*SPOILER ALERT*
Suddenly you’re on the internet, reading this page. How did you get here? Do you even remember? You do? You googled inception + explained? Excellent. You remember. This is real then.
Discussion of Inception begins at the end. With that last image. The “totem.” The totem is a spinning top that’s either about to topple over… or not. There are two camps here. If you’re in Camp Spinning and believe the top continued to rotate, never slowing down enough to wobble, thereby defying the physical rules of the world we live in, then you must necessarily believe that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, was dreaming this final sequence.
If you’re in the other camp – Camp Topple – and believe the top fell over, thereby confirming the laws of our physical world, then Cobb had to be awake, his feet firmly planted on the real carpet of his real home. Right?
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t really matter if the top fell over because it was never a reliable totem in the first place. The top is a diversion.
The layers of Inception’s dream world go deep, and at times it’s hard to say exactly which layer we’re in and how we got there or how we might escape (which is, according to the rules laid out in the first layer, exactly how we know we’re in a dream – we can’t remember how we arrived). A.O. Scott, in his review of the film (NYTimes) points out that these dreams are too structured to truly mirror our sleep world – the characters are too well defined, the rules too stringent. And David Edelstein in New York Magazine logs a similar complaint: “Nolan is too literal-minded, too caught up in ticktock logistics, to make a great, untethered dream movie.” (NYMag) Both reviewers are correct…. unless… well, we’ll get to that later on. For now what’s important is the last three minutes of the film, starting with Cobb waking up on the plane and ending with the image of the totem. Let’s examine this section, as an exercise at least, as its own layer.
The question, then, is whether Cobb is returning to a layer of dream world we’ve already seen (namely, the one in which he and the other main characters go to sleep on the Sydney-to-LA flight) or if what we’re seeing is a new layer entirely.
And I believe it’s the latter. The best evidence being this: Cobb and Sato, who’s ostensibly stuck in Limbo with Cobb, wake up sans wires. At no other point in the movie is a character allowed to wake up without wires after they’ve been occupying a dream space with another character. Based on the rules of the film, this simply wouldn’t be possible.
When Cobb and Sato (finally) wake up, the reactions of the other characters, which are admittedly difficult to read (no words are exchanged), nevertheless diverge from what we’d expect to see if they really thought Cobb and Sato had a chance of dying (or at least losing their minds) in limbo. They’d be overjoyed to see their friends awake, even if they had to contain their emotions so as not to tip off Fischer, Cillian Murphy’s character. There are certainly knowing, satisfied looks exchanged between Cobb and the others, but we don’t know if they’re business associates or if they simply met in the first class lounge before the flight. The fact of the matter is, if you dreamed a ten-hour dream, which incorporated everyone else in the first class cabin, including the flight attendant, and the dream was so intense that it changed your outlook on life, you’d probably look a little strangely at those around you once you woke up. You’d look for meaning in their glances toward you. You’d wonder if they somehow (impossibly) shared that dream with you.
Think about Cobb’s dad, too: when he picks up his son at the airport, he acts like a father happy to see his son after a long absence, but probably not like a father whose son has been in exile since fleeing murder charges. We can safely assume, I think, that if Cobb’s name had been cleared literally minutes earlier, literally while on the plane, his arrival at the airport would have been a much bigger deal. As for the reactions of Cobb’s children – yes, they’re happy to see their father, home from a long business trip, but that’s how kids behave in those instances. There’s nothing to suggest Cobb’s been gone for an extended period.
About those kids: There was an internet rumor swirling that the children wear the exact same clothes throughout. Upon further review, this isn’t true. They are wearing similar clothes, but the clothes change. The boy’s plaid shirt is a different color in the last scene. The girl’s dress goes from pink to white-and-pink.
The kids are positioned the same way, wearing similar clothes, simply to provide us, the viewer, with visual queues. Emotional queues. In fact, the children of the last scene aren’t even the same kids we see as projections in the dream world. They’re older – the film used separate actors to play the two sets of siblings. (IMDB -- there are two actors listed as Phillipa, two as James). Cobb just remembers his children younger (as parents do – especially when those parents go away on business a little more than they’d like).
When Cobb wakes up on the plane, we are for the first time in reality, or at least as close to reality as we can ever get while watching a movie. This is why it hardly matters whether or not the top falls over at the end. If it stays up, then yes, Cobb’s dreaming. But if it falls over… we don’t really learn anything. Because we’ve seen it spin indefinitely in the dream world, just as we’ve seen it fall over in the dream world. That top’s gonna fall over eventually – I’d bet this entire essay on it – but that event would neither prove nor disprove Cobb’s reality.
It’s also worth reminding ourselves that it’s an auteur’s right to snap his or her fingers at any moment and say, “but it was all a dream…” True, this is a trick that we all pretty much detest. Employing it is always ballsy, usually cruel, rarely enjoyable. But, when we’re watching a movie, we’re at the director’s mercy, aren’t we? We’re in his or her dream.
