The kids do age and are wearing different clothes. If you see the cast in IMDB, you will see two sets of actors playing each kid.
The top wobbles. Here’s the science behind spinning objects.
I wanted to add this perspective to address people who say “hey, whether dream or reality, Cobb found happiness”. Well, Cobb’s a convict. Cobb and Mal were technically irresponsible parents simultaneously risking their lives in mind experiments in spite of having two kids. Cobb screws up, Mal commits suicide. Cobb lives his life stealing information. Now, look at it from the kid’s point of view. They have two parents who are constantly up to something. Soon their mother is no more. Soon their father has left the country and they never get to see him. They are with the grandparents, who are old. They will soon be orphaned. Unless Cobb makes it back IN REALITY, it is not really a happy ending because the kids will grow up as orphans. Cobb’s happiness doesn’t mean squat in comparison to the life of the kids! I’m not saying **THIS ** is the reason the ending is in reality, but rebutting the theory that Cobb’s In His Happy Place is no reason to stop looking to see if the kids united with their remaining parent.
The question with the film isn’t “dream v reality”, it’s “is Nolan really as clever as he and his fans think he is”? From reading everyone’s comments over the intervening years, I would say that answer is … ambiguous.
Wait, it was even meant to be ambiguous? He spins the top, walks away, and spends several minutes with his kids, and then we cut back to the top, and it’s still spinning, long after a “real” top should have fallen. They told us what it meant for the top to keep spinning, and then they showed us the top keeping spinning. That last scene came right out and directly said that it was a dream.
Forgive me for my rather vague memories, it’s been years since I watched it, but I thought there was an obvious clue that the “reality” level was actually another dream level.
One character tells another that one way to tell if you’re in a dream level is that people do unrealistic, grandiose, “Hollywood movie” things.
Later the Asian billionaire does just that, buying an entire airline on the spur of the moment just to guarantee that they can get the seat reservations they want.
While there’s the meta issue of the fact that this is, in actuality, a Hollywood movie, the airline purchase seemed like a nod and a wink to the audience to me.
As I said, it’s been years since I watched it, I hope my memories are accurate.
Ok, so these little tops are fun. They are heavy metallic tops with a very pointed tip. If you spin them there go on for 3 to 5 minutes depending on how fast you spun them. When Cobb spins the top and goes away to his children … The camera returns to the top in under 2 minutes. These tops can go on spinning for a much longer time. But the wobble we see … That is an indication of slowing down.
Saito is super rich and super connected. That is the reason why Cobb can get back into the country. If we choose to say that Saito is just a figment of Cobb’s imagination, then there is nothing left in the film’s story. It’s still a science fiction that places its rule set extremely well and tells the story through those complex rules. If a theory demolishes those rules, it pretty much demolishes the entire movie.
I think it was. I think the whole movie is quite ambiguous. The ending is ambiguous because the top itself is ambiguous. Thematically, the end of the movie is about accepting loss and moving on, and the behavior of the top at the end is a clue.
Another clue is that Cobb is an unreliable narrator, so we shouldn’t accept his claims as gospel without analysis. Note that although Cobb says the top is a totem, it doesn’t act like he says a totem should act.
The point of a totem is to tell whether you’re in reality or in someone else’s dream. In order for that to work, it needs to have a behavior that only you know. An internal weight, for example, like Ariadne’s chess piece. Someone else might be able to create the look of your totem, but not the special way it feels when you move it through space.
But it doesn’t protect you from being fooled by yourself. Because you know what it’s supposed to do. And it doesn’t protect you from anything if the realbehavior isn’t secret.
A top that doesn’t spin forever isn’t secret. That’s just… how tops work. They slow down and stop. A top that spins forever is fantastic. Think about an adversary trying to trick Cobb into believing a dream is reality. They know he carries a top. So they make it… spin forever. That doesn’t make any sense. Cobb uses the top as his totem because he doesn’t want to accept reality. It gives him license to believe that any half-competently constructed world is real, because the top behaves like a real top, and he reinforces that false belief by making the top behavior unnaturally in any world he construes to be a dream-world.
Obviously, a real top doesn’t spin forever, so if it spins forever, he must be in a dream. But a toppling top doesn’t prove reality. With a converse totem he can accept any level he wants as reality.
The top isn’t a totem. It’s a symbol. It’s a symbol of the infinity, of the boundless possibilities of imagination. Of the perfection of fantasy over the entropic decay of reality.
And the end of the movie is about coming to terms with his wife’s death. About rejecting the addictive high of fantasy (it’s not a coincidence that there’s so much drug-related imagery associated with the dream worlds), and about living in the here and now.
