(Spoilers follow, I guess)
I finally got a chance to see Inception a couple of days ago and while I enjoyed it, there were a few things that puzzled me. Not that the movie was confusing — honestly, one of its bigger flaws was that it often seemed to feel the need to spell things out for the slower kids — but for a generally well-written movie it had some odd flaws. Or were they flaws? Well, probably, but just for fun let’s use the No-Prize method and see if we can’t find in them hints of a deeper, better story underneath the obvious one.
See, a lot of people think that the ending means the whole movie was a dream, but that’s not likely. To begin with, “it was all a dream” is no less of a cop-out just because your movie is about dreams, and if there’s room for multiple interpretations you might as well pick the one that doesn’t suck. More importantly, though, the “real world” sequences include scenes that Cobb, the Leonardo DiCaprio character, isn’t in. When was the last time you had a dream you weren’t in?
Interestingly, the scenes without him all feature Ellen Page, whose character is oddly underdeveloped and inconsistent considering how prominent she is. She’s set up heavily (Cobb remarks on how she’s a natural at manipulating dreams), has a heavily symbolic name (Ariadne) and gets a number of scenes without payoffs (for example the scene where she makes her totem, the chess piece.) But in the actual action of the movie she’s not very important, being mostly a vehicle for exposition — the “new guy” that other characters can explain things to, as well as the person who ferrets out Cobb’s backstory. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that there’s another character who plays a similar role — Saito, the one played by Ken Watanabe — and at first glance, at least, the movie would be stronger if he had the role to himself: he has an emotional investment in learning the rules of the game and understanding the plan (since he wants it to succeed) and there’s tension added if he learns about Cobb’s issues with his wife (since he has the power to reunite Cobb with his children), while Ariadne is both uninvested and undermotivated. In fact, her motivation changes several times throughout the movie: at first it’s just professional interest, then a desire to protect the other team members, and then finally (for no clear reason) she’s determined to complete the mission even at the risk of her and Cobb’s lives.
So here’s my attempt at a No-Prize: none of these things are mistakes. The whole movie that we see is a dream, but Cobb isn’t the only real person in it: Ariadne is there too (and maybe Joseph Gordon-Levitt, what the hell.) She has inserted herself into Cobb’s dream because he is still stuck in limbo from his experience with his wife — when he experienced her “dying” that was her waking up, but he’s still asleep. The mission is actually to rescue him; like the fake mission explained to Cillian Murphy in the hotel room, it’s a fiction designed to make him rescue himself. That’s why she plays coy at first — the trick of getting the dreamer to do the work for you — then draws out his emotional issues, and in the end is determined to complete the mission at all cost. It also explains her name: Ariadne, after all, was the one who got Theseus out of the labyrinth.
But why was she so determined? Because Cobb has been dreaming longer than he realizes — ten years or more — which explains another motif with no apparent payoff, the hiding of his children’s faces throughout the movie. Ariadne is his daughter.
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I like that theory. I thought that he was still in a dream at the end because neither of his kids had aged since he last saw them (or did something go completely over my head? That’s a distinct possibility.)
It was all just a dream.
Like when Cobb says: “We create the world of a dream. We bring a subject into that dream and they fill it with their secrets.”
Nolan created the world of the dream (the movie) and we all fill in the blanks.
*BRAAAAAAAAAM*
A compelling argument, but with one fatal flaw. Cobb’s totem, the spinning top, falls in the real world.
I’m glad you focus on Ariadne as more than a helper. It strikes me that hardly anyone is talking about what Mal put in her locked box in her childhood home that she needs to hide, and that makes her refuse to leave their shared world and not go back….yet it’s the hinge of the entire plot. So why did Michael Caine pull a long con on Cobb? why did the male’s self-integration require the death of a/the mother in the underworld? What about how his/her token/totem displaced whatever was in the safe? A little Freud, a little Jung, a little “Hero with a Thousand Faces”–but all the fuss and noise of the film functions as a distraction from the fact that the only place for female sexuality is either repressed in the underworld or dead so Leo can have the kids all to themselves.
