Inception Explanation
Was it all a dream?
Inception cannot be interpreted in a vacuum. It draws from our collective unconscious, which is depicted by other movies.
There are a dozen movies that Inception draws from. Take one example, The Matrix. It is impossible not to compare Inception to The Matrix, and Nolan, eyeballs deep in post-modernism, must know this. He actually begs us to to make the comparisons-- Ariadne touching the mirror (which, rather than passing through it, she shatters); the tailored clothes ("residual self image"), the gravity defying fight scenes; the bullet time explosions. I doubt these are gratuitous or even an homage, he's responding to the Matrix using Matrix language, which is ultimately our language since we the language of media. And his response-- the same one in Memento and, The Dark Knight, is that what you do, not what you think, defines you.
The Matrix was a straightforward, though awesome, story of narcissism; a single man for whom reality is incidental to ego, who defines himself not on what he does (initially, he does nothing except hack computers) but who he thinks he is. He is the main character in his own movie-- maybe not the best, not the strongest, but the main one. Everyone else is supporting cast. All he needs is the right cluster of magical (think like a 2 year old) events and the awesomeness that he knows is inside him will become real. Note also that everyone is perfectly content being the supporting cast. Everything they think or do is about and for him.
Inception is the exact opposite. It doesn't matter whether you think it's all a dream, or just some of it, or it's actually someone else's dream, or it's all real. The main point-- and Nolan makes it twice-- is that you can't hide from yourself.
Second main character Fisher could choose to coast, identity handed to him by his father-- pretend he is who everyone says he is-- but he wouldn't have actually done anything himself. He would be the person who hasn't done things, but everyone still thinks he has. His only choice is to grow up, find his own way, define himself.
Cobb-- a former Architect-- can dream anything he wants; his wife begs him to stay with him, and many characters admit that ten years or a lifetime in a dream is just as good as real-- "who's to say?"
But though Cobb can do that, it's still no solace because it doesn't work. No matter what world he picks, the guilt follows him, the guilt defines him. Cobb can't pretend to be anyone, he can't hope to become anyone, and not clothes or guns or drugs or genetics or hypnosis or even being in someone else's dreams will change who he is.
It's almost impossible, in real life, for any of us to understand how a single emotion can be so defining; it's the stuff of movies, and we prefer to define ourselves rather than wait for events to shape us. Usually, movies) try to make that defining emotion love, but that fails because it's some kind of idealized love that doesn't take into account that there is someone else on the other side who has their own ideas about love. Nolan doesn't go that way-- this isn't a love story. Nolan chooses (twice) death. When someone very close to you is abruptly, unexpectedly, incorrectly taken from you, everything else is contaminated by that.
The death of a parent is different because it is never completely unexpected (unless you're a child) and it is understood to be something to overcome by moving forward. Fisher succeeds. But there is no forward when your child or your spouse dies. The only way forwards is downwards.
If you've not lost such a person, you wouldn't know that every morning before you open your eyes, you spend a moment trying to change reality: I am going to wake up, and everything will turn out to have been a dream. Cobb doesn't wait for morning to try this.
Did the top stop spinning? Probably not-- it spins a very long time, given that it started well before the camera fixed on it. But that's totally beside the point: the audience was rooting for it to stop. We have an instinctive aversion to other people's false realities because they aren't our realities.
Cobb doesn't bother to check the top at the end because it doesn't matter whether he is dreaming or not. No matter what, he's the same person that the same things happened to. Nothing else is real.
-------
These are just random thoughts I had about the movie, feel free to add or correct them; I'd like to write something better about this movie when I have thought about it more.
Totems are for people to project their ambivalence (e.g. hate) about others.
Magical thinking is the "omnipotence of thought"-- that your thoughts can alter the world
Last line of Totem and Taboo: In the beginning was the deed.
Ariadne = the woman who helped Theseus navigate the minotaur's labyrinth (ball of red thread-- follow Saito's blood trail); Ariadne was eventually abandoned by Theseus-- left sleeping on the beach at Naxos. Didn't Ariadne and Arthur share a kiss, and later wind up on the beach?
