Reading between the lines of ‘Inception’ and ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ – Dailyuw

Editor’s Note: “Space Gayze” is a bi-quarterly column taking a deep dive into the staples of sci-fi, analyzing gender, sexuality, and queer subtext across a range of iconic movies and TV shows.

Warning: Minor spoilers ahead. 

“Inception” is my favorite movie, and has been ever since it premiered when I was 10 years old. I can offer you no concrete reason why it’s remained my all-time favorite after more than 10 years, but nevertheless, rewatching it always brings me a sense of comfort. 

The movie, one of Christopher Nolan’s characteristic mind-bogglers, focuses on a man named Cobb who deals in extraction — the invasion of another’s mind through their dreams — a lucrative form of corporate espionage. He wants to return home to his children in America, but he’s running from the law in the wake of a tragic crime he didn’t commit. 

After he meets a powerful businessman and is given a chance at redemption, Cobb assembles a team to accomplish a feat that many in the business consider to be impossible: Inception, or the implantation of an idea so deep into the subject’s subconscious that when they wake, the idea will seem to them as if they thought of it themselves.

“The seed of the idea we plant will grow in this man’s mind. It’ll change him. It might even come to define him,” Cobb explained. Their mission is to make the heir to a major energy corporation decide to break up his father’s business empire, and to do so, they must design and safely execute a dream within a dream within a dream.

The film is amazing, and if you haven’t watched it yet, then I don’t know what you’re waiting for. The cast boasts all-stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, and Elliot Page, and the score, composed by Hans Zimmer (with his beloved organ), is legendary and makes for prime workout music (trust me). However, the thing that always stood out to me most about the movie is its side characters, specifically Arthur and Eames, two of the less fleshed-out members of Cobb’s inception team.

Arthur, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is a straight-laced enforcer and Cobb’s right-hand man tasked with researching and perfectly executing the dream. Logical, skeptical, and resourceful, he has the most type A personality of the group and stands as a foil to Eames, the group’s thief, useful for his ability to shift his identity and appearance within the dream world. 

Inception Wiki describes Eames, played by Tom Hardy, as a “suave, smooth talking flirt with an English accent. He is also somewhat of a prankster and has a penchant for dry humor, evidenced by his constant one-upmanship and incessant teasing of Arthur. Aside from his friendly rivalry with Arthur, he is somewhat of a loner, choosing to work apart from the rest of the group for the majority of the mission.”

Their dynamic always intrigued me as I rewatched it growing up. While Eames is obviously acquainted with Cobb and gets along fine with the other team members, Arthur is the only one with whom he has any real rapport, which seems odd given the interesting lineup of the other characters. Eames is the guy that in other action movies uses his charm, guns, and sass to bicker with the other characters about anything and everything. In “Inception,” he really only has this witty repartee with Arthur. Many of the movie’s iconic, bantery one-liners come from the pair. My personal favorite is when Eames, approaching Arthur whilst the group is under heavy fire, hoists a grenade launcher and quips “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”

Cheeky, yes, flirty, maybe, though for a long time I didn’t think of it much beyond a funny line in a good movie. 

And then, in a move familiar to some, I was scrolling through Tumblr one day at the beginning of the pandemic when I saw a post that made me do a double take. It was a piece of fan art, a few doodles of two men kissing that only gave me pause when I saw its caption: “hhhhhhhhhggghh. i watched inception again.” 

Hold up, what? I looked closer. I definitely would have remembered a gay kiss in my favorite movie. But the fanart clearly depicted Arthur and Eames, and I very quickly fell down a rabbit hole of fan theory. 

Part of “Inception”’s beauty lies within the skill with which it captures the audience’s attention despite failing to provide almost any relevant context for some of the major characters and plot points. It’s not important that we viewers know the why or how of the movie’s premise for it to be an entertaining story — the in-universe explanations of dream sharing are never substantially explained, nor are the motivations behind the entire inception heist. 

To be fair, the movie has quite a lot of plot to get through in its two-and-a-half hour run time and could easily have been bogged down with details. However, the backgrounds of side characters like Arthur and Eames (much less the one character of color, a pharmacologist named Yusuf) are consequently somewhat lacking. The characters don’t even have last names, and while it’s made clear in the script that Arthur and Eames have worked together before, not once does the narrative try to explain when they’d met or how they knew one another, much less the nuanced possibility of a romance between them. 

“Eames and Arthur aren’t just work associates because they have this tension … Arthur clearly could have tension with Cobb over things, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t fight him on things. He clearly is capable of it, but he does fight with Eames,” third-year undergraduate Sarah Lai said. “They’re an outlet for each other, and that whole characterization gives you [an] entrance into Arthur’s character in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise.”

Fortunately, the storyline’s unexplained gaps are ripe for fans to explore, and the tantalizingly few details we do get about Arthur and Eames’ past has been enough to inspire a fandom that has only grown in the eleven years since the movie’s release. The more Arthur/Eames content I found online, the more shocked I was that I’d completely missed their flirtatious subtext in the many times I’d seen the movie. Even Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Arthur himself, acknowledged his character’s teasing: “good afternoon friends remember how much tom hardy and joseph gordon-levitt’s characters flirted through all of inception because i sure do,” Twitter user @tcryla posted, to which Gordon-Levitt replied, “And good afternoon to you sir.” 