Ariadne as his daughter works, in the the “sprung fully grown from her father’s head” mode of female daughterhood.
Morejolli: Except that the top was Mal’s totem first, before she “died.” If Mal really did just wake up, then we can assume she primed Ariadne–including with the nature of the totem.
Gorillamist: as I said, the notion that it was all a dream fails to account for the scenes that don’t feature Cobb. If you go for a straight interpretation of the script it makes more sense that he simply didn’t escape from limbo, but that the rest of the film “happened.”
Morejolli: note that I didn’t say that Ariadne succeeded. In my theory (which, I should again mention, is just my projecting stuff that isn’t really there onto flaws in the script) Cobb prefers the fantasy of returning to his family as children to returning to real life with the time that’s passed.
I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t comment on any of that, but I have had dreams I wasn’t in.
Uh, yeah, my dreams are often movies rather than participation sports. But I get you. For the movie to be anything more than a waste of time, it can’t all be one guy alone in his head.
Holy crap…that makes total sense to me. You just helped me enjoy this movie 10 times more than I did the first time. Now I have to see it again with that backstory rattling around in my head.
I actually just got in from seeing Inception about half an hour ago, and was glad to find this here. I’m still turning things over in my mind, what was real, what wasn’t real, and the delightful ambiguity of the final shot (was the top about to fall? Or would it keep going?) is something that’s going to stay with me for a long time.
The idea that there’s another “job” happening that’s deeper than any of the things being depicted on film . . . I like that. And I like that Nolan, while indulging his this-is-how-things-work fetish throughout the early portion of the movie, keeps opening things up, wider and wider, and directing your attention one way while he’s setting something else up off in the corner somewhere. It’s a great piece of filmmaking.
The ending is meant to be ambiguous, which means there’s no real answer. Either it was reality or Cobb dreamed the whole movie, or he just never escaped from Limbo when he attempted to retrieve Saito or some combination thereof.
Here’s an article, with multiple interpretations, from someone who has spent way too much about the film and liked it more than I did:
http://www.ravenfoundation.org/blogs/daniel-s-movie-reviews/inception
I won’t bother with my own crackpot theories since there is no right or wrong answer. I will say that people using the “it was all a dream” theory to excuse uninteresting characters and lapses in the film’s own structured logic is weak reasoning. Yes, I suppose it’s thoroughly reasonable that a drab, uninteresting person would dream about other drab, uninteresting people taking place in drab, uninteresting environments (or risible Modern Warfare 2 levels, apparently). That doesn’t make it good storytelling.
Dreams certainly are capable of being alternately exciting, wondrous, imaginative or terrifying things. Inception was too serious for that, and thus we’re stuck with sterile concrete, glass and steel cityscapes where everyone wears a suit. The dreams of an accountant.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t like the film. I thought it was a collection of interesting ideas, but was it really that thought-provoking? Was there magic? Was there heart? I couldn’t find any.
Just from what I’ve heard about the movie (I’ve not seen it yet), I’ve actually wondered whether the whole scenario was meant to trap Cobb and make him reveal his guilt.
I’ll add that there shouldn’t be any reason why somebody couldn’t be persuaded to visualize their dream totem incorrectly. The easiest way to trap Cobb in a dream level is to make him dream that his top fell when it spun.
That’s a good one. The It Was A Dream theory I’ve been going with is that Mal really did die, but Dom hasn’t been exiled, except byhis own guilt – the government doesn’t think he killed her, HE thinks he killed her. So Michael Caine hired Ariadne and the rest of the team to incept the idea of letting go of his guilt.
Although I also love the idea that Mal really did wake up instead of dying, and hired the team to go in and get Dom out of limbo, because then you can try and figure out WHICH MALS ARE REAL and which ones are Dom’s projection.
the problem is that the most dreamlike sequences – the chase with the tight passage when Leo gets Tom Hardy and his wife’s suicide – are supposed to take place in the ‘real world’
I haven’t seen it yet, but about dreams:
I often have dreams I am not in. I tend to switch between roles, sometimes having several roles at once and sometimes being more of an omniscient narrator. I had no idea that was not a common thing!
