I think he is in the real world because of what he says to Mal near the end. I don’t remember exactly but it’s something about her not actually being the woman he loved because she is only the product of his own mind. I think he would want to see his real children, the ones who can surprise him with their individuality.
Found the quote:
Cobb: I can’t stay with her anymore because she doesn’t exist.
Mal: I’m the only thing you do believe in anymore.
Cobb: I wish. I wish more than anything. But I can’t imagine you with all your complexity, all you perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. You’re the best I can do; but I’m sorry, you are just not good enough.
That’s how totems are supposed to work. The problem is that the top is completely messed up as a totem.
We learn that totems are everyday objects which are given an unusual property, which only the owner of a totem knows about. This is how Arthur’s weighted die or Ariadne’s hollow chess piece work. That way, you can use the totem to test whether you’re inside someone else’s dream, because, presumably, the creator or that dream won’t be able to fake your totem’s top secret special property. In someone else’s dream, the object will look and behave like a normal object.
There is a problem with this, namely that you can’t use it to test whether you’re in your *own *dream. You know the secret property, therefore you can presumably also dream up that property. But anyway.
Now, Cobb’s totem is messed up for the following reasons:
It’s backwards. The totem only has a special property (it spins forever) inside a dream, not in reality. If you’re in someone else’s dream, the dream creator would presumably make it behave just as it does in reality. Therefore, it’s useless for knowing whether you’re in someone else’s dream.
But aha, you say. Cobb has it backwards on purpose. He can use it to check the one thing a normal totem can’t tell you: Whether he’s in his *own *dream.
That would at least make sense as a plan. The problem is, Cobb bungles it. It’s essential that only the owner of the totem knows how it works. However, he goes and blabbers the secret to Ariadne, which means that he could be in Ariadne’s dream. Furthermore, before the totem was Cobb’s, it was Mal’s. Therefore, he can’t know for sure he’s not Mal’s dream.
Basically, the only thing Cobb can know, is that if the totem keeps spinning, he’s in a dream, but he can’t know whether it’s his dream or someone else’s. And if it falls over, it doesn’t mean that he’s in reality, he might still be in someone else’s dream. All he knows is that it’s not his own.
(Also, as I said above, even a normally-functioning totem can never tell you that you’re not in your own dream. Totems are completely overrated and very limited as a way of determining reality. I’d say you might as well go with the old trick of pinching yourself. Or, at the end of the day, maybe only Mal’s strategy of jumping off a building will do it.)
I believe that despite the ambiguous ending, he’s in reality because he’s finally able to see his kids and interact. Not a smoking gun, but certainly something he wasn’t able to do previously.
Anyway, even he does happen to be in the top-level reality according to the rules of the movie (which he can’t know, but let’s say he is anyway), who’s to say that’s really the top-top level? Maybe he’s in the Matrix. Maybe he’s in God’s dream. Maybe God is dreaming inside some alien’s snow globe.
It’s entirely possible. It’s not really addressed in the film though and so I took the ending at face value. Not that the meta-game, so to speak, isn’t worth dissecting if that’s what you find interesting but I walked away from the film without feeling like Nolan gave me any reason to doubt it was reality. Which is why I was bemused some time later to start seeing the “It’s ambiguous and it’s supposed to be and if you thought otherwise you’re wrong” bits on the internet (Cracked, et al).
It could just be that I wasn’t engrossed or invested enough to start second guessing what seemed obvious to me.
Ah, but he never sees their faces, and they seem to be the same size/age as they were (years?) earlier. Another bit of data suggesting he’s still dreaming.
The top spins for 50 secondsbefore the cut to black. Here’s a dude spinning a similar-looking top (in what we can safely assume is not a dream) for a solid 4 minutes plus.
I previously concluded he must be in a dream due to the striking similarity of his meeting with the children and previous scenes in the movie (in his mind’s eye when he is on the phone to the kids, when he washes up on the beach and in the scene where he is handed airline tickets and has to flee) - but I just rewatched all of these and they are not the same.
They are styled in such a way as to strike the same impression in the viewer’s memory, but they are not the same.
Therefore, it’s impossible to tell, but I think he could be in the real world.
The movie’s credits show two sets of kids; the older pair is between 2 1/2 and 3 years older than the younger pair.
Yes, the costumes and hair-styling for the two pairs is similar (to add another element of ambiguity).
I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have someone in the thread acknowledge that totems can’t work as either Cobb or Ariadne say they do (either to signal dreaming versus wakefulness, or to ‘keep track of reality.’)
I’ve participated in more discussions of Inception than I can count, and virtually always, people are so in love with the idea of totems (including inevitable gabfests about ‘what your OWN totem would be’), that they simply won’t apply logic to the topic.
Well…actually, it could be his own dream, too (in which the top falls over), given that we’re shown that he can’t stop his unconscious from affecting his own dreams. If he can’t keep Mal from showing up, then he certainly can’t keep himself from (without his conscious knowledge) making the top stop spinning.
Yeah, I can go with that. We do see all through the movie how Cobb is unable to control his dreams.
Which is why I will from now on stick to the opinion that we see the top wobble slightly at the the end, and hear it fall on the soundtrack after the cut to black. If the top falls, Cobb is truly lost. He has no idea where he is.
By the way, I’m noticing that I seem to have a different emotional response to this movie than a lot of people. A lot of the time, people want one answer or the other. It’s a dream, or it’s reality. I’m the opposite. I want the ending to be as ambiguous as possible. Certainty is boring. Ambiguity is just sexier.
I think I might be a bit of an uncertainty junkie.
Testify! It’s not that I don’t care; I like to imagine how it could be either. The movie isn’t a riddle to be solved, it’s a starting point for your imagination to fill in another part of the story. The more the movie points you in a particular direction, the less you get to fill in yourself.
I hear you. But for me, it’s not that I crave ambiguity so much as that I don’t mind it in the least. It usually leads to livelier discussions of the movie (witness the long thread elsewhere in CS on 12 Monkeys) and, if it’s well-done, can be more aesthetically satisfying than an obvious, clear, cut-and-dried ending.