Ariadne's totem/token was a PAWN; Arthur's was a loaded dice.
All dreams are always wish-fulfillments.
Matrix references abound; "you have to dream bigger" (of a bigger gun); the fights, defying gravity. Perfectly tailored suits, hair-- "residual self image?" Signals the dream world?
Totems, like tattoos (Memento)--- physical reminders of reality
If it's a dream, who is "watching" the top spinning all by itself?
Suits also call up the old aesthetic that so many post-modern films have (Dark City, the Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, etc.)
Leads to "Eames" (the forger)-- likely Charles Eames, the modernist designer and ARCHITECT who also made some experimetnal films... like 1969's "Tops. "Tops are born, they live, and then they die."First scene with Mal (= "mal")-- he ties a rope to her chair to hold him as he goes out the window, but the chair slips empty-- she is not his anchor.
Fisher is the audience, the mark. We/he need to have an idea incepted, we need to experience the drama, the dream, and the catharsis.
Each level of the movie was a different kind of film: The kidnapping is a thriller, the hotel is a heist, and the mountaintop was an action film. Each also had different hues: first Saito meeting was red/yellow, kidnapping=blue, hotel/heist=brown, mountaintop=white. Think Matrix reality=brown, in the Matrix=greenWere all the totems game pieces? pawn, poker chip, top, loaded die. Why?
This movie can also be seen a a metaphor for movies. Cobb is the director, Eames is the actor, Arthur the producer, Ariadne is the writer.
You can tell a dream because you can't remember how you got there; much like scenes in a movie, which either have an establishing shot (e.g. a wide shot of a building where the scene will take place) but Inception noticeably lacks these establishing shots-- you're dropped right into action.
The top at the end is for us to see if it's a dream, not for him-- he doesn't even wait-- but the truth is that he's in a movie, not a dream, so complete is our suspension of disbelief.
Why is it called Inception? If they're doing the "opposite" of extractions, it should be Insertion.
Raskolnikov's guilt was over the murder of a PAWNbroker
There was a scene after dreaming that he runs to the bathroom to check the top, but he is interrupted. From that point on, all bets are off as to whether we are still in dreamworld.
MAl CObb is played by MArion COtillard, who also played Edith Piaf in "La Vie En Rose." Edith Piaf is the singer in the song played on headphones to time the wake up ("Je ne regrette rien.")
The top is Mal's totem, not his. His totem is his wedding ring.
---
A more complete explanation can be found here: The Ultimate Explanation Of Inception.
Score: 15 (23 votes cast)
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July 21, 2010 12:49 AM | Posted by : | Reply
I kinda thought his totem was his children's faces. How would the wedding ring have unique knowledge?
Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
July 21, 2010 1:43 AM | Posted by : | Reply
His wedding ring could be Cobb's totem if he wasn't wearing it while awake -- regardless, the critical point is that the top was Mal's totem, calling into question whether it was an actual item or just a projection.
The possibility also exists that the target of the inception was Cobb, with the Father(-in-law?) setting up Ariadne (I'd missed the mythology entirely) to try to get Cobb on the road to recovery, and the top was his totem. Regardless, the utter lack of establishment through the rapid end of the film -- most notably the shift "out" of limbo -- suggests that Cobb did not rejoin waking reality per se. And this seems important: for all of the booming, banging, bashing, bleeding and peril going on the one bit of violence we're missing is the one that would wake Cobb up after he believes that he's saved somebody from limbo in a near inverse of how he lost his wife. Thus I might suggest that the violence in the film was not part of Fisher's (expertly acted; I've never seen Murphy better) mental workings, but was rather Cobb's self-destructive guilt that could only be calmed by releasing his guilt and then achieving atonement by rescuing Saito whose functional purpose... was to let Cobb see his kids' faces again.
And if that's what the guns really were all about, then I'm way more impressed and less disappointed that it didn't feel more visionary... after watching Paprika, I spent so much of the film thinking "Guns? Really, that's it?"
Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
July 21, 2010 1:49 AM | Posted by : | Reply
@pyromanfo:
Cobb never had a wedding ring in the "real" scenes, but always had it in the "dream" scenes if memory serves.
I like that Alone is dismissing the ending as being insignificant. That most focus on whether they escape to reality in the end seemed like it was missing the point to me.
Score: 3 (3 votes cast)
July 21, 2010 11:34 AM | Posted by : | Reply
The Matrix also leans heavily on and replicates the work of others. Pretty much every director discussed in film school is referenced/copied in the film - particularly Hitchcock. Without any of the originality or actual thought process or aesthetic genius of Hitchcock. The concepts in it are also a sort of hodgepodge - it's kind of like The Secret really. (Much more fun and worth watching obviously, particularly for all the "spot the reference" and overwrought meaningfulness that's, well, kind of almost a stand in for actual meaning in some ways.) The most interesting thing about The Matrix is really just how much it resonates with people. It's kind of the Star Trek of a digital generation.
Score: 0 (2 votes cast)
July 21, 2010 12:23 PM | Posted by : | Reply
I greatly enjoyed this movie just as a fantasy tale as well. I'm a lucid dreamer, and also often experience the "dream within a dream" phenomenon.
I found the feature that the more one changed things the more the projections would notice rather adroit. Truly lucid dreaming, wherein one has control of the dream world, is a suspension of disbelief balancing act. Somewhat like navigating by those stars you can only see out of the corner of your eye.
The more sweeping environmental changes you make, the more likely you are to completely upset the narrative the subconscious is rolling out and wake up.
I just through it was portrayed in a very interesting way in the film.
Score: 2 (2 votes cast)
July 21, 2010 1:35 PM | Posted by : | Reply
This film, like the Matrix, Memento, the Thirteenth Floor, and many others, takes place in the shadow of "Dark City," the 1998 film which was a scifi re-telling of Plato's allegory of the cave. That film also established modernism as the setting for the post-modern story to take place.
The problem Inception has is that the postmodern narrative is exhausted. Once we knew the film was about dreams, we knew that it was about whether some part of the story was real or just a dream. Our minds, in 2010, so conditioned to expect the postmodernist science fiction story that the premise of the story suggests its own climax. If dreams are a worthy setting for a story it's only because we've accepted the postmodern notion that reality is no more than perceptions, and is therefore equivalent to all other perceived constructs.
To wit: why do we care about whether the top spins or falls? The film is not real, so neither result is real. Furthermore, why do so many movie goers desire the story to end in the imaginary reality rather than the imaginary imaginary? I think the real point of the film is the truly postmodern one - that Cobb doesn't care whether he is dreaming or awake, as long as he feels like he is with his children. His feelings are what dictate his reality.
There could have been a subtext here of dealing with nostalgia (Cobb's returning home) a present day preoccupation of the over-30 hipster set. Nostalgia depends as much on what is forgotten as on what is remembered, and the film did implicate the intersection of
memory with dreams (one false reality against another), but I don't think the film could have addressed the post-post-modern confrontation with nostalgia while simultaneously being firmly entrenched in the postmodern exploration of the desert of the real.
Just my $0.02.
Score: 2 (4 votes cast)
July 21, 2010 1:36 PM | Posted by : | Reply
huh, for some reason no-script block my name being attached to that comment. Oh well.
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
July 21, 2010 4:37 PM | Posted by : | Reply
I liked a couple of things in that movie
1) In the scene where Cobb's projection of Mal was trying to persuade him of the supposed "top level"'s unreality, Cobb clings to a two psychological "totems"; his guilt, and his acknowledgement of how imperfect the projection of Mal summoned by his unconscious is. That scene was as good a rebuttal as any I've seen w/r/t po-mo alienation & solipsism.
2) Cobb and Fisher both reach catharsis/enlightenment in questionably "real" circumstances, yet that doesn't stop either of them from acting on that revelation as if it matters. Even though it may have been a dream, it still had meaning to them.
Score: 3 (3 votes cast)
July 21, 2010 5:07 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Ariadne's totem was a bishop, not a pawn.
