Inception is a great movie. Perhaps one of the greatest of all time. You should see it without reading reviews, or learning anything about the film beforehand. For those of you who have seen it, some thoughts about various meanings are below the fold.
First some resources: Six Interpretations and Five Plot Holes, by Peter Hall. Cinema Blend has a helpful FAQ and glossary. TechEBlog provides a useful graphic of the dream levels. To keep things straight, let’s adopt their terminology of level 1 (“reality”; takes place in Paris, Mombassa, the airplane cabin), level 2 (dream of the kidnapping of Fischer), level 3 (hotel dream), level 4 (ice world dream), and level 5 (“limbo,” perhaps; Cobb & Mal’s beach city, and Saito’s oriental mansion).
As the above sources details, there are some plot holes which seems difficult to resolve. There are two meta-explanations: One, the movie-makers made mistakes. Two, the incongruities are clues to what’s really happening. Namely that everything in the movie is a dream.
The all-dream theory is well-developed in this essay by Devin Faraci of C.H.U.D., comparing Inception to Fellini’s 8 ½, a film about making a film. It’s not at all a cop-out, in the sense of Fifties-era Superman comics in which Superman marries Lois, but then the whole episode turns out to be Lois’s dream. In support of the all-dream theory, Faraci points out that the chase scene in Mombassa (which is supposed to be at level 1, Reality), ends with Cobb being trapped between two walls that are closing in (classic anxiety dream), and then rescued by Saito, who just happens to pull up in a car at the right moment. Further thoughts on Inception as a movie about movie-making here, by Maria Bustillos.
When you think about it, the whole Mombassa chase sequence (which reminded me of the chase sequence at the beginning of Disney’s Aladdin) is quite unrealistic, although it’s the kind of chase sequence we accept as “real” in movies. And there’s plenty of other stuff on Reality level 1 that, on second thought, doesn’t seem very plausible in real life. For example, Saito buys a transpacific airline in a few days. Really? Buying an international airline usually takes longer than that.
I differ from Faraci in his conclusion that the final scene proves that Cobb is still dreaming. The ending is deliberately ambiguous. We don’t know if the top will fall. While it’s true that Cobb’s children are playing in the same place, and in the same posture as when Cobb last saw them, and wearing the same clothes, they are wearing different shoes, and they are played by different actors. Further, Cobb wears a wedding ring when dreaming, but not when in level 1, and at the end of the movie, he has no wedding ring. However, none of these facts are decisive proof that level 1 itself is not a dream. They’re just proof that the movie ends on level 1.
Now if the whole film is a dream, one might say that Cobb has just decided to stay in dreamspace, hanging out with his children and father. The story arc is about Cobb progressing from being tortured by doubts about what is real, to being content with being happy and not worrying about reality. One might theorize that Mal was correct in discerning that level 1 is still a dream; she escaped, and the movie concludes with Cobb achieving peace about his decision to stay behind in dreamworld level 1.
Fair enough. But here’s an alternate understanding. Cobb, the guy whose dream we’re watching, is not in true Reality (level 0) a professional dreamer who can get into other people’s dreams. He’s just a regular guy having a very elaborate dream. And it happens to be a dream in which Cobb learns some important lessons about himself, and Reality. When Fischer wakes up on the plane, Fischer knows that there was not really a pinwheel in his father’s bedside safe. But finding the dream pinwheel has helped Fischer grow emotionally, and make progress in his own real life. There is an obvious parallel between Fischer’s cathartic confrontation with his personal demons on level 4 (ice world) and Cobb’s confrontations on level 5 (getting rid of Mal, and—with Saito—remembering to come back to Reality). A more subtle point is that Cobb is continuing this process of discovery, of personal reintegration, when he returns to level 1; there, the barriers that have kept him apart from his children disappear, and he reintegrates into his family. When he wakes up, eventually, into level 0, he will have all the insights he gained from dream levels 1-5.
Maybe real-life Cobb has been feeling bad because he wife walked out on him. Or maybe his real-life anxieties have nothing to do with a spouse. Someone named “Mal” can represent all kinds of pernicious influences or obstacles. Is Ariadne (who in Greek mythology gave Theseus the string which he used to escape the Minotaur’s maze, and who in Inception creates the maze for Fischer which will lead him out of his own mental prison) a projection of the part of Cobb’s personality that he needs to help him escape from Mal? Is she his real-life psychotherapist?
The real answer is that we don’t know the meta-story around the movie, but we do know that the movie invites us into the creative process of creating the meta-story, and there is not necessarily only one true answer.
One can reduce Inception to a didactic 1969-style moral like “There’s no reality. Just whatever makes you happy.” And it’s also true that no-one can fully answer the movie’s “Am I dreaming?” question, namely “How did I get here?” You may have scattered memories from when you were a baby, but those memories could just indicate a very long dream. However, blithe unconcern for reality vs. unreality is not entirely consistent with Cobb’s realization that Mal and he needed to escape from their fifty-year excursion in level 5.
More broadly, Inception plants many diverse ideas in the audience—multiple ideas for every person who sees it. Like the characters in the airplane sequence, when we watch the movie we experience a shared conscious dream. Like almost all performance artworks, Inception is a deception; it is an unreal artistic construct which we choose to believe for a while, in order to find a deeper understanding of reality.
