Inception, my thoughts on
Warning: very long. And quite late. But better late then never, right?
...and why “it was all a dream” is NOT a cop-out ending here.
So after watching "Inception," everyone seems to be trying to figure out whether the top falls in the last scene, and advancing various arguments in favor of one or the other. I'd just like to say that as far as I'm concerned, trying to figure out whether it falls is somewhat missing the point-what the film does, that I think is quite clever, is advance two parallel character arcs that could work with either interpretation, and so trying to definitively pick one or the other is a limited way of viewing the film.
Now, I think the audience is certainly allowed to pick which interpretation they personally find more meaningful and compelling-but if Nolan had wanted it to definitively be one or the other, he would have picked a different closing shot.
I'd also like to say that although one can choose whichever interpretation works better for them, both interpretations are definitely there through the fabric of the movie. The “maybe it's all a dream!” “twist” is no a wrench thrown into the works in the last scene, it is not just a bit of a self-satisfied wink-wink head-fuckery tacked on at the very end-it is part of a consistent story thread that was carefully interwoven through the movie, both in structure and in content, almost from the very beginning.
The very opening of the movie: showing us something we might think is real, and then having it be a dream, and then having that be simply yet another layer of the dream, right away establishes an atmosphere wherein we are asked to question the reality of things and not take what we are shown for granted. That, in retrospect, is fairly obvious but also perhaps not particularly compelling. What is compelling is the way the film structure starts following the rules of dreaming as soon as they are revealed to us.
After we are told that dreams-within dreams are possible, we are taken up through the levels to what we assume is "reality"--but we shouldn't assume. After Cobb first explains that the way you know you're in a dream is that you just arrive at places without knowing quite how you got there, the movie starts making very abrupt cuts between scenes, throwing characters this way and that. Cobb needs to go to Paris--now he's walking straight into the professor's classroom! He needs to meet Ariadne--there he is, standing in a hallway as she's walking out. He needs to talk to her--no preamble, there they are talking on the roof of somewhere. This was all happening so quickly, I got whiplash, and even wondered if the meeting was happening in dreams already (as their next-scene encounter was shown to be). When Cobb just as suddenly (and just as without any arriving there/establishing exposition) went to Morocco, and I tried to figure out whether that was a real-meeting or a dream-meeting too, I realized that the movie was actually trying to call my attention to this confusion. That is, the film was using this succession of scenes to forcibly illustrate just how little certainty we viewers could have of what was “real” and what was not. At that point, I began to feel that I was supposed to start questioning the dominant narrative itself, and to consider the possibility that it may well be a dream.
However, what I'd consider the most convincing piece of evidence for the dream theory was the professor's exhortation to Cobb to “get back to reality,” which literally only made sense if he was really telling Cobb to “wake up!” The professor repeats the line “get back to reality” with a deliberate insistence, even though Cobb is not, in fact, particularly distanced from reality as far as we see him. Certainly, he spends much of his time in dreams, but from what we're shown, he is quite aware of their illusory nature, and quite businesslike when he's under. Moreover, telling Cobb to face reality as a way to see his kids again makes no sense at all-Cobb is facing reality, and the reality is that he is wanted for murder and can't return to the states. Sure, we can take the prof's “get back to reality” to mean “quit dreamtheft and find a legal, non-dream-based line of work,” but how would that allow Cobb to see his kids again? They don't exactly give out legal pardons along with architecture degrees. No, the insistence that all of Cobb's problems would be solved if only he were to “get back to reality” seems to indicate that Cobb's current existence is a dream, and he would be reunited with his kids in real-life if only he were to wake up.
