Inception

[chuckro]

I saw Inception, I enjoyed it (though not quite as much as The Prestige), and I recommend it. And I feel the need to ramble about what was going on.

Okay, so, the movie can be interpreted a bunch of ways depending on what parts are dreams versus "reality". My possible interpretations depend on a reliable narrator--that is, that everything we are shown on screen "actually happened" from someone's point of view. If you assume the details shown on screen are inaccurate, everything goes out the window.

1. It was all really as presented. Cobb found Saito in Limbo, pulled them both out, woke up on the plane, met his father and went to see his kids, and the top fell over right after the camera cut away. Pros: Happy ending. Support: Apparently the promotional tops the studio gave out could spin for a solid minute and a half if you spun them right.

2. It was as presented, up until the point Cobb woke up on the plane. He and Saito were still in Limbo, and he dreamed the entire ending sequence. The actual ending was that while the job went off as planned and Fisher split up the company, when they landed Cobb was arrested and Saito was a vegetable. Support: This would explain why Cobb's father was there when he was supposed to be teaching in France, and why the top didn't fall.

3. The "top level" is still a dream: Mal was right, they were still dreaming when they got out of limbo, and she woke up by killing herself. Except for the earliest flashbacks, the entire movie was Cobb's dream and the "projection" of Mal was actually her going in to try to get him out. In the end, he rejects that, and either #1 or #2 happens, but either way he's still dreaming. Support: Mal herself mentions how much his reality of being hunted matches being attacked by projections.

4. The "top level" is a dream, but the ending was in reality. The entire story, including the flashbacks of Mal, are a dream Cobb had on the plane, which he inserted the other passengers into. Mal may be dead, divorced, or non-existant and he's married to someone else. For some other reason, Cobb has been away from his kids for a while and returning to see them. Support: Explains the action-movie, hunted nature of the entire film; explains why no one on the team speaks to each other after the flight. Several exchange glances and Saito makes a phone call, but none of that is particularly out of the ordinary for strangers interacting.

5. The plot is "real" up until sometime after we last see the top fall, before they get on the plane. The rest of that is an inception Adriane is performing on Cobb, probably at his father's behest, to get him to let go of Mal and come back to his children. The murder charges probably aren't real in this case--he was just staying away out of guilt--and the ending may be real. Alternately, #1 or #2 could be accurate, but Adriane was also incepting Cobb in addition to the inception on Fisher. Support: Adriane's constant prying and pushing, and accompanying him into limbo near the end. It seems to go beyond mere concern and her skills seem far beyond someone introduced to this technology only a short time before.

6. Cobb didn't incept Mal; he incepted himself. He convinced himself that there were dream-layers, there was a dream-limbo, and that there was a "reality" at the top. Actually, this existance presented in the movie has infinite layers, and you move through them by dreaming or dying, and in some of those layers you can be a god. Mal was right that she needed to die to escape an unreal world; Cobb had convinced himself not only that he was in the real world, but that there was a real world at all. (A lighter version of this tags onto #3.)

As I noted to Jethrien: I wonder if Nolan et al actually has an idea of what he thinks is "really" going on, or if he intentionally lets it stay open-ended so as to not color any of the possibilities for the audience?

Comments

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

If you're ever wondering whether you're in a dream, just go pull a math textbook off the shelf - one in a subject you don't know. If it makes internal sense and you can learn from it, either you're not in a dream, or your subconscious mind is a genius :-P

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Or that whoever's controlling the dream knows more about math than you do...

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I actually had a dream last night about taking a chemistry final that we were allowed a cheat sheet, but I hadn't known that. And so it was all stuff that I knew I had learned at one point but couldn't remember, and if I'd known I could have had a cheat sheet, totally would have written down. And thinking back - I can remember most of the questions, and they are indeed all stuff I've learned but forgotten. I haven't used Maxwell's equations in five years or so. I can remember some basic information about them, but I cannot tell you what they are.

