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.