You see, this is an interesting enough interpretation, and like all interpretations of Inception, I don’t buy it for a second.
Inception is, to me, a heist movie. I enjoy it on that level a hell of a lot. I’m not interested in the possible allegory behind any of it, I don’t think it’s hiding some Grand Mysterious Meta-Plot behind it. I just enjoy the film for what is presented to me, and I just like the way all the intricate pieces click together. The fact that I fairly regularly have dreams-within-dreams might help.
And I think the last scene cutting off early is a half-assed attempt at a Deckard-Was-A-Replicant level of Stupid Plot Twist. It’s just an attempt to get people to argue over the internet about the Deep Hidden Meaning in this movie.
Which I guess seems to be working.
Also I have dreams I’m not in, just for the record. I have had dreams-within-dreams that I’m not in.
I still don’t buy what you’re saying, though.
There are about five or six different interpretations I’ve seen. (“He didn’t wake up from the sedation in Mombassa”, and “Saito is playing a Mr Charles on Cobb for the entirety” being two of the more interesting ones. The former is nicely backed up by the fact that when he wakes in Mombassa, he starts to spin the top, but drops it, and we never see what happens.) This one’s a nice addition, and I quite like it.
I must add, though, that you’re totally wrong to say that there’s no apparent pay-off to the motif of the children’s faces being hidden. That’s got the biggest, most obvious pay-off possible: he explicitly says that he doesn’t want to see their faces in a dream, repeatedly, and avoids Moll’s attempts to make him do so, before finally seeing them in what he believes is his real-life return to America.
[Actually, that brings me to a nice theory. There’s no dialogue post-Cobb’s final wake-up, so we don’t hear what Saito’s saying. What if the entirety of the film up to the final “waking up” takes place in a dream?
They’re all on the plane, for reasons that aren’t clearly defined, but Cobb got lost after retreating into his dreams after the suicide of Moll. Even better: he comes across Moll who is dying in real life, then decides to put her into a dream, and join her. They dream together and grow old together, until she dies in real life, and he’s lost in limbo alone. He creates a projection of Moll, who gives him the idea that she killed herself because she thought life was a dream: he performs Inception on himself. He convinces himself that Moll killed herself because of an inception he performed on her, in a case of survivor’s guilt, of some kind.
The main part of the plot, as we’ve already seen, involves the group of people sharing a dream with Cobb helping him to get over his guilt, and face his children again. Saito’s call is about something utterly unrelated, or to tell Michael Caine to bring the children to the airport.
(Actually, I’m not convinced that this interpretation requires the earliest parts to be a dream. The straightforward idea is that Cobb performed Inception on himself, not Moll, after, not before, her suicide. He convinced himself that he can’t return to the States, and that he is responsible. Which is why people kept trying to get him to come back, or asking “Are you safe here?”. They know it’s all a delusion, but want to help him get over it. Which they do, by placing another delusion over the first one.
This is maybe the best variation on the “Inception on Cobb” theory I’ve read, but the sequence where Arthur trains Ariadne is problematic. Either he’s Real, in which case why are they staying “in character”, or he’s a projection of Cobb’s subconscious, in which case EWWWW THE KISS! EWWWW SHE SMILED!
You’re right; Ariadne and Saito should’ve been the same character.
Another tally for “I have dreams I’m not in.” That kind make up the majority of mine, actually. I have nightmares I’m not in, too, but they’re infrequent these days (‘nightmares’, not just ‘nightmares with Sir Not Appearing In This Film’).
I enjoy the thought of Ariadne as actual-daughter, but it doesn’t work for me. The film’s descriptions and depictions of the Dreamer’s self-defense mechanisms make it only possible through a really REALLY liberal reinterpretation of events that I don’t think the film itself supports. If this is Cobb’s dream with outside influences instead of “in and of itself” (or, “self-contained”), then Mal does a singularly crappy job of imitating an immune system.
