kind of erudite verbal play,
beloved by Virgil and other learned poets of his generation,
in which a noticeable gesture of meter, grammar, or etymology
becomes thematically linked to similar formations, so
that a single word or phrase can recall an entire context. The
trail begins with Catullus 64, whose central ecphrasis on
Ariadne's romance with and abandonment by Theseus finds
many resonances in Virgil's tragedy of Dido. Catullus memorably
describes the winding paths of the labyrinth as an in observabilis
error , an untranslatable phrase in which error
conveys both "meandering" and "mistake":
Inde pedem sospes multa cum laude reflexit
errabunda regens tenui vestigia filo ,
ne labyrintheis e flexibus egredientem
tecti frustraretur inobservabilis error .
(Catullus 64.111-15)
Then, unharmed, he retraced his steps amid great praise,
guiding his wandering footsteps with a slender thread ,
lest as he made his way out of the labyrinthine curves
he be foiled by the building's inscrutable wandering.
Virgil reworks this passage in his own description of the labyrinth
at the beginning of Aeneid 6:
Minotaurus inest, Veneris monimenta nefandae,
hie labor ille domus et inextricabilis error;
magnum reginae sed enim miseratus amorem
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Julia D. Hejduk 97
Daedalus ipse dolos tecti ambagesque resoluit,
caeca regens filo uestigia.
(Aeneid 6.26-30)
The Minotaur is within, reminder of unspeakable desire,
here is the labor and inextricable wandering of the house;
but Daedalus, taking pity on the queen's great love,
himself unraveled the traps and windings of the building,
guiding blind footsteps with a thread.
There can be little doubt that Virgil's inextricabilis error is
a direct allusion to Catullus' inobservabilis error , and the
additional echo of regens vestigia filo , "guiding his footsteps
with a thread," reinforces the point. Virgil uses a
similar phrase, inremeabilis error ("unretraceable wandering,"
5.591), in his simile likening the boys' Troy Game to
the Cretan labyrinth. Since both of Virgil's passages, like
Catullus', are describing the labyrinth with the striking
phrase in-something-abilis error , they surely are connected
both to each other and to Catullus.
Once the labyrinth has become associated with this construction,
a single word can reactivate that resonance - and
Virgil does this, I suggest, shortly before the appearance of
Dido. When Aeneas has crossed the Styx and is about to step
onto the bank of the underworld, the river is called an inremeabilis
unda (6.425). Ancient marginalia (graduate school,
perhaps?) in my Virgil text reflect a naive reader's response
to this word inremeabilis : "int [short for "interesting"] used
of labyrinth in 5." In fact, though the author of that
comment was unaware of this at the time, the word appears
nowhere else before Virgil, and he uses it only in these two
places. It is likely, then, that Virgil intended to remind his
readers here of the labyrinth imagery with which the book
opened. Seven lines later (432), another remark appears in
my margin: "And here's Minos" - the president of a very
Roman-looking criminal court of the dead. Fifteen lines after
that (447), among the Fields of Mourning for women
who died because of love, we encounter Pasiphae; since
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9 8 FACING THE MINOTAUR
there is no known tradition of her violent death, and her object
of passionate love seems to have been a quadruped, her
appearance here is especially conspicuous. In the twenty-five
lines preceding Dido's appearance at the book's center,
then - line 450 of 901 - there are at least three references to
the labyrinth story.
Is there any justification, however, for regarding Dido herself
as a Minotaur figure? Here we must be clear about the
nature of Virgilian allusion: for his complex characters, and
Dido is one of the most complex in the poem, Virgil never
draws upon just one source. One could name dozens of
mythological figures, both male and female, who contribute
to her portrait: not only the seven heroines in the Fields of
Mourning who precede her, but Medea, Nausicaa, Diana,
even Ajax and Hercules - the list could go on almost indefinitely.
