Thursday, 02 September 2010
Don’t worry, Christopher Nolan isn’t going to pull a Drood on you.
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This isn’t a review of Inception. Someone else will probably post one here at some point, and failing that Google and Rotten Tomatoes can muster a small army of critics willing to report that Christopher Nolan seamlessly matches the elegantly clever scriptwriting of Memento with his Batman-honed eye for an imaginative action sequence and thrown in a dose of visual wonders to create another winner, that Leonardo DiCaprio has once again managed to pull off a suitably world-weary, jaded performance which we’d never have expected to see from the baby-faced star of the film that made his name, Critters 3 (oh, and some James Cameron flop called Titanic), and that the supporting cast don’t get as much interesting characterisation to get to grips with but do get to have a lot of fun with a neat script that gives all of them a chance to shine. The more useful critics will also point out to you that Nolan does an excellent job of both introducing his science fantasy metaphysic to you, and of helping you distinguish between the varying levels of dream-states which the protagonists explore.You’ve probably also heard the basic premise by now: Dominic Cobb (DiCaprio) is a corporate espionage operative who specialises in the invasion of other people’s dreams. In this world the right sort of dreamer can, with the use of obscure drugs and technologies, create a dream scenario that a subject can be induced to enter into; once there, the subject populates the locale created by the dreamer with projections from their own subconscious, allowing operatives like Cobb to literally interrogate the subject’s unconscious mind. After a botched operation leaves Cobb facing ruin, the operation’s target, business kingpin Saito (Ken Watanabe), offers Cobb a chance to not only wipe the slate clean with his former employers, but to get rid of those inconvenient criminal charges which prevent him from returning to the US and seeing his children. But this time the task isn’t extraction, but inception (see what they did there?) - the implanting of an idea so deep in the mind of corporate heir Robert Fisher (Cillian Murphy) that on waking Fisher will think he came up with it himself. Obviously, there’s complications - to even have a hope of implanting the idea that deeply, Cobb and his team will have to take Fisher into a dream within a dream within a dream, and Cobb’s own psychic baggage is likely to show up at the worst possible time to sabotage things...
But let’s put all that aside, because there’s something you more or less definitely have heard someone asking about Inception: is any of it real or is it totally all a dream, dude?
To be honest, that did kind of put me off going to see it. Listeners to the Text Factor will have heard how I was traumatised by the deceptive pile of trash which is Dan Simmons’ Drood, a book which yanks the unreliable narrator chain so hard that it snaps - so much is ambiguous that it is impossible to pick out which parts were real and which weren’t, aside from the biographical details Simmons gleaned from Wikipedia, with the result that the book ends up saying absolutely nothing and takes an awfully long time to do it. You can't work out what point it was trying to make, you can't work out whether there was anything resembling a story occurring at any point during the proceedings, you can't trust its depictions of events - you just can't take anything away from it and say "this is what the book is about", or even "this is what happens in it".
The point of this article is to reassure you, in case you have similar doubts, that Nolan has done nothing of the sort. It honestly doesn’t matter whether or not, in the end, Cobb spends the entire film in slumberland, and I will give you a bunch of reasons why the ambiguity of the final scene of Inception simply doesn’t matter - the first two not-spoiler, the second two quite spoilery.
The Ambiguity Doesn’t Matter Because All the Dreams Are Important
The first thing that a story about dreams has to establish is that dreams are important. If dreams are just random neurons flaring in the night, and are ultimately no more than the brain’s nocturnal masturbation ritual, then a dream story becomes nothing more than solipsism. Nolan, because he isn’t a moron, understands this, and makes sure to establish early on that what happens at each level of dream is still important, both for the higher and lower levels of dream and for waking life itself. The relationship between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind is not a one-way street - what happens in the deepest depths of the subconscious filters up to prompt us in waking life, and what happens to us in reality can have deep effects, right down to a subconscious level.
The most obvious way Nolan reminds us of this is in the climactic sequence with the dream within a dream within a dream within a dream (which might all be within a dream), in which events at every single level of the dream are of paramount importance, and will have drastic consequences in the real world if things go wrong, but he’s always reminding us of it throughout the film, in big ways and little. If he didn’t, it would be completely meaningless.
The Ambiguity Doesn’t Matter Because the Dreams Don’t Change the Dreamers
The various dreamers in the film do not lose their identities as they sink down through successive dream states. It would be disastrous for the film if they did. This is actually a break from the way dreams actually work - or at least the way my dreams work. Sometimes in my dreams I am the same Arthur who is writing this, but I can remember dreams in which more or less every aspect of my identity - my age, my race, my gender, my mobility, my economic background, my level of education - was radically different from waking life. I have had dreams where I was a robot dismantling a nuclear reactor, for fuck’s sake. And what’s more, when I dream I sometimes remember things and facts that didn’t happen, and I forget things which are actually true - sometimes I forget entire decades of my life.