Score: 8 (8 votes cast)
July 21, 2010 8:19 PM | Posted by : | Reply
After post modernism movies were subjected to the same standards and practices that religious institutions found themselves subjected to, namely that each were required to honestly portray to the public the fiction of a reality that is/was purported as truth. Hollywood, at least colloquially, remains in post-modern times as the only one at least pretending to publish itself as fiction. For that, it gets a pass.
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
July 22, 2010 1:01 AM | Posted by : | Reply
I'm guessing that you are under ... 45. Am I right?
No blame attends.
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
July 22, 2010 5:26 AM | Posted by : | Reply
The narcissism is to the think the whole world is your dream. The wine is to help you when you realize it is not.
Score: 0 (4 votes cast)
July 22, 2010 8:14 AM | Posted by : | Reply
"Did the top stop spinning? Probably not-- it spins a very long time, given that it started well before the camera fixed on it."
Alone, I am disappoint (double joke score!). Twas clearly left to be undecided... yes it spun for a long time, but it was also wobbling like a moth****cker when it cut to black.
All I kept wondering was "what's in my safe?"
Score: 1 (5 votes cast)
July 22, 2010 1:23 PM | Posted by : | Reply
every news outlet is trying to explain what inception means (there's a good list here: http://www.themarknews.com/articles/1910-inception-explained). bottom line: all this coverage in the news & amazing ticket sales are evidence that somewhat smart blockbuster movies are actually what audiences WANT, not fluffy romantic comedy b.s. kudos to nolan.
Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
July 22, 2010 1:49 PM | Posted by : | Reply
I thought the top was a distraction, like the magician that tells you to keep looking at this hand while the other hand does the trick.
The top was to draw your attention away from the unchanged children. Near as I remembered every scene with the children they looked the exactly the same. The impression I had was that he had been away from them for a couple of years or so and they would have grown, possibly had different hair, and certainly had different clothes.
Score: 4 (6 votes cast)
July 22, 2010 10:53 PM | Posted by : | Reply
that is a genius comment, of course he is still in his dream. he notices this when he walks in the room, looks around, and realizes that everything is exactly as it was before. he chooses to accept this dream as reality and leaves the top behind.
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
July 23, 2010 12:16 AM | Posted, in reply to , by : | Reply
I have to disagree. Earlier in the movie we hear the children's voices and they are very young. There is no evidence to suggestion that they would be older than they were in the yard.
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
July 23, 2010 4:01 AM | Posted, in reply to , by : | Reply
When he talks to his kids on the phone he tells them that he is sending presents with their grandfather and I got the impression that it was something he had done before.
Later he talks about having been away from for quite awhile and having done a prodigious amount of his illegal work. He says he keeps trying to find a way back to them but there seems an edge to his statement that to me hints at his frustration of time slipping away. Given the logistics and planning that would go into each job, I got the feeling that it was a couple of years.
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
July 24, 2010 1:27 AM | Posted by : | Reply
Am I the only one who really doesn't CARE about the meaning of the movie as it was pretty terrible and I couldn't relate to, like or care about any of the main characters?
The only character I felt any emotion for was the poor heir. He seemed like a decent young man who was lonely and just wanted his father to love him. He wanted to do the right thing. Then these bastards come along and try to fuck with his head for their personal gain... helping a shady violent businessman? No big deal. All throughout the movie Cobb is an amoral asshole. From the moment it begins until its last minute, he has zero moral code.
I wanted Cobb to lose. I thought he was a bastard who needed to take responsibility and accountability for his fuckups.
This is a man who goes about life fucking with the heads of everyone he meets and he just runs away like it never happened. If he "cared" so much why doesn't he man up and take responsibility for what he has done? It WAS his fault that his wife went crazy and killed herself. He fucked with her mind to the point where she went insane. So, if he truly does feel "guilty" (he doesn't) why doesn't he just face the music eh?
All he cares about is himself. His "guilt" for what happened to his wife is better described as a regret that his life got fucked up and now he's considered a murderer, his comfortable fake reality poof out of control blew up in his face.