“They’re just captivating to watch,” Lai said. Lai, who identifies as bisexual and polyamourous, has watched “Inception” twice, both times drawn toward Gordon-Levitt’s and Hardy’s characters.

“[When Eames] first shows up, he’s wearing that, like, paisley button down … And I was like, ‘That is a style I have only seen on TikTok lesbians.’” Lai said. “[He] was the OG, like, this is what they’re emulating … Eames is the original TikTok lesbian.”

What’s more is that actor Elliot Page’s recent transition technically does make “Inception” gay after all, as he and Gordon-Levitt share a brief kiss. Page played the female character Ariadne, the group’s architect and one of the film’s two female characters. When Page announced his transition in December 2020, Twitter user @communistbabe posted in congratulations: “everyone please join me in loving and affirming elliott page and rejoicing in the now homosexual kiss between elliott and joseph gordon-levitt in christopher nolan’s INCEPTION, a movie that is becoming less and less heterosexual with each passing year.”

What most recently brought my attention back to “Inception” (and Arthur/Eames) was that after multiple nudging insistences from my father, I finally read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (HHGG) by Douglas Adams.  At 180 pages, it’s a bit short, but perhaps that’s one of the reasons it was so popular among teenagers when it came out in the late ‘70s.

While the franchise has endured sequels, video games, radio series, and a feature film, it’s the original novel that interests me. The book follows Arthur Dent, a hapless and comically misfortunate man who learns in a very short span of time that not only is his best friend an alien from Betelgeuse, but his house is about to be knocked down so that they can build a bypass. To make matters worse, Earth is also apparently about to be destroyed in order to make way for a hyperspace express route. His best friend is the lovably eccentric, absentminded Ford Prefect, field reporter for the in-universe publication of “HHGG.” He saves Dent by pulling him along for a ride as the Earth is vaporized, and thus, the two embark on a chaotically adventurous trip around the galaxy, complete with ancient planets and depressed robots.

What first struck me about the book was Dent’s characterization: Dark haired and serious, with a propensity for dry wit and stubbornness, he reminded me startlingly of Arthur from “Inception.” The parallels become even more apparent when you consider the grouchy Arthurs’ juxtapositions against Eames’ and Ford’s similarly carefree, optimistic brand of nihilism. As I read, I kept my eyes peeled for any signs of queer subtext between Dent and Ford, unwilling to miss a single sliver of gay representation the way I had with “Inception.” 

Again, Dent/Ford drew similarities to Arthur/Eames. In both cases, there’s nothing about their behavior or interactions that screams “gay” in flashing neon letters, so for all intents and purposes, they could, respectively, just be a pair of hitchhiking best friends and begrudging co-conspirators. 

But it’s in that nebulous space beyond what is explicitly stated that alternative readings thrive. Given that there are so few concrete details given in canon (or the “official” text), there’s just enough in their interactions to hint at something more, especially if you’re looking for it. Small moments abound between the two pairs in which the characters act a little too close for a platonic bromance to be the most logical explanation. It happens most notably when they’re in danger: In the moments before Earth is destroyed, Ford wastes valuable time chasing after Arthur, desperately trying to ensure he wouldn’t be left behind on the doomed planet. 

Similarly, in the dreamscape of the inception job, Arthur and Eames each make pointed references — sometimes teasingly, sometimes outright — to each others’ safety on an unexpectedly deadly mission. While we love a strong platonic male friendship, to me, these moments don’t read quite as heteronormative as they were likely supposed to be. For one thing, though both “HHGG” and “Inception” involve colorful rosters of characters, Arthur/Eames and Arthur/Ford only ever seem to be concerned primarily for one another, despite the danger present to all of their teammates.

In addition, both Arthurs find themselves looking to Eames and Ford for aid and stability throughout their wild adventures. “Inception”’s Arthur faces the dangerous consequences of a mistake in his preparation for their intricate criminal operation, while “Hitchhiker”’s Arthur Dent must cope with both the loss of his planet and a whirlwind of an introduction to galactic society amidst a high profile act of treason. In both cases, they rely on the strength of their friendship and the other man’s suave expertise to help the two of them work together to solve the challenge ahead. Who’s to say that they hadn’t been falling in love the whole time?

One of the most fascinating things about science fiction is its mutability. Much like dreams, sci-fi has an otherness to it that explores liminal spaces where planes of reality can become suspended. Whether you’re dealing with dream manipulation or galactic hitchhiking, science fiction inherently demands that the audience suspend its disbelief in some impossibility. The belief that the story convinces you to suspend can be as potentially plausible as lucid dreaming technology or as far out as a Vogon construction fleet bulldozing Earth, but if a book can get you to imagine the possibility that hitchhikers from Betelgeuse can become stranded in England, you can surely also suspend other aspects of reality, such as the patriarchal and heteronormative standards of our society. It’s entirely possible that of the vast amount of information left up to viewer interpretation, a queer reading is as valid as any other stance. After all, gay love is less improbable than a two-headed man.

Reach columnist Sarah Kahle at arts@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @sarkahle

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