Okay…it was mentioned in another thread, but not answered.
Within the logic of the movie, a person who goes into another’s dream takes a token to be safe. Something only he/she knows how it works. For example, I might take a magic eight-ball that I’ve doctored so that it only says “yes” when I shake it. Per the movie, I don’t tell anyone about this. That way, if I’m in “real life” my magic eight ball always says “yes.” If I’m in someone else’s dream, the magic eight ball might say “No” or “Ask again” or whatever other shit these eight balls say. It would say those other things because the dreamer in control would make an educated guess about how my magic eight ball would work and make it say random things.
If I have misunderstood the movie in my last paragraph, then the discussion should start there, but I don’t think I have.
So, our hero, DeCaprio (“Leo”) takes a totem from his dead wife (which we will put off that discussion unless it comes up) and spins it throughout the movie. If it rolls over and drops, he is in real life, but if it spins in perpetuity, then he is in a dream. My question: why?
If he is in a dream and the “controlling” dreamer is trying to screw with him, wouldn’t his totem roll for a while and then drop? A random “controller” would anticipate that a top would drop after a while, and make it drop…just like it did at the end of the movie.
He uses the top throughout the movie. When it drops, why is he relieved?
I think the logic went the other way around: the dreamer didn’t have enough attention to detail to really notice the top and, since it wasn’t being bound by real physics, once Leo started it spinning it’d spin forever. One of the reasons they weren’t supposed to even let people know what there totems were (let alone how they would perform in real life) was to keep them from performing normally in a dream: if the dreamer saw him spinning a top, the dreamer might cause it to perform normally.
In your example, in a dream your magic 8 ball might just say nothing at all, which would be as good an indicator you were in a dream as if it said random things.
Not sure why he was relieved when it dropped… I got kind of lost in the multiple levels of dreams and I think he drank too much kool-aid: the top dropped not because he was in the real world, but because he was in his own dream and it performs normally in his own dream, because he knows how it’s supposed to work.
The OP is right. Cobb’s totem, the spinning top, is all backwards. We know that a totem should be rigged in reality in a way that only the dreamer knows about (like the loaded die and the chess piece), so you can use it to determine whether you’re in someone else’s dream.
Now, if the top keeps spinning, that’s a good indication that you’re in a dream, but if it falls over, it tells you nothing: It behaves that way in reality, but it could also behave that way in someone else’s dream. So it’s pretty much useless as a totem. Which is why the ending is a complete red herring: Even if the top falls over, it could still be happening in a dream.
But wait, it gets worse: We’re told that you should never tell anyone else about how your totem works, to ensure that you’re the only one who knows about its secret trait. But Cobb tells Ariadne how his works. Now, no matter how his totem is set up, he can never know for sure that he’s not in one of Ariadne’s dreams.
But it gets even worse. Before the top was Cobb’s totem, it was Mal’s. So, again, no matter how the totem worked, Mal also knew how it worked. So he could never be entirely sure that he wasn’t in Mal’s dream all along.
You’ve identified one of the problems with the Leonardo DiCaprio character’s totem, but there’s another one too – he’s not the only person who knows how his totem is supposed to work. He tells the Ellen Page character about it even though he instructs her not to tell him about her totem, and since the top originally belonged to his wife then if she’s actually still alive (which can’t be completely ruled out) then she knows how it works. Even if she’s truly dead she may have told someone else about the totem before she died. Sure, Leo apparently trusts Ellen Page and is pretty sure his wife is dead, but even so he’s being pretty careless with the only means he has for testing whether he’s in a dream created by someone else.
IMHO, the best explanation is that Leo actually does not really want to know if he’s in a dream and has (perhaps subconsciously) arranged things so that he can never truly be certain.
I think the OP got it right. The totem was supposed to have some characteristic that you would not expect or realize just from looking at it. Someone creating a dream with a magic eight-ball in it would know how normal eight-balls work and would use that as their reference. If they created something incomplete as you state, it would be immediately obvious that it was a dream.
My take is that the script originally stated that the top was supposed to be off-balance, so it would not stay spinning at all. If it stayed upright, she would know it was a dream. Somehow during the revisions, that morphed into the top always staying upright in the dream–never stopping. It is either a screenplay mistake, or cryptic evidence that the whole thing is a dream.
Unfortunately, the wedding ring, from what we can tell, is a lousy totem as well, for similar reasons as the spinning top.
As far as we know, in reality, Tobb never wears his wedding ring, but in dreams he does.
Which means that if he’s wearing it, it’s a good indication that he’s in a dream. But if he isn’t, it stills proves nothing: Someone could have rigged a dream to simulate a reality, where, as far as anyone knows, Cobb isn’t wearing the ring.
That is, if he is indeed using it as a totem at all, and there’s no proof that he is. It could just be a symbol of something else in his subconscious.
There’s ways the ring could work as a totem. The easiest is that, despite looking like gold, it’s actually a light-weight alloy. If he’s in a dream, it’s going to be heavier than it would be in real life.
I’m not entirely sure that’s a correct understanding about totems. If I’m in your dream, how would I be able to check my totem if you haven’t dreamed it into existence? There has to be a way for dream participants (i.e. not the architect) to poof them into existence, right?
Or are the totems always on the person in real life (i.e. in their pocket), and thus go into the dream world with them? And thus that doesn’t work with Cobb’s ring?
One impression I got was that no one is really a hundred percent sure how the dream things work*. You could be an expert programmer but do you know how your compiler parses your program and translates the logic into machine language.
What I don’t see in the discussion is Yusef telling Cobb exactly what’s going on in the story to him and us. He spoils the movie and it’s no coincidence that when he’s about to spin the top he knocks it off the sink. And it seems a huge oversight that it is Mal’s token he uses but it really isn’t. I think that’s telling us he’s in Mal’s dream still down a level (the dreamer is not in the actual dream). I think it’s even possible that the visions of Mal are her trying to get into her own dream which as far as anyone knows (but remember the imperfect knowledge) is impossible. As for how tokens come in with you, it is a shared dream and everyone brings in their own self-knowledge. Otherwise you could just check out your underwear color and know you’re in a dream (assuming the dreamer didn’t see you change). The dreamer merely directs the dream so that Arthur still has his chess piece that only he knows the secret of. The problem with the opening scene with Lukas Haas and the carpet was that his direction overruled what Saito would have been dreaming (Saito didn’t know he was in a dream) simply because you can’t leave everything up to the victim.
*Which is an intergral plot point unlike the thing that lets you smoke in space from Thank You For Smoking.
Sure, that’s true. I was just thinking of what seems to be the idea in the article linked to be satoridt: That the way the ring tells Cobb (and the audience) if he’s in a dream or not, is whether he wears it at all. Apparently, in some scenes he wears it, and in others he doesn’t. In that sense, it won’t work as a totem. If he always keeps it around, though (either always wears it or at least keeps it on his person), there are obviously lots of ways he could use it that way.
Anyway, I’ll admit that when I watched the movie, I never paid attention to the ring. I think I might go back and watch it again. It’s a fun flick, after all.