A.O. Scott’s review does an excellent job of breaking down the relationship between film and dream:
The relationship between movies and dreams has always been — to borrow a term from psychoanalysis — overdetermined. From its first flickerings around the time Freud was working on “The Interpretation of Dreams,” cinema seemed to replicate the uncanny, image-making power of the mind, much as still photography had in the decades before. And over the course of the 20th century, cinema provided a vast, perpetually replenishing reservoir of raw material for the fantasies of millions of people. Freud believed that dreams were compounded out of the primal matter of the unconscious and the prosaic events of daily life. If he were writing now, he would have to acknowledge that they are also, for many of us, made out of movies.
Movies have to start somewhere. The screen transforms from black into the opening image, and suddenly we’re in someone else’s dream. We don’t know how we got here, and we don’t know how the characters arrived, either. We just take the leap of faith necessary to lose ourselves in the dream world for two hours. “When you can’t remember how you arrived somewhere, you’re dreaming.”
So if the last three minutes of Inception bring us into “reality” for the first time… what the hell were we watching before then?
If you believe that there are scenes during the first 140 minutes of the movie that represent Cobb’s reality, then what you watched probably felt like a very stylish, very cool action flick (unless you’re one of those who wasn’t drawn in by the action – fair enough). But would it have held up to a second viewing? Wouldn’t you have been frustrated by some of the vagaries and inconsistencies? Weren’t there times when the world just felt a little… wrong?
What, for example, is the deal with this sleep technology “developed by the army?” And even if we suspended our disbelief long enough to believe that the wire-machine-thingy actually works, exactly who has access to this technology? Only rich people? Impoverished Kenyans (as we see in a basement that looks a lot like an opium den)? Who are these evil corporations that will kill to keep their secrets? Would Cobb really be charged with murder given what we know about his wife’s death? Would he really be able to leave the country? Would his father really teach at an English-speaking School of Architecture located in Paris? And who is this Japanese businessman that can clear an American murder charge with one phone call?
Then there are the constantly shifting rules – a wounded dreamer feels less pain with each level of dream world they descend… when you die in a dream and you’re heavily sedated, you go to limbo… limbo represents the blank slate of your subconscious… unless someone you’re sharing the dream with has already been there and has already built a city by the sea… and hold on a second – how are we supposed to escape from limbo? Do we kill ourselves again? Or just remember to try to escape? It’s never quite clear. All these rules come at us too quickly – it’s as if a child is changing the rules of a playground game as it’s being played. Or it’s as if we’re in a dream world and we’re creating the world as we go.
Mal, Cobb’s dead wife, tries to spell it out for him. She says he’s asleep but doesn’t know he’s dreaming. The subconscious is attacking him (manifested by the evil corporation’s henchmen). His world is a maze – in Mombasa, he has to squeeze through a gap in the labyrinth, an alleyway so narrow he can barely fit through it… Everything in Inception feels a little too dreamy to be reality.
I’m not saying that a movie can’t be made that makes us buy at face value the rules of inception and the different layers of dreaming, even after we’ve left the theater, even as we’re thinking about the movie on the car-ride home, even after we’ve seen the movie a second time. All I’m saying is that this is not that movie. This movie didn’t even try to be that movie. This movie just tried to be entertaining enough to keep us in our seats, willing to suspend our disbelief long enough to make it through 140 minutes of action.
I can’t really blame anyone who didn’t love Inception because if you were unwilling to look beyond the hastily explained rules and technology, if you thought the set pieces felt too contrived, then probably you weren’t invested enough to care whether or not it was all a dream.
I, however, was invested enough to care. And the last three minutes made me go back and revise my opinion of the first 140. It’s like if you pick up a hitch-hiker and you drive with him for two hours and you think he’s just a rambling, amusing fool, but then after you let him out of the car, you realize he was some kind of angel who was giving you amazing life advice the entire time. Only after he’s gone do you realize how relevant it all was.
So this is what I learned in the last three minutes, after Cobb had left the plane: I wasn’t watching a very cool sci-fi action film. I was watching a mind-blowingly thorough and entertaining study of one man’s subconscious.
This is where I take exception to Scott and Edelstein’s reviews. If you believe the first layer – the one in which Cobb recruits his team and sets up shop in Paris – is reality, then yes, the dream world is a highly structured, logical place. The rules may shift or pop up as we go, but at least there are rules. However, if you believe that it’s all a dream, if you believe that we’ve been in one man’s dream world the entire time, inside the subconscious of a man on a flight from Sydney to LA… then woah.
If this is all one man’s dream, then it’s a shockingly elaborate one that borrows inspiration from every corner of Cobb’s daily life, as well as his surroundings, as well as movies he’s seen, as well as all the other inexplicable and varied debris that his brain’s been lugging around.
This is not how Scott sees it. He writes:
Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears.
But if it’s all a dream, then there’s hardly anything literal or logical about it. There is confusion and delirium at every turn. Cobb’s mind projects father-son angst onto a stranger. It draws on memories of a wife and children. It takes what we must assume is a real event (the wife’s death, possibly by suicide, leaving him as a single father) and skews it and rehashes it until Cobb is so confused that he can’t remember whether or not to feel guilty. Into a dream full of Cobb’s own very real anxiety, he pulls strangers – passengers on a plane, flight attendants – all playing roles that Cobb’s inventing on the fly. Cobb’s mind is a whirlpool that sucks everything from his pre-sleep state – all his problems and memories, mixed with his surroundings – to produce a realm of chaos.