Personally I have no problem with the “It was all a dream” case, because I think that adds further strength to the argument that at the end of the film he’s not awake, and further strength to the emotions presented in the film. It’s when someone actually wakes up at the end and discovers that it was just a dream that it feels like a copout; here it presents as Cobb’s own mind generating a scheme, presented to him in his own idiom, to break him free of whatever iterative layer of Limbo he believes he’s in.
(My consideration of “Straight heist film” comes down to a couple of things, headed with:
By the dream-rules presented, Mal shouldn’t even exist in someone else’s dreams (nor should the freight train), but the place they CAN exist is in Cobb’s dream. Also, if it’s Cobb’s dreamstate all along, that makes Michael Cain’s comment towards the end of his introductory scene (“Come back to reality”) that much more poignant. That doesn’t differentiate between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ for ‘heist to rescue Cobb’, though.)
This construction makes Ariadne (as, possibly, Cobb’s own interpretation of his daughter, aged up to adult relevance in the same way Robin Williams’ kids were in the afterlife in “What Dreams May Come”) the seed his mind has planted to allow him to finally shrug off the memory of Mal. One aspect (Cain) introduces her, with Cobb playing both BY the rules he’s set up for himself of no longer being an Architect because of Mal, but playing WITH the rules by creating a clean identity which can work in opposition to Mal. Mal comes to clock her adversary in the initial Architecture sequence with Ariadne (who notably doesn’t seem to use any places for rough building framework material that she knows and Cobb DOESN’T, but that could stand further inspection for accuracy), but Ariadne later adapts her approach so that they never so much as come in further contact with one another until the very end.
If Mal is reacting defensively, using the same set of information/knowledge as Cobb, why go after Fischer, of all people, in Ice Station Zeta? That could be No-Prize’d just as readily, but again, I don’t think the actual details of the film would support it. If Ariadne was an outsider, she’d be the prime target; if Ariadne was a discrete partition of Cobb’s consciousness, however, then in the allegory of the heist both Cobb and Mal would think that stopping the heist itself would be self-destruction. Ariadne, on the other hand, would have the goal of getting Cobb to confront/purge Mal, not in order to actually get home, but to figuratively ‘escape’ this self-punishing construction that Cobb has created for himself.
I know a lot of what I’m bringing up can be used for both ‘Ariadne as external’ and ‘Ariadne as internal’; I just think that in the absence of solid evidence of external interference, the ‘Jungian-archetypes safari through Dante’s Divine Comedy’ interpretation holds together better.
Good god, I do go on.
I also don’t find alternate explanations for the movie convincing, mainly for a reason Matt gave in the original post. Nolan does indulge in some hand-holding for the audience, because it’s a potentially confusing story and he doesn’t want anyone to get lost. That being the case, I can’t believe he would intentionally hide any narrative elements, or make people try to figure out things that were never even cleanly hinted at. That’s why I think everyone in this movie really is who they say they are. In fact, given the ending of the film, I think people are really missing the point when they try to find alternate explanations. We never see if Cobb’s top falls over. Why? Because Cobb himself has stopped looking at it. Cobb doesn’t care any more if this is a dream or not. The whole point of the film is that anything is as real as you believe it is – there’s no layer of reality that has a more privileged status than any other. That was Mal’s problem – she got hung up on the idea that there was a more real existence than the one she was living, and couldn’t let go of that idea. Cobb went home. Whether he went home for “real” or not doesn’t make any difference to him, not should it to us.
Sorry, should be “nor should it to us.”
Man, was I the only one who saw that the top at end was stopping to spin? Although that doesn’t explain the very young children…
Not sure if my first comment was eaten by Internet gremlins or needs approval, but it doesn’t show up. Anyway, once again: Am I the only one who saw that the top was stopping to spin? I tried to look really closely at the moment and that was what seemed to be happening.
@Magnuskin- Yes, the top was starting to fall. The fact that the film cut out before it fell I consider a weak attempt to generate Pretentious MetaPlot.