Inception is not only about dreaming, but also an optimistic invitation to awaken to the creative possibilities of sharing imaginations—as some people do when participating in the creation of a film, and as we all can do with our diverse talents when we share our dreams with others, and they share ours.
Bski says:
Fantastic analysis of the movie.
July 27, 2010, 4:53 pmneurodoc says:
“Perhaps one of the greatest of all times.”
Hmmm, what will account for those, of whom there undoubtedly will be at least a few, that don’t share your unbridled (is that word even adequate here) enthusiasm for the movie? (And no, I haven’t seen it and it isn’t top of my list of movies I want to see.)
July 27, 2010, 5:02 pmMetamorf says:
The analysis was better than the movie.
July 27, 2010, 5:13 pmBski says:
That’s how I feel about the 70 minute video review of The Phantom Menace.
July 27, 2010, 5:28 pmt1 says:
SPOILER ALERT:
As we sat there watching the movie, the first time the top was spinning, my companion leaned over to me and said “There’s the last scene.”
Anyone want to offer up a concise explanation of why you wake up when you die in a dream but that if you die during a dream within a dream you never wake up?
And what about the apothecary who has the really good secret sauce stored in that pretty glass bottle on the shelf behind him. I guess despite all of the high tech goodness of the machine in the briefcase that syncs everybody’s dreams, sometimes you have to go to a dusty storefront in the third-world to get the good stuff.
Sorry Mr. Kopel, the movie was crap. One of the best of all times? Get thee a Netflix subscription so you can watch some good movies.
July 27, 2010, 5:35 pmguy in the veal calf office says:
I walked out thinking the movie was deliberately ambiguous and not trying to impart a single meaning.
It made me reflect on movie making- Cobb explains that in dreams you never know how you got there and, if I recall, they cut to him in Bombay. Plus, characters travel all over the world for no apparent reason– his father in Paris, can’t use a phone to call the Forger…; this happens when movies seek out foreign production tax credits, which can require the city to be featured.
The inconsistencies that show up in every movie’s post production process were probably deliberately left in to add to the mystery.
Ellen Paige was in over her head as an actress; the part (a guardian who pushes Cobb into emotional and personal breakthroughs) required a stronger personality.
July 27, 2010, 5:43 pmTanker J.D. says:
Many folks are saying that a totem is so that “dream raiders” know when they are awake. E.g.
Not true. The weight and feel of the totem lets you know you are in your own mind, whether awake or asleep. No other person, like an architect, can exactly replicate the totem’s feel, because no other person has ever felt it. So when you are dreaming, and uncertain whether you are in your subconcious or someone else’s, you just check for the feel of the totem in that conciousness. But you can still dream your own totem.
Accordingly, whether the top falls or not at the end is irrelevant to whether Cobb is still dreaming. He can dream a top that falls as well as he can dream a top that keeps going forever.
July 27, 2010, 5:44 pmJerry Mimsy says:
My understanding is that you do wake up. It just takes a long time from your perspective. Each level of dreaming runs faster than the previous level. By the time you get down to limbo, seconds in the real world are perceived by you as decades. So even if you wake up a few seconds later, there’s a good chance you’ll wake up stir-crazy from having been stuck there for several decades.
July 27, 2010, 5:53 pmTanker J.D. says:
Techblog’s graphic also reveals a plot hole. The “dreamer” of each level has to be the mark, the guy into whom they are trying to implant the idea. The exposition part of the film makes it clear that the architect creates the dream’s physical world, but that the host dreamer populates it with his subconscious. In the latter part of the film, they are being chased by the mark’s subconscious projections. Thus, the mark is the dreamer at all levels. That one of the team members becomes the “dreamer” doesn’t make sense, b/c their subconcious projections wouldn’t attack the other team members…
July 27, 2010, 5:58 pmTanker J.D. says:
The movie attempts an explanation — they won’t wake up at that point, because they are so deeply sedated. That’s the gateway to limbo–to die in a dream while sedated…
July 27, 2010, 6:00 pmzippypinhead says:
My admittedly pinheaded view: if a movie plot is too complex for me to flowchart on a 2D piece of paper, then watching it takes far too much effort for it to be good “entertainment.”
July 27, 2010, 6:02 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Perhaps I’m being dense, but isn’t the mark the dreamer at all levels in the movie? Is there some place where it violated this rule?
July 27, 2010, 6:26 pmLessinSF says:
http://slumz.boxden.com/f218/inception-not-all-period-faggishly-overrated-1396323/
July 27, 2010, 6:26 pmColin says:
I don’t think this is quite right. Cobb brings his own projections into other hosts’ dreams, for example, and they’re hostile to all other dreamers.
July 27, 2010, 6:30 pmKamal says:
Why is it that they establish you need to be woken up by something, and at the end Cobb apparently wakes up from a deep dream on the airplane, all by himself?
July 27, 2010, 6:45 pmAlan says:
I like to think that he lived happily ever after in the real world with his kids and father. I don’t care what all the deep analyses say.
July 27, 2010, 6:49 pmmilo says:
I liked the movie a lot but I thought the ending was a little contrived. It was like they tried too hard to make it ambiguous and it felt forced and a little lazy as well. The formula for a ‘good’ movie these days is the plot twist or ambiguous ending. They just followed the formula. The rest of the movie was really good, but the ending distracted from it.
