# "Inception" - Why Was It Hard To Understand? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 24, 2011, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418 "2011-02-24T03:28:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Heart\_of\_Dorkness](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/4bbf92/32.png) [@Heart\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heart_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/61 "2011-02-25T22:17:14Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Totems make less sense the more I think about them, even given everybody else’s explanations. If you’re in somebody else’s dream wouldn’t they have to know you have a totem to materialize it on you? If so, nine times out of then you’d be missing your totem. If not, it implies YOU “carry” your totem with you into the dream world, in which case your own mind is defining its properties and therefore it should have its quirk\*. The only case where a totem would work is if the dreamer knew what your totem was but not how it acted. > > - My reasoning: The dreamer/architect should only define the physics of the world, so as long as you know the physical properties of your totem and physics are relatively similar to the real world it should act the same, like the chess piece that tips one way. The creator knows there’s more weight on one side, so as long as the physics of the world allow for objects to tip based on their weight it should act the same. But beyond that, if you’re in somebody else’s dream, and they don’t know you have a totem, then you wouldn’t have one. But it wouldn’t be “missing” - you wouldn’t even know you’re _supposed_ to have a totem, much less what it is or how it acts, because your mind just accepts the dream world as normal. Seriously, it makes no sense. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/62 "2011-02-25T22:25:57Z")
> [@Heart\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > But beyond that, if you’re in somebody else’s dream, and they don’t know you have a totem, then you wouldn’t have one. But it wouldn’t be “missing” - you wouldn’t even know you’re _supposed_ to have a totem, much less what it is or how it acts, because your mind just accepts the dream world as normal. > > Seriously, it makes no sense. The thing that really tips it over the edge is when you realize in the second level that the architect has changed their clothing for that level. This pretty much settles that the architect has control over what’s on their person, meaning the only time somebody would have their totem be when the architect knows precisely what object they carry. Unless, given “dream bigger,” they can make their own objects, in which case it should act the way they think it does. So yeah. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/63 "2011-02-25T22:39:59Z")
> [@Heart\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > But beyond that, if you’re in somebody else’s dream, and they don’t know you have a totem, then you wouldn’t have one. But it wouldn’t be “missing” - you wouldn’t even know you’re _supposed_ to have a totem, much less what it is or how it acts, because your mind just accepts the dream world as normal. I don’t remember anyone saying that anyone dreaming accepted _everything_ as normal. At the very least, the people whose job it is to invade other people’s minds clearly are fully lucid dreamers with complete awareness of what’s going on. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/64 "2011-02-25T22:40:35Z")
**Jragon** , you are apparently not recalling the time displacement element of the dreaming. Each layer has a seven-fold or some such speed dilation, so dreaming at level 1 is 7 times faster than awake. So when at 4th stage dreaming, years pass in microseconds. They lived a lifetime at stage 4, but when returned to reality, only hours had passed. Thus they were still young when Mal killed herself. The other slightly confusing bit of it all was they kept experiencing their decades spent in limbo as if they were young the whole time. Finally one scene showed how old they were supposed to be when they offed themselves with the train. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/65 "2011-02-25T22:42:32Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > The other slightly confusing bit of it all was they kept experiencing their decades spent in limbo as if they were young the whole time. Finally one scene showed how old they were supposed to be when they offed themselves with the train. That’s the part that got me! I thought they had actually aged that much in limbo\* and thought that they somehow regressed (in limbo) back to their true ages when they were going to kill themselves. I didn’t realize it was just a “that’s how old we were supposed to be” scene. - By this I mean I know they were only there 5 minutes, but I mean that their actual physical appearance changed in their dream state. ---
**Author:** ![Galileo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/85e7bf/32.png) [@Galileo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Galileo)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/66 "2011-02-25T22:51:49Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > You don’t have to think a movie makes sense to summarize its plot, but okay: I didn’t say that you have to, but thanks for the summary. I notice that your summary is missing an important structural element of the movie – time dilation – and how it is affected by the various dream levels. Also, you don’t mention the ongoing role of totems, and, although you mention “kicks”, you don’t identify what they are and how the Limbo level is different. And, you don’t address the obstacles that needed to be overcome to perform a successful inception, and how these obstacles were at the heart of the plan’s complexity. Okay, perhaps those missing elements go beyond a plot summary, but I think that they are essential to understanding the movie. Also, I’m more interested in how the movie “makes sense” for some people, rather than in the raw outline of the plot. It’s clear that Nolan took great pains to make sure that all the plot threads were connected but some of those threads and connections are very thin. The special effects were cool but it seems to me that the contrived “rules of the game” were formulated to provide a context for those special effects rather than to propel a plot that made sense. I prefer an exploration of a simple conceit, like Nolan did in _Memento_, which I found to be more intriguing and enjoyable, and it didn’t require the type of intrusive explanations that were offered by the characters in _Inception_. I was often “kicked” out of the movie by those explanations. Maybe I’m not a dreamer … ---
**Author:** ![Heart\_of\_Dorkness](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/4bbf92/32.png) [@Heart\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heart_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/67 "2011-02-25T22:55:34Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > At the very least, the people whose job it is to invade other people’s minds clearly are fully lucid dreamers with complete awareness of what’s going on. Are they? Or is that just the reality they’ve