That is not the case for the dreamers in Inception. As lucid dreamers, even though there is a risk of them forgetting that they are in a dream, they do not forget their names, or their pasts, or their identities. Consequently, even if Cobb is in a dream at the end of the film, we can still be sure that there is out there a guy called Cobb - and the other dream agents are probably real in some sense too - and that the things we have learned about Cobb’s past are true. Thus, even if the ending does mean Cobb is in a dream for the entire film, that doesn’t invalidate any of Cobb’s characterisation.
OK AFTER HERE IT GETS SPOILERY
The Ambiguity Doesn’t Matter Because He Blatantly Isn’t Dreaming
All the signs are there to show that Cobb is, in fact, not dreaming.
Firstly, the ambiguity only exists in the first place because his (well, his wife’s) spinning top is spinning for a long time. But sometimes they spin like that. It’s been established that the sign that Cobb is in a dream is that the top keeps spinning and doesn’t run down ever - and yet, before the scene cuts to back, if you listen carefully you can hear that the top is making the sort of sounds tops make before they wobble and fall over.
Secondly, it has been established that you can use more than one “tell” to establish whether or not you are in a dream or reality. In the multiple-level dream operation at the start of the film Nolan cuts in shots of the second hand of a wristwatch. Reminding yourself to check your watch and see if the second hand is acting funny is, in fact, a technique used by people to try and induce lucid dreaming in real life. Sure enough, in the waking world the second hand is ticking forward at a rate of one second per second, just as you would expect, whereas in the different levels of the dream it is behaving in various screwy ways.
From the watch, we learn that even if Cobb was dreaming at the end of the film, he wasn’t dreaming at the start. On top of that, we also learn that you don’t need to look at the top to work out whether you’re in a dream - if you keep an eye out you can catch other signs as well. For me, seeing the faces of the Cobb children is that sign: it’s been such a consistent motif throughout the film that Cobb doesn’t see their faces in his dreams that seeing them at all is enough to make me believe Cobb is really awake.
The Ambiguity Doesn’t Matter Because Even If He Is Dreaming We Can Still Piece a Story Together
But what if I’m wrong? Even then, it doesn’t matter, because even if Cobb is still dreaming, we can just about piece together a narrative that makes sense.
If the Inception job the film is based around was all a dream, what was the real purpose of the operation? Clearly, it was to incept an idea in the mind of Cobb himself - to bring him down to Limbo, the lowest level of the subconscious, all along the way prompting him to eventually accept an idea at that level which he will then accept in the waking world. That idea pretty much has to be “let go of the memory of your wife”, because that’s the major decision he makes in Limbo - and it’s the one which Ariadne (Ellen Page) has been prompting him to do for all this time. Ariadne might be some sort of dream construct - she’s named after the person who helped Theseus get out of his own labyrinth, after all - but I think it more likely that she and the rest of the team are actual operatives who’ve entered Cobb’s dream to help him sort through his psychological issues and render him fit for active duty again. (It’s not impossible that this would have been masterminded by Michael Caine’s character, who’s the one important person in Cobb’s life who isn’t a) dead, b) a tiny child, and c) apparently involved in the Fisher operation).
I came up with that literally before I even left the cinema I watched Inception in. So even if you do feel drawn towards the conclusion that Cobb was dreaming for the whole film, it should be easy enough for you to come up with an interpretation that provides you with closure. Nolan makes this exceptionally easy. Because he's a genius.
Basically, It Really Doesn’t Matter
The ambiguity in Inception is literally introduced in the very last shot. If you cut six seconds off the end of the film the ambiguity wouldn’t be there at all, and you’d still have a really great film. Really, don’t let it bother you.
Themes: TV & Movies, Sci-fi / Fantasy
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I love the way the narrative works either way. Really, if he's really dreaming the whole time all it means is that there's one more layer that we haven't seen, but as we've seen throughout the movie already, that's like saying there's one more floor to the house that we haven't seen. It doesn't change the story, it just adds another layer. One that will contain information from all the others and basically just put a twist on them.
Which may or may not be a good Inception. Ariadne is telling him to let go of Mal; Mal is begging him to realize that he's dreaming. Which means that Dom could have made the choice to hang onto his delusion and recommit himself to the dream (symbolized by not waiting to see if the top falls over and by his being able to overcome his subconscious's refusal to allow him to see his children's faces in the dream)
I agree with that conclusion, but I would actually say that there are hints throughout that it could be a dream--or more accurately, there are things that could be hints. It's just that the top is the only thing that introduces the theme consciously (see what I did there?). I mean, once you have the idea from the last shot you can go over a lot of things in the movie and see it as potentially being the way it is because it's a dream. And while I don't think the movie's written to make that the "hidden correct answer" all along, I do think that Nolan made choices with that in mind so that there would be that grey area.