July 27, 2010, 7:11 pmDonBoy says:
I don’t think that Cobb is still in a dream at the end, and here’s my reasoning: because I would really hate that. The fact that Cobb’s situation reflects that of his target’s is, in this interpretation, thematic unity (good!) rather than a clue that we have no idea what happened (bad!)
Also, most people think Caine is Cobb’s father-in-law, not his father, but to be honest it’s quite ambiguous. (The prequel comic I’ve seen around refers to his character, Miles, as “Professor Miles”, but I don’t know how guaranteed canonical that comic is.)
July 27, 2010, 7:19 pmLarryA says:
An author in a workshop I attended many years ago defined fiction as, “Telling a lie to reveal the truth.” Wish I could remember his name.
July 27, 2010, 7:38 pmJoshua says:
There is one key point no one here has considered yet. In a dream, nothing exists or happens on its own; it has to be, well, dreamed to exist or happen. Once something leaves your range of perception in a dream, it might as well cease to exist altogether, because your mind is no longer projecting it. This is why when you turn your back on something in a dream (e.g. the only way in or out of the room you just entered), it often is no longer there, or has transformed into something entirely different, the next time you turn to face it again.
As it turns out, that’s exactly what Cobb does in the final scene: he starts the top spinning, and then turns his back on it to greet his kids. Once he does this, the top is out of sight and out of mind as far as Cobb is concerned, and yet it clearly continues to exist. This pretty much clinches it for me that Cobb is awake in the final scene. If it were a dream, the top – and for that matter the table it’s spinning on, and everything else behind Cobb’s back – should have either vanished or morphed into something else, because that’s the sort of thing that tends to happen in dreams.
July 27, 2010, 7:38 pmOrin Kerr says:
Inception is a great movie. Perhaps one of the greatest of all time. You should see it without reading reviews…
Rats, too late! ;-)
July 27, 2010, 8:06 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
My daughter saw it Saturday night. I asked her what she thought of it. She hesitated, and then said, “The actors were pretty.” This is damning with faint praise. Evidently a chord was not struck.
July 27, 2010, 8:13 pmsecond history says:
Having seen 142 films so far this year, and 112 last year, (mostly from the 1930s-70s, with a few silents), I think Inception was probably the best picture I have seen that was released in 2010, but not of all time. I really enjoyed the film and its ideas. All of Christopher Nolan’s films have involved ideas, even the Dark Knight series.
But the best of all time? Hardly.
July 27, 2010, 8:15 pmCrunchy Frog says:
Even dying in Limbo works. That was Cobb and Mal’s method of waking up – having their skulls crushed by a train.
July 27, 2010, 8:21 pmHenry Campbell says:
Few reviewers have mentioned the religious imagery in the film, which I took to be one of the most interesting parts. With religions that believe in some kind of afterlife, there’s always a tension surrounding the question: what, then, is this life? The dream metaphor works, since whatever this life is, it is (relatively) short, temporary and not the ultimate reality. Also, while in a dream, you often believe that the dream is real — and only when you wake up do you realize that it was unreal.
This is how true (religious) believers often characterize our reality. And religious awakenings aren’t called “awakenings” for nothing.
In the film, I took Mal to be representative of a true believer, who is trying to convince her husband to come along. He loves her, but can’t quite make the leap of faith that she demands of him. To her, he looks like someone who cannot quite believe that he’s living in a dream world. To him, she looks like someone who cannot accept reality — in the way that insane people cannot.
I don’t mean to suggest that this is the overarching theme. But just as there are 4 levels of dreams in the movie, I think there are at least as many levels of interpretation.
July 27, 2010, 9:05 pmDJMoore says:
It’s an excellent movie, but I’m not willing to go as far as “best of all time”.
Random points:
The movie was gorgeous. There is not an ugly setting in the entire film. Even the abandoned factories have a texture, a feeling to them that resonated with me and made long to visit them. When I learned that the dream planners were called “architects”, all I could do was nod.
We didn’t see Cobb’s top fall because Cobb didn’t need to; he knew that it would; he had faith that it would.
Nevertheless, the screen going black was a shock for us. The audience dies and wakes up from the dream of the movie.
Cobb knew that Mal wasn’t real for the best reason that any of us knows that reality is real: the dream Mal could not surprise him the way the real Mal could. Dream Mal was too perfect, too predictable. That’s one of the Great Truths, that reality is deeply surprising.
It is a sign of Cobb’s genius as an Inceptor that Fischer accepted the pinwheel, and all it implied, as a true insight. In fact, we do not know why his father was disappointed in him, but evidently, that resonated with Fischer’s own understanding of himself and his father. It worked because it might well have been true.
Along the same lines, we do not know that Saito’s motive, that Fischer’s business empire was about to become implacable, was accurate. That idea was Saito being a master Inceptor himself, using only the power of words. Cobb did the job in order to rejoin his children, but he needed an external justification, and Saito provided it.
This, perhaps, is the real meaning of the falling top, the false Mal, the children’s faces: Cobb didn’t care whether the final level we see was real or not; all that mattered to him was that he had finally reached a level he was satisfied with, that he found fulfilling.
