I watched Inception for the second time a few days ago (the first was in the theater), and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. I love a story with some depth, a story that you can go back to over and over and always come away with something new. I feel as if this is one of those stories. And since I’m a giant geek, I like to spend time on the data. I like to let it marinate. Like Cobb, I like to see how deep I can go. I’m not saying I’ve got everything figured out—far from it. And I’m sure there are areas where I’ve missed something or misinterpreted a bit of datum. So join me as I offer my impressions and insight, and let’s see where it leads, shall we?
But before we do, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say “SPOILER ALERT!” I’m about to spoil the shit out of the entire movie, so if you haven’t seen it please do yourself the courtesy of not reading on. Watch the movie first. To do otherwise would be a mistake.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s start by taking the movie at face value. On the surface, the movie is actually pretty simple. Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) has learned to manipulate dreams—to become an Architect—and he’s fallen in love, with both the god-like wonder of creating a world and Mal (played by the entrancing Marion Cotillard), the woman with whom he plays God. It’s revealed over the course of the film that Cobb and Mal essentially experimented on themselves. They trudged deep into their own minds, into Limbo, and created their own personal world.
The problem, of course, is that they got lost in it. They became unable to discern fantasy from reality, and spent a lifetime in Limbo growing old together. Hardly the worst fate one can imagine—oh bummer, you spent a lifetime with someone you love—but Cobb somehow became aware of the unreality of their situation and tried to convince Mal of it. When she resisted the truth, Cobb planted an idea—that their shared world wasn’t real—in her mind. Inception. The idea took root, and she was finally prepared to take the leap of faith with him. They killed themselves (Rather gruesomely I might add. Death by train? Yuck.), awakening in the real world.
Unfortunately for both of them, they didn’t live happily ever after. The idea that Cobb planted in Mal’s mind bled into reality. It had become so deeply rooted in her mind that she couldn’t shake it. Reality became unreality. She was convinced that they were still asleep, that their real lives—their real children—were waiting for them above, in the real world. Cobb did his best to convince her otherwise, but he had done his job too well. She knew she was asleep.
And so, one fateful night, she forced his hand. She wanted him to take the same leap of faith that he had once asked of her. She was so sure of herself that she had written a letter to the authorities claiming that Cobb was unstable, and that if she died it was at his hands. She wanted to be sure that he’d join her, but, try as she might, she was unable to convince him that she was right. And try as he might, Cobb was unable to convince her that she was wrong.
And so she leapt to her death, turning Cobb into a man on the run, estranged from the family he loved.
Plotlines aside, think about the psychological ramifications of that for a moment. Imagine being trapped in Limbo. Imagine becoming aware of it, and having to resort to subterfuge to convince the one you love that the world around you is an illusion. Imagine winning free of that illusion, only to watch your wife go mad because of what you’ve done. That, my friends, is the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.
And now the love of your life is gone, and it eats at you. You know she was wrong. You know that you’re in the real world—that death in this world is truly Death—but it doesn’t matter. She was so sure. She asked you to take the very same leap of faith that you once asked of her, and you failed to believe in her the way that she once believed in you. Even though you know she was wrong, you can’t help but feel that you’ve failed her on a number of levels.
And now her steadfast belief sits in a corner of your mind, rotting. Just how sure are you, anyway? What if she was right? Is she waiting for you a level above? She and the children you miss so dearly? You miss them all with every fiber of your being, and even though you know you’re right—even though you know this is the real world—the delusion of your dead wife haunts you. Every day the pain of loss and guilt grows, and every day the delusion becomes more attractive. It pulls at you. One simple action—the pull of a trigger or a leap from a ledge—and you could regain the woman you love. You could regain your family.
This is the burden that Cobb deals with. This, more than anything, is his reality. This is why Mal keeps showing up while Cobb and his cohorts are on the job. His subconscious has spun this aching need into a self-destructive Projection with an angelic face. The greater Cobb’s pain grows, the stronger “Mal” becomes, until she begins to endanger not just Cobb, but the jobs that he and Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are doing. He tries to sate her by spending time in dreams—in memories—with her, but this only makes matters worse. She wants him dead.
Or rather, he wants to die.
But enough of his sanity remains. He wants to go home. He wants to be a father to his motherless children. And so he takes the job offered by Saito (played by Ken Watanabe). He will lead a raid into the mind of Saito’s business rival, Robert Fischer (played by Cillian Murphy), with the purpose of planting the idea of breaking up his father’s business empire. In return, Saito will make Cobb’s legal problems disappear, allowing Cobb to reunite with his children and ensure that they have at least one parent to raise them.
Glossing over large chunks of the movie (not to mention the scene-stealing acting of Tom Hardy, who played Eames), Cobb and Co. succeed in their attempts at inception, and Cobb is finally reunited with his family. The last thing we see is the top spinning, about to fall over, thus proving that he is, in fact, in the real world.
