Inception Explained

I've seen Inception twice and am contemplating a third viewing. It's a great movie and if you haven't already seen it then you really should stop reading and make plans to go see it. (Also, SPOILER ALERT ... obviously.) If I do go see it a third time that will make it the only movie I've seen 3 times in a theater other than the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which really doesn't seem like it should count.

As most (hopefully all) of you know, Inception has the basic plot of a heist movie (meet the protagonist, gather the team, pull off the caper). It's made awesome by director Christopher Nolan's super-smart landscape of shared dreaming and dreams within dreams, plus a spectacular ending that is designed specifically to make you think about what the hell is actually going on. For me the key to understanding what's really going on lies in the title of the movie. Who is the real target is the "Inception?"

The straight viewing suggests that Fisher is the subject of the inception, the top falls over, and Cobb lives happily ever after with his kids.

However, there's a fair amount of evidence that Cobb is actually dreaming for much, possibly all of the movie. Why else would he be the only one who brings elements of his own subconscious (aka Mal) into the shared dream? Plus what the hell is going on with that chase scene in Mombasa where the walls of the alley become too narrow to squeeze through? In this reading, the top never falls over at the end and the whole movie is actually an attempt to implant an idea into Cobb (something like 'don't grow old alone, filled with regret' which is repeated to him several times by several people). Here's the trickiest part of this interpretation, though: Who is implanting the idea? Is it his crew/friends who want him to let go of his guilt over Mal? Or is it actually Mal- who was right to commit suicide and is still alive in the real world.

I think if the top never falls then it actually has to be Mal making the inception attempt because she's the only other person who has touched his totem (the top) and the top falls over at several points during the movie. Based on the logic of the movie, only she could fake that. The most interesting aspect of this line of thought to me is that at the end of the movie Cobb DOES NOT CARE whether the top falls over or not. He walks away. He's embracing that reality with his kids whether it's really real or not. (Which can be interpreted as the inception to 'not grow old alone full of regret' taking hold, but not in the intended way. Kind of like Nolan's film Mememto in that the lead character tricks himself into being happy.)

The third way to view the movie, and the one I like the most, is that we - the audience - are the subject of the Inception.The movie is essentially an allegory about filmmaking, and the director has shared his dream world with us so that we can fill it with projections from our own sub-consciousness (including this conversation). On this reading, the movie is deliberately ambiguous and consistently supports multiple interpretations. Note that if you stay until the end of the credits the Edith Piaf music starts and the credits end abruptly in an attempt to give the audience a kick to wake them up, so this is clearly at least part of what is going on.

If you buy my argument that we (the audience) are the real subject of Christopher Nolan's inception then here is the interpretation I want to project onto it: the end of the movie is a dream, and the top never falls, but most of the movie was exactly what it suggested it was. Saito's only way to make good on his end of the bargain was to send Cobb "home" in a dream.

I'm not sure the evidence actually supports this reading, though. The best analysis I've heard (some of which is below in the postscript) supports some combination of reading #2 and #3, and the idea that the whole movie is a dream. However, the thing I keep getting stuck on is that final scene. This is not a super subtle movie (see for example "Ariadne" - the guide from Greek mythology who leads Theseus (Cobb) out of the labryinth (maze)). If Nolan closes on the spinning top, then it seems like it should matter whether or not it falls. But if the whole movie is a dream then whether or not it falls isn't actually a reliable sign. I do think a lot of the power of that final scene is the fact that Cobb walks away - after an entire movie of obsessing over whether he was really awake (including a scene where he watches the top while holding a gun, presumably planning to shoot himself in the head if it doesn't fall over), Cobb no longer cares. His catharsis mirrors Fisher and he's ready to move forward with his life and be happy. Maybe the subtext is Nolan telling us that we're not supposed to care whether the top falls either, but we all clearly do care and he set us up to care.

At the end of the day I think things are deliberately ambiguous and much of the point is that we're supposed to populate the details of Nolan's dream world for ourselves.

Post Script: I've spent a fair amount of time talking about the movie with Mark Rosewater. He's convinced a) that the film is entirely a dream and b) the film is really an allegory about film making. Here's a cut and paste of my recent exchange with him:

Here's the link: http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/49059535.html

In short:
Cobb is the director
Arthur is the producer
Ariadne is the writer
Eames is the actor
Yusud is the technical guy
Saito is the money guy (aka the studio)
Fischer is the audience

After reading this and several interviews with Nolan, I am hands down convinced that he set out to make a movie about film making. The moral is that it doesn't have to be real to have an impact on the audience. The inception is the effect a good movie has on the audience much like this one.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Mark

I'm not sure that this is precisely what Nolan "set out" to do, but the parallels are certainly there and many are deliberate. That link is also worth following if you want to read more.

One last thing — the second time I watched the movie I had the distinct feeling that the opening scene isn't actually duplicated at the end of the heist section. I think they might have mirrored all the dialog, but switched around which characters said which lines. (If that scene really does happen two different times, rather than just having the opening of the movie foreshadow the denoument, then this would lend massive support to my theory that the end of the movie is Saito implanting the idea in Cobb that he can go be happy with his kids.) Anyway, I had the same impression that something was just a little bit off that Leonardo DeCaprio seems to have on his face throughout the rest of the movie (the plane ride, clearing immigration, etc.), until he hears his kids and then decides he doesn't care any more whether anything is wrong. If someone could either confirm or deny that those two scenes are actually identical, I would appreciate it.
 


 

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