One of my guilty movie pleasures is Romeo + Juliet by Baz Luhrman, another semi-hallucinatory work. DiCaprio plays Romeo, and is frankly not up to the job (Neither is Clare Danes as Juliet, but the supporting performances — Ah! Perfection!). DiCaprio has matured considerably; he was a much better actor here, and his physical presence is far, far better. Like the sets, he has texture here, he resonates in a way he was unable to do for Luhrman. Unrecognizable in the best sense of the word.
July 27, 2010, 9:29 pmBasil says:
I haven’t seen it, and I guess I’m like zippypinhead.
Sounds like “2001: A Space Odyssey” for a new generation.
July 27, 2010, 9:30 pmDJR says:
It’s certainly an interesting movie, but I think the ambiguity is the point. It’s not possible to know whether Cobb is dreaming at the end or not because the movie makes more than one interpretation possible. It’s fun to talk about whether the evidence better supports one interpretation or the other, but the nature of moviemaking — that some things are going to be inconsistent or not realistic — coincides with the principle ambiguity of dreaming versus not dreaming. In reality, Cobb is neither dreaming nor awake because he is a fictional character in an ambiguous movie. You might as well debate what is in Marcelas Wallace’s briefcase.
I do wonder how Mal managed to make a top that never stops spinning. Also, when exactly did Mal and Cobb grow old? Was it in limbo? Clearly one can grow old in limbo, as Cobb and the other guy did. But if that’s what happened, why did they look young when they put their heads on the tracks?
July 27, 2010, 9:36 pmStephen Lathrop says:
My usual mode for movies of that sort is dozing off. But in this case, the whole thing is sort of a cautionary tale—doze off at your peril. So I had to prop the eyelids up with toothpicks and take it all in. Hard work. Nor will I be hunting up that soundtrack for at-home entertainment.
July 27, 2010, 10:18 pmLN says:
It’s a very nice suspenseful summer heist film. It has some beautiful scenes and the actors and actresses are good-looking. The ridiculously contrived plot is surprisingly coherent.
It’s not a great movie about dreaming. In real life dreams aren’t about action sequences and strange obsessions. Rather, real dreams are ambiguous, sexy, dread-inspiring, strange, full of inversions, full of signs that may possibly reveal the nature of the dreamer (or not). Nolan captures the catharsis/wish-fulfillment aspect of dreaming but doesn’t bother to even approach the other aspects.
The action sequences in the snow-level dream were terrible. Everyone is wearing the same outfit, bad guys are all anonymous and faceless, and at this point there was no suspense regarding the survival of the team members.
Doesn’t come close to “greatest of all time” status.
July 27, 2010, 10:48 pmCatCube says:
Finally, it’s nice to run into someone else online who agrees. To me, the ending felt less like a plot twist, and more a clumsy way to set up a sequal. (I don’t think they’re contemplating a sequal, it just felt that way when I saw it) It’d have been like ending Casablanca with the audience arguing whether or not Ingrid Bergman really got on the plane. I wanted Nolan to finish the damn story with some emotional closure before I walked out of the theater.
I’d have given the movie four stars right up until the last 0.5 seconds, then knocked it down to three.
July 27, 2010, 11:14 pmSpanky says:
It made my brain hurt. All I could think of was who hit Bobby Ewing.
July 27, 2010, 11:32 pmReader says:
I could not get over the fact that one of the anchors of the plot was the concept of a “totem” – i.e., a device, like a top, that you alone understand the concept of. Doesn’t everyone know that a top doesn’t spin forever? Even if there are some people who don’t know, this important concept works only if the whole world (other than the main character) think a top spins forever.
Also, only falling wakes up a sleeping person? I use an alarm clock, and find that noise does the trick for some other people I know.
D-
July 27, 2010, 11:41 pmi meta man says:
Marketing director Cobb has an important meeting in the morning after staying up late to pull together a big presentation for an Asian client. After setting his clock-radio to wake him, he asks the wife to be sure he doesn’t oversleep.
The movie is about Cobb hitting the snooze button and his wife trying to shake him awake. He’s in a deep sleep, though, and his subconscious kills her off and then deals with the guilt. On some level he realizes he’s late to work and not providing for his children, too.
Cobb’s dream of nested dreams only starts when the radio comes on and the totem he incorporates into it is the Spinners and the Four Tops playing on the oldie station. After a few minutes the wife splashes his face with cold water and he stirs but won’t awake, because his adventure nightmare just turned pleasant.
We never find out how late Cobb’ll be.
July 28, 2010, 12:29 amLN says:
LOL. Awesome.
July 28, 2010, 12:50 amCato The Elder says:
I really enjoyed this movie, but this so true. I thought the snow world really interfered with the suspense of the “ticking clock”, because there was no way to tell what was going on, what exactly Eames was trying to do; all I could decipher was one white figure shooting at anonymous white figures in a very clumsy manner. The location could have been much better.
July 28, 2010, 12:53 amneurodoc says:
Gee, I was about to say that if you are that into movies and thought so highly of this one, I might discount some not so favorable reviews. But then you mentioned favorably Dark Knight, which my wife and I were repulsed by.
July 28, 2010, 1:52 amWhat is the greatest movie of all time… for you? « Bren’s Mental Dump says:
[...] all time… for you? The Volokh Conspiracy, a legal/political blog I peruse occasionally, posted an analysis of Inception. While I found that interesting, it’s the comments that made me sit back and go, [...]