Yeah, it was starting to bobble. But on the other hand, it started spinning by going in circles, and then straightened up and spun in one place. Tops don’t do that. Is that supposed to be a clue? Or did Nolan think nobody would notice?
“When was the last time you had a dream you weren’t in?”
I’m not sure when the last time was but I’ve certainly had lots of them.
@Candlejack: Yeah, but wasn’t it doing the “spinning in place” throughout the whole movie? Okay, going with the “all a dream” theory, that’d be another metaphor. Meh, I am going with the “straight” ending, I guess.
OK, so it seems I may be in the minority here, but I don’t have dreams that I’m not in. At least not that I’m aware of (of course, if I’m not there, would I even know?).
So how exactly does that work? By not being in the dream, is it like watching a movie, i.e. you see everything happening but aren’t a participant? Or is there some deeper “dream logic” that comes in to play that makes it more like something you experience yet don’t experience, all at the same time. And does Heisenberg enter into it, whereby observing your dream, even as a non-participant, alters what happens?
Basically, I’m just curious about the experience.
My dreams in which I’m absent have been anything from ‘unseen observer but still some sort of me’ to ‘straight-up cinematic style uninvolvement of me’, Kyle. Though that difference comes from subject matter (the former is ‘stuff that relates to my life’ and the latter isn’t); mostly it’s just that, of the entities and objects that actually interact with each other in the dream, I’m not one of them.
This is just me, but I very often have dreams where I cease to be the lead. Especially if I pick up a book or watch a movie, at which point my dream starts to follow those characters and events.
For me, the dreams in which ‘I’ am not present usually take the form of the ‘myself as unseen observer’ variety, as though I am just hovering over someone else’s shoulder like some kind of incorporeal parrot.
And dreams-within-dreams are almost impossible to remember, but I could /completely/ relate to the whole perceive-time-faster-one-layer-down thing. I’ve had dreams that seemed to last all day, then I’ll wake up and I’ll be all disconcerted and it’ll be mid-afternoon or something and I’ll go through another hour or so of dream and /then/ I’ll wake up.
It’s really weird.
When you talk about Cobb’s experience of Mal “dying,” you are referring to the hotel suicide right? If so, what about the train track co-suicide scene? Is that supposed to be a projection and a false escape from his dream prison? I thought it was pretty clear that the train scene was how they killed themselves out of limbo into reality.
Alternate plot meanings are fun to think about, but I agree with ‘Menamebephil,’ it is most successful on its primary level. It should be considered a great piece of screenplay writing, because it allows the viewer some freedom to interpret, like a lot of other great films and novels allow.
Don’t know how useful it’ll be, but I would like to back Tenken347’s post- that the ending isn’t actually an attempt to insert ambiguity into the whole of the movie- with a slight addendum.
It is indeed a heist movie, but it is a heist movie of style we don’t see terribly often. We are at every point following the thieves, participating in the deceptions and in the motivations to the point where the only mystery is the setting (which, for all the ‘but it’s not dreamy enough’ elements, it’s good to remember that these were designed by conscious waking people with a goal- the whole point of the architect is to establish a controlled setting, and one in which the move from dream to reality is ambiguous in order to better confuse the ‘mark’ they seek to bamboozle. Presumably heading straight into acid-trip territory would be counter-productive). Everything is explained, to the point of tedium for some viewers, and every attempt is made to keep the viewers in step with the action. It’d be a drastic switch in the character of the film if that last scene was indeed meant to throw the whole of the events of the movie into a sort of solipsistic doubt (and it’d be cheap storytelling).
There is an element to choosing one’s reality that goes on, as Tenken347 mentions, but if that’s all there is to it, then there’s not point in /not/ choosing to stay with Mal’s projection in limbo (other than the fact that she’s not as cool as the real Mal, as per Dom’s little speech). There is a reality which has supremacy, and Dom repeatedly tries to make the point that it is all that matters to him: the reality of his children. In one scene, he argues with Mal that regardless of his belief in the ‘reality’ of this or that existence or his wants, his children exist in a reality where they are waiting for their father to come home, and that is what he must focus on. They are more important than either his psychological issues (represented by the fact that anywhere his subconscious is, Mal’s projection is as well), or whether he likes what he’s doing (as he says to Michael Caine, whose name I cannot even attempt to remember in the movie). He not only points this out to Mal, but to Arthur, to Ariadne (repeatedly- she flees to the rickety elevator upon yet another reprise of this theme, even as Dom says ‘all you need to know about me is…’) and to anyone who holds still for long enough.
