Another aspect I thought about is how dreams may seem more convincing to the people who dream them then they do to the people who visit them.
The fourth level was presumedly Mal’s dream - it’s her childhood home there not Cobb’s. So Cobb was able to see that this was a dream when Mal could not - it was too convincing to her. But Cobb was able to convince her to leave the dream by committing suicide. Then they ended up in Cobb’s dream - and this time it was Mal who was able to see it was a dream while Cobb could not. But Mal was unable to convince Cobb to believe her so she was able to escape via suicide while Cobb remained behind.
I suppose you could look at it that way if you chose to, but I prefer to think of Mal was an actual actor.
There’s a theme of recursion going on that reminds me of some of the dialogs in Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. I don’t think the demonstration that it was possible to trick someone into entering their own subconscious while thinking that they were actually entering the subconscious of third party was for nothing. (Particularly since there seem to be clues that Fischer wasn’t what he seemed.)
I think it was Mal - and I think that her inception (like his) was well-intended. (Note she derides his “reality” of constant persecution by shadowy forces.) If the “top level” we not an authentic reality, then Mal is not dead, but in a level above, and free to drop down again.
I think some people might find it objectionable, but I think in the context of the movie the distinction between dream and reality is ultimately meaningless - with the exponentially increasing nature the subjective rate of time in the nested realities, it seems that the setup allows for an infinite universe to get lost in.
I think it was there to invite speculation as to whether or not it would go on spinning or not - and ultimately, I don’t think it matters which. Here’s why:
We are explicitly told that the important thing about a totem object is that is has attributes known only to its user. “Don’t show it to me, that would defeat its purpose.” (We also are beginning to notice how much time Dom spends doing things he tells us we must never do.) The reason we are given for this is that it prevents someone from deceiving you in an ersatz reality. Dom’s totem object is an object that Mal is intimately familiar with; if Mal is the trickster, there’s absolutely no reason that she wouldn’t be able to make a perfectly convincing simulacra of it, with whatever properties she liked. Dom’s totem offers a false sense of security.
Saw it a second time and now even more convinced its a dream. For me, it was the scene with the chemist. He practically tells us its all a dream and Cobb is nearly convinced and is about to spin the top but it gets knocked off and he doesn’t see what it’ll do.
This is completely (well, not completely) off-topic, but I was playing the Sims 3 recently and uploaded a new music file to the Classical radio station in-game: “Non, je ne regrette rien” by Edith Piaf.
I find the argument that it was all a dream increasingly convincing, but I really hope it’s wrong, for two reasons:
A movie about dreams where it turns out that the whole thing was a dream? How original! How daring! For what was billed as an intelligent movie, it seems a little cheap.
Assuming that it was all a dream of Cobb’s, then the whole point was to get him to his moment of catharsis with Mal. Just as Cobb was trying to bring Fisher to a new perspective of his relationship with his dad, so the “actual” inception team (or possibly just Cobb’s subconscious) were trying to bring him to a new perspective of his relationship with Mal. And they succeed. He gives her the speech about how she’s just a simulacrum, a shade he’s created that can never be anything like the true Mal. And so he must leave her behind and move on. It is a powerful moment of catharsis for the character. So powerful, that immediately he “wakes up” he… stays in a dream world where he’s back with his children again. It’s exactly the mistake he was making before - letting a dream subsitute for the real thing. If the last scene is still a dream, Cobb has learned nothing, there has been no inception and, more importantly, no character arc - he’s just moved from one dream to the next. It’s ultimately banal.
The one saving grace for this is Dio’s suggestion that the last wobble of the top is the moment that the real Cobb wakes up. I like this idea a lot. We don’t need to see the real Cobb - he could well just be some schlub who’s lost his wife to divorce. He might not actually have any kids. But his dream has led him to a fundamental realisation about his life - he has to stop living in the past and start embracing the present.
Until the very end of the movie, Cobb is very concerned with checking that he’s not in a dream. In the chemist scene, it looks like he spins and then knocks the top off the table. When he grabs the top off the floor, it’s not spinning. I think that was good enough to tell him he wasn’t in a dream.