Cobb takes the leap of faith into this dream, but once he’s in it, he constantly tries to manipulate it, writing rules as he goes, simultaneously designing the world and living it. He’s the architect of the kind of dream world where logic seems to rule – it’s only in retrospect, once he wakes up, that the logic falls apart. Earlier in the film Cobb explains to Fischer that a dream feels real while we’re in it. It’s only when we wake up that we realize that something was wrong.
So who is Cobb? We don’t know, really, because we only see him as his awake self for a few minutes. We can only extrapolate from the dreams. Probably he’s a successful architect (as suggested by his occupation in the dream, coupled with his first-class seat, first-class house, first-class suit). His father, most likely, was a legendary architect. (For what it’s worth, there have been several famous architects named Cobb. One was I.M. Pei’s partner. Another Cobb studied design in Paris and later partnered with an architect from Sydney).
Our Cobb’s been working in Sydney. Now he’s on a plane (which would account for the various changes in gravity and equilibrium throughout the film – the plane was banking or hitting turbulence).
He feels guilty about not seeing his children enough. He feels guilty about his wife’s death, and even more potently, he feels guilty about knowing he has to let her memory go. These emotions aren’t ones he deals with on the surface – probably he doesn’t even acknowledge them. Only his subconscious is aware of them – only in his dreams can they be confronted. And only in a particularly intense and vivid dream can an idea be planted that will take hold and remain lodged in his mind once he wakes up. Cobb goes to sleep with regrets, but wakes up grateful (hearing Edith Piaf’s song “Je ne regrette rien” over and over has apparently had an effect). It’s a positive emotion that took hold in limbo – the deepest layer of Cobb’s subconscious, the one that can only be accessed after digging deep into the dream world.
And before we get off the plane for the last time, we should try to imagine what it was like in the first class cabin as Cobb slept through the entire flight. The plane must have been banking, hitting heavy turbulence, to explain all the changes in the dream world’s gravity, right? But what about the loss of gravity? That wouldn’t be possible… unless the plane went into free-fall.
But how could you sleep through a free-fall? Cobb would have had to have been heavily sedated, right? So maybe he’d gone to a pharmacist to obtain a heavy, heavy sedative, one that would keep him asleep through the most jarring instances. Why would you obtain such a sedative? If you were having trouble sleeping. He brings this real life experience into his dream world (remember the man slapping a sleeping Kenyan in the basement opium den? Remember them tipping Arthur over in his chair as he slept through it?) In the dream world, wiring himself to the machine is the only way Cobb can dream anymore. In the real world, taking a serious sedative is probably the only way he can sleep anymore.
And if the plane almost went down over the Pacific, it would explain why the other passengers, once they land, look at Cobb as a comrade. They don’t know each other, but they made it through something together. They made it home safe.
We should also, before we finish here, acknowledge the meta side of the film. The referential side. Nolan borrows from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The bridge over the Seine is famous for its role in Last Tango in Paris. When Cobb and his team descend into the first layer of dream world, they go to (where else?) Los Angeles. I’m sure I missed a hundred other references (“Je ne regrette rien”? Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose? This isn’t a rabbit-hole I’m ready to go down just yet). Are these nods to films that have influenced Nolan? Or are they films that Cobb has watched, their images informing his dreams? Or is it both?
Here’s what we can say for sure: Nolan knows that his movie is influenced by other movies. The film is self-aware.
Good movies are like dreams so vivid that we forget we’re dreaming. They feel real for the two hours we’re in the theater. It’s only when we walk outside that we realize there was something wrong. Action movies, in particular, have a tendency to fall apart under close scrutiny – why did the villain explain the plot before trying to kill the hero? Why are the henchmen so horribly inaccurate with their guns? How do our heroes miraculously feel less pain as the movie advances? Isn’t it convenient that the safe is located in a bunker on a ski slope, necessitating that our heroes strap on skis and machine guns to eliminate the snowmobiling bad guys?
Why do action movies employ these devices? Because it’s awesome to watch, dammit. While you’re in the dream, you’re blown away. But so often we wake up afterward and realize that the motivations of the bad guys were a little… forced. The set pieces felt… contrived. The technology seemed… impossible. And the hero’s journey was cinematic, sure, but completely adrift from reality. When you wake up, you realize something was wrong.
In Inception, Cobb wakes up for us. He realizes, on his own, that something was wrong. He had a crazy dream – an action dream – but it wasn’t reality.
It’s only when we wake up, by leaving the theater, that we realize something was right – this wasn’t a sci-fi action film. This was a beautifully rendered map, drawn on film, of the subconscious.
****
More fun with character names (from contributing editor Alex Plapinger):
EAMES – Ray and Charles Eames were famous designers and architects.
ARIADNE – helped Theseus get through the labyrinth and slay the minotaur.
SAITO – the bad guy from Bridge on the River Kwai
adam@theadamwhite.com
|