July 28, 2010, 1:56 amAndrew Maier says:
They actually do address this: Ariadne is not creating the environments for the subject in any of the dreams. They weren’t even going to bring her along originally, but Cobb decided to because she convinced him he needed her to watch over him. Her job was to design the dreams and then teach the levels to the dreamers (who would be the ones listed in the graphic). They would be the dreamers, and Fisher would be the subject who filled in with his subconscious. Ariadne is never a dreamer in the movie, and is merely there to help Cobb. So no plot hole.
July 28, 2010, 2:11 amReview: Inception « ricketyclick says:
[...] my favorite heavy weight legal blog, Dave Kopel, heavy weight Second Amendment lawyer, posts a very favorable review of Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Inception is a great movie. Perhaps one of the greatest of all time. [...]
July 28, 2010, 3:00 amLeni Winter says:
I resonate with this review. I agree this was a healing dream for Cobb and also to add to what was stated about Cobb being in a classic anxiety dream (i.e. being squeezed by two walls), is the fact that the architect of the dream, Ariadne, shows Cobb — by use of the mirrors — that he is but a vision, within a vision, within a vision, etc. She is his guide. She demands of Cobb the cooperation and openness Cobb demanded from Saito when he took him on as a client.
July 28, 2010, 3:20 amMalvolio says:
It wasn’t just how incredibly contrived the film was (if you die in your dream, you wake up, unless you’re sedated, in which case you go to Limbo, where some other stuff happens, blah-blah-blah). What bothered me was how many loose ends it lost track of.
At the beginning, agents of the “Cobol Corporation” chase Cobb through Mombasa and then … they forget about him.
There’s a lot of talk about “labyrinths” and “mazes” and “puzzles”, but none are ever encountered.
The totems are described as proof you are in your own dream and not someone else’s but never serve that purpose.
Cobb warns that the “projections” (the other people in the dream) will become aggressive if the dream is manipulated; this never happens.
The chemist claims that falling will wake dreamers up, but when the dreamers are in a van that flips over, they snooze on contentedly.
Cobb refuses to design dreams because then Mal will be able to find her way around; however, Mal seems perfect adept even in in dreams designed by strangers.
I liked Nolan’s Memento, precisely because it rewarded carefully attention. The more you think about Inception, the less sense it makes.
July 28, 2010, 3:27 amPlucko says:
The movie did not work for me because I did not care about any of the characters. Did you?
There was very little tension in the movie — maybe because I knew most of it was a dream … or didn’t know if it was a dream. For example, the chase scene in Mombassa — that sure seemed like a dream. If you’re watching the chase wondering if it’s a dream, a lot of the tension is dissipated — at least for me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t care about any of the characters.
Even with the possibility of limbo or death, there was no real tension when the van was falling into the water.
Did Cobb’s almost constant pained expression elicit any empathy in you?
July 28, 2010, 5:49 amTamerlane says:
I thought the end of LOST made more sense than any
July 28, 2010, 8:21 am“intellectual” aspect of this movie (sarcasm!). I tell friends to see it because the visual effects are enthralling and surreal in the best sense. As for the plot — it’s like the Emperor’s new clothes — there’s nothing there so it’s open hunting season for critics manque, post-modernists, deconstructionists, and similarly inclined mavens.
John says:
I thought the movie was pretty awful. Most criticisms I’ve seen have been from people who don’t like Nolan’s work in general, due to his view that films require no plot, but I’ve liked his previous movies. Inception is an epic failure and I’m surprised so many people disagree. It’s not so much complicated as it is convoluted. The ‘plot’ is ostensibly about preventing a young, insecure energy conglomerate heir from mysteriously taking over the world when his ruthless father dies. This irrelevant exercise is the vehicle for a ton of big-budget action scenes, which are fine except they don’t fit the movie viscerally or logically.
The real point is supposed to be Cobb’s subplot- coming to grips with the fate of his wife. Unless it’s all a dream, and thus she’s still alive, Cobb is dreaming, and nothing that happens in the movie carries any significance. Putting that aside, Cobb’s prior life is mostly kept hidden and there is no connection with his feelings. His children are generic and his projection of Mal goes around killing people, screaming, or jumping off a building. All the characters are flat. Fischer (the younger) seems like a decent enough guy. The ‘antagonist’ is Fischer’s subconscious, which is curiously unable (despite “training”) to dream up better defenses than snowmobiles and some guys that can’t shoot.
July 28, 2010, 9:08 amJL says:
That’s a lame analysis, but it’s only because it’s a lame movie. “Growing emotionally”, “making progress in his own real life”, “confrontation with personal demons”, “process of discovery”, “personal reintegration”? What New Age hogwash! The fact is that the Cobb character and all the other characters are cartoonish and boring, and there is nothing to analyse in them. Cobb is a snivelling beta male whose only ambition in life seems to be to reunite with his bitch of a wife and his nondescript kids. There should have been at least some heroic qualities in him to keep me interested.
July 28, 2010, 10:10 amelaine says:
Malvolio says:
“What bothered me was how many loose ends it lost track of.”
Upon wakening, all seemingly seamless dreams have inconsistencies and unresolved plot points. After sharing Cobb’s dream, moviegoers blink awake and think Wow, but what about…
“At the beginning, agents of the “Cobol Corporation” chase Cobb through Mombasa and then … they forget about him.”
