SusannahINCEPTION: THE SPOILER EDITION
August 8th 2010 01:29
INCEPTION: THE SPOILER EDITION
Written & Directed by Christopher Nolan
Inception makes you think. The ending is not so much a twist, as something that you can discuss and debate with other filmgoers afterwards. The beauty of the film is that the ending can be seen two different ways, and the narrative has been constructed by Christopher Nolan specifically to give clues both for, and against, Cobb still being in a dream-state at the end. These are some useful arguments that I have found on message boards, and on various comments after reviews posted online. If there are any plot inaccuracies, that is because I have left the argument from the original poster unchanged.
As someone stated on a message board: “Nolan was the architect; the movie was his dream. The audience was sharing his dream. With the top in the end, kept spinning and not exactly shown to the audience the outcome [sic], the inception is practiced. You will choose your own idea about the outcome and it will grow like a virus in you to the point you will watch the movie again and again only to see that your view holds together. Yet, the movie is actually open for many interpretations if you ask me. In this case he chose not to show you the top falling down. Thus the idea is implemented.”
1) In all scenes believed to be reality throughout the movie, Cobb is definitely not wearing a wedding ring. In all dreams, Cobb is wearing the wedding ring. Nolan clearly set it up consistently so that dreams = ring, reality = no ring. At the end he does not have a ring. The rule that Nolan set is no ring = reality.
2) The children are wearing different clothing at the end. To this point, I have focused only on the differences in the girl’s clothing. The girl is wearing a solid pink dress in the dreams. In the ending scene (reality) she is wearing a pink dress with a white t-shirt underneath. Nolan purposely makes the outfits ultra-similar so it will create the idea for nay-sayers to claim it was a dream. But if you look closely you will notice they are different.
As someone stated on a message board: “Nolan was the architect; the movie was his dream. The audience was sharing his dream. With the top in the end, kept spinning and not exactly shown to the audience the outcome [sic], the inception is practiced. You will choose your own idea about the outcome and it will grow like a virus in you to the point you will watch the movie again and again only to see that your view holds together. Yet, the movie is actually open for many interpretations if you ask me. In this case he chose not to show you the top falling down. Thus the idea is implemented.”
On why at the end of Inception Cobb is not still dreaming:
1) In all scenes believed to be reality throughout the movie, Cobb is definitely not wearing a wedding ring. In all dreams, Cobb is wearing the wedding ring. Nolan clearly set it up consistently so that dreams = ring, reality = no ring. At the end he does not have a ring. The rule that Nolan set is no ring = reality.
2) The children are wearing different clothing at the end. To this point, I have focused only on the differences in the girl’s clothing. The girl is wearing a solid pink dress in the dreams. In the ending scene (reality) she is wearing a pink dress with a white t-shirt underneath. Nolan purposely makes the outfits ultra-similar so it will create the idea for nay-sayers to claim it was a dream. But if you look closely you will notice they are different.
Inception poster image 1
3) The children are bigger and older at the end. The end credits list two children playing the girl, and two playing the boy. Their voices are older sounding in the end as well.
4) Cobb refuses to look at his children in the dreams, saying that "if I will ever see their faces again, I have to get home, to the real world." He stated that he will not give up until he sees their faces in the real world. He knows he can see them in the dream world, but he states that he will not do it until it is real.
5) The top goes from perfectly spinning, to wobbling slightly, to wobbling a lot, which implies it should fall next. I know should does not mean it will, but in previous dreams the top never wobbles like that, it goes smoothly non-stop.
6) Remember the scene in the outdoor cafe in which Cobb tells Ariadne that in dreams it always seems that we are "dropped" into the action and that we can never remember the "beginning" or "how we got there"? Admittedly, the last scene is very dream-like - the warm lighting, the children wearing similar clothes and playing in the exact same position - but does Cobb just "show up"? Not at all. In fact, the preceding couple of minutes to this last scene are visually the most banal and non-dream like: Cobb wakes up on the plane. Cobb waits in line. Cobb goes through immigration. There's that extended shot of Cobb and his team and Fischer waiting for luggage at baggage claim (how exciting). Then Cobb sees his father in law, who is there to pick him up and take him home.
What's the point of Nolan showing all these banal, everyday aspects of airport routine? To show there is a logical, normal, decidedly non-dreamlike process to how Cobb ended up at home seeing his children. The ending is real, and you could argue it has nothing to do with whatever ends up happening to the top. There's no faceless corporate boogeymen, no walls closing in, no Mal popping around, no staircases that end in other staircases: it's a plane at touchdown, an immigrations check, a baggage claim shot, a guy waiting to pick up his son in law at the airport. So the audience knows - and Cobb knows - "how he got" to his children at the end. That would not happen in a dream.