Inception is now the only live action movie of 2010 to be in the Box Office top 10 for 10 consecutive weeks. I still don’t think it has much chance of passing Twilight (it would need a couple more months), but at position #5, it’s the top money-making movie this year that’s neither a sequel nor an adaptation.
He has Departed and Catch him if you can in the Gangs of New York or on the Beach searching for Blood diamonds assisted by Aviators.
I am aware of that. I saw Titanic again a few weeks ago and well if you had told anyone in 1997-1998 about how Leo and Kate careers would have turned out by 2010, you would have been laughed out of the romm.
Okay, it’s not quite dead yet. Saw the film over the weekend and I enjoyed it a lot, except for the last half hour when my bladder nearly burst.
My thought was, and continues to be, that it’s entirely possible that the entire film takes place within a dream. The strongest evidence (and sorry if this was already mentioned; it was a long thread) is not the tokens, or the logistics of the dream levels, but the character names “Mal” and (especially) “Ariadne.” A woman hired to design—and help ensure their escape from—a series of labyrinths just happens to be named Ariadne? It’s either an example of uncharacteristically heavy-handed symbolism by Nolan, which would be disappointing, or a hint to the audience that all is not what it seems.
If we’re still within Cobb’s dream, is there even really a “Mal” at all? Is he dreaming the entire concept of inception and extraction? We’re given precious little information about how it works, and the chemist’s shop with its rows of translucent bottles looked more like something from a Wild West medicine show than a laboratory where state-of-the-art sedatives (which leave one’s system instantaneously with no apparent side effects) are likely to be engineered.
I hope I’m not just retreading someone else’s earlier post, I have to admit I skimmed the last few pages here.
I rewatched Inception recently and did some more thinking about the “Is it or isn’t it all a dream” debate. I like rewatching movies like this, seeing the whole thing again so you can consider the entire movie as evidence against the question it raises at the end.
Anyway, I think the key is the conversation (fake)Mal and Cobb have, I think down in Limbo, when she is trying to convince him that reality doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if she is the real Mal, it only matters that she is Mal. Why, she asks, can’t Cobb just choose this as his reality so they can be together? What is reality, anyway?
With that in mind, I decided the question we are meant to ask isn’t “is Cobb dreaming at the end?” The question we’re meant to ask is “does it matter?” Cobb has what he has always wanted: He is back home with his children. It is 100% real to him. If it is a dream, then Cobb is still in Limbo. He’s so deep he will likely never wake up. So, should he care if it’s “reality”, or should he just care that he’s reunuted with his children?
Cobb doesn’t care, not anymore. He spins the top, but he abandons it. We never get to see if it falls down, and Cobb doesn’t either.
Perhaps Inception is the story of two inceptions: the multi-level job pulled off as the main plot of the movie, and Cobb subconsciously incepting himself to believe that being so concerned with what is real and what isn’t real is less important than avoiding becoming “an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone.”
That works if you only consider Cobb’s fulfillment. But what if Cobb is stuck in a dream, happy as can be with his “dream children”, while in reality his children are fatherless (and motherless)? It matters a great deal to them whether Cobb is with them in reality, or only with them in his dream.
Cobb himself should probably realize this, and therefore it matters to him, too, whether he is in reality or in a dream. Unless he’s just completely selfish.
If he is dreaming, then nothing matters, it’s just a dream. If he’s not dreaming, then everything matters. It’s best to assume he isn’t dreaming.
If he’s still dreaming, it’s not a burden on the real children. While from his perspective, he might be gone for decades, from the kids’ point of view, he’ll be gone for at most 12 hours. Not a huge tragedy there. Presumably they are with babysitters. And if anyone really needed them, they could be awoken with an anti-sedative.
the very act of spinning the top means he wants to know. he leaves it for the time being, but he will go back to it eventually. when he does, it will either be spinning or not. if he really didn’t care, he really has no reason to spin it.