3 This is one of the joys of reading a learned author
working within a rich literary and mythological tradition. As
Eskimos have fifty words for "snow," and Texans have fifty
words for "ants," so Virgil has fifty and more than fifty models
for abandoned women and tragic heroes. To return to Inception
for a moment, Cobb expresses this concept of
multiple allusion beautifully when he explains how he and
Mai lived in a dream-home that was simultaneously a traditional
house and an ultra-modern apartment: "In the real
world, we'd have to choose, but not here." In dreams, we can
encounter figures who are somehow, impossibly yet possibly,
our fifth-grade teacher and our former best friend and Brittney
Spears; art allows the same stunning combinations. To
say that Dido is Aeneas' Minotaur, then, is to say that recognizing
this layer of allusion adds another facet to the gem.4
Among these many facets, there is at least one that could
be described as monstrous. The underworld encounter contains
much that is uncannily dreamlike: when Aeneas first
sees her she is wandering in a great wood and appears
darkly, obscura , like the moon just barely glimpsed rising
through the trees (452-54) - a simile used in Apollonius'
Argonautica of Heracles (4.1477-80), emphasizing his disThis
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Julia D. Hejduk 99
tance from the Argonauts. Yet suddenly Aeneas is standing
close enough for her to hear every word. After his speech
Virgil gives us a strangely contradictory description of her
posture:
talibus Aeneas ardentem et torua tuentem
lenibat dictis animum lacrimasque ciebat.
ilia solo fixos oculos auersa tenebat . . .
(4 66-68)
Aeneas, with such words, was trying to soothe the soul
burning and glaring fiercely , and was moving tears.
She, turned away, was holding her eyes fixed on the ground . . .
Whether it is his own tears or hers that he moves is, as so often
with Virgilian tears, left ambiguous; how a mind or soul,
animus , can be "glaring fiercely" is another puzzle. Just as
Dido's shade was both distant and immediately present, so,
with dreamlike impossible possibility, it is both glaring
fiercely - the reader assumes at Aeneas - and turned away
with eyes fixed on the ground. The word I would like to focus
on here, however, is torva , which I translate "fiercely"
but which is more literally a substantive adjective, "glaring
fierce things" (like our expression "looking daggers").
Nearly every appearance of this word in Virgil designates
something bestial or monstrous: in the Eclogues , a lioness
(2.63); in the Georgics , significantly for our purposes, a cow
(3.51); in the Aeneid , the brow and eyes of a Cyclops (3.636,
3.677), the snakes or face of a Fury (6.571, 7.415), and the
bloody glance of Amata when infected by one (7. 399). The
only sane human described with this adjective is Abas
(10.170), and his followers have such an interesting connection
to the Cyclopes that Virgil may have used it there for
that reason. Certainly, that word alone would not be sufficient
to establish Dido as a monster or beast, still less a
Minotaur; but given the other contextual clues and the thematic
appropriateness of such an allusion, it allows for the
possibility.
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ioo FACING THE MINOTAUR
In any event, the encounter is certainly not, from Aen
perspective, a victory. Those fiercely burning eyes, whet
piercing her former lover or turned away from him, do
close. She flees into the shadowy wood, his enemy for
eternity: inimica refugit / in nemus umbriferum (472-73).
the labyrinth that is Virgil's underworld also represent
some level, Aeneas' own soul, we could say that the pain
guilt Dido causes him are repressed but not vanquished. V
gil describes the Minotaur as a "reminder of unspeakab
desire," Veneris monimenta nefandae (6.26); at the end
the poem, Aeneas, who is beginning to be swayed to sh
mercy to Turnus, is re-enflamed by the sight of Pa
swordbelt, "a reminder of savage pain," saevi monimen
doloris (12.945). Aeneas is a champion at pressing pain d
in his heart, premit altum corde dolor em (1.209), but it ris
up to overwhelm him at last.
INCEPTION I EPIC DREAMS AND A MONSTER SLAIN
among the many thrills of Christopher Nolan's bl
busters - for the classicist, at least - is his absorption and
juvenation of the ancient epic tradition. (Is not the m
struggle of "Two-Face" Harvey Dent in The Dark K
(2008), driven mad by the murder of his loved one, the
emblem of Aeneas in Aeneid 10 and 12? "Madness is like
gravity, all it takes is a little push": Are not the Joker's words
a commentary on the Aeneid* s entire second half? But I digress.)