The top tells him what he wants to believe. In the final scene, he starts it spinning, then goes to be with his children. Just before the cut, the top wobbles. Because, finally, he wants to be here. He wants to be with his children. He wants to live this life.
At another point Mal (Dom’s deceased wife) comments on how his life consists of being “chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces”—another clue that what we’re seeing isn’t intended to be considered “real” in the world of the film.
But the majority of viewers of Inception want to believe in the chase and the billionaire buying an airline and the totems and the levels—and particularly in the PASIV Device (the dream-connecting machine)…because it’s all so cool. (And it is!)
Thus those viewers are able to ignore all the unmistakable clues Nolan salted throughout the movie–clues that what this movie is about is the healing power of sleep and dreaming.
I agree with Sherrerd - everything up to Cobb waking up on the plane is a dream.
Note the behaviour after that point - none of the gang acknowledge each other at any point, and Cobb walks out of the airport alone. Sure, it’s consistent with them being a gang of international dream thieves maintaining a high level of operational security, but it’s also consistent with them all being a bunch of strangers who found themselves in the same first-class cabin and have no other connection with one another.
Cobb is a widower who has been dealing with his grief by throwing himself into his (high paid, international) work, to the detriment of his children. He’s riddled by guilt, and though he knows his grief is affecting him he can’t stop dwelling on his ex-wife. He carries a memento of hers wherever he goes. People near him are trying to get the message through that he needs to live in the present, for his sake and the sake of the children - for example, his dad who recently told him on the phone that he needed to come home and deal with the situation there.
He is reaching crisis point and needs to achieve catharsis.
He gets on a flight home without being fully committed to his decision to rejoin his family. On the long flight he has a weird dream. It incorporates his grief for and obsession with his wife, his concerns about becoming a distant, unloved and unlovable father, his internal debate over the obligations the living the owe to the dead, and a sense of the chaos and and impermanence of his peripatetic, grief-haunted existence. For example, at one point he finds himself in a foreign country, running away from trouble but increasingly trapped as the walls narrow in. He populates this dream with the faces of the people sharing his cabin. It’s a troubled dream, but when he wakes he has finally had the cathartic moment he needs to realise that he has to leave his dead wife in the past and live in the present.
I haven’t seen this film since when I saw it in the theater and while it was perty to look at, about half way through I couldn’t make heads or tails of it and, frankly, stopped trying. Since this thread was revived I’ve looked online for explanation articles and they’re so overly detailed that nothing is any clearer to me.
I really like this theory and I might give the movie another try with this in mind.
Aside from the whole “only the smart people know what this film is really about” putdown, if this is the case, then what’s the point of the film? Films that are 100% dreams are about as fulfilling to watch as actually watching someone dream in real life.
The movie is presented as an action heist film to the audience. If it is really entirely about a guy (who we actually know nothing about - obviously everything we “know” about him comes from his dream) coming to terms with his disassociation from his family, then it’s a stupid idea for a film. There’s no “shame” in not getting that out of the film. Why would you be expected to? You could tell that story straight up, and in less time.
It’s like someone playing a prank on you by having a fake policeman come to your door and tell you your wife is dead. And just when you start to cry, they say “gotchya!”. Would you feel stupid for thinking your wife was dead? Of course not! But pranks like that have been pulled.
Nolan isn’t a genius. Face it.
You might as well say that any random movie is really all a dream. Pick one -
Casablanca. Obviously a dream, because what are the odds Rick’s ex-gf shows up in his place, out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world? And the letters of transit? They wouldn’t work in the real world. And DeGaulle wouldn’t have signed them. The clues are right there, people! Rick isn’t even a real person - the movie is actually a metaphor for America’s isolationism and subsequent involvement in WWII. Rick represents the USA. Michael Curtiz was a genius!
Ghostbusters. Obviously just a dream, because ghosts aren’t real. Everyone knows that. It’s really about the illustration of teenage wet dreams. It’s a metaphor for sex. Ivan Reitman is a genius!
The Seventh Seal. It really isn’t a metaphor for death, and a treatise on dealing with death, but really a heist movie. It’s like Ocean’s 11, but subtler. The clues are there, people! Bergman was a genius!
Oh, great, Just Asking Questions, now I have to try again to understand the darned thing
Ok, so I get the basic premise - that’s not too complex - but keeping straight what"level" everything happens on is a little too much for me. Was that by design? Did anyone here totally “get it” as it was happening, or after just one viewing? Do repeat viewings help or is it a “you either get it or you don’t” type of thing?