accepted as true, because they’re dreaming? ---
**Author:** ![Tangent](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tangent/32/3098_2.png) [@Tangent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tangent)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/68 "2011-02-25T23:19:02Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Totems make less sense the more I think about them, even given everybody else’s explanations. If you’re in somebody else’s dream wouldn’t they have to know you have a totem to materialize it on you? If so, nine times out of then you’d be missing your totem. If not, it implies YOU “carry” your totem with you into the dream world, in which case your own mind is defining its properties and therefore it should have its quirk\*. The only case where a totem would work is if the dreamer knew what your totem was but not how it acted. > [@Heart\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > But beyond that, if you’re in somebody else’s dream, and they don’t know you have a totem, then you wouldn’t have one. But it wouldn’t be “missing” - you wouldn’t even know you’re _supposed_ to have a totem, much less what it is or how it acts, because your mind just accepts the dream world as normal. > > Seriously, it makes no sense. But doesn’t each dreamer have the ability to “populate” the dreamworld they are in with people and items from their subconscious? That’s how Mal kept showing up, and the runaway train in the city street, both materialized from Dom’s mind while in someone else’s dream. And Fisher’s “bodyguards” that show up and start shooting at them. And the whole trick to Extraction, as explained in the beginning, is that the Architect creates a safe or vault in the dreamworld, and the person they are trying to steal from subconsciously fills the vault with their secrets. Their Inception con worked much the same. When Fisher opens his father’s safe in the mountain hospital and finds the photograph, it’s because his own subconscious put it there. So the dreamworld is not limited to things that the dreamer knows about. This allows for the possiblity of each person in the dream to somehow have their totem with them. I think. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/69 "2011-02-25T23:30:39Z")
> [@Heart\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > The fact that no such watch exists - and you never even met your grandfather - wouldn’t occur to you until after you woke up. Right? I think it’s pretty clear that the shared “dreams” in _Inception_ don’t really bear a lot of resemblance to the way we typically dream. I think it consciously borrows from Philip K. Dick, where (as in _Ubik_, or the Palmer Eldritch trilogy) it’s not straightforward dreaming but an ersatz reality that’s communal, somehow. _Inception_ even uses the concept of a “layout” - a model that defines and limits environment and props of the shared experience - though of course their are some significant differences in how it’s shared. For sure we often have dreams that seem totally plausible until we wake (and only then do we realize what was odd about it.) (Recently I dreamt that I happily purchased a six pack of “Adolph Coors’ Ammoniated Lemon Fizz,” which seemed perfectly natural. But we also have dreams which are sort of lucid, and that can become a habit. Seems that in the context of the movie, dreams are necessarily always the former type. If we accept that they can enter people’s dreams at all, it doesn’t seem like asking _much_ more to have them be lucid dreams. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2011, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/70 "2011-02-26T00:02:26Z")
> [@Galileo](#): > > I didn’t say that you have to, but thanks for the summary. > > I notice that your summary is missing an important structural element of the movie – time dilation – and how it is affected by the various dream levels. Also, you don’t mention the ongoing role of totems, and, although you mention “kicks”, you don’t identify what they are… Yes, I know. **I was providing a plot summary, not a detailed explanation of the film.** My point in the OP is that the plot is easy to follow, in my opinion. Precisely how “kicks” work isn’t especially relelvant to an explanation of the plot, just as how hyperspace drives work isn’t important for explaining the plot of “Star Wars.” To be honest, none of those things confused me, either - they weren’t always consistent, but the movie’s essential points seemed quite solid to me. > [@](#): > > The special effects were cool but it seems to me that the contrived “rules of the game” were formulated to provide a context for those special effects rather than to propel a plot that made sense. I’m not sure how the plot didn’t make sense. It makes perfect sense. It may be that you’re referring, perhaps to something other than the plot when you say it “didn’t make sense,” but Inception actually has a pretty linear plot, all in all, and the motivations and actions of Cobb are consistent. Picking at the technicalities is valid, and there ARE inconsistencies in the movie’s explanation of how this stuff works, but the plot is rock-solid. How you “kick” someone, or why it is a person’s subconscious defenses appear as men with guns, aren’t really plot holes. ---
**Author:** ![Galileo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/85e7bf/32.png) [@Galileo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Galileo)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2011, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/71 "2011-02-26T01:24:49Z")
No reason to put your justification in bold letters. I did say this: > [@](#): > > Okay, perhaps those missing elements go beyond a plot summary, but I think that they are essential to understanding the movie. Also, I’m more interested in how the movie “makes sense” for some people, rather than in the raw outline of the plot. When I was composing the post, I added “perhaps” at the last minute. Are you okay if I withdraw that word? As for why the movie does or doesn’t make sense, it has nothing to do with whether the plot is linear or whether there are plot holes. I’ll leave it at that for now. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2011, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418/72 "2011-02-26T02:01:59Z")
I found the essential plot to be easy to follow. But I also recognize that the concept was more complicated than average, or at least, had the veneer of the unfamiliar, so it’s not really surprising that some people who were unprepared for the concept spent time trying to wrap their head around it and didn’t pay enough attention to the actual plot to follow along. Also, there were a bunch of things that I didn’t catch the first time around, and even upon noticing them on a further viewing, the greater understanding would lead to more questions as well. While the plot made sense to me, there were at least some serious questions about the mechanics of the premise, and possibly even some internal inconsistencies. While this doesn’t ruin the plot or enjoyment of the film, it can lead to some fridge moments. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inception-why-was-it-hard-to-understand/572418.md?page=3)