Btw, there is another theory about proof that Cobb is awake that I found interesting because I didn't think it was foolproof either. The theory points out that when Cobb is dreaming, he is always wearing his wedding ring. When he is awake he isn't. The idea is that the ring is more of a true totem for him (the top is never a reliable totem because it belonged to Mal and you're not supposed to let someone else touch your totem). The movie always finds a way to show us his left hand with the signal of the ring showing that he's dreaming or awake.
I don't consider it completely decisive, though, because I think the flashback of limbo of Mal locking her totem away implies that Dom could have done the same thing. (In fact, we already know that Dom's flashbacks of his time with Mal in limbo are suspect since at least once we see them change--so it could have been Dom who locked away his totem to begin with, if he is the truly the one who didn't wake up.)
I love how fun this movie is to talk about.:-D
I don't quite buy the idea that Mal is actually right, is the thing. It's so clear that the place she comes on is a howling vortex of chaos that can only be held together by solipsism that accepting her point of view just can't be seen as a good or a positive step for Cobb. Mal's putting forward the idea that it's the things you cook up by yourself in your head which are real, whereas Ariadne's view is that it's your interactions with the external world that are real. It's Robert Anton Wilson's "reality is what you make of it" versus Philip K. Dick's "reality is what won't go away when you stop believing in it".
If anything, accepting Ariadne's argument is a positive step for Cobb to not simply live in his own mind and wander around his stale old memories, but to open up to other people. Even if he is dreaming at the end, it's a far healthier dream than Mal's crumbling city, or ancient Saito's fortress of solitude - so when he does wake up we can at least expect him to wake up happy and sane.
I never noticed that before, but you're right, and it does make a lot of sense. I'd also dispute your objection to the theory because in that theory the totem isn't the ring, it's the fact that he's wearing a ring, just as the wristwatch totem isn't the fact that you're wearing a watch, it's the fact that the watch is not behaving as watches are meant to behave.
And, again, Mal is the force which keeps trying to drag him deeper, deeper, deeper into dream. Turning away from Mal by definition is turning away from dreams and illusions, and so removing the ring, even if it doesn't mean he's awake, at least means he's going to have a happy awakening.
Right, but Mal in limbo isn't Mal, it's Cobb's projection of Mal, who could be playing any number of roles in his subconcious. There could be a real Mal in the real world (if this is all a dream) who tells him to come back to reality--which quotes a line his father has in the movie as well (in a scene where Cobb is ostensibly awake). If Cobb is rejecting that reality Mal becomes a crazy force of chaos as a projection. Projection!Mal is threatening him to stay with her in limbo but real!Mal would be telling him to wake himself up. So in that case real!Mal and Ariadne would be on the same page. They both want him to wake up. The final barrier would only be the last one. If it's all a dream Ariadne is getting him to potentially the upper most level, but there could be one more step.
Which keeps it from being a totally different movie based on the reading, thank goodness. Because the ideas it's putting across are the same either way. It being a dream doesn't destroy the messages Cobb is receiving. Reality is still better than fantasy; and ideas shape how we interact with that reality (which I thought was very Memento).
True, but we don't know if the ring is that sort of totem or how its behavior should be different. If Cobb is dreaming that he's awake he would naturally give himself the projection of his ring when he thinks he's dreaming and get rid of it when he thinks he's awake. Costumes change to fit the dream level.
Dream!Mal tries to drag him deeper into the dream, like when he meets her in limbo. But the Mal that Cobb reads as a memory was telling him to take the very action (the leap of faith) he takes at the end to wake himself up.
If Cobb is awake real!Mal's encouragement to kill himself was encouraging him to die . If Cobb is dreaming jumping off the building with Mal would have woken him up.
I don't, btw, really hold the "it's all a dream" theory to be correct. I just like how it lurks so stubbornly so that that last shot isn't just a joke but something woven into the themes of the movie. The whole danger of limbo and dreamwork in general, we're told, is losing track of when you're dreaming. The "real" Mal killed herself not because she embraced living in a dream but because she wanted to live in reality. She was parrotting back Cobb's own encouragement to her to wake up. If she was right then Mal *did* wake up and was replaced by a projection.
And Cobb, of course, is associated more than once with doing exactly the things he claims you shouldn't do, including those things that put you in danger of losing track of reality: using a tainted totem and building dreamspace via memory. It's not so much that there is real evidence that this is really all a dream. It's more just that Cobb's reliability is questionable. Which doesn't mean that he doesn't know when he's dreaming, it just means he could be.
Anyway .......
I think the significance of the final moment has nothing to do with whether the scene is real or not. The significance is that Cobb *no longer cares*. He doesn't bother watching the tell, because if this is a dream then he doesn't want to know any more.
Actually, when I watched the film I wasn't struck so much by this "twist" (a film like this simply *had* to end on a note of this sort really) as by the absence of any twist involving Ken Watanabe. I mean, the mysterious suspicious businessman was actually telling the truth and didn't have any underhand motives or schemes?