The unspoken motif of “wake up wake up wake up!” runs throughout the movie. Cobb is constantly asked to calibrate his understanding of reality, and of course he himself is tasked with telling other dreamers to “wake up” from what they think is reality over and over and over. And then there's Mal. The first time we see her, we already know they're both in a dream, but we don't yet know she's dead. Her questions for Cobb--“don't you miss me,” “don't you miss the kids,” and her pleas of “come back to me,” “you know what you have to do” all ring of “you're choosing dream-existence over our family, come back to us, wake up.” Of course, the film eventually provides the explanation that what she's asking him to do is drop down to Limbo, and live life with the dream-semblances of her and the kids-but it's worth noting that Mal treats herself and their kids as one unit whereas, if we take the film's reality at face value, they are separate. She is dead, the kids are still living, just inaccessible-there are two very different things that Cobb would “have to do” to get back to her vs getting back to them. He knows this. As a manifestation of his subconscious, she should know this. But she doesn't say “there's a way for us all to be together,” she simply says “you know what you have to do.” This is also the wording she uses when she accuses him of abandoning her-different from the more natural statement of “we can still be together,” if what she means is him giving in to dreams. There's a reason for her using that wording, and it's partly that it carries the idea that there is something Cobb knows, but chooses to ignore... or to forget. And the parallel with something else that someone knew but chose to forget is quite intentional.
Some other hints:
In Morocco, when we are told that some people pay to dream for hours at a time, with dream-times lasting several decades, Cobb explains that they do this because eventually it is the only way you can dream, and someone asks him if he's still capable of dreaming naturally. Immediately though, the dream-parlor proprietor interjects that Cobb has it wrong-that these people begin to consider their dreams their real life, and they come to the parlor not to sleep, but to be woken up. The question that should have been posed to Cobb as per this shift of perspective, then, is not whether he still dreams, but whether he is able to wake up.
The kids Cobb speaks to on the phone at the start of the film sound older than the kids of his memories. There are several strong suggestions that a fair amount of time has passed: he has a hard time recognizing their voices, the daughter sounds like she is beginning to resent his absence and not trust that he will come back, like she's been growing up without him. The kids we see at the end of the film, however, look the exact same age as the ones in his memories. That's incongruous on two levels: first of all, unless he's only been gone 3 months or so (which hardly seems long enough for the kind of desperation he exhibits, and the grandfather's cynical pronouncement that Cobb is never coming back), his kids (especially the boy) should already look older, since kids that young grow and change quite visibly at a very fast pace. Second of all, the daughter we heard on the phone sounds definitively older than the daughter shown: her voice sounds like the voice of an older child, and the emotions she expresses are too mature and complex for a girl as young as the one we see. The daughter-on-the-phone is beginning to distrust her father and to be angry at him for leaving-a child as young as the one we saw is simply incapable of those emotions.
When Cobb is reunited with his kids at the end, they are wearing pretty much the exact same clothes, and standing in the exact same pose as when he left them. That certainly casts suspicion on the reality of that vision.
Not quite a hint, but it just struck me as weird: Cobb calls the professor “grandfather,” but he doesn't seem to be his grandfather-from what we can tell, they met at university. Thus he is likely Mal's father. Even if he believed that Cobb didn't murder Mal, and accepts on a logical level that Cobb should not technically be held responsible for Mal's death, it is very strange that there is no tension between the two of them over the fact that participation in Cobb's experiments killed his daughter. The only shortness he exhibits with Cobb has to do with telling him he should give up his dream tinkering and come home-and like Mal, this is something he appears to think is actually in Cobb's power, but which Cobb chooses not to do.
So, having covered all that, what are my two parallel readings?
Reading 1. Well, in the surface reading of the movie, what happens is what seems to happen: Cobb and Mal were involved in testing out the possibility of the new dreamtech, and got waylaid in Limbo. Mal quickly gave in to the dream-reality and was content to remain there, and Cobb planted the suspicion that her life wasn't real in her mind, and that she could only escape to “true reality” through death, which pursued her even after she woke up, and she committed suicide. The guilt and grief has haunted Cobb ever since, but as the film progresses, with the help of his new team and the new experiences, he manages to resolve that guilt complex. At the end of the film, he is able to put the past behind him by killing the vestiges of that guilt as embodied by the dream-projection of his wife, and to return to his children, no longer obsessed with the dream-world and able to walk away from his totem. (It belonged to his wife and no longer has to do with him.) His emotional arc thus nicely resonates with the redemptive and positive arc of Fischer-he achieves his catharsis by helping another man obtain his.
