Sleuth And Deception Essay

Christopher Nolan’s, “Inception” and Anthony Schaffer’s “Sleuth”, considers the role and effect of deception in an individual’s life. Inception, like the play, sleuth draws upon the character’s actions in depicting the theme of deception and utilizes this to advance the plot. Inception revolves around planting an “idea”(Nolan 2:58), a “virus”(Nolan 2:51), in an individual’s mind, causing the individual to believe that the idea is reality. Whereas, sleuth revolves around clever game playing in order to outsmart and deceive one’s adversary. Deception is a major theme that exists in both Inception and sleuth, and is expressed in a variety of ways. Both Nolan and Schaffer were able to express this theme through the deception of others, the deception of one’s self, and through the use of clever dialogue and plot twists, in order to deceive the audience.

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This can be seen in both texts, as characters utilize manipulative language in their pursuit of deceiving one another. The relationship that exists between the deceiver and the deceived is often complex and dynamic, and in order to fully comprehend the idea of deception one must understand this relationship. In the movie, the theme of deception and the concept of Inception are introduced early in the movie, during the conversation between Cobb and Saito. The backbone and plot of the movie are foreshadowed in this scene as Cobb describes an “idea”(Nolan 2:58) as being a deadly “virus”(Nolan 2:57). He describes it as “being resilient and highly contagious”(Nolan 3:04) and stresses the fact that “once an idea has take hold in the brain, [it becomes] almost impossible to eradicate” (Nolan 3:08). Cobb and his team of extractors are able incorporate this by implanting an idea, a seed, into the mind of Robert