But the thing is that he will wake up, he will, it is inevitable, he cannot be prevented from waking up. That's the thing about limbo - it's only subjectively eternity. On an objective level, you sleep the exact same amount of time no matter whether you are having a light single-level dream or a super-heavy multi-level dream. The danger of limbo is not being stuck in there forever in terms of objective time, it's being stuck there for so long that when you wake up you're completely fucking insane.
If Cobb is in a dream at the end, then it is a happy dream in which he grows and moves forward as a person, enabling him to grow and move forward when he does wake up (which will be pretty soon since he's at or close to the top level at that point). If he hadn't chosen to reject Mal, then not only would he have woken up without resolving to move on, but he'd have woken up having spent an eternity in a constant cycle of not moving on - in other words, a complete wreck.
It's not a matter of Cobb choosing to wake up. It's choosing to wake up sane, whole, healthy, and having either given up on Mal or not.
Also Mal's death is as huge a feature of Cobb's dreams as his kids, and if we start questioning whether or not she's dead we may as well question whether or not there are kids, or indeed whether or not there's a Cobb, at which point there is no story, only speculation.
I think that sequence - which I would point out is Cobb reminiscing about Mal so it arguably doesn't even show the real Mal - is meant to highlight that a bad exit from limbo fucks you up really, really badly. Like getting the bends after a diving trip only in your brain.
I don't think it collapses to that extent--at least least, not any more than the basic "it's all a dream" would anyway. It's splitting off in a specific way: Mal is right when she tells Cobb they are both dreaming and must kill themselves to wake up. This version just flips it on its head. She is "dead" in his reality since she left the dream.
It does, of course, add a lot more speculation just as any version where it's all a dream does because we don't know what awaits on that waking level now. But it can still retain the same guilt that he has to let go of in order to live his real life with his kids.
The real loss with that theory, I think, is that it turns a real emotional blow into a trick and an illusion. In this version Dom didn't kill his wife, he just thinks he did. He actually saved her. And that's a bit of a letdown after all that. Though for many it's a good letdown because they don't like the wife just being a victim for the guy to feel guilty about. I mean, Mal doesn't kill herself because of a bad exit from limbo, she kills herself because of an idea that Dom intentionally planted in her mind that changed her entire outlook on life--just like he's doing to Fischer. Because he wanted to induce suicide in limbo for her own good.
Not that this is the only version of "it was all a dream" that there is, of course. It could all be a dream with Mal being dead the way she's supposed to be.
But I do also tend to agree with Andy that the thing about that last scene is that whether or not we get to see if the top falls over, Cobb no longer cares. He's going to his kids regardless. He's succeeded in his goals even if he's done it in a dream world. And after all the lines referencing dream vs. reality, the choosing of one over the other and the potential inability to tell the two apart it seems like the movie almost has to end on that question. Making it too clear either way (either by showing the top falling over to signal "the end" or pulling away from the top spinning and spinning in a way that implies forever) would just seem wrong. Because once you start playing around with dream vs. reality you're never going to feel completely sure. The ideas been planted.
I didn't take it as not caring whether or not he's in a dream so much as letting go of the thing which was keeping him mired in dreams and memories in the first place (Mal). That, after all, was what was keeping him away from his children - his sense that he didn't deserve the happiness of being with them. They're not the goal, even if Cobb might have thought they were, they're the reward - the goal is Cobb forgiving himself, and that's something you pretty much have to do on the playing field of your own mind whether it's a conscious decision or something that gets processed in dreams.
(Also, like I said, if he is in a dream by the end, he won't be for long, because by the terms of the cosmology he's going to wake up soon...)
But in this universe the top is also a practical object. It was Mal's totem, so it can be a symbol of Mal. Spinning it would remind him of her. So he could spin the top at the end and not feel the usual guilt and obsession he felt in the past: he's free now. He's reached his goal.
But there's no getting around the other, usually more important goal the top has, which is to tell him whether he's dreaming or awake. That's what he's usually used it for throughout the movie. (Perhaps not in the scene when he talks to his kids on the phone.)
At the end, perhaps he does spin the top to see if he feels the same guilt and obsession and, realizing he doesn't, knows he's reached his goal and can freely go to his reward. But that still means he's not listening to the top's opinion on whether he's dreaming. Either because he doesn't care or perhaps because he's so sure that he's awake now he doesn't need the top to tell him. But that's still relying on personal impressions over an objective test of reality in a movie that over and over says you can't trust impressions.
So I guess in some ways the question is: why does he spin the top? Does he spin it as a good-bye to Mal and reassurance she no longer has any hold over him because he's forgiven himself, or as a test to see that he's dreaming? Or maybe a little of both? Because either way walking away before the top assures you you're in reality seems like it has to be a decision to not know.
The totem represents not just Mal but reality and unreality.
He walks away because he no longer needs a representation of reality. I think he sees that his kids have aged from his dream kids. They become his world, and the totem becomes a top.
Also, it's shit to end a story with 'it was all a dream'. Nolan is more clever than that.