But then. But then. There is the alternate reading.
Reading 2. In this reading, Cobb never made it all the way to waking from his and Mal's stay in Limbo. In this reading, Mal was right, and the level he took for “reality” was still just another layer of the dream-onion. Mal is still alive, and is there with his kids in the real-real-world, waiting for him to wake up. As such, his subconscious, aware of this on a buried level, constantly attempts to send him “wake up!” reminders. As mentioned before, it repeatedly puts him into situations where he has to tell other people that what they think is reality is in fact a dream--Saito, Ariadne, Fischer-and this interpretation provides a reason as to why the Mr. Charles gambit is Cobb's idea, and why he comes back to it again and again even though it does not always yield positive results. Cobb's subconscious has a need to expose the illusory nature of dream-reality. It sends him the dream parlor-proprietor and butts him against the professor's impatience with his refusal to return to reality, as well as having various characters question whether he really knows what he's doing. And of course, there's always Mal.
Mal, who pursues him and exposes the dream-reality for what it is; Mal, who sometimes outright tries to kill him... Mal who is really trying to hold out a chance for salvation to him, to remind him that he's still dreaming. To remind him that that he did go back on their promise, that he did abandon her. That he left her to go alone to waking reality while remaining in dreamland. In this alternate interpretation, the moment when Cobb “triumphs” over his subconscious and is finally able to kill Mal's projection is not a triumph over guilt and the past, but instead, a triumph of determined delusion against reality. It is darkly, horribly ironic: at the moment we think he is asserting his will to live in freedom, he is actually killing off the last vestiges of his subconsciousness' attempt at a wake-up call.
From then on he is free to “see” his children's faces, exactly as he left them. He was right in saying that his imagination could not provide a dream-counterpart to Mal that would live up to her real self-and so in his dream reality, Mal is dead. Her presence is not there to disturb its veracity. His walking away from his totem-originally her totem, her continual reminder of examining one's reality-is not the affirmation of life over dreams but the opposite.
And now the relation to Fisher's arc is also an ironic one-but we should remember that Fischer's catharsis, too, was an illusion. We are left with positive feelings concerning Fischer's catharsis at the end of the film, and the same film cleverly makes us forget or disregard the fact that they are all based on a lie. Fischer's father was not actually proud of him-this was a false idea perpetuated through dreams. Both Cobb and Fischer, in this interpretation, achieve a false redemption, one that is based on grounds that are the opposite of reality.
There are some people who've proposed that the movie is about an unknown inception that Ariadne or someone else is trying to enact on Cobb, but aside from the pleasing symmetry that the film “Inception” should be itself an inception, I don't see why that should be true. That has too many unknowns, too many things we have to assume or guess at or imagine from outside the film. The alternative interpretation provided above is hermeneutically sealed, it does not require us to go outside of what the film itself shows us. The film presents us with an exposition of futuristic dreamtech, and with tips on how to tell if one is dreaming, and then, by having us identify with Cobb's character, gives us the experience of a dreamer who is given hints that he is, in fact, in a dream-and like Cobb, we can take those hints or ignore them.
Why does Cobb choose dreamworld over reality, one may ask? Well, after her first shared dream, Ariadne sees the dangers and yet comes back anyway, because, as Cobb states, for someone who wants to build and create, it's an offer that's impossible to resist. Cobb is likewise addicted, and ends up choosing creative ability over life and love (albeit cushioned with the type of circumstances that will allow him to take dreamlife for real, unlike with Limbo). There are some problems with this interpretation, I admit: isn't dying in Limbo supposed to take you straight out? How would Cobb have gotten trapped in a dream-level under that of reality if both he and Mal commited suicide in Limbo? But then, I don't know. We only have Cobb's word for it, after all-and we don't see anyone else die in Limbo and wake up. When Cobb comes for Saito, we don't actually see either of them commit suicide-and the sedative wears off at that point for everyone anyway. Maybe dying in Limbo simply takes you one level back up. Maybe it's a plot hole.
But overall, these two parallel interpretations, existing on either side of the token fall, are what I'd put my money on.