But that's unusual. I think your dreams tend to track more exactly to your real life than mine do. Math textbooks are not usually available when one is Batgirl in a pit trap, or riding fish.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I'm more in the cubby camp--my dream last night included some sort of explanation of separate state and federal jurisdictions.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the weird vividness of many of my dreams is connected to the fact that I've never been able to lucid dream. My dreams are routinely so weird that it's more like being in a novel than in my real life. It's not like there's some little element that will throw me and make me realize that I'm dreaming. It's full immersive weirdness from beginning to end.

I cannot remember ever having the question of whether I am currently dreaming or not. It doesn't occur to me to ask in dreams. Although I do have memories of other dreams while dreaming - I will think about things that occurred in previous dreams while dreaming. About 50% of the time, I remember it was a from a dream, and 50% of the time, I think I'm remembering something real. ("Hmm, I've got deja vu. Have I seen this giant floating house with wings before? I feel like I saw it before last week. Did I actually see it, or did I just dream that? I guess I must have dreamed about something just like this giant floating house with wings that I am now totally seeing in reality.")

I will sometimes wake up and realize that I have dreamt about locations that I had dreamt about the previous night. But at no point while I'm dreaming will I think that what I'm experiencing at that moment is a dream.

I think perhaps I have an overly vivid imagination.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

At some point in my youth, I read about lucid dreaming and thought it was the coolest thing ever, and it turned out that for all I had read about special masks and subliminal tapes, all you really needed was to want to do it enough that your subconscious is aware of that.

The problem I've always had is that lucid dreaming means you're right on the edge of waking up, so "pushing" too hard towards what you want to dream about will just push you all the way into waking up.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Nolan et al actually has an idea of what he thinks is "really" going on, or if he intentionally lets it stay open-ended so as to not color any of the possibilities for the audience?

I don't know if it ruins your many perceptions of what reality is in the movie, but there is an answer, a "what is real" answer from Nolan. I can tell you what they officially determined was reality or not, if you like. If you're happier to wonder, feel free.

But, really, Nolan isn't as creative as you were getting there. One of his limitations as a filmmaker is that he doesn't explore. It's not that he's not clever--he managed to work out a way to help the audience follow the dream layers by having it be a heist movie, after all (and for some reason, audiences can't work out complicated stories but they can follow all the details of your average Ocean's Eleven). But it never feels like he searches out all the corners to his shiny new toy. He dreams it up, but he doesn't have the partner working with him to figure out all the angles that need to be covered. You, being creative, seek them out.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

There is a Word of God "official" answer? Sure, I'd love to hear it. I can stick to my interpretation if I like that better, but I'd love to know what they were aiming toward.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The official answer is that it's all real on the top. As in, there is no question that Mal is dead and that the one we see is the one that Cobb has constructed from his memories and guilt. It's about Cobb coming terms with his guilt and letting go of his grief, not about him just deceiving himself ad nauseum. The point is that he has been deceiving himself--believing that he could keep his imagined Mal under control--and his progression is to realize he can't and confront that.

I always thought this was true, myself, since, as I said, Nolan displays an evident lack of curiosity about addressing this point. He never plays the story out that way. His interest isn't in the question of what is real versus what is not. He makes it very clear with the hostilities of the projections that people have a strong enough sense of reality that the slightest little thing weird sets them off. Even in a dream, where you're more accepting of a little weirdness, you are still remarkably resistant to monkeying around with reality. There is no question but that Cobb would be running into hostile actors all around if he were in a dream on the topmost level. Yes, he has that one chase scene, and Saito's on his back, but the general public around him doesn't swarm him the way projections in the dream do to the team. The whole thing with those deeply-sleeping dreamers that are under the chemist's drugs is a red herring. The only reason Nolan focuses on the top at the end is that we expect the question to come up. If you've really paid attention to how technical he's been about the whole process, you don't have any questions.

I should also point out that one of the foremost reasons some people think the whole thing is a dream--Cobb's kids are in almost the same position as they were in his memory of them and, for some reason, Michael Caine is there--is totally explained within and without of the movie's space. Upon a second watch, I noticed that Cobb says he's sending gifts home with grandpa before giving said gifts to Michael Caine, so that explains that. The costumer spilled the beans that the kids are in different but similar clothing in the end versus the memories. And, most importantly, there are actually two sets of kids. The ones in the end are played by different actors from the ones early in the memories. That's the Word of God.