But it's not just a symbol. It's a piece of fantasy technology with a specific purpose, to tell you whether you're dreaming or not dreaming. If he walks away before the top stops spinning because he doesn't "need" a representation of reality according to the rules of the movie he could be in a dream. In their line of work he does need a symbol of reality.
Well, regardless he didn't end it with "it was all a dream" as the post points out. But he does end it with a very in your face "it *could* be all a dream." It's not coming down on either side. Because imo coming down on one side would be too pat and the other side would be just sort of annoying.
The fantasy tech is only used when you don't know if it's real or a dream. I'm saying initially he wasn't sure, so he spun. But upon seeing his kids, he recognized the truth and left the top.
Didn't the kids look just a little bit different in the last scene? I need to see it again, but that was my impression.
I don't think so. What makes the scene clever is the subtly. The top sounds like it's about to fall, the kids look different, and you mentioned the ring. All signs point to exquisite unambiguity. imo.
Well, that's the thing - it could be all a dream, and Cobb is about to check, but he decides that he doesn't need to check any more because he's no longer mired in Mal's solipsistic bullshit. He's happy to just take things as they come and if they turn out to be a dream, well, he'll deal with it when he wakes up.
As I understood it the purpose of a totem was that only their owner would be aware of their true properties- i.e. the exact weight and feel of the chess piece. This prevents a perfect replica being created by someone else's dreaming.
However the relevant property of Cobb's Top was that it would stop spinning in reality. Why wouldn't it do that in dream? Other people don't possess an expectation that tops spin perpetually so why would any top created in their dreamscape reliably have that property?
It was a nice visual cue, but it just didn't make any sense to me in the context of what had been explained about totems.
The way it has been explained to me is that the point isn't that Cobb knows the top would stop spinning, but that Cobb knows more or less when it's meant to stop spinning, whereas other people who don't know how the top is weighted wouldn't be able to predict that.
I don't buy that, mainly because tops aren't actually that predictable. Sometimes you'll spin them deftly and they'll keep going for a while. Sometimes you'll botch it and they'll fall over almost immediately. And what's more, the spinning properties of a top depend a heck of a lot on the surface you spin it on, so for the totem to work that way Cobb would need to carry a little mat around or something to spin the top on.
I prefer to see it as being a bit like the second hand on the wristwatch at the start of the film - it's not that anyone expects the second hand to move backwards or change speed irregularly, it's just that the subconscious mind isn't actually that good at maintaining that level of consistency. Cobb's totem helps him tell whether he's in someone else's dream because whilst it's important to Cobb, it's an irrelevant detail to the dreamer and so their subconscious won't bother to model it with any accuracy. (By that virtue it's less likely to tell him whether he's in his own dream because it's literally a weight on his mind - the totem is so important to him that you might expect his dreams to model it with perfect accuracy.)
But that contradicts not only the way totems are supposed to work but *also* what we are *specifically told* about the way Cobb's totem works (both of which also directly contradict *each other*).
To put it another way, it's kind of clearly fanwank.
This is mostly what bugged me about Inception. I kinda felt it worked best if you saw it as an over-the-top heist movies. The points where it asked me to take it seriously were the points I could take it least seriously.
Oh, it's definitely the best fantasy heist film ever.
I suppose the irony of it is that the more you get caught up in the "is it a dream or isn't it?" thing, the more that impedes your ability to just take it as it is and enjoy yourself. Which is precisely the dilemma Cobb was in.
My problem with the film was that - as you observe - the "is it a dream" element adds nothing to the movie whatsoever, but the film *never the less* pushes that element very strongly.
It's a heist film which uses small-f fantasy (rather than big-F Tolkien and wizards fantasy) to present a kind of heist which would be conceptually impossible in a completely realistic movie. A bit like Groundhog Day is a romantic comedy which uses a fantastic idea to present the story in a way it wouldn't be able to if Bill Murray weren't recycling a day. Hence my use of "fantasy heist movie", "fantasy" being a mild modifier to the basic genre of "heist movie".
I don't think the "is it a dream?" thing adds nothing, I just think speculating furiously as to whether or not is a dream slightly misses the point. The thing about the ending is that, however you interpret it, one thing is consistent, which is that Cobb has learned not to let questions like "is this a dream?" rule his life and attained a peace of mind which has allowed him to move on and grow as a person. It's a lot like the end of Memento in that way - in both cases you've got protagonists who are caught up in a classic existential dilemma who realise that the only way to stop themselves being constantly tormented by a particular question is to stop asking it.
Yes, the kids are older-and finally dressed differently I believe.
I'm saying that the fantasy tech is used when you don't know if it's real or a dream because it's established that it's the only real way to know if you're an experienced extractor.