Cobol/ Cobb? Perhaps his manufactured boogeyman, inner conflict that jumpstarts the deeper self-exploration.
“There’s a lot of talk about “labyrinths” and ‘mazes’ and ‘puzzles’, but none are ever encountered.”
In the movie were confusing street and hotel chases that go nowhere, and we’re lost. The third(?)-level snow setting was effective in that concrete and walls no longer ground and define physical space for us or the characters, until they gain entry into the “hospital” at long last. Protagonists have the ultimate challenge to overcome obstacles in an amorphous, non-cartesian, snow spray obscured whiteout setting before scaling unassailable fortified walls.
It’s interesting how, by contrast, the inner vault was relatively easy to access after the struggle to get to it. Of course, instead of navigating the maze of hospital halls for which there was no time, they used a direct shortcut (air duct system cheat device,) much like just slicing through an inner Gordian knot of submerged issues.
There definitely was a motif of off-kilter passageways and psychic passages. The final bridge works as transition to a breakthrough final stage of understanding before awakening. The plunge into water is baptismal-like shock therapy, falling out of the womb, what have you– getting out of the submerged van like (re)birth. However, we don’t see Cobb emerge, only his other sympathetic characters do, leading one to think he doesn’t work out his final issue. Sometimes (always?) in life we stop just before the Big Understanding when things are “Godunov,” and we make our peace with ourselves. To know more would mean we have to die, perhaps.
The movie as a piece is a puzzle, surely.
“The totems are described as proof you are in your own dream and not someone else’s but never serve that purpose.”
The totems are only self-serving false reassurance and fashioned from vanity and sentimentality. Only in a dream would someone dream up the idea of verifying reality. Awake we can’t verify, only describe, and from different points of view at that.
“Cobb warns that the ‘projections’ (the other people in the dream) will become aggressive if the dream is manipulated; this never happens.”
The movie, Cobb’s dream from start to finish, features only his projections, sometimes as his, others as prompted by his conjured characters who are also, one supposes, projections although they never get hostile. Perhaps they are akin to angels and the others as demon and wraiths of our divided nature. Cobb calls Mal a “shade.”
While it gets a little confusing as to who or what is a projection within the nested dream logic, Cobb’s subconscious is the source of all aggression, conflict and hurdles (which are never easily controlled in dreams and often seem random.) I agree that this plot device could’ve been used more effectively.
“The chemist claims that falling will wake dreamers up, but when the dreamers are in a van that flips over, they snooze on contentedly.”
I dunno, but perhaps the heavy sedation gimmick allows for only the sensation of impact to rouse them. I’m unclear as to what point in their drugged state they can die and then awake as opposed to going in limbo. Can’t remember how the characters got from the van to the plane- did they kill themselves? Cobb and Saito died in limbo, I suppose, and that’s how they returned to “reality.” Was their death via the gun that the old Saito put his hand on?
You’re right, there are dangling ends when it comes to gravity :) But that’s consistent with dreaming, right?
“Cobb refuses to design dreams because then Mal will be able to find her way around; however, Mal seems perfect adept even in in dreams designed by strangers.”
Cobb has self-deceived that his only issue is the loss of his wife. The loss he experiences is not necessarily her actual death but could be estrangement, desertion or divorce on her part, or, on his, his avoidance of reality and she’s very much alive while it’s he who won’t leave a dreamworld.
In all likelihood, the corporation, trains, bullets and bad guys are all Cobb’s projections assigned to characters he creates. I particularly love the explosive charges that conveniently materialize (bought by the gross at Walmart?) to get them out of situations. IOW, brute force of willing issues away is often needed in conjunction with nuanced, finessed introspection and therapy.
“I liked Nolan’s Memento”
Oh, yea! It was pearcing.
July 28, 2010, 10:38 amLymis says:
One point I’ve never seen anyone mention, but that leaped out at me – is that the spinning or non-spinning of the top is a red herring.
Yes, there are plenty of times that he wakes up (in what we’ve agreed to call level 0) and spins the top and it falls – it is his ritual to himself to prove to himself that he isn’t dreaming. Since we agree he’s back at that level at the end, and it has been established that it can fall over in that reality, even if it were seen to fall, it wouldn’t prove anything. (If it kept spinning, it might.)
But, they go out of their way to explain in some depth the whole idea that you have to construct your own little object, the talisman that connects you to reality, and that you don’t dare let others in the dream interact with it, because, if I recall, it means you could lose touch with whether you are or are not in reality.
And then, having said you absolutely have to have your own object, they then pull a quick shell game and get us to swallow that Cobb using what he believes to be Mal’s talisman means something in relation to his contact with reality. We never see an object we’re told he made for himself to remind himself about reality – only what he tells us Mal made. You can make a case that it is a “real world” top that Mal modeled her talisman on, but then what’s with Cobb going into Mal’s innermost secret place and getting her dream top and keeping it?
If she’s dead and out of the dream on that level, then why is the top still “real” in that dream level, and if its entire existence was based on Mal using it to tell she is alive and in the dream, what’s it even doing there to be collected? Do everyone’s talisman objects stay behind when they leave a level or die in the real world?
So, one conclusion they trick us into buying can’t be true – that the top tells us and him whether he is dreaming.