...and why “it was all a dream” is NOT a cop-out ending here.
So after watching "Inception," everyone seems to be trying to figure out whether the top falls in the last scene, and advancing various arguments in favor of one or the other. I'd just like to say that as far as I'm concerned, trying to figure out whether it falls is somewhat missing the point-what the film does, that I think is quite clever, is advance two parallel character arcs that could work with either interpretation, and so trying to definitively pick one or the other is a limited way of viewing the film.
Now, I think the audience is certainly allowed to pick which interpretation they personally find more meaningful and compelling-but if Nolan had wanted it to definitively be one or the other, he would have picked a different closing shot.
I'd also like to say that although one can choose whichever interpretation works better for them, both interpretations are definitely there through the fabric of the movie. The “maybe it's all a dream!” “twist” is no a wrench thrown into the works in the last scene, it is not just a bit of a self-satisfied wink-wink head-fuckery tacked on at the very end-it is part of a consistent story thread that was carefully interwoven through the movie, both in structure and in content, almost from the very beginning.
The very opening of the movie: showing us something we might think is real, and then having it be a dream, and then having that be simply yet another layer of the dream, right away establishes an atmosphere wherein we are asked to question the reality of things and not take what we are shown for granted. That, in retrospect, is fairly obvious but also perhaps not particularly compelling. What is compelling is the way the film structure starts following the rules of dreaming as soon as they are revealed to us.
After we are told that dreams-within dreams are possible, we are taken up through the levels to what we assume is "reality"--but we shouldn't assume. After Cobb first explains that the way you know you're in a dream is that you just arrive at places without knowing quite how you got there, the movie starts making very abrupt cuts between scenes, throwing characters this way and that. Cobb needs to go to Paris--now he's walking straight into the professor's classroom! He needs to meet Ariadne--there he is, standing in a hallway as she's walking out. He needs to talk to her--no preamble, there they are talking on the roof of somewhere. This was all happening so quickly, I got whiplash, and even wondered if the meeting was happening in dreams already (as their next-scene encounter was shown to be). When Cobb just as suddenly (and just as without any arriving there/establishing exposition) went to Morocco, and I tried to figure out whether that was a real-meeting or a dream-meeting too, I realized that the movie was actually trying to call my attention to this confusion. That is, the film was using this succession of scenes to forcibly illustrate just how little certainty we viewers could have of what was “real” and what was not. At that point, I began to feel that I was supposed to start questioning the dominant narrative itself, and to consider the possibility that it may well be a dream.
However, what I'd consider the most convincing piece of evidence for the dream theory was the professor's exhortation to Cobb to “get back to reality,” which literally only made sense if he was really telling Cobb to “wake up!” The professor repeats the line “get back to reality” with a deliberate insistence, even though Cobb is not, in fact, particularly distanced from reality as far as we see him. Certainly, he spends much of his time in dreams, but from what we're shown, he is quite aware of their illusory nature, and quite businesslike when he's under. Moreover, telling Cobb to face reality as a way to see his kids again makes no sense at all-Cobb is facing reality, and the reality is that he is wanted for murder and can't return to the states. Sure, we can take the prof's “get back to reality” to mean “quit dreamtheft and find a legal, non-dream-based line of work,” but how would that allow Cobb to see his kids again? They don't exactly give out legal pardons along with architecture degrees. No, the insistence that all of Cobb's problems would be solved if only he were to “get back to reality” seems to indicate that Cobb's current existence is a dream, and he would be reunited with his kids in real-life if only he were to wake up.