Or is he? Maybe that top wasn’t about to fall over. Maybe it would have just kept on going, proving that Mal was right all along. And so begins the fun of not taking the movie at face value. There’s certainly evidence to lend credence to Mal’s idea that they were not, after all, in the real world.
Why is Cobb being chased across the globe by mysterious men? Doesn’t that seem eerily similar to the way a Dreamer’s Projections end up chasing intruding minds? Is the name of Cobb’s newfound Architect, Ariadne (played by Ellen Page), irrelevant, or a bit of symbolism on the part of writer/director Christopher Nolan? Why does Cobb have Mal’s totem? Where is his own? So many questions, so little brainpower with which to answer them.
But I’ll take a stab at it.
I think Cobb was right. I think Mal killed herself, albeit unintentionally. Why is Cobb being chased? Because of a job gone wrong, that’s why. To believe otherwise—that these “men” chasing him are, in fact, Projections—is to believe that he is not only asleep, but in someone else’s mind. After all, projections don’t attack the Dreamer, only those who don’t belong. Presumably the “someone else” is Mal. But that doesn’t seem right, because Mal killed herself. If the world Cobb now inhabits isn’t the real world, if it’s been created by Mal, then why is it still there after she’s gone? Does the movie ever address what happens to the others—the invaders—if the Dreamer wakes up first? Not that I recall. My assumption would be that everyone else would wake as well, that the effect would be similar to a mental version of having the rug pulled out from under you. You end up on your ass, back in the real world.
But then again, maybe the result is madness. Maybe you get trapped down there. Who’s to say?
Regardless, I’m inclined to believe that his world is the real world, because the alternative hurts my brain. And I think that Page’s character’s name, Ariadne, is a hint. Ariadne is a character from Greek mythology, the daughter of King Minos. King Minos occasionally sacrificed young men and women to the Minotaur lurking in the labyrinth of Crete. One day, Theseus was to be the sacrifice. Ariadne, however, fell in love with Theseus, and provided him with a ball of thread, allowing him to lay the thread down as he walked the labyrinth, and giving him a clear way out.
In other words, Ariadne provided Theseus’s path out of the labyrinth and back to the larger world. And I believe that she provided the same function for Cobb. Ariadne followed Cobb into Limbo in search of Saito and Fischer. (Note that his name is “Robert Fischer,” so they were “searching for Bobby Fischer.” And Ariadne’s totem is a chess piece. Not sure if that’s just a joke or has some deeper meaning.) Ariadne found her way out, and so did everyone else down there at the time. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the fact that Mal’s very name is derived from the Latin for “bad” seems to lend credence to the idea that, at this stage in the game, Ariadne is the reality, and Mal is the fantasy.
But even if this is incorrect, would staying in the “un-real world” really be so bad? Let’s assume that they’d been trapped in the fist level down. According to the movie, 5 minutes in the real world is an hour in the dream world. Assuming my math is correct (if you know me then you know that this isn’t exactly a safe assumption), that means one could live out 60 years on Level 1 in just a month’s time in the real world (and the further you go down, the less real world time it would take). Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Sure, your kids would miss you for a while, but you’d be back soon enough. It’s surely not something to kill yourself over, because the alternative—that you’re wrong and dying really would mean Dying—is rather permanent. As such, the entire movie could be seen as suggesting that, real world or dream, we should make the most of what we’ve got. “Real” is irrelevant. “Real” is what we perceive.
And then there’s the confusing business of the totems. Cobb uses a spinning top as a totem, and at one point mentions that it used to be Mal’s. But he also notes that a totem is personal to you and that you should allow no one else to touch it, lest you be fooled into believing that the dream is reality. The totem is supposed to be your sure-fire way of telling dream from reality. So why did this suddenly fail Mal? Shouldn’t she have been able to spin the top, watch it fall, and be reassured that she was in the real world? Was the idea planted in her mind so powerful that it was able to overcome this simple and elegant solution to recognizing reality?
And one must assume that both Cobb and Mal both had their own totems while they were together, so what happened to his totem? Why is he using Mal’s? Is using someone else’s totem just as foolproof, so long as you don’t let anyone touch it once you’ve started using it? Is Cobb’s use of the top merely his way of honoring Mal, of being close to her, or is it some form of self-deception? This line of thinking seems to be the clearest path to believing that Mal was right all along. But most of the evidence seems to indicate that she was in error.
And so, in the end, I’m left in a position eerily similar to Cobb’s: being nearly certain that he’s in the real world, but with nagging doubts that maybe—just maybe—his “crazy” wife wasn’t so crazy. What fun!
And now I must know! What do you think? What did I leave out? What did I get wrong? I’d love nothing more than to hear your take on things. --Gryffindork