Everything points to Cobb being awake except the huge "I'm going to leave this ambiguous by not actually showing the top fall over." If the point is to be unambiguous you end with the top falling over and putting a button on it, not tantalizing sounds that it's going to fall over which we hear because we're so focused on waiting for it to fall over. When I saw it the audience literally groaned when it cut out because they knew they were being denied that last bit of reassurance. (Groaned in a happy way, though.) We as the audience don't follow Cobb out to the yard and so leave the top behind when he does.
Exactly. It seems to me that one of Nolan's biggest interests--and one that I really love--is the whole concept of people giving meaning to their own lives with their own ideas. The protagonist of Memento 'inceptions' himself throughout the movie via notes and tattoos. He can do that because he has no memory. He's creating his reality by feeding it into himself exactly the way the Inception is supposed to work. For an idea to take hold it has to come from yourself on some level.
I don't think the point of the movie is speculating whether or not its a dream because it doesn't really add anything to the real story of the movie. It's more just fun exercise if you like that sort of thing. But when someone claims that it's obviously one or the other, that's when I can't help but argue it because I think the hints witholding that reassurance is part of the movie. I mean, Cobb's kids being older is a change that is a bit like Bill Murray finally proceeding to Wednesday in Groundhog Day. But the whole walk through customs is dreamlike, as is Saito's magical phone call of exhonerration! Fischer's ideas about his relationship to his father come from his own experience of reality--he thinks, but he's wrong.
I do think Inception provides another level of nuance, though, in rejecting the idea that you can be completely happy by rejecting reality entirely and diving into the sort of complete solipsism that Cobb is at risk of succumbing to in limbo. You do ultimately have to find something outside of your own head to give richness and texture to your life, unless your highest ambition is to float around in a sensory deprivation tank all day, and part of doing that is putting aside questions as to whether those things you find fulfilment in are a valid use of your time - if you find them fulfilling, then that in itself is validating. Look at how Mal keeps trying to convince Cobb that the kids aren't real, and time spent with them is time wasted on an illusion (a fallacy, considering the metaphysics of the film - time spent with dream-children is time Cobb would have spent sleeping anyway, so it's not like any hypothetical real children are losing out).
Memento, I felt, was sort of a tragedy that way anyway. That was a character who had had his conscious life robbed from him, really, because he couldn't create any new memories. He's stuck in the same loop based around the time when his memories end. In Inception that possibility is the main danger of the film. You don't want to get stuck in limbo because if you're there for long enough you lose your waking life (your brain turns to mush--or at least that's what they imagine). All the work Cobb does for Saito won't mean anything if he doesn't remember their deal when he wakes up. It's all about the real world in Inception.
Actually I thought it was fairly explicit in Memento that he got away from that?
Spoiler-obscured, since people reading this might not have seen Memento:
The biggest surprise for me was the plot—I was astonished to find it so simple and straightforward. Oh, the science-fantasy metaphysics are absurdly complicated, and despite the excellent job Nolan does introducing them, I got lost in the details by the end. But I never lost track of the action or failed to understand what was going on (even if I didn't always understand why).
I wasn't necessarily expecting a twist involving Saito, but I definitely expected some sort of twist related to the Fischer mission: not necessarily due to any duplicity on Saito's part, but some way that it turns out “this is about much more than just brainwashing a young heir.” Nope.
This, I think, was the biggest disappointment of the movie for me. There were a couple instances where I thought “you know, this scene could be so much stronger if you'd just given me a reason to care about this character.” Most notably, Saito, when Cobb goes back for him in Limbo. I cared about that scene because I care about Cobb getting back to the States and seeing his kids—but I could've cared about Saito for his own sake, too, which a bit more characterization. Too bad.
There's a book called School of Light, about illusionists who create images out of light that occupy space, appear to react to stimuli, and can cover up real objects that occupy the same space. At the end of the book the protagonist has to fight her way through a castle which has been covered up with an illusion of a different castle, such that she can't reliably tell by sight where the real walls and doors are. The solution turns out to be throwing eggs at the walls. The idea is that if the wall is an illusion, the broken egg will form a mathematically perfect yellow oval instead of just dripping everywhere, because the illusions are artificially precise and have limited processing power.
I think you can make a similar argument about the top in Inception. It's not that people expect a top to keep spinning forever, because they don't. it's that the engine rendering the dream is not sophisticated enough to model the small-scale events that lead to the top destabilizing, so it just keeps going.
1: The chronological beginning of the movie is the dinner scene where they explain dream security to Saito. The very first scene the viewers see comes from the end of the story and isn't subjectively experienced by the characters until then.
2: The main plot of the movie, including both the failed attempt to rob Saito and the successful attempt to brainwash Fischer, are actually dreams Cobb is dreaming while in limbo. This interpretation seems bolstered by the fact that they repeatedly say that you know you're dreaming if you can't remember how you got where you are, but the movie as a whole starts in media res in exactly this way.
I'm not really happy with either interpretation so I'm hoping I missed something.
