Something that’s been bothering me since I saw Inception for the second time and have been reading interpretations and reactions online:
The concept of totems is explained in the film as something that only you know the exact properties of. It would be impossible for an architect or someone else to know and recreate those exact properties (the spinning top, the weighted die, etc.). Thus, you can use your totem to be sure that you aren’t in someone else’s dream.
Most of the discussion about the ending of Inception seems to revolve around the spinning top and whether it wobbles and falls, with references to all the other times he spins it during the movie. Seems to me that this is pretty meaningless since I can’t see anything to prevent it from being Cobb’s dream (which is the usual hypothesis – that he doesn’t actually get to see his kids again). It seems perfectly reasonable that if your brain knows the exact weight and feel of the chess piece, that you could easily replicate that in your own dream.
The totem doesn’t seem to be any kind of useful tool for telling dream from reality. Rather it only serves the purpose of making sure you’re not being operated on by a 3rd party.
Anything I’m missing here?
(This is not even to mention the fact that the totem isn’t even Cobb’s, but rather belonged to Mal, which makes it fairly worthless.)
To determine whether you are in a dream or reality. It has a secret but fantastic property that only works in dreams. If it fails to exhibit the fantastic property, then you are not dreaming.
To determine if you are in someone else’s dream. Your real life totem has a secret property. If it has some other magical property, or is realistic but different than the real object, then you must be in someone else’s dream.
I think the key here is, your totem must have two properties: something about it is unique but secret in real life, and also it has a secret fantastical superpower that only works in dreams.
OTOH: Cobb’s totem has one fatal flaw: he inherited it from his wife rather than designing it completely on his own. BUT this is very very unlikely. The only person who could take advantage of this is Mal - REAL Mal, not shadow Mal, and she wouldn’t want to trick him into thinking he was dreaming since her goal was to convince him he needed to wake up.
I think the reason people get confused is because for most of the totems, they only show either of the two secret properties. For Cobb, we see the dream fantasy property (infinite spinning). For Eames and Adriane we see the real life secret (special weight distribution).
people are confused because Nolan didn’t tell, show, or even imply there needs to be dual properties. in fact, i’m not convinced there needs to be dual properties, or even totems in general.
you say there needs to be a “fantastic property” to differentiate between your own dream and someone else’s dream and yet cobb repeatedly uses the neverending top and only the neverending property to check if he’s in a dream. he takes the never-endingness to be the end-all be-all of dream state.
that’s because the “fantastic property” is mental. this makes all the physical properties of ariadne’s and eames’s totems irrelevant. nolan wrote them wrong. a specially crafted chess piece and a loaded dice makes no difference in dream world. as long as you believe the piece to be special, and the dice loaded, then they will be.
the inconsistency doesn’t point to duality, it just points to a MISTAKE with the movie of which there are plenty.
Call it a cop-out if you want, but I got the impression from the movie that going in dreams was still a new science and that no one was really sure what the rules were and that a lot of it was theory.
To ‘get’ the movie you have to accept several completely impossible concepts at the “level 0 dream” stage:
That you can participate in someone else’s dream in the first place.
That there’s a machine that can facilitate this for multiple participants.
That dreaming within a dream speeds up the experience of time.
That to get out of one level of a dream you need to die.
The “drop” and all that bumph.
The entire chase he endures in Africa is real.
That people’s subconscious can become “security” against intruders.
I’m good with “willing suspension of disbelief” but that’s a pretty big stretch.
In my opinion, the entire bloody thing is a dream - the Africa piece foreshadows this - and thus any logic one tries to impose on it is doomed to failure.
Thus, and here’s my point, the stuff about the tokens is nonsense. That the token at the end wobbles means nothing, because he’s been in a dream since the beginning of the movie.
In this particular case, the totem is a top that has the property in dreams that it will not fall over/stop spinning. This would be a fairly reliable indicator that the person is in a dream if it doesn’t stop spinning/never falls over. Having it stop spinning/fall over is not a guarantee you are not dreaming, however.
Why would it be worthless? He took on the totem after she died. It was her idea that he implemented after their trek to limbo.
The more significant criticism is that he tells just about everybody how his totem works. That makes it useless as an indicator that he is being worked on, only effective for demonstrating that he is dreaming.
jackdavinci said:
I don’t think it is understood to be this way. You may have a point about how totems should work, but there’s no indication in the film that they expect this dichotomy. They consistently describe Cobb’s totem’s behavior as the same manner of tell as the other totems.
jjimm said:
That’s not accurate. You can get out of a level of dreaming by completing the dream (accomplishing the goal), or by being pulled out from the prior level (the bump), or by dying. Dying works simply by stopping you dreaming at that level, so you return by default to the previous state/next level up.
Unless you are going for 3 levels deep, which apparently doesn’t boot you up a level, but rather gets you caught in a collective limbo which really doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.