The unspoken motif of “wake up wake up wake up!” runs throughout the movie. Cobb is constantly asked to calibrate his understanding of reality, and of course he himself is tasked with telling other dreamers to “wake up” from what they think is reality over and over and over. And then there's Mal. The first time we see her, we already know they're both in a dream, but we don't yet know she's dead. Her questions for Cobb--“don't you miss me,” “don't you miss the kids,” and her pleas of “come back to me,” “you know what you have to do” all ring of “you're choosing dream-existence over our family, come back to us, wake up.” Of course, the film eventually provides the explanation that what she's asking him to do is drop down to Limbo, and live life with the dream-semblances of her and the kids-but it's worth noting that Mal treats herself and their kids as one unit whereas, if we take the film's reality at face value, they are separate. She is dead, the kids are still living, just inaccessible-there are two very different things that Cobb would “have to do” to get back to her vs getting back to them. He knows this. As a manifestation of his subconscious, she should know this. But she doesn't say “there's a way for us all to be together,” she simply says “you know what you have to do.” This is also the wording she uses when she accuses him of abandoning her-different from the more natural statement of “we can still be together,” if what she means is him giving in to dreams. There's a reason for her using that wording, and it's partly that it carries the idea that there is something Cobb knows, but chooses to ignore... or to forget. And the parallel with something else that someone knew but chose to forget is quite intentional.
Some other hints:
In Morocco, when we are told that some people pay to dream for hours at a time, with dream-times lasting several decades, Cobb explains that they do this because eventually it is the only way you can dream, and someone asks him if he's still capable of dreaming naturally. Immediately though, the dream-parlor proprietor interjects that Cobb has it wrong-that these people begin to consider their dreams their real life, and they come to the parlor not to sleep, but to be woken up. The question that should have been posed to Cobb as per this shift of perspective, then, is not whether he still dreams, but whether he is able to wake up.
The kids Cobb speaks to on the phone at the start of the film sound older than the kids of his memories. There are several strong suggestions that a fair amount of time has passed: he has a hard time recognizing their voices, the daughter sounds like she is beginning to resent his absence and not trust that he will come back, like she's been growing up without him. The kids we see at the end of the film, however, look the exact same age as the ones in his memories. That's incongruous on two levels: first of all, unless he's only been gone 3 months or so (which hardly seems long enough for the kind of desperation he exhibits, and the grandfather's cynical pronouncement that Cobb is never coming back), his kids (especially the boy) should already look older, since kids that young grow and change quite visibly at a very fast pace. Second of all, the daughter we heard on the phone sounds definitively older than the daughter shown: her voice sounds like the voice of an older child, and the emotions she expresses are too mature and complex for a girl as young as the one we see. The daughter-on-the-phone is beginning to distrust her father and to be angry at him for leaving-a child as young as the one we saw is simply incapable of those emotions.
When Cobb is reunited with his kids at the end, they are wearing pretty much the exact same clothes, and standing in the exact same pose as when he left them. That certainly casts suspicion on the reality of that vision.
Not quite a hint, but it just struck me as weird: Cobb calls the professor “grandfather,” but he doesn't seem to be his grandfather-from what we can tell, they met at university. Thus he is likely Mal's father. Even if he believed that Cobb didn't murder Mal, and accepts on a logical level that Cobb should not technically be held responsible for Mal's death, it is very strange that there is no tension between the two of them over the fact that participation in Cobb's experiments killed his daughter. The only shortness he exhibits with Cobb has to do with telling him he should give up his dream tinkering and come home-and like Mal, this is something he appears to think is actually in Cobb's power, but which Cobb chooses not to do.
So, having covered all that, what are my two parallel readings?
Reading 1. Well, in the surface reading of the movie, what happens is what seems to happen: Cobb and Mal were involved in testing out the possibility of the new dreamtech, and got waylaid in Limbo. Mal quickly gave in to the dream-reality and was content to remain there, and Cobb planted the suspicion that her life wasn't real in her mind, and that she could only escape to “true reality” through death, which pursued her even after she woke up, and she committed suicide. The guilt and grief has haunted Cobb ever since, but as the film progresses, with the help of his new team and the new experiences, he manages to resolve that guilt complex. At the end of the film, he is able to put the past behind him by killing the vestiges of that guilt as embodied by the dream-projection of his wife, and to return to his children, no longer obsessed with the dream-world and able to walk away from his totem. (It belonged to his wife and no longer has to do with him.) His emotional arc thus nicely resonates with the redemptive and positive arc of Fischer-he achieves his catharsis by helping another man obtain his.
