Inception : the ending was not ambiguous at all, was it ?

Cafe Society
21

Ah, shit. I really don’t like to crap all over other peope’s experiences of a thing, but sometimes I just get so frustrated.

There really is a lot to this movie, but people generally talk about, say, half or a third of what makes this movie interesting (including that philosophy dude somebody linked to, again). At best. Really, though, a lot of people just reference this movie and confuse the concept “Inception” with a “dream within a dream” recursiveness. Thank goodness you fellow 'Dopers are at least beyond that.

The ending is absolutely, objectively, ambiguous. There are, of course, signs and symptoms that point to one thing or another, such that, depending on which signs one pays attention to, one can determine (falsely) for oneself that the ending is definitely one thing or another. But, technically, objectively, it’s ambiguous. It is clear to me that the auteur meant it to be such.

There’s another issue. Nolan did go pretty deep and fairly complicated with the movie. But (and here there are reminiscences of the thread about the author being wrong about his own work), Nolan was not quite as detail-oriented as some of his fans. The top was not Leo’s totem, but sometimes Nolan forgot that fact. For instance.

But, all of that kind of discussion is missing the point, really.

Okay, cards on the table. I once started a thread about this movie that got zero replies. I realize I have weaknesses as a writer, but I really thought that I had hit on something in that movie that other 'Dopers would catch on to, but no one did.

Screw it. What is the name of the movie? What is the theme song of the movie? What is the background music/sound/bwang of the movie? And do you think the top wobbling is the end-all be-all of what the movie means? It’s just a device to get you to wonder about the other stuff. And everybody missed it. I feel bad for Nolan.

22

Well I personally disagree with that and judging by the dissonance in this thread alone it’s safe to say that I’m not alone in that disagreement.

Yes. And if you think you’re being tricked, you reach for your totem. There’s nothing special about lucidly dreaming and making your top spin forever or lucidly dreaming and conjuring up a bridge out of nothing except being discrete.

You’re going to have to explain yourself better here, but with regards to carrying it with them at all times, to me was just a blend of convenient exposition and to reinforce the fact that totems are deeply personal and secretive.

As Kobal2 said, the bishop can’t be toppled and the die is loaded.

The point of the totem isn’t in what it does in the real world but what you’ve chosen that it does (impossibly) in the dream world. The fact that if you’re able to will it to spin forever (or longer than reasonable) you’re in a dream. The same goes for toppling a chess piece or casting a die.

What you said - manipulating totems - is exactly what Mal and Cobb did in the beginning when they were exploring lucid dreaming. Leo fucked with Mal’s totem and so when she was back in reality, she wasn’t sure if her top falling was reality or if it was Cobb’s doing. She ultimately killed herself because she just didn’t know.

It’s sad, but really she should have just came up with a new totem that Cobb wouldn’t know about that didn’t involve killing herself.

23

BTW: Here’s an entertaining review of the movie, published August 19, 2010:

Guide for the perplexed: Inception (Warning: Extensive spoiler alert!)

written by Ed Zotti.

24

You know, I feel the same way sometimes, but really, it’s just not worth it. Besides, you’ll just end up breaking too many keyboards by smacking your head against them. Apparently, ambiguity is scary to some people. “There must be one right answer, dammit!” Really, I think it’s some kind of phobia.

Yes, people, the ending is clearly, unambiguously ambiguous (if you know what I mean). In fact, the movie goes so out of its way to set up that ambiguity that it feels clunky at times. One thing I noticed on my second viewing wasthe scene where Cobb wakes up in the plane and then walks through the airport. Notice how the glances he exchanges with Ariadne and his other partners in crime are very carefully shot and acted in such a way that it makes it possible, just possible, that these are people he doesn’t actually know or have even met before, at least not beyond going on that flight with them. Nice, isn’t it?

25

Why does no one ever mention the strange passport stamp put in Cobb’s passport? A spiral? Never seen anything like it.

26

And wouldn’t that make it inherently unreliable as a totem?

I think they can “program” their totems to do certain things in a dream. For example, there are some theories that Eames’ poker chip becomes two chips if he’s dreaming. So Cobb’s totem making the top spin forever. If he can’t make it spin forever, he knows he’s in the real world.

Although it seems like a simpler totem would be to have a top that’s weighted such that it’s unspinable. The whole point of a totem is to have some detail that a potential inceptor wouldn’t know about (like the weight of Ariadne’s chess piece or Saito’s rug (more of a miss really).

That’s why the ending is ambiguous. Not because it’s ambiguous but because Cobb chose a shitty token.
Someone made a good point about the kids not being older. I didn’t get a sense that Cobb was only on the lam for a few months. One does not go from legitimate architect / dream researcher to global criminal with a close-knit gang of cool accomplices in a short period of time. So I would assume the vision of the children we see at the end of the film is Cobb’s memory of them form however many years ago. Had the scene continued (and assuming it’s real), we would likely see Cobb’s shocked realization that his little kids are now big, possibly even teenagers.
My assumption is that the ending of Inception does take place in the real world, but is kept just ambiguous enough to leave you with a lingering doubt. Sort of the way Cobb’s wife could never really convince herself she was awake.