The most plausible "all a dream" reading in my mind is Cobb is using inception on himself to convince himself that "Your wife's death isn't your fault and you can't let guilt separate you from your children." Fischer, his business empire, and Saito's magic phone call aren't real, which is why they're vague and don't really make sense. They're just a pretext used to trick Cobb into confronting his own subconscious, which we know is possible because Cobb is able to trick Fischer in a similar way. Saito is probably the dream architect who set this trap up for Cobb, and possibly even deliberately kills himself in order to force Cobb to go to limbo.
Yeah, this is actually the interpretation I offered in the article.
The thing is, though, the more of the film we can write off as "just" a dream, the more doubt's laid on everything else. If we never see the waking world we never have objective confirmation that Cobb ever had a wife or kids.
Also if you refuse to believe the waking world is the waking world - or that there is a waking world at all - you end up like Cobb's wife. :P
The "if you don't know how you got here, you're dreaming" argument is sufficiently compelling that if he *isn't* dreaming, the film makes (to me) no sense, but like Arthur I dislike "it was all a dream" plots on general principles.
To look at it another way, can't you make the 'not knowing how you got there' rule support whichever of those two interpretations you prefer? Because if you posit that Cobb got washed up on the beach as a result of the events we see near the end of the film in which he goes to try to rescue Saito, then we do know how he got there, and therefore he isn't dreaming. If you posit that the end sequence doesn't connect with the opening in that way, then you don't know how he got there and he must be dreaming. If you keep an open mind between the two, then you don't know whether you know how he got there or not and therefore it doesn't help. No?
My argument depends on the assumption that the line about knowing you're dreaming if you can't remember how you got there breaks the fourth wall to some degree. If it literally only applies to the characters, it's a confusing and stupid piece of dialog to include because the viewer can't tell by watching whether the characters remember how they got here or not. The only way a viewer can engage with that rule at all is to look for moment where the narrative they're watching appears to jump.
Yes, a movie necessarily starts somewhere and so the viewer can never really know "how we got here," but that just means that a movie is like a dream. The viewer is being instructed to look at the heist as a dream within a dream within a dream within a FILM, and explicitly encouraged to use all FOUR levels of simulation to interpret what's going on.
(Just to be clear, I'm not throwing these ideas out because I find them compelling and deep. I just want to argue that I've posted a good interpretation of a stupid text, not a stupid interpretation of a good one.)
I will point out that the dinner scene is the one where Cobb and Arthur appear to be the most in control, and in fact (because it's two layers deep) they actually have a better idea of what's going on in it than Saito. So arguably it's the point where the two of them actually have the best handle on what's going on and what's happening to them and therefore have the best odds of discerning dream from reality.
I'm pretty certain that's not the case - the way it's explained in the film, which more or less overlaps with my anecdotal experience of how, well, actual dreams work, is that although you don't know how you got there, you still take it at face value until you *realize* that you don't know how you got there. In the cafe scene where Cobb first explains the idea, both he and the girl are acting perfectly naturally until he asks her to try to remember how she got there.
I'd also point out that I'm pretty sure that at one point Cobb is fairly explicitly challenged to remember how the whole thing got started, and fails to do so. Although I saw the movie quite a while ago now, so I could be totally wrong.
One argument I can see for a "Cobb is dreaming everything" interpretation is that he's the only person who seems to use a totem. Ariadne prepares one but then never actually uses it. We never even see anyone else's, to my recollection. Of all the cast, Cobb is the only one who ever feels the need to check whether he's dreaming or not.
In fact, my favoured interpretation of the end of the film is that Cobb stops paying attention to the totem because he realises it's better to live in the moment and enjoy what you've got than to constantly question the reality of it, because then you end up jumping off hotels to wake yourself up. If it's real, it's real, if it's not real then that's all the more reason to enjoy it before your alarm clock goes off.
I agree. Though actually I might even say that it's not so much dropped as never needed. Cobb uses it in that scene talking to Ariadne not to set up a rule that everyone's going to be checking to see if they know how they got to a particular place, because all our pov characters know when they're dreaming (are dreaming on purpose) and never need to check. He just says it in that scene to have Cobb show Ariadne that dreams feel real dramatically so she can say, "Wait, are we dreaming right now?" It's just setting up the way dreams mix the real and the not real, imo.
Reading this discussion again I realized that to me it seems like it's about how Nolan is interested in the idea of people creating their own realities by giving themselves a narrative purpose. He does it most obviously here and in Memento, but it also comes up in Batman (the Joker gives multiple stories for how he got his scars, each one implying a different type of meaning). I agree with Arthur that it basically comes down to having to accept that things are real at some point, because you can't ever be 100 percent sure about anything.
Not only that, but the totem he is using is tainted. Mal or anyone who had rooted through Mal's memories could fake that top. (As could Cobb himself, obviously, if he is performing autoinception)
I always wondered that about his totem as well. Since he's not using his own totem, but Mal's, then doesn't it render the totem completely useless as a way of figuring out if he's dreaming or not?