1) Cobb is still dreaming. This explains why the movie starts off with him meeting Old Saito, since neither we, nor Cobb, know how he gets there before this. This scene abruptly changes to him trying to steal from a memory from Young Saito, and while we do not question what came before this, it is quite possible that nothing came before this.
2) Cobb explains that you can think faster while dreaming than you can while awake, which is totally legit, and explains why you can have an hour's time pass in a 5 minute dream. But that does not explain why you'd experience time faster while dreaming within a dream. In fact, his explanation makes the phenomenon of compounded time increasing for dreams within dreams impossible. Your brain would not feed any faster on its own thoughts in a dream just because you are dreaming that you are dreaming.
3) Cobb and his wife are seen together walking as an old couple, but when they kill themselves on the train track they are young. Cobb explains that you do not notice the things that are strange about a dream until you wake up, but it is certainly strange that they would go from being old to dying young.
4) Cobb refuses to look at his children in the dreams, saying that "if I will ever see their faces again, I have to get home, to the real world." He stated that he will not give up until he sees their faces in the real world. He knows he can see them in the dream world, but he states that he will not do it until it is real.
5) The top goes from perfectly spinning, to wobbling slightly, to wobbling a lot, which implies it should fall next. I know should does not mean it will, but in previous dreams the top never wobbles like that, it goes smoothly non-stop.
6) Remember the scene in the outdoor cafe in which Cobb tells Ariadne that in dreams it always seems that we are "dropped" into the action and that we can never remember the "beginning" or "how we got there"? Admittedly, the last scene is very dream-like - the warm lighting, the children wearing similar clothes and playing in the exact same position - but does Cobb just "show up"? Not at all. In fact, the preceding couple of minutes to this last scene are visually the most banal and non-dream like: Cobb wakes up on the plane. Cobb waits in line. Cobb goes through immigration. There's that extended shot of Cobb and his team and Fischer waiting for luggage at baggage claim (how exciting). Then Cobb sees his father in law, who is there to pick him up and take him home.
What's the point of Nolan showing all these banal, everyday aspects of airport routine? To show there is a logical, normal, decidedly non-dreamlike process to how Cobb ended up at home seeing his children. The ending is real, and you could argue it has nothing to do with whatever ends up happening to the top. There's no faceless corporate boogeymen, no walls closing in, no Mal popping around, no staircases that end in other staircases: it's a plane at touchdown, an immigrations check, a baggage claim shot, a guy waiting to pick up his son in law at the airport. So the audience knows - and Cobb knows - "how he got" to his children at the end. That would not happen in a dream.
On why at the end of Inception Cobb is still dreaming:
1) Cobb is still dreaming. This explains why the movie starts off with him meeting Old Saito, since neither we, nor Cobb, know how he gets there before this. This scene abruptly changes to him trying to steal from a memory from Young Saito, and while we do not question what came before this, it is quite possible that nothing came before this.
2) Cobb explains that you can think faster while dreaming than you can while awake, which is totally legit, and explains why you can have an hour's time pass in a 5 minute dream. But that does not explain why you'd experience time faster while dreaming within a dream. In fact, his explanation makes the phenomenon of compounded time increasing for dreams within dreams impossible. Your brain would not feed any faster on its own thoughts in a dream just because you are dreaming that you are dreaming.
3) Cobb and his wife are seen together walking as an old couple, but when they kill themselves on the train track they are young. Cobb explains that you do not notice the things that are strange about a dream until you wake up, but it is certainly strange that they would go from being old to dying young.
Inception poster image 2
4) Old Saito’s limbo beach is identical to Cobb's limbo beach, and his kids are playing on the beach in the beginning of the movie. You could say that they are in limbo together. But if you are saying that Cobb is still in limbo, then maybe they are all just figments of his imagination/sub-conscious, and it looks like Cobb's limbo because it is Cobb's limbo.
5) Cobb's wife says that she knows that they are not her kids, that a mother can tell, and then she jumps from the window across from Cobb. How does she get there? Surely forensics would be able to tell that she jumped from the room across from theirs, rather than being thrown out of her window. And yet, in a dream, that would not matter. I think that, like Cobb's wife, Cobb cannot try to have a real relationship with his kids or parents, since he would eventually recognize that they are not real, which explains the line from his wife at the end: "what seems more likely, trying to run from superpower multi-national corporations, trying to get back to your family.”
6) Cobb is the only one that does not have a totem. Cobb says the way best way to distinguish between reality and dreams is to make a totem. Yet Cobb does not make one. Cobb’s totem is borrowed from Mal. It is her old totem. The top was Mal's. Mal died in the dream, returning to reality, and Cobb takes the top to use as his totem.
7) And even if it belongs to Cobb, it only tells whether the owner is in someone else’s dream, as the other person cannot copy a particular totem without having touched it. It does not tell whether the owner him/herself is still dreaming: a perplexing situation which a man faces while he is in limbo.