I didn't find him to be guilty (thus, "reality oriented", thus "good"). Above all else he seemed concerned only with his base emotions, his self gratification. He seemed like a very, very selfish person. All he concerned with was whether or not shit would go his way... whether his feelings were what he wanted them to be. How it affects others is insignificant, and how others felt was less than insignificant.
Cobb = very selfish, amoral.
I honestly do not care if he ended up in reality or stayed in a dream. He seemed more like a villain than anything else. He reminded me of a giant selfish 2 year old with insatiable needs and a control freak as well.
If there is any way the protagonist is opposite from neo, it is not in their narcissism... it's more in the fact that the protagonist in inception was a little selfish amoral asshole, whereas neo did everything he could to try to benefit and save humanity like a jesus figure. Cobb was the epitome of all the bad qualities of humanity whereas Neo was more like a religious figure (and thereby not particularly human at all, an idealized form of humanity, a diety).
Cobb is way more narcissistic than Neo ever was, pfft. Cobb creates realities on a whim and just turns his back when shit falls apart. He doesn't really care who gets hurt as long as things are "right" as he defines them; he talks out his neck otherwise but his behavior is clearly apathetic about others. He feels no accountability to anyone other than himself. His children are more about a symbol of him (whether or not he is "home") than they are real people. On the other hand, Neo was self sacrificial and everything he did was to benefit something greater than himself. Neo LEFT his comfortable fake reality to benefit and save humanity. Neo's capacity for "greatness" wasn't something that he knew, it is something everyone but he himself knew, that would be manifest when he PROVED HIMSELF worthy of it. I fail to see the narcissism here.
On the other hand, Cobb's "greatness" (his genius and his gifts ) are primarily known / believed by him alone, used primarily for HIS benefits, and no one else really knows about them, can see them, but they are very real. They were mostly innate, handed down by his father. He didn't have to work nearly as hard as Neo did to obtain his gifts and greatness. Cobb reminds me of narcissists way more than Neo ever did.
Neo wasn't born great, he was born with the potential for greatness. Cobb is just almost omnipotent without effort, it is innate.
Just sayin'.
Score: -2 (10 votes cast)
July 24, 2010 2:24 AM | Posted by : | Reply
First, I had an initially negative reaction, but this post helped me give it a second chance, and now I'm leaning toward it being important.
Second, on the dream/reality business, was I the only one who thought the rather pointedly presented image of the Escher staircase that always ascends/descends and yet always returns to where it begins, impossibly, was a broad hint about the narrative structure, a hint echoed in Mal's delusion (if that's what it was)? If I read this right, this reinforces Alone's point that it doesn't matter whether the end is in dream or reality: it is in *experience*, the determinants of which are in his character.
As for the preceding comment, I would only say that the idea that there is something more mature about Neo getting to be the *messiah* is, well, problematic. And as for the complaint about Cobb, recall that Cobb's inception in Mal was well-intentioned (trying to get them back to reality) and went disastrously wrong. That's the stuff of tragedy.
Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
July 24, 2010 2:51 AM | Posted by : | Reply
Neo is the savior of humanity not because of who he is but because of the choices he makes and who he becomes. Neo is only neo when he becomes neo. Sure, only neo can be neo, but he is only so when he earns it. Neo's power is not to be awesome, to control people, to have fun, it is to save humanity. The fact neo is awesome is incidental.
I didn't say Neo was more mature, I said he was less narcissistic and maleficient than Cobb, who is a petty child indulging in every craving whim need desire sensory experience he impulsively has. He manipulates people without second thought, and his "guilt" is more accurately described as self focused remorse for unfavorable outcomes of his selfish behavior. His life can be described as a series of selfish actions and selfish remorse (selfish remorse - not necessarily feeling guilty about other people's suffering, but rather feeling bad for HIMSELF that he can't have what he wants because he lost control and fucked things up).
