I know I’m veeeery late on that movie, but I finally got around to watching it in full (twice before I’d fallen asleep midway through. Which I’m sure Alanis Morisette would deem ironic) and I gotta admit, it’s a clever movie.
That being said, I don’t grok the few final shots. Cobb wakes up in the plane, apparently goes back to the US and his old home to find his kids. To make sure he’s not in a dream, he spins his top. The final shot is the top starting to wobble before a quick fade to black, ostensibly to M. Night Shamalyan the viewer : is this real ? Is this a dream ?
But that doesn’t work, does it ? He’s been on the lam for a while (although we don’t know exactly for how long, he’s got a network of underworld contacts and has worked jobs high profile enough to wind up with a price on his head). How come his kids are exactly the same age as in his last memory of them ? So it can’t not be a dream, can it ?
We’re never lead to believe that Mal died a long time ago. It could have been as little as a few months before the start of the movie. Also, Saito arranged for all of Cobb’s legal problems/price on his head to disappear. So…
Apparently Cobb and Mol were pioneers in the whole shared dreaming tech thing. The getting trapped in limbo for 50 years together was a result of pushing the envelope, learning new stuff that nobody knew because nobody’d tried it before. But every other guy in Cobb’s enterprise seem to treat all this information as old hat.
Same goes for the totems : apparently Mol is the one who figured the concept out, possibly while she was in Limbo or maybe before that back when she and Cobb were exploring the possibilities of dreamspace and Cobb urged to go deeper and deeper. It’s not something that came of the original military experiments.
Then there’s the fact that the crew’s got its own Ocean’s Eleven cutesy codenames for ploys (“let’s go for Mr. Charles”) - which again implies that they’ve worked together for a while. And Eames has been in the business long enough to build a reputation for the best dream forger around, but also to have an “old partner plucked out of retirement” arc.
Then there’s the fact that apparently dream thievery has become commonplace enough that there’s a whole security and psych tricks industry dedicated to building defenses against it, and it’s widespread enough that people who obviously have very little clues about the whole Dreamworld thing (like Fischer) get in on the “fad” just in case. But again, Cobb was on the forefront of dream tech. He and his wife were on the ground floor. I know the modern world moves fast, but you don’t get from “budding yet promise-full new technology” to “this is a Thing in this universe, roll with it” in a couple of months. GPS took a good ten years to get inside every car. Hell, people in Congress still haven’t puzzled out the Interwebs, and that’s been out for, what, twenty years ?
It can’t have been that long since Cobb hasn’t visibly aged from his memory self (then again, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything - it’s notoriously difficult to impossible to picture one’s old self in memories. You always dream or think about present you in past you’s circumstances), but it simply can’t have been fresh enough that a) Cobb has developped an all-encompassing burning hunger to go back home and b) kids who look like they’re 6 haven’t grown the fuck up !
The top spinning has got nothing to do with whether it’s a dream or not. The purpose or totems is explained, it’s to be an object that only the owner knows in detail, therefore the owner can look at the totem and tell whether it’s in a dreamscape created by someone else because the little details aren’t right. In other words it’s to tell if it’s in the owner’s own dream or one made by someone else. The top, like any other totem, wasn’t a test to see if you were dreaming, it was only a test to see whose dream you were in.
No, because we don’t know if he’s just dreaming that the top wobbles (that’s why totems are problematic as proof).
Also, does the wobble we see truly mean the top is going to fall? The top continued to spin despite the small wobble and the film cut to black before we saw whether it would stop spinning or continue.
I’m forced to assume he (or someone) was still dreaming, because otherwise the character names like “Mal” and “Ariadne” are way too on-the-nose, and because let’s be honest, the whole concept of shared dreaming is pretty hard to swallow.
The ending is that he didn’t care whether or not he was in a dream or reality, etc. He walked away from the totem without examining it for long/closely, and had accepted the reality he was in.
Keep in mind, there is actually no reason to believe the rules about totems are in fact true. Maybe the totem rules are just a figment of someones dream?
The top is actually a fantastic piece of misdirection.
During the movie, there is evidence that elements from one level of dreaming can slip though to other levels (for example, when Robert Fischer is talking to the girl at the bar in level 2, she gives him a phone number which is the same as the safe number in level 1).
While we are all watching the top wobbly, and asking ourselves if it’s going to fall or not, you can hear Cobb talking to his kids, and the kids say “we’re building a house on the cliff”. This is such an odd thing for a child to say when seeing their father again for the first time in years, especially seeing as Cobb has just come from a house on the cliff where he rescued Sato.
Everyone is so focussed on the top that they miss this line completely
The movie is not only ridiculously complex in plot and scope but intentionally misleading so it might be an exercise in futility to come up with a definitive answer.
A totem can tell you if you’re in dream world or not - not just your dream world or someone else’s dream world. Visitors can still manipulate the dream world even if they’re not the creator. You can pull guns out of thin air, create bridges, etc. all without being the main dreamer. I suspect the idea of a totem is simply something small and discrete so you can tell yourself you’re in a dream or not without tipping off anyone else.
The top is Mal’s totem. Cobb (Leo)'s totem is seeing Mal. It’s problematic because everyone else can control their totem but Cobb can’t. It’s actually pretty irresponsible, but that’s alluded to in the movie.
Here’s what I said about it some time ago. Apparently I was wrong about the kids’ clothes, but I don’t think that ultimately detracts from the argument. (In my view, it’s all a dream, from beginning to end, and if there’s any kind of rescue attempt actually going on it’s an attempt to get Cobb out of Limbo.)
Whole thread’s worth reading IIRC.
ETA: Also in my view it’s actually not too important whether “it was all a dream” or not.
It’s just a normal film, not particularly complex at all. It’s about a complex as the original Star Wars.
But the whole idea of the film is that people are hired to put people into dreams where they can be interrogated or planted with ideas and suchlike. Someone who knows they’re dreaming might be able to manipulate it, yes, but the idea is to trick people.
At the start of the film, the first dream they’re in, they’re interrogating someone until he falls onto the floor and realises the carpet is very slightly different, because it was created in the dream world by someone less familiar with it than he was. Having heard of this dream stuff he then realises what is going on. If the dream had come from his mind the carpet would have been correct. That’s the function of the totem.
And no, the totem doesn’t tell you if you’re in a dream or not. They carry them at all times, the stated reason being so that no-one else can examine them and hence be able to recreate them in the dream world, and that means they carry them both in the real world and the dream. Nor do most of them do anything that might imply unreality, like endlessly spinning, most just sit there being detailed.
Well, Arthur’s loaded dice does a thing, as does Ariadne’s bishop.
But it is kind of stupid for Cobb’s top’s real world mechanic to be “fall down eventually”. That’s what tops do. Each and every one of them. So anybody could manipulate Cobb’s top in a dream and make it fall to let him believe he’s in reality.
Then again, I suppose it makes sense, since it’s a “legacy” totem, the first of them all. I expect Cobb has learned the hard way how unreliable Mol’s top is, which in turn informed the totem design of his co-conspirators.