We’re left with (as far as I can see) one of two other interpretations. Either this really is Mal’s object, which very likely means that Mal is still alive and her input is ongoing (in the level above level 0, or the “real world” outside Cobb’s reality), or that Cobb actually created this object himself, within the dream, and invested it with some meaning of his own – in essence, to do the opposite of what he claims, to keep himself in the dream.
Whether the top is spinning or not isn’t the important thing. As long as it stays a top and keeps existing, it ties him into his investment in staying in the dream at level 0. Actually, I’d say that the fact he has abandoned (or never made) his own connection with reality, and his connection to reality is entirely through Mal’s top makes a case that she was right and he has deliberately abandoned his contact with reality. Why? Maybe he and Mal aren’t married or even a couple one level up and don’t have kids, and that’s a dream he isn’t willing to give up. Can’t tell, but Something Else is Going On.
People say that the point of the last moment of the movie is the Schroedinger scenario about whether or not it will fall over. I maintain that the real significance is that the top is there at all. Mal is alive and sharing a dream with Cobb. Cobb is still dreaming.
July 28, 2010, 10:49 amJaimeInTexas says:
It was an OK movie. In the end:
1) Cobb remained the same age but Saito is old.
2) Cobb’s children have not aged.
In one hand, the end seemed to indicate Cobb has woken up after a long sleep. And on the other hand, there is no aging, indicating a dream.
Inconsistent.
BTW, I consider the following movies I have seen (not an exhaustive list) some of great movies of all times:
July 28, 2010, 11:24 am1) Chariots Of Fire
2) To End All Wars
3) Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
4) The Lost City
5) Gods And Generals
6) Joyeux Noel
elaine says:
I agree, Lymus, that Cobb is dreaming throughout. We never have “proof” Mal (evilicious name) was ever real and the kids seem idealized and gauzy, much like when we look back at our own childhoods, to see this from a different direction.
If I might, a little tongue-in-cheek but not too much, it seems that movie director and pressured pater of films Nolan via dream director and confused father figure Cobb via the secondary dream director and confused son Fischer just might have “father” issues.
I like the idea of creation as nested autobiography engendered by the tension between self-defeating anxiety and constructive endeavor motivated by approval issues. We owe dear old dad/parent, audiences, and the Genesis God for inception.
And yet any point of inception is difficult to pinpoint, a major point of Nolan’s movie. Also that a successful movie can be catharsis by dream for the audience and fantasy flowering from therapy for its creator.
To me, Inception feels a bit like a Bond-paced version of The Sixth Sense, but sans the definitive twist ending to be more meta, metaphysical for the art and meta-controversial for commercial appeal. So, OK, I think the ambiguity works well enough.
July 28, 2010, 11:50 amKen B says:
Can someone also explain why the bad guys can’t shoot straight in a dream?
I agree with elaine. It felt to me like the 6th Sense, The Matrix, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service blenderized.
July 28, 2010, 12:34 pmelaine says:
I should amend: there are obvious father AND mother issues in Nolan’s movie, as Cobb’s nightmare/ dream is also centered around a husband-sabotaging wife who deserts her kids.
Cobb’s subconscious paints a damning perspective on the woman he professes to love, much akin to how children love their mothers but are conflicted over how bad they make them feel, a sense of love as betrayal that often adults never resolve.
Cobb kills the Mal figure several times: the limbo train (mutual suicide that looked coerced by him ostensibly for the two of them to move on); the balcony jump (she does herself in despite his “love” for her when he realizes she’s mean crazy); shooting her when she kills what he thought was his last chance at success (Fischer/ vault access) and emotional redemption (done by him for him, at last, but on a visceral level); and, last, by a cooler bullet from his architect-guide proxy (for him by his higher reason and knowing finally reconciled to ridding himself of his demon Shade and plaguing memory of her sabotage “love.”)
Cobb’s Fischer projection deals with an emotionally distant father whom he thinks regards his son as a failure. The solution to reprogram the damaged adult son’s thinking is “inception,” implanting the idea that his dad would’ve wanted him not to please him by being like him but to be his own man, whether true or not. This sounds like psychotherapy in which the answer is constructive projection, or positive self-deception.
In the end, we see the real inception isn’t the dream manipulation of Fischer but at a point closer to his having the photo of the pinwheel and him, or from when he actually had the pinwheel as a child, or from years before that, even. Is there any point on a pinwheel that actually starts turning first? In the end, we don’t completely know beginnings or what moves us.
July 28, 2010, 12:58 pmSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
Hollywood movies–esp big budget summer movies–are aimed, laser-like, at the demo of 13-24 yo males. I would be shocked beyond words if any movie that got green-lighted for such an opening was even worth consideration as “best of the (any) decade”; forget “all-time”.
And Ken B’s comment just makes us all the more aware of how much we miss George Lazenby.
July 28, 2010, 1:16 pmsecond history says:
I said the Dark Knight series, which includes Batman Begins, which I agree was much better than The Dark Knight. TDK was pretty dark (pardon the pun) and unrelenting, and less appealing than Batman Begins. I was surprised it didn’t get an R rating for violence, but that just go to show you the looser rating standards for violence versus sex.
July 28, 2010, 1:27 pm(digression) says:
(Memento, Batman Begins and Inception: a regression obsession progression?)