My rationale is mostly based on my opinion that an entire story that takes place in someone’s imagination sort of cheapens the impact story.

27

You didn’t put the cards on the table here, you just hinted at what kind of thing they might be.

Let’s have it!

28

Well, a lot of the time it can certainly make a story feel meaningless if you find out in the end that “it was all just a dream”. I can’t see how that could possibly be said about Inception, though.

Interestingly (or, well, maybe interestingly), the actual plot of the movie, namely the “heist” that Cobb and his gang are trying to pull off, is so boring and lacking in stakes that I doubt most viewers even remember what it was all about. Let’s see if I get this right: A guy running an energy company (Saito) wants to break up a competing company (run by the old man Fischer) which is threatening to gain a monopoly in the energy business, to avoid being driven out of the market himself. To achieve this he wants to give the heir of the big company (the young Fischer) the idea to split up the business after the old guy dies. For this, he hires Cobb and his partner, and as payment he’ll help clear Cobb of a murder charge.

I mean, what? Energy companies? Market shares? Who cares? Nothing that is interesting about *Inception *(and this movie comes with a truckload of interesting) has to with the things that (arguably) happen in the “real world”.

29

I’ve always thought that most Inception analysis misses the most obvious part. Yusuf is explaining how dreamers get lost in their own dream (I can’t find the clip right now) and so Cobb goes into the bathroom to spin the top. The top gets knocked off and Cobb leaves the room without respinning it. It’s like we’re being hit over the head with the fact that that is what is happening to Cobb.

Question on the top re: Mal’s totem. What if she is the dreamer in the next level up and returned to the real world when she jumped? Would that affect the spinning?

30

Bingo. And if the top falls over at the end, that is precisely the situation that Cobb finds himself in as well.

If the top does topple, that means that the ending is not only ambiguous for the viewer, but for Cobb as well. But he certainly won’t kill himself. He’s there with his kids, he has what he wants, and waking up could mean losing it all again. And if it’s *not *a dream, death means losing it for sure.

Heck, even if the top doesn’t stop spinning, and Cobb knows for certain that he’s in a dream, he’ll stay in the dream, for the same reason.

So Cobb will go on living for the exact same reasons that Mal killed herself.

31

We have to go back to The Island.

Actually, I did put the cards on the table, but it was in the post I mentioned, but, rudely, failed to link to. It was a failed post, anyway. Essentially, though, a large part of my frustration stems from the fact that every single discussion I’ve found about the movie hinges on various details that are meant to be ambiguous, and these discussions fail to explore the actual meaning of the movie.

The movie is called Inception. What is the inception imbued upon the audience via this movie? A big clue is the fact that the “bwang” sound so famous in this movie is actually the “Rien de rien” song slowed down. I’ve never seen an analysis (besides mine, in the unlinked post, and even then, only alluded to it) that even begins to discuss the meaning of the song as it relates to the meaning of the movie.

Now, I realize that my unlinked post is just one man’s opinion, but I am absolutely flabbergasted that so many clever people are missing so much of what is meaningful about this movie. Instead, we are lost in the details (details, which, Nolan himself didn’t really pay enough attention to).

Cards on the table - such an evocative phrase. Part of my insistence on ambiguity here comes from the magician’s credo: what makes this movie interesting is when you figure out the trick for yourself. Nolan has expertly played some “close up magic” with this movie, and yet everyone is stuck on the irrelevant details.

Cards on the table - the movie is very meta. The “moral of the story” of the movie is precisely the message of the “Inception” that Nolan has attempted to put to his audience.

And yet we quibble over a wobbling top or whether Cobb is dreaming.

Here’s a thing to blow your mind: a lot of people picked up on the fact that the name “Airadne” is quite telling, but did you realize that the name “Cobb” has a very similar meaning?

I realize that I’m still being… coy, I guess. But if just one person would be able to respond to this post, or to my heretofore uinlinked OP about the movie, I’d be more than happy to be direct, and specific. It’s not about a wobbling top, goddammit.

32

I’m not quite sure what you’re going for here. The mythical Ariadne is associated with labyrinths, because she helped Theseus defeat the Minotaur and saving the sacrificial victims. I wasn’t familiar with any other meaning of Cobb, and I couldn’t find any similar meanings, but looking up on Wikipedia, it says cobb (or coppe) is an archaic English word for a spider, is that what you mean?

Also, if Cobb is named for the archaic word for a spider (instead of after Cobb from another Nolan film Following, which had a character named Cobb who was a criminal/con artist who constructed an elaborate deception), what does that mean? How would it blow my mind?

33

I read your post that didn’t get any replies.

Are you saying the message of the film is that we shouldn’t listen to other films’ admonitions to “wake up” but instead should subordinate waking up to the more important goal of not feeling guilty about things?

34

It’s all one big . . . cobweb?

35

At one point Ariadne refuses to hand hers to Cobb, and he acts like she has passed a test, because that’s the whole point of a totem: don’t let anyone else touch it.