Inception opens with our hero washing up on a
shore, a hero who, like Odysseus and Aeneas, is struggling
to reach his home. In a perfect illustration of epic "ring composition,"
the final scene in the dream world, the encounter
with Saito, is the very one with which the film opens. Another
epic trademark is expert forger Eames' impersonation
of Fischer's mentor, a word that derives from the wise old
man impersonated by the goddess Athena to instruct
Telemachus in the Odyssey. The spinning top, a talisman
that mysteriously symbolizes the passage between the wakThis
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Julia D . Hejduk 101
ing and sleeping worlds, resembles another mysterious metal
object that affords such passage: when the aged Saito says,
"I know what this is. I've seen one before, many, many years
ago," he is to my mind the spitting image of the ferryman
Charon, marveling at the Golden Bough "seen after a long
time," longo post tempore uisum (6.409). Yet Saito also resembles
Aeneas' helmsman Palinurus, the one comrade (almost)
sacrificed to the mission, (almost) trapped between the
living and the dead.
The list could go on; but most importantly for our purposes,
Nolan represents the descent into the world of dreams
as a catabasis, a journey to the land of the dead. The name
for the terrifying realm of the "undifferentiated unconscious,"
where Saito risks being trapped forever until rescued
by Cobb, is "Limbo," the outermost ring of Dante's
Inferno, where Virgil and the virtuous pagans famously reside;
and Cobb tells Mai that he must see their children "up
above," not stay with her "down here." Conversely, the film
reminded me that Virgil's underworld is also the realm of
sleep: as Charon tells Aeneas, "this is the place of Shades, of
sleep and of soporific night" (umbrarum hie locus est , somni
noctisque soporae , 6.390). That Aeneas should meet there
the particular umbrae most likely to haunt his dreams is a
beautiful piece of psychological realism. The film constantly
teases the viewer with different layers or levels of dreams, so
that we are never quite sure whether our hero has made it
back to reality; this indeterminacy is symbolized by the spinning
top, which is supposed to fall over if and only if the
dreamer has in fact awakened. When Cobb sets it twirling at
the very end of film, it wobbles - but only a little. Aeneas'
famous exit through the Ivory Gate at the book's end - the
gate that sends forth falsa insomnia , false dreams - effects
precisely the same sort of exasperation. Is the panorama of
Roman history he has just seen a false dream? What is real,
after all? Do we wake or sleep?
Nolan's debt to ancient myth is more obvious still in his
use of the labyrinth theme. He signals its centrality even beThis
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102 FACING THE MINOTAUR
fore the movie begins, reviving the maze on the Legenda
Films logo; a labyrinth gleams on the surface of the DV
And how many modern young women are named "Ar
adne"? The film's heroine, the architect who both construc
the dream world and helps Cobb to escape from it, tells u
that she has designed it in the form of a labyrinth, as sh
holds up a large model of a labyrinth. No need to look f
subtle clues here.
A little more subtle, but no less striking, is the similarit
between Mai and Virgil's Dido. Like Cobb, Aeneas has unintentionally
caused his beloved - Dido would say, "wife"
to commit suicide. Often throughout the film, I found mysel
seeing Aeneas and Dido in Cobb and Mai. The dream worl
they create together, magnificent in its complexity and
grandeur, is entirely empty of other people - a perfect em
blem of the consuming passion that seeks only its beloved, as
Aeneas and Dido (according to Fama) have heated up t
winter "between themselves," inter se (4.193), forgetful o
those depending on them. The way Mai keeps popping up
everywhere, intruding on all Cobb's plans, is like a person
fication of Dido's curse, "as a Shade, I will be in all places,
omnibus umbra locis adero (4.386). Her burning eyes whe
she screams at Cobb for betraying her are a very illustration
of Dido in her fury when Aeneas says he is leaving her.