Were I inclined to spring for the autoinception theory (as I am 50% of the time) I'd suggest that all this totem stuff is just bunk, a theory of dream manipulation invented specifically for the purpose of representing Cobb's insecurities in the autoinception dream.
I would say that yes, it does, and that that's probably on purpose. Not to tell us that it really is a dream, but to show there's doubt where Cobb's concerned. Which is probably one reason for the theory about the wedding ring being Cobb's "real" totem, since it's always on when he's dreaming but not when he's awake. But Cobb never checks it the way he does the top. The audience can use it as a totem based on whether he's wearing it or not, but it doesn't follow the other totem rules--we don't know what it feels like, don't know what special qualities it might have in the dream. And we don't that I remember ever see Cobb interacting with it in the real world as he's supposed to do with a totem (like for instance if he wore it on a chain in the real world but had it on his finger in dreams).
Nobody on Cobb's team is ever shown checking their totems, because they don't need to. As dream INVADERS, they're perfectly aware that they're dreaming anyway. The people who can't tell dreams from reality are the TARGETS: Saito and Fischer. But niether Saito nor Fischer uses a totem.
Why not? Fischer has explicitly been trained in "subconscious security," getting weaponized projections and the like. Why didn't his self-defense isntructor tell him to use a totem? The asnwer seems to be that the "dream invasion" process renders a totem unhelpful. When you're the target of a dream heist, you don't wonder whether you're dreaming any more than you wonder how you got here. So it would never occur to you to look at your totem until you've already broken free of the spell.
Since people worried about being victimized by dreamhackers don't use totems, but the dreamhackers themselves do, that implies that the totem is a defense against some kind of confusion which can only be self-inflicted, or can only happen to Architects. But what that threat is isn't ever made clear.
That definitely seems to be the idea. Although since we know that Arthur, at least, also has a totem I don't think it's necessarily just architects. It's probably all people who spend a lot of time doing this. If you go back and forth too often or spend too much time in dreams or make them too close to reality you start to get confused. Like those men who are always dreaming in Yusef's place, I think.
The totem definitely seems linked to something more existential than just "am I dreaming or not?" because there are lots of ways to tell that. The subconcious of the dreamer coming after you, whether or not the details are right, whether you can remember where you came from, looking for strange things about the weather. The totem's more for people who have special problems with reality. In fact, it seems like it's presented more like a last hope which is why the person has to guard it so carefully.
http://chainsawsuit.com/2010/08/09/keep-the-secret-safe/
Because nothing dovetails with a meditation on the constructed nature of reality like a good knob gag.
--Yusuf's assistant accuses Cobb of being unable to tell dreams from reality, despire apparently never having met Cobb before.
--Cobb evidently can't dream without using the dream machine. They say this is a side effect of using it too much, but it seems more likely that he can't dream because he's already asleep.
--Saito talks about taking a "leap of faith" despite being supposedly unaware of its significance to Cobb
So basically, everyone seems to know things about Cobb that they shouldn't and to be deliberately poking at his subconscious problems. Of course, there is a problem here where some of the artificiality of the "real" interactions might be because it's a movie and not, you know, real life. You could chalk the repetition of "leap of faith" up to simple theme-building. Ultimately if you accept the real wrold as real, you also have to accept the movie as kinda poorly written, while you can fix most of those problems by playing the dream card. Why don't anyone but Ariadne press Cobb on his obvious huge issues? because they're projections; or, because they're in on the game and letting Ariadne work.
I think that's a different kind of hostility. The subconscious attacking the dreamer is more like a mob glaring at you and then tearing you apart. But Cobb makes himself attacked by Mal in his dreams in a more personal way. It seems like it's the difference between visiting somebody else's dream and being attacked as a foreign object and having a dream yourself where you're pursued by others, which isn't uncommon.
I took the film as a mixture of reality and dream with Cobb definitely on a downward spiral into psychosis. My interpretation on the film was regarding two jobs, one to incept Fischer, the other shadow job was to de-incept Cobb. Cobb was never wanted for the murder of his wife. That was an inception job done on him by Mal (who definitely did lose her mind while in Limbo).
I definitely think there was more to Eames than the film let on. And he does discuss a job that failed. Which led to an interesting thought if that job was about Cobb. I do think that whoever had the ailing Cobb on the leash for jobs found it convenient to let him believe that he was wanted by the FBI, Interpol etc.
Right, but I'm saying that Cobb's subconscious sends people after him in his dreams, so if the "reality" layer is also a dream Cobb could still populate it with agents after him for Mal. Mal doesn't appear in the reality layer because he "knows" in reality that she's dead. The goons seem dreamlike because of the way Cobb gets rescued from them.
I do agree that the lack of crowds of people going after them points to reality, though. The way it reads to me is still that the layer we consider reality is reality, but with enough things hinting at a dream to intentionally keep it from being 100% certain. Because Nolan's more interested in the uncertainty being a part of life/narrative than he is in hinting at some story that doesn't exist and so brings nothing to the plot.