At least spoil me this: Cobb’s wife.When did she die for real? It seems she was stuck in a dream state but didn’t know it? But she kept showing up in places (?) Maybe I’m misremembering her part but I do recall that being one of the more confusing things for me.
If you subscribe to the view that the entire movie is a dream, especially if you believe the film is about Cobb coming to a decision about his family, then she might not even be dead. We have no idea at all. And no way of finding out, since the genius director failed to tell us. She might not even look like Marion Cotillard.
The whole point of the movie is that dreams are important and meaningful, and this is especially true if you accept that Cobb is an international dream thief. The whole story is about the gang creating a series of elaborate dream-scapes in order to manipulate the real-life mental and emotional state of Fischer. It’s a film about fictions and how things that we know for a fact are not ‘real’ can nonetheless have real and important effects on us.
I’d normally agree with you that “Oh, it was all a dream” is a cop-out ending, but in this one case it’s not precisely because the underlying theme of the whole movie is that dreams (and stories) matter enormously.
(There were a few articles and reviews when it came out pointing out that the whole movie can be seen as a metaphor for film-making. This is a good one.)
As to your point about us not knowing anything about Cobb’s wife: you’re right, we don’t. We don’t even know if he really had a wife. She might (as per the linked article) represent his commitment to his work. Doesn’t matter.
This is a very silly comment. Inception is, on its face, a movie about dreams, how they are distinguished from reality, and how we can fool ourselves into believing a fantasy. It’s a movie full of characters who are lying to themselves and others about whether they are in a dream.
It’s not a crazy unfounded leap to say “hey, maybe the director is also playing with the audience about which part of the movie is a dream and which is reality”.
That is a fine opinion to have but I don’t share it, and I don’t think most people do. Well made films on any topic can be fulfilling.
I’m not totally sure I understand why this bothers you. I mean, 90+% of the movie is explicitly a dream. Was all that part as unfulfilling as watching someone sleep?
To me, the movie is what it appears at face value - a science fiction story about a team of people that invade your dreams and steal information. In the world of the movie, the scenario is real. You can invade people’s dreams, you can have multiple levels of dreaming, totems work (if you design them correctly). Everything in the movie “happened”. Cobb’s wife got trapped and committed suicide. Saito really bought an airline.
In the movie I watched, the stakes are real. Cobb can fail or succeed. He can get stiffed on his payment, he can get arrested, he can even die or be killed. He can get trapped in the dream world (maybe he even did?). We care (one way or the other) what happens to him. It’s an exciting heist.
In the movie some are saying they watched, nothing “happens”. The entire movie save for the last scene takes place entirely in Cobb’s head. There is no heist, no dream machine, no totems, no nothing. The only thing that possibly happens is that Cobb comes to a decision about his family. A decision that seems to be entirely outside the movie, that we are not in any way invested in. We aren’t even aware what decision he is reaching, or why, or even if he did reach a decision at all.
A movie that lies to its audience isn’t a movie, it’s a practical joke. A very expensive practical joke, in this case.
That’s a fine interpretation. Obviously, the movie is literally a heist film about people stealing and inserting information in architected dreams. And there’s nothing wrong with appreciating it through that perspective. It’s a great heist film! But it’s also interpretable in a number of other ways.
I think that makes the movie better than one that has only one interpretation. The beauty of art is that most of it is at least a little ambiguous, open to interpretation. We can each find what we want in it. Even very straightforward movies where no one disagrees about what literally happens in the story have this, since most movies are about characters, and how they change. And we can’t really know the minds of the characters, we have to interpret them through their actions.
FWIW, I dispute the idea that there’s one true interpretation, and people with other interpretations are wrong. My interpretation isn’t objectively better than yours. They are both interesting and valid.
The unreliable narrator is a valid way of telling a story. It’s arguably a more true to life way of telling a story. In real life, people experience and remember things differently. At the risk of spoilers of a 20-year-old movie, ever seen The Usual Suspects? (Or a 70-year-old movie, Rashomon?)
But I want to ask again: If the 90% of the movie that is explicitly no-disputes a dream is enjoyable, why does it matter if the last 10% is “real” in the world of the movie. You point out that in your interpretation the stakes are real, while in the “all a dream” interpretation they’re not. But… the stakes aren’t real in either case. It’s a movie!
Why should we care if some dude we know nothing about makes a decision about his family? That only works as a plot if we’ve spent an hour or two learning what he’s like, and what his family situation is, and so on. If the whole thing (including framing story) is a dream, then we known none of that. He’s just some random stranger.
So, please 'splain it to me based on what the popular understanding is.