The Usual Suspects is not an example of good storytelling, since, after you subtract out what is revealed to be explicit bullshit (most of what we see during the movie!), there isn’t a story left. [Cf. the comic book Arq, where it turns out that nothing actually happens and we have not gotten to know any characters.] I agree with Ebert that “there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests.” Rashomon, on the other hand, is a great movie.
The movie is the same length. We spent the same hour or two learning what he’s like, we just learned it in a different context.
I mean, if we can accept that the climactic assault on a snowy fortress is all just a dream, but it still means something in the context of the plot about dream-spies doing some corporate takeover, I’m not sure why we can’t also accept that the framing story of dream-spies means something in the context of a man who’s dealing with grief over his wife and trying to accept what it means to move on and be a good dad. To me it’s exactly the same thing that we’re doing for the rest of the movie, just applied to one more layer.
Agree to disagree. I think it’s a phenomenally well-told story and I love the movie. Should every story be told with an unreliable narrator? No. Probably not even most of them. That doesn’t make stories that use the technique “practical jokes”, though.
If he knows he’s dreaming and is controlling the dream (as is the conceit presented by the movie), then his dream-persona is a good reflection of his waking persona. If he’s dreaming without even knowing it, then his dream-persona might be completely different from his waking persona. And his family could be even more different: I’ve had dreams about family members I don’t even have.
Though that’s true, what makes the film meaningful is not the specific details of Cobb’s life—it’s that the film provides an answer to the questions: what can you do when you are reeling from guilt and mental anguish? How can you live your life when you are haunted by the past? How can you function when you are floored and confounded by sorrow and grief?
The particulars don’t matter because this human experience is so universal.
Like all the most highly-regarded fiction—like all art—Inception approaches these questions through indirection. Art doesn’t state its solutions to life’s problems in bullet-point form; art leads us to see those solutions via circuitous means.
There’s nothing in the final scene to suggest that it isn’t reality. But for me, the part that messed with my mind is the way they did a smash-cut directly of him walking through customs right into his living room, with nothing to indicate this is the routine elision of the boring ground-transportation arrangements that we normally thank directors for leaving out.
To me that’s very dreamlike, you begin a motion in one space and complete it in another space without any well-explained reason for the transition. So that’s why I feel like the whole thing could have been a dream.
All the other characters in the movie are the same people when they don’t know they’re dreaming. By the rules the movie established, it works fine.
I guess you can say that if it’s all his dream, then logically we know nothing. But that seems sort of like cinematic nihilism to me.
The movie explains how dream logic works and that people don’t always realize they’re in a dream, so it’s reasonable to consider the level presented as reality through that lens. Nothing in the movie suggests that dreams are arbitrary or meaningless, so deciding that the top level being a dream means that the whole movie is pointless isn’t supported by the text.
How much did you care about Fischer when you watched the movie? At one level, he’s just the MacGuffin - the prize the heist is aimed at. You might not care at all.
But it’s hard not become a little invested in what happens to him. He’s lost his cold and distant father, and inherited the company his father seemed to care about more than him. We don’t learn anything about his inner life when we see him in “the real world”. Then, through a series of dreams, he goes through an emotional journey. He experiences a cathartic reunion with his dead father, and so feels able to step out of his shadow and live his own life.
Most of the movie takes place in Fischer’s head. There is no kidnap, no arctic base assault, no secret will, no final conversation with his father. The only thing that actually happens to Fischer in the world of the movie is that he goes to sleep and wakes up having come to a decision about his relationship with his father, a father we never actually meet. We know for a fact the “father” he talks with is only a dream-version of his real father, and a deliberately fictional one at that. But we have no problem accepting that this fiction is meaningful and important. And yet, in the dream-heist interpretation of the movie, these dreams were everything. Fischer, through dreaming, comes to a real and material decision about his life. And more importantly, we (or I at least) care about Fischer’s decision. We are moved by the entirely fictional conversation between him and his father.
If you accept that Fischer’s fictional dreams had a material impact, and if you found that you were moved by his emotional journey even though everything about it was false then it doesn’t seem to me to be such a stretch to still be moved by Cobb’s emotional journey, even if you think the people in it were phantasms and fictions, or to accept that despite almost everything being a dream it’s still real and material in important ways.
I don’t think de Gaulle is supposed to have signed the letters of transit in Casablanca, it wouldn’t make any sense. I’m pretty sure who the signatory is is mentioned (and I think Darlan, who would certainly have had the authority to issue a document allowing someone to leave Morocco) even though I might be mistaken.
Very well put, Stanislaus. I’ve been trying to say basically this but you did so much more eloquently than I’ve been able to.
This has been said in different ways, but I think “is it ambiguous” is itself the wrong question because it implies different things. It is ambiguous in the sense of, “is it meant to have multiple interpretations”. But it isn’t ambiguous in the sense of the average viewer thinking in terms of the cliche movie trope “is it the standard twist ending where it was all a dream?”
There is a feignt in that direction, but it is only so we will be led towards the more important issues. The most immediate one is, although both the audience and protagonist are given at least some justifications to believe this is reality, what’s really the crucial factor is simply that Cobb has let go of caring about the nature of reality shown by his giving up the totem to focus on his kids. So the question we are meant to think about is not, is this a dream, but why does it really matter?
The film gives possible reasons, such as effort making rewards feel more satisfying, the journey as destination, and complexity and unpredictability of people and context being more fulfilling and substantial seeming. But the ending highlights the reason we are supposed to consider paramount, whatever our own personal primary drive pulls us toward. And to an extent, it also implies the importance of being able to distinguish between actual meaningfulness, and things which merely symbolise or signify those things.