But their final meeting is most conspicuous in its absolut
reversal of Aeneas and Dido, and shows just how disturbin
the Virgilian meeting actually is. Dido's response to Aenea
anguished plea is the most cutting rejoinder of all: silence
Those fiercely glaring eyes may be turned away and fixed on
the ground, but they are never closed. There is no attempt at
an embrace. Rather than admitting his feeling of guilt, A
neas expresses disbelief that his departure could hav
brought her so much pain. In the film, by contrast, Cobb
able to come to terms with his own pain and say goodbye
a way that enables him to move on. Mai asks him, "What d
you feel?," and he replies, "I feel guilt"; the psychotherapists
would tell us that acknowledgment is the first step to recovThis
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Julia D. Hejduk 103
ery. He is able to converse with her, to face squarely the
temptation to remain below with her forever. When this
Minotaur pulls out a knife and nearly kills him, he is saved
by - naturally - Ariadne. Mai's beautiful, fierce, furious eyes
are finally closed, and she vanishes from the film. For Cobb
has come to a realization that enables him to escape, and his
choice of words establishes conclusively the filmmaker's
debt to the classical catabasis: "You're just a Shade."
CODA: A SECOND MINOTAUR?
I have argued that both Virgil and Nolan figure their underworld/dream-world
as a labyrinth, where the hero must
face and overcome the Minotaur that represents the guilt
and desire at the center of his own soul. I shall close by looking
at another of the film's heroes, the one for whom the
dream-labyrinth was actually constructed and whose encounter
with his father is the ostensible goal of the whole enterprise.
The relationship with one's parents is the first and
most primal of all, and it is this relationship that the inception-artists
seek to change, so that Fischer will be inspired to
break up his father's empire. When Fischer faces his own
Minotaur, the father he thought was disappointed in him, he
discovers that the old man actually loved him for himself,
that the word "disappointed" on his father's dying lips
meant "disappointed that you tried to be me." Locked deep
in the safe beside his father's deathbed, the child's pinwheel
- his Rosebud - represents the ascendancy of personal
affection over dynastic aspirations.
This is precisely the opposite emotional trajectory from
that of Aeneas' underworld encounter with his father. When
Anchises, at the close of his admonitory speech declares, tu
regere imperio populos, Romane, memento , "You, Roman,
remember to rule the peoples with imperium " (851), he
completely elides the identity of his own son. Whether he is
actually addressing Aeneas as generic "Roman" or looking
past him to those who will spring from his line, the message
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104 FACING THE MINOTAUR
is clear. Aeneas' value to his father is not as an individual
person, still less a beloved son: he is first and foremost the
progenitor of an empire. The touching scene between Fischer
and his father brought home to me just how dysfunctional,
how terrifying, is the Aeneid* s erasure of the worth and
uniqueness of the individual person.
NOTES
I am extremely grateful to Monica Cyrino and to audiences at Baylor
University, the Texas State Junior Classical League convention, and the
Classical Association of the Middle West and South annual meeting (all in
Spring 2011) for their comments and encouragement on earlier versions of
this paper.
1. See especially R. Padel, "Labyrinth of Desire: Cretan Myth in Us," Avion
4 (1996) 76-87. On Freudian psychoanalysis and Roman literature
more generally, see E. Oliensis, Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry
(Cambridge 2009).
2. See W. Fitzgerald, "Aeneas, Daedalus, and the Labyrinth," Arethusa
17 (1984) 51-65; P. R. Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity
through the Middle Ages (Ithaca 1990), 227-53; P* A. Miller, "The
Minotaur Within: Fire, the Labyrinth, and Strategies of Containment in
Aeneid 5 and 6," Classical Philology 90 (1995) 225-40; and R. Armstrong,
"Crete in the Aeneid-. Recurring Trauma and Alternative Fate," Classical
Quarterly 53 (2002) 321-40.
3. See J. Tatum, "Allusion and Interpretation in Aeneid 6.440-76,"
American Journal of Philology 105 (1984) 434-52.
4. One might also note that in the Phaedo , a text on which Virgil draws
heavily in Aeneid 6 (see C. Weber, "The Allegory of the Golden Bough,"
Vergilius 41 [1995] 3-35), Plato assimilates his hero Socrates to the Minotaur:
see R. Burger, The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (New Haven 1984),
2I3This
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