8) If Cobb is still dreaming, then he never actually touched the totem in real life. Also, he was in a shared dream with the person whose totem he took. There is no way that the top can be used to prove or disprove reality at any point in the film.
9) If Cobb is still dreaming, and this is all in Cobb’s head then there are two possibilities:
His wife wakes up by killing herself in the dream, but he does not. He creates this idea that he incepted the idea of "this world is not real" in his wife's mind so that she would wake up. Perhaps the reality is that she woke up, and he is rationalizing his existence in Limbo by identifying himself as the origin of that idea to confirm that this is reality and that his wife was wrong in killing herself.
Second is that he is in Limbo by himself. Who knows if inception, extraction or even dream sharing is possible. Maybe he is just in a coma and his brain is active but he cannot wake up. He dreams of his wife and kids, but those dreams cannot last because, as he says, they are just a shade of his real life. So his brain creates this dream reality to explain why he cannot see his kids, nor wife, and when things do not make sense, it is because he is in a dream, and then he imagines himself waking up from that dream, while still dreaming. Mal cannot appear in Cobb's "reality state" because he cannot create a convincing version of her. He knows her too well to fool himself with a "shade" of her. Cobb spends most of his time in the movie with people who he barely knows. Cobb is externalizing his own experiences into a fictional (or dream version of) persons or people. The person who gets the most screen time that Cobb should know the best is Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Arthur, and yet he has the least character development of anyone in the movie.
An interesting point is that if you started the movie again from the very first scene right after the very last scene in the film, the movie would still make sense. Seems he's stuck in a loop chasing after a real version of his wife and kids, but does not know that he is dreaming, or how to wake up.
5) Cobb's wife says that she knows that they are not her kids, that a mother can tell, and then she jumps from the window across from Cobb. How does she get there? Surely forensics would be able to tell that she jumped from the room across from theirs, rather than being thrown out of her window. And yet, in a dream, that would not matter. I think that, like Cobb's wife, Cobb cannot try to have a real relationship with his kids or parents, since he would eventually recognize that they are not real, which explains the line from his wife at the end: "what seems more likely, trying to run from superpower multi-national corporations, trying to get back to your family.”
6) Cobb is the only one that does not have a totem. Cobb says the way best way to distinguish between reality and dreams is to make a totem. Yet Cobb does not make one. Cobb’s totem is borrowed from Mal. It is her old totem. The top was Mal's. Mal died in the dream, returning to reality, and Cobb takes the top to use as his totem.
7) And even if it belongs to Cobb, it only tells whether the owner is in someone else’s dream, as the other person cannot copy a particular totem without having touched it. It does not tell whether the owner him/herself is still dreaming: a perplexing situation which a man faces while he is in limbo.
8) If Cobb is still dreaming, then he never actually touched the totem in real life. Also, he was in a shared dream with the person whose totem he took. There is no way that the top can be used to prove or disprove reality at any point in the film.
9) If Cobb is still dreaming, and this is all in Cobb’s head then there are two possibilities:
His wife wakes up by killing herself in the dream, but he does not. He creates this idea that he incepted the idea of "this world is not real" in his wife's mind so that she would wake up. Perhaps the reality is that she woke up, and he is rationalizing his existence in Limbo by identifying himself as the origin of that idea to confirm that this is reality and that his wife was wrong in killing herself.
Second is that he is in Limbo by himself. Who knows if inception, extraction or even dream sharing is possible. Maybe he is just in a coma and his brain is active but he cannot wake up. He dreams of his wife and kids, but those dreams cannot last because, as he says, they are just a shade of his real life. So his brain creates this dream reality to explain why he cannot see his kids, nor wife, and when things do not make sense, it is because he is in a dream, and then he imagines himself waking up from that dream, while still dreaming. Mal cannot appear in Cobb's "reality state" because he cannot create a convincing version of her. He knows her too well to fool himself with a "shade" of her. Cobb spends most of his time in the movie with people who he barely knows. Cobb is externalizing his own experiences into a fictional (or dream version of) persons or people. The person who gets the most screen time that Cobb should know the best is Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Arthur, and yet he has the least character development of anyone in the movie.
An interesting point is that if you started the movie again from the very first scene right after the very last scene in the film, the movie would still make sense. Seems he's stuck in a loop chasing after a real version of his wife and kids, but does not know that he is dreaming, or how to wake up.
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Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
i was meaning to do a similar thing on my blog but was waiting for my second screening.
he wedding ring theory is one that I like, though for several other reasons I believe Cobb is caught in limbo.
One theory I like is that the whole thing is Saito pulling a Mr Charles on Cobb and that Cobb is in fact the victim of Inception.
Haven't got time to elaborate at the moment but may come back.
Comment by Susannah
Film Rant
Any other theories are completely welcome! Just post them in the comments for others to view.
I just put together the main theories that I found, but I am sure there are lots of other interesting theories to be put forward.