So not amiguous in terms of “yes or no” but more in terms of “meanings at multiple levels”.
On this Casablanca question: it’s usually thought that Peter Lorre may have been saying “Weygand” rather than “De Gaulle”. The vowels and emphasis of the two names could have been pronounced in a similar way in Lorre’s accent.
Maxime Weygand was the Vichy Delegate-General for France’s North African colonies at the time the screenplay was being written, so would have been the logical choice.
The screenplay was being written and revised on the fly, and apparently there’s no official “shooting script” to look at–nor did anyone ever ask Peter Lorre.
There are some great theories about *Inception *here, just about any of which could be true. But the movie contains purposeful ambiguities and gives rise to unanswerable questions, and I, for one, like it that way. The line between reality and dreams is blurred if not erased as we follow Cobb and his team, and surely that’s just what Nolan intended. Take a look here: Inception - Wikipedia
And for more on the letters of transit in *Casablanca *and just who the hell signed them, see the third paragraph under “Anecdotes and inaccuracies” here: Casablanca (film) - Wikipedia
There are a lot of ambiguities and oddities in Casablanca, but they seem to be artifacts of a fast-paced screenwriting process. In this, Casablanca differs from both Inception and a movie with some elements similar to Inception: Verhoeven’s 1990 Total Recall. The ambiguities in the latter two were, famously, deliberate.
In contrast with other ‘what the heck is going on here?’ movies (such as The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, and Dark City), Total Recall shares with Inception a marked focus on playing with the conventions of film storytelling itself. The TR protagonist is shown a conventional Heroic Adventure Story, which will be implanted in his memories. By the end of the movie, he’s actually lived that Heroic Adventure…or has he?
Anyway, I could go on (but won’t). It just fascinates me.
The top is Mal’s totem and his wedding ring is Cobb’s
Now assume Mal was right and they were still in a dream world and by “dying” she is up one level (does it matter if she is in reality now?). What would her top do in Cobb’s dream level?
FWIW, there’s a video out there somewhere that states that the end scene in Inception is definitively reality, not a dream. Michael Caine has stated in an interview that he went to Nolan in frustration over all the dream-within-a-dream crap, and Nolan assured him, “Any scene you’re in, that’s real.” Since Michael Caine is in the last scene, it is meant to depict reality.
Of course, we’d have to assume Michael Caine was speaking truthfully and accurately to the reporter or whomever, and that Christopher Nolan wasn’t just feeding Michael Caine a line that may or may not have any bearing on his actual intentions for the movie. Oh, well.
And BTW, It’s kind of funny to me how many of you are so obviously very far off base with all of your theorizing and supposing. I’d clear it all up for you guys, but I’m pretty sure you’d just find it amusing how badly I’ve misunderstood the movie.
I mean, authorial intent doesn’t really matter here. Like if Nolan came out tomorrow and said it was real or fake it’s kind of like… well… fuck that guy. If you wanted to say that you’d put it in the goddamn film! While of course authorial intent can have merit, especially wrt allegory, it’s only one lens and honestly speculating on Nolan’s intent is by far the worst method of interpreting Inception’s ending. Do you want to know Nolan’s likely intent? It was to make it ambiguous so people would debate it and come to the conclusions and interpretations that made the most sense and resonated the most with them.
There is no objective reality you can cite that proves anything about the ending of Inception, it’s just a bunch of people giving their own interpretations and their arguments for why they’re supported by the text itself.
Nolan just seems to like weird storytelling (or just isn’t that good of a story teller. It’s…ambiguous. 
)
Take* Dunkirk*. What’s up with Farrier flying for like ten minutes and having a full dogfight (and winning!) on empty tanks? Was that all a dying fantasy? Or just bad writing? Should a historical movie like Dunkirk even have artsy stuff like that?
Now Memento, I think, works better ambiguous. But it’s a movie that tells you right up front that things aren’t what they seem. It doesn’t pretend to be a detective movie and then say “fooled you”. It doesn’t matter whether Leonard is really Sammy Jankis or if Sammy even existed or if anything we were told but not shown was true at all. It’s not a movie about a mystery to be solved.
Memento is about the journey. How does Leonard deal with his amnesia. Fans of Inception-as-a-dream would say it is about the destination. But, if the movie was a dream or not, that leads to different conclusions about what the destination was, or if we have even arrived.
Doesn’t it pretend to be a detective movie, though? Doesn’t Memento explicitly present itself as a movie about a mystery to be solved? We’re trying to solve the mystery of who killed Leonard’s wife, right? Obviously, there’s more to it than that.
I’m still not totally understanding the idea that Inception is tricking you if it’s all a dream. The whole movie is about how you can’t tell if you’re in a dream. It’s not some afterthought. Just like Memento isn’t tricking you when it turns out it’s not really about solving a murder, it’s about psychology: loss and memory and sense of self. It’s not a trick because from the very first scene, the movie tells you that it’s not a standard detective/heist film.
I also agree with Jragon that it mostly doesn’t matter what Nolan says about the movie extra-textually. The movie must stand on its own merits, and the movie he made is ambiguous. If he was make to write a movie where it was 100% clear that the “top-level” was reality, he failed pretty badly.
I would guess that Nolan’s assessment was that his message would have more impact if ambiguity were present.
Spelling everything out is not generally characteristic of art. Nolan wanted to make a financially successful movie, but (I believe) he wanted it to be emotionally and artistically significant, too.
I’m not sure I agree with the take “Spelling everything out is not generally characteristic of art.” Like, there are plenty of great movies whose strength is many things, but not subtlety. Mad Max Fury road is impressively good and has great social themes, but it’s about as subtle with its themes and plot points as its bombast suggests it would be.