Score: -3 (3 votes cast)
July 26, 2010 3:32 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Am I the only one bothered by all the (unnecessary) action sequences? The concept is ok but after a while all the pointless shooting and killing numbed my senses. At one point where Cobb is chased by killers he is magically rescued by Saito in a limo. I absolutely hate scenes like these. How can Saito ever know where to pick up Cobb and the nonchalance he shows makes me want to barf.
I would have sat up and given more thought to the movie if there had been better dream sequences than the rather random action sequences.
For what it's worth I think Existenz is a more enjoyable movie with the dream within a dream concept.
Score: 0 (2 votes cast)
July 26, 2010 9:42 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Thoughts on the thoughts:
Ariadne's totem is a pawn because she has to carry it around in her pocket and IT'S THE SMALLEST PIECE ON THE BOARD. Do you think she should be lugging around a solid brass queen?
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
"Raskolnikov's guilt was over the murder of a PAWNbroker"
Nice try - if "Crime & Punishment" was originally written in English, as opposed to Russian.
Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
July 26, 2010 11:42 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Some interesting observations here. Here's my take:
http://drawadistinction.blogspot.com/2010/07/to-understand-inception-begin-at-its.html
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
July 27, 2010 12:46 AM | Posted, in reply to , by : | Reply
your stupid it was a pawn. shut up.
Score: -3 (5 votes cast)
July 27, 2010 2:41 PM | Posted by : | Reply
I actually feel asleep during the movie and had a dream--I think???
Score: 2 (2 votes cast)
July 28, 2010 1:41 AM | Posted by : | Reply
my thoughts were the ending was deliberately left open for a sequel. i dont think the writers know themselves if the top stopped spinning or not, it was mostly a hook for part 2.
Score: -1 (1 votes cast)
July 28, 2010 4:12 PM | Posted by : | Reply
The totem falling/still spinning in the end is really irrelevant. I have read a ton of blogs about different theories, but one common theme that people seem to miss (or get messed up on) in the definition of the totem, and what it does. A totem is a small device/object that let's you know that you are not in SOMEONE ELSES dream (vs. your own). I believe that Cobb was dreaming during the whole film, even during the end, so whether the totem fell or kept spinning is really unimportant. Since he isn't in someone elses dream, it should technically fall, like it does earlier in the movie. But just because hes not in someone elses dream does no mean he himself is not dreaming.
Score: 4 (4 votes cast)
July 29, 2010 1:03 AM | Posted by : | Reply
Until I read this post, I thought Inception would just be fodder for a Saturday Night Live spoof, ala "Sith Sense." Now I know different!
http://www.screened.com/news/even-inceptions-music-is-designed-to-mess-you-up/546/
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
July 29, 2010 10:58 AM | Posted by : | Reply
The word "inception" has only come to be a synonym for "beginning" recently.
Taken at its roots, in-cept, means to take on. Its opposite would be exception.
It's clever that the verb they use for what they are doing has the recipient as the object, rather than the speaker.
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
July 30, 2010 6:49 PM | Posted by : | Reply
"If you've not lost such a person, you wouldn't know that every morning before you open your eyes, you spend a moment trying to change reality: I am going to wake up, and everything will turn out to have been a dream."
I am sorry you know this.
Score: 3 (3 votes cast)
August 3, 2010 1:35 PM | Posted by : | Reply
quote: Why is it called Inception? If they're doing the "opposite" of extractions, it should be Insertion.
The movie answered this. When you try to insert things, the victim's brain rejects the material every time, usually violently. That's why Cobb's team needed to go to all the trouble to make the victim think that it was actually his own idea.
Score: 2 (2 votes cast)
August 9, 2010 10:50 PM | Posted by : | Reply
wow you've really raised some interesting questions about this movie.
about 95% of the things you pointed out have never crossed my mind.
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
August 23, 2010 1:36 PM | Posted by : | Reply
I just wanted to point out to Felan, in response to his argument about the children looking the same and not aging, that there were two sets of actors playing the children. The cast list clearly shows that the children had aged two years.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the end is reality, as Cobb would have seen recent photos of the children and could easily place those faces in a projection.
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
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