That’s not really a significant deviation from Tenken347’s post, but I thought a viewpoint worth mentioning, because it speaks well of the originality and intent of the movie that there is an interpretation of the events in which the protagonist is a hero not for achieving his own goals or conquering his own demons, or pulling off a great heist and getting the wonderful prizes at the end, but because he’s able to hold on to what is important to him, and see it through, not only resolving his issues, but doing good for the rest of his team and taking on considerable personal risk to do the right thing. The big celebration, the payoff, is, in fact, seeing his kids turn around, and that’s all it needs to be. A heist movie without a thief protagonist, after the glittering prize.
That leaves my problem with the movie as the fact that while Leonardo diCaprio does a wonderful job, and is a great actor, and I like his character, he’s just a little bit hard to believe as a doting father who wants to get back to his kids. Perhaps a little more fleshing out of some of Ariadne, or Saito (although I also think Saito’s pretty clear) would’ve helped, but when was there time? Arthur and Eames are well-rounded characters with really only a handful of lines about their own motivations, though, so… *shrug*
Anyway. did I win longest post?
This movie would have been better had Cobb decided that he wasn’t living in the real world at the end, and then killed his children and then himself.
Nearly all my dreams don’t involve me, at least the ones I remember. I try to have much more interesting people in them; a recent one was a spy flick starring Tricia Helfer and Danny de Vito.
I agree with msot of this.
One thing I want to mention though, is that I’m not always in all of my dreams. Sometimes I just have settings and I am a secondary character, some times a bunch of shit happens and I have no part of it whatsoever, and somewhat often i am someone else (its still first person, I mean, but it’s not me per se).
@magnuskn –Tops do spin in one place if they’re spun upright. If you’re in a hurry, it’s easy to impart a tilt, and then they spin in circles until they fall. They just don’t right themselves. So is it a simple mistake? Were we not supposed to notice it righted itself, because it’s not important? Or is it supposed to be some kind of signal?
The thing about the totems is, they should only let you know if you’re in somebody else’s construct–because the person laying down the rules in that case doesn’t know the specific properties of your totem. But you obviously do know the details of your own totem, so if you’re building the dream yourself…well, then, the totem should basically act as you think it ought to.
So, if the behavior of the top was supposed to be a clue, I imagine it would be something like this: Cobb comes home and everything looks just as it did in his memory-constructs. He panics and gives the top a wild spin. He sees the kids–and they also are exactly as they were in his dreams. The top, as an indication of his own disbelief, rights itself and prepares to spin indefinitely. But then Cobb goes out to his children and subconsciously decides, fuck it, this is real, this is what I need. For me, this is real enough. The top bobbles…and probably falls. Because he wants it to.
@Candlejack: I see… Hm. Well, I’ll see the movie again in two weeks with a friend, I guess I’ll pay even *more* attention to that moment. :p
Doesn’t that all mean, as per the premise introduced when the group got into the dream, that the others are still trapped in the first layer of the dream, too? Or worse, drowned in the van and are all in limbo?
Just saw it, and enjoyed the hell out of it. To me, the ending isn’t all the important; in this case the ride was more enjoyable than the destination.
I kept wondering if Ariadne and Cobb awoke from the dreamdive right before the plane; I figured they were going to use that to pull off that there was yet another layer, and that the job was to wake Cobb up. The idea of her as the older daughter is interesting and leaves me asking this: at the beginning of the film; when Cobb was on the phone with his kids, wasn’t there an older girl’s voice that seemed a lot older than the daughter they pictured?
During the whole movie i thought cobb was in a hospital, and the whole movie was like a struggle to wakeup or not from his coma.