My pet theory is that he’s trying to make it harder because he doesn’t particularly want to live in real life. He’s like one of those people who wants to die, but can’t commit suicide himself… he wants to live in a dream, but can’t be satisfied doing so when he’s aware that it’s a dream. So he sets things up in a way that creates his own plausible deniability and lives “happily ever after.”
Obviously, that interpretation takes some liberties that aren’t explicitly stated in the movie, but it’s like you say, there are three basic options: he’s an idiot, he wants to live in a dream, or the movie screwed up on something they go out of their way to say is important.
I thought that the totem was a continuously spinning top? Which is why the ending was so ambiguous in that maybe the top is going to topple, and maybe not.
Didn’t the Tom Cruise character get accused of killing his wife? And wasn’t that one of the sub plots that inception could be used for murder - via suicide?
What a difference a couple of good nights’ sleep can make. I apologize for being so crabby in my previous posts in this thread. And I send my thanks to Martian Bigfoot for his kind words regarding my frustration.
Yes, I meant that Ariadne and Cobb both refer to spiders. I withdraw my comment about this blowing anyone’s mind, that was a poorly chosen phrase. At best, it’s kinda neat.
That’s an interesting take on it.
Essentially, my analysis is that the “inception” that the movie wishes to imbue upon its audience is precisely the moral of the story. My estimation of that moral is reflected in the contrast between the story of Mal and that of Cobb. In Mal’s case, she believed that she needed to “wake up”, and in order to do so, she needed to commit suicide. This is the same message that can be found in numerous other movies that explore such topics, including Abres los Ojos (Vanilla Sky) and The Matrix trilogy. [I wish I could remember exactly which scene made me think that Nolan was referencing Abres los Ojos, because it would go a long way in convincing anyone reading this that my supposition is well-founded.]
Cobb’s story, of course, takes a different, more enlightened turn. He chooses to embrace life, and love, and family, as his solution. My supposition is that Nolan was playing with the idea of using an inception on the audience; this inception would be to undo the notion implanted in us by films such as Abres los Ojos and instill in us the desire to choose as Cobb did in the movie.
It may sound like a bit of a stretch, but I’ve come to realize it’s actually a rather pedestrian reading that only seems a bit wild because of Nolan’s cleverness with the movie title and concept.
AFAIK the name “Ariadne” doesn’t have anything to do with spiders. I think you’re confusing the mythical Ariadne, who helped Theseus navigate the labyrinth by giving him a ball of string to mark his path, with the mythical Arachne, the weaver transformed into a spider by the goddess Athena.
I don’t know where I made the connection between those two. Probably from some fantasy stuff I absorbed years ago. I did some googling just now to try and find a source, and apparently there are some New Agey people that believe Ariadne and Arachne are aspects of the same goddess/archetype.
I don’t think it’s crazy to think their names are significant. Ariadne uses a thread to help people out of a labyrinth. A labyrinth is a way of trapping somebody in a way that makes even their struggles to get free just as likely to make things worse. A spider web does this too. And a cobb is a spider. (And btw webs are made of threads.)
And “Ariadne” has a distinct visual similarity to “Arachne.”
Iunno, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this was intentional.
Even without the “Ariadne/Arachne” similarity, the two names’ significance seems intentional given the characters’ roles in the film.
Totems can’t work at all in the Inception movie world. As clearly established in plot and dialogue, no dreamer can control or will all of what shows up or happens in a dream. Unconscious elements intrude despite the dreamer’s willpower.
This message is hammered home not only by the repeated incursions of Mal (very much against Cobb’s will) but by the numerous projections that we see several dreamers insert–outside their conscious control–into dreams. Arthur says explicitly that this is outside the dreamer’s control; the subconscious creates what it wants to create:
ARIADNE: My subconscious seems polite enough.
ARTHUR: Well wait, it’ll turn ugly. No one wants to feel someone else messing around their mind.
And Cobb, tutoring Ariadne:
ARIADNE: Mind telling your subconscious to take it easy?
COBB: It’s my subconscious. Remember, I can’t control it.
No dreamer could keep himself from dreaming–against his conscious will–any particular physical state or property for his totem. Arthur, for example, could dream that his die is loaded or unloaded, based on his own unconscious and uncontrollable impulses. He would have no way of knowing whether he had done this. Therefore the totem is useless as an indicator of anything at all.
Interesting trivia: According to imdb, “real” Phillipa was played by the older sister of “dream” Phillipa, who herself is the twin brother of “real” James. (“Dream James” wasn’t related to them at all – he was, in fact, played by Christopher Nolan’s son.)
After watching the movie again, it’s true that the kids are visibly different at the movie’s end; but they do look so similar, that a casual viewer is unlikely to realize they are different. Which was probably the director’s intent.