But then. But then. There is the alternate reading.
Reading 2. In this reading, Cobb never made it all the way to waking from his and Mal's stay in Limbo. In this reading, Mal was right, and the level he took for “reality” was still just another layer of the dream-onion. Mal is still alive, and is there with his kids in the real-real-world, waiting for him to wake up. As such, his subconscious, aware of this on a buried level, constantly attempts to send him “wake up!” reminders. As mentioned before, it repeatedly puts him into situations where he has to tell other people that what they think is reality is in fact a dream--Saito, Ariadne, Fischer-and this interpretation provides a reason as to why the Mr. Charles gambit is Cobb's idea, and why he comes back to it again and again even though it does not always yield positive results. Cobb's subconscious has a need to expose the illusory nature of dream-reality. It sends him the dream parlor-proprietor and butts him against the professor's impatience with his refusal to return to reality, as well as having various characters question whether he really knows what he's doing. And of course, there's always Mal.
Mal, who pursues him and exposes the dream-reality for what it is; Mal, who sometimes outright tries to kill him... Mal who is really trying to hold out a chance for salvation to him, to remind him that he's still dreaming. To remind him that that he did go back on their promise, that he did abandon her. That he left her to go alone to waking reality while remaining in dreamland. In this alternate interpretation, the moment when Cobb “triumphs” over his subconscious and is finally able to kill Mal's projection is not a triumph over guilt and the past, but instead, a triumph of determined delusion against reality. It is darkly, horribly ironic: at the moment we think he is asserting his will to live in freedom, he is actually killing off the last vestiges of his subconsciousness' attempt at a wake-up call.
From then on he is free to “see” his children's faces, exactly as he left them. He was right in saying that his imagination could not provide a dream-counterpart to Mal that would live up to her real self-and so in his dream reality, Mal is dead. Her presence is not there to disturb its veracity. His walking away from his totem-originally her totem, her continual reminder of examining one's reality-is not the affirmation of life over dreams but the opposite.
And now the relation to Fisher's arc is also an ironic one-but we should remember that Fischer's catharsis, too, was an illusion. We are left with positive feelings concerning Fischer's catharsis at the end of the film, and the same film cleverly makes us forget or disregard the fact that they are all based on a lie. Fischer's father was not actually proud of him-this was a false idea perpetuated through dreams. Both Cobb and Fischer, in this interpretation, achieve a false redemption, one that is based on grounds that are the opposite of reality.
There are some people who've proposed that the movie is about an unknown inception that Ariadne or someone else is trying to enact on Cobb, but aside from the pleasing symmetry that the film “Inception” should be itself an inception, I don't see why that should be true. That has too many unknowns, too many things we have to assume or guess at or imagine from outside the film. The alternative interpretation provided above is hermeneutically sealed, it does not require us to go outside of what the film itself shows us. The film presents us with an exposition of futuristic dreamtech, and with tips on how to tell if one is dreaming, and then, by having us identify with Cobb's character, gives us the experience of a dreamer who is given hints that he is, in fact, in a dream-and like Cobb, we can take those hints or ignore them.
Why does Cobb choose dreamworld over reality, one may ask? Well, after her first shared dream, Ariadne sees the dangers and yet comes back anyway, because, as Cobb states, for someone who wants to build and create, it's an offer that's impossible to resist. Cobb is likewise addicted, and ends up choosing creative ability over life and love (albeit cushioned with the type of circumstances that will allow him to take dreamlife for real, unlike with Limbo). There are some problems with this interpretation, I admit: isn't dying in Limbo supposed to take you straight out? How would Cobb have gotten trapped in a dream-level under that of reality if both he and Mal commited suicide in Limbo? But then, I don't know. We only have Cobb's word for it, after all-and we don't see anyone else die in Limbo and wake up. When Cobb comes for Saito, we don't actually see either of them commit suicide-and the sedative wears off at that point for everyone anyway. Maybe dying in Limbo simply takes you one level back up. Maybe it's a plot hole.
But overall, these two parallel interpretations, existing on either side of the token fall, are what I'd put my money on.