July 28, 2010, 1:33 pmShelbyC says:
Good lord, there went two hours of my life I’ll never get back. To me it was obvious that the whole movie was a dream, but I expected something that the end to pull it together. But nope.
July 29, 2010, 1:04 amCathey Moye says:
The story and cinema are truly complicated and at times scattered so I can see why some people today couldn’t stick to. When you never desire every detail spelled out for you personally then, like most people today, you’ll be able to truly benefit from this dvd. The results have been definitely outstanding and exciting, i considered it had been superb how they could visually match this sort of an crazy notion. bottom line is how the cinema is quite abstract nevertheless it comes in concert genuinely honestly properly in particular at any time you do not need to completely recognize every detail suitable aside to delight in a tv show.
July 29, 2010, 1:56 amMargeret Amster says:
I’ve read the user-reviews that rated it C, D or F and concluded that they were being incredibly young or not wise enough to follow the storyline to obtain any satisfaction. They are most likely the very same viewers that gave the Eclipse series movies higher ratings.
July 29, 2010, 2:09 amShelbyC says:
Geez. I don’t suppose everybody who liked the movie is the type of clown that thinks people who see things differently from them are dumb?
July 29, 2010, 8:08 amRaanan Rants Against the Grain – INCEPTION — Isle of Cinema says:
[...] Understanding Inception (volokh.com) [...]
July 29, 2010, 9:07 amVolokh – Understanding Inception | Inception Ending says:
[...] –http://volokh.com/2010/07/27/understanding-inception/ [...]
July 31, 2010, 11:39 pmLee A. Arnold says:
In “free fall” you are NOT weightless — you are going down at exactly the same rate as the van, not flopping around inside. The only way out of this scientific illiteracy is to suppose that the whole movie is indeed a dream and Cobb doesn’t know physics.
August 1, 2010, 12:42 amJustin Levine says:
An important point Mr. Kopel (and Mr. Hall) seem to overlook is the notion that one’s totem (Cobb’s spinning top) is only effective if you are the only one who has ever possessed it.
But remember, in Cobb’s case, he took the top from his wife who originally created it. That is evidence to suggest that the spinning top has been ineffective/irrelevant from the start and that the entire film is a dream from beginning to end.
August 1, 2010, 12:50 pmBob says:
I just thought it was interesting that the young achitecture student’s totem was a chess pawn, and that the person she was being used to defeat was Bobby Fisher.
August 1, 2010, 9:38 pmthe dude says:
I think Elaine comes pretty close to explaining what Nolan is up to. There doesn’t have to be a metastory for the film to succeed, but it makes Cobb more interesting. Try this one, for example: Mal was Cobb’s mother. Cobb had a sister, Ariadne. Mal committed suicide when they both were small children. That was the false totem she gave to Cobb, the idea that moves like a virus through his dreams, the idea that differentiating between reality and dream is a matter of life or death. Cobb was estranged from his powerful father after the suicide. He does not know whether his father drove Mal to kill herself. That is information he wants to extract. Cobb and his sister go to a safe place in France and study architecture with Professor Miles. Perhaps they experiment with drugs. Like their mother, one or both of them also commits suicide. Cobb thinks it was inception that caused his sister/mother to commit suicide and has to find his way out of the maze of guilt and resolve his ambiguous feelings toward his father. He only has unreliable fragments of memory to go on. Everything else is dreams, mirrors and projections with Cobb playing all the parts. Is this the only possible metastory? Of course not. And that may be the point.
August 2, 2010, 1:25 amNick says:
The top wasn’t really Mal’s to start with. She was dreaming, and Cobb put the idea of it in her head, when he wanted to reassure her and pacify her. He was manipulating her by creating this thing that she could believe was proof. And if I was Cobb, I’d feel guilty too.
August 2, 2010, 7:51 amdawn says:
It was impossible to understand what was going on in the snow level,except for in the hospital of course!The only part of the movie that i wasn’t thrilled with.
August 2, 2010, 9:55 pmTobias Puskarich says:
Chris Nolan has shown us the future of huge spending budget movies for adults– A slightly intellectual thought is stretched and padded with explosions and intense chase scenes, put jointly at a pace so quick we don’t recognize that there is just barely alot more substance than the average cinema carries. I never suggest to bash “Inception” as well a lot. It’s an exciting motion picture that should sweep anyone with half a human brain into its narrative. When the viewer has supplied in to “the ride,” he or she will likely be transfixed to the duration for the film. “Dark Knight” demonstrated this a couple of many years ago. Nolan takes that almost impossible-to-beat formula and pushes it into the highest on this film.
August 3, 2010, 12:53 amthe dude says:
I may be wrong about this, but I think Nolan inserted a scene from Baz Lurhmann’s “Romeo+Juliet” near the end of “Inception.” Others have written persuasively about the comparison Nolan is making between dreaming and film-making. One way to see the film is as being about the creative process in the broadest sense.
August 3, 2010, 6:47 pmassumptions says:
why did the crew members die and fell into a deeper level instead of waking up in reality? gees…ppl why cant you accept the fundamental assumptions of the film? it’s a sci fi film for gods sake why you want it to be realistic? cmon I mean prove to me superman’s race can breath in the outer space and survive and if not evidence that they dont need O2 to survive. wouldnt that just ruin the joy of watching films??
August 10, 2010, 9:11 am