As for totems – here’s something I’m wondering about. Near the film’s beginning, we see Ariadne crafting her own “totem”, which looks like a golden chess piece, though she never explains its significance or what it does. However, her totem’s never mentioned again for the rest of the movie. What’s up with that?
Also – Cobb’s totem originally belonged to Mal, but he essentially stole it from her “dark, secret place” while they were trapped in limbo. So how did he know how it worked? Did she ever tell him, or even know that Cobb had found it? (For that matter, how do we know that it was a genuine totem in the first place? Cobb could have made all that stuff up.)
Well, most totems are not observable to the casual witness–they’re based on a unique weight or feel. But Mal’s top is a totem based on behavior–it either falls or it doesn’t. So I guess you could say that it was one that Cobb could take once Mal was gone.
She never really needed it–she was always well aware that she was in the dream and not reality, so the story never required her to resort to it for reassurance. We never see Arthur use his in the dream states either.
I suspect that Nolan, having worked on the Inception screenplay for so long, knew that he had crafted an extraordinarily effective piece of work. But I wonder if he had any idea of the extent of his achievement?–there can be few pieces of fiction that provide such startling and unmistakable evidence of our desire to believe what we want to believe.
Thinking about Mal’s/Cobb’s totem.
While a totem tells you whether or not you’re another’s dream by “being normal” in a dreamworld, Mal’s totem tells you if you are in your own dream viz. being able to make you totem o something impossible. You see, I get the impression from the movie that the whole sleep/dream thing was relatively new and the “experts” themselves were not sure of how it worked and that Cobb & Mal were pioneers similar to the Curies in the early days of radiation research so the idea of having different types of totems kind of make sense.
So Mal and Cobb are in Limbo and the top keeps turning. So Mal knows she is in her dream. So they go up a level. But wait? Limbo is a pretty low level so were they only down one level? This is where I start to feel like either there is something very subtle going on or the writer fucked up and with this movie either is reasonable. The movie establishes that the dreamer can go down one level but not two. So for example Nash is in the real world as the dreamer and his projection is in Saito’s apartment but not in Saito’s house stealing the papers.
So let’s get back to Mal and Cobb waking up. We know that Limbo was Mal’s Dream but if that’s the real world then they were only one level down. I said earlier that the movie takes place in Mal’s dream but now I’m having second thoughts. I think that the real world is Cobb’s dream and the reason the top wobbles is that
a) he cannot force Mal’s totem to be abnormal.
b) more likely, his subconscious makes the top wobble to “prove” he is in reality.
But wait! Didn’t we say that a dreamer can only go down one level? So if it is Cobb’s dream then how could he go own a second level. That’s easy, if the dreamer goes down a second level they go into Limbo. For me it makes perfect sense since the Dreamer/Architect cannot construct reality if in a second level dream their top level dream becomes unconstructed i.e. Limbo. Notice the movie never says the Architect cannot be in a dream within their own dream, they just never do it. Why, because you put yourself in Limbo.
Mal realizes this and that there is still one more level up so we have
Real world (Mal is alive and awake) -> Cobb’s dream (Inception world) -> Mal’s dream (Limbo because of Cobb going one level beyond the limitation).
But wait wait wait. Cobb is going into deeper level of dreams in the movie all the time. According to the theory, as soon as he goes on level beyond his own dream he’ll be in Limbo. Really? Is he really going into deeper levels? Are Arthur, Eames, Yusef and Ariadne real? Is that air you’re breathing?
Another piece of evidence I don’t think that video makes is the very, very loud blare of the movie’s theme as soon as the credits start. The startling volume acts as a “kick” to bring the audience back to reality out of the “dream layer” that was the film itself.
Thanks, Elendil’s Heir and Jragon, for those links; both are very interesting.
Actually I found Nolan’s remarks most interesting for what he did not say: anything beyond what he’s already said, really. He’s still being cagey (and in that, remains in the good company of David Chase, as the Independent article notes). New to me, though, was his continued concern with the “groan” of the audience at Inception’s ending.
If I had to make a bet, I’d bet that he never again leaves a movie’s ending quite that ambiguous.
Nolan said, “The point is, objectively, it matters to the audience in absolute terms: even though when I’m watching, it’s fiction, a sort of virtual reality.”
This is a bit of a tangent, but his statement reminded me of a recent conversation I had in which I tried to explain why I enjoy reading third-person fiction slightly more than first-person. Of course, it’s all fiction. Third-person narration, though, gives me a feeling that I’m there as an invisible observer. With a first-person narrator, I’m only being told about something that already happened to someone else. That second layer of removal is subtle, but often makes a story just a little less enjoyable to me.