The die is loaded so only he knows it’s exact feel and it can’t be recreated in a dream by someone else.

I’ve just rewatched the film and none of that is mentioned. There is never any mention of the die being cast or the piece toppled or of Cobb messing about with Mol’s top.

The reason Mol killed herself, and the reason she didn’t know if she was in a dream, was because Cobb did inception on her and gave her the desire to leave the dream when she was happy staying in limbo. She kept the desire to leave the dream even after leaving the dream and hence killed herself in reality to escape the dream she wasn’t in.

That’s why she didn’t know what was real, not because of anything to do with the totem. Because Cobb put the idea into her head “You’re in a dream, get out!”, or in the exact words “Your world is not real”. Planting that idea in her head fucked her up. Did no-one else watch the last half an hour or this film?

So her disconnect from reality is not totem-related.

What we know about the totems is that they have to be detailed and kept private so other people can’t discern their exact feel. There’s no reason to believe they can be used to discern the reality or unreality of a situation, certainly Mol, who invented the totem, couldn’t use it for that purpose. The only time something like a totem reveals a dream in the entire movie is the aforementioned carpet, which is only because the architect got the details wrong, showing that he was in someone else’s dream, rather than because it did something it wouldn’t do in the real world revealed that it was a dream.

So no, the totems don’t serve to distinguish between dream and reality and therefore whether the top falls at the end or not is a matter of supreme indifference. It was just stuck in by a pretentious film-maker trying to look clever. This entire discussion is therefore based on a false premise, and there is no reason to believe he is still in a dream.

Also, there is no spiral stamped in his passport, just a rectangular stamp and the one he gets in the film, which is an oval.

36

Can’t remember if this is mentioned in the film, but why did Cobb have to convince Mol to leave limbo? Couldn’t he just wake himself, and the drop Mol in the level above?

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What is their purpose?

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I’m not sure about that - IIRC Cobb explains that Mal *noticed *that tops would spin forever in the dream world. Maybe she was the one making them spin unconsciously, but maybe it’s just a property of the dream world, i.e. unless directly focused on things tend to go on doing what they were doing in the background, as the mind of the dreamer only imparts significant detail to the foreground/focus of the dream ?

I’m not sure that’s correct. What I understood was that Mol deliberately tried to convince herself that Limbo was the real world (hence her symbolically locking away the top, the one tool she had to determine dream from reality), while Cobb tried to convince her that none of it was real, which is why they oughta kill themselves. He didn’t foresee that the idea would worm itself back to the surface in reality.

I don’t know whether Mol used her top at all once they were back home - she seemed quite adept at deluding herself, so if she was somehow convinced that the real world wasn’t real I don’t think she’d have paid attention to anything else, top included.

(BTW anyone else had a chuckle when Cobb said he couldn’t adequately fight the murder charge because “she’d had herself declared sane by three different shrinks” ? Yeaaaah cause that’s not in and of itself suspicious at all. I myself carry both a sanity certificate AND a human certificate at all times !)

[QUOTE=Bakhesh]
Can’t remember if this is mentioned in the film, but why did Cobb have to convince Mol to leave limbo? Couldn’t he just wake himself, and the drop Mol in the level above?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think it’s mentioned. But they were way off the edges of the map so it’s conceivable he was afraid she’d be trapped down there if left alone, or she’d somehow resist external forces. Ultimately I think he just loved her too much to leave open a chance for them to be separated for any length of time.

39

Many people confuse the purpose of the totems. They are simply there to determine if you are in someone else’s dream. If you are in your own dream, you know because you still retain the memories of designing the layout, who you brought with you, etc.

If you are in someone else’s dream, you are subject to their world, and the rules of their world that they have created (bridges from nowhere,etc). That’s why you carry a totem with unique properties that another person cannot predict. Say I carry a magic 8 ball that I have tweaked so that it always answers “not sure” any time I shake it. I don’t tell anyone this. That way when someone else designs a dream around me, the 8 ball will act like a normal 8 ball (saying “Yes” “No” “Try Again” etc). If that happens, I know I am in someone else’s dream. If it comes up “not sure” every time, then I am not in another person’s dream because they had no way to predict the unique action of my totem.

However, for the reasons discussed above, Cobb’s totem was flawed. Tops will naturally fall after a short period of time and someone creating a dream would naturally design the top to do that.

40

Yup. Cobb’s totem is completely ass backwards. You have to wonder why he doesn’t realize this himself, though. It could that he has designed his totem backwards on purpose, because the one thing he’s afraid of is that he’ll get confused and not know if he’s in his own dream or not.

But then he goes and tells Ariadne how it works, even though the one thing you’re supposed to not do is reveal to someone how what the secret of your totem is. And especially not to an ace dream architect.

Either Cobb is a complete dumbass, or he’s setting things up on purpose to make it harder to know whether he’s in a dream. Although I’m not sure why anyone would do that. I think he may be losing his marbles a bit.

Edit: Or I’m just overthinking it and the movie is simply a lot dumber than I’m desperately trying to give it credit for.