Some Thoughts About ‘Inception’ 2010 (100% SPOILERS)

Everything that follows is a spoiler.

I don’t want to spend the time explaining all of the concepts of ‘Inception’ because other places have already done that extensively. I also don’t want to try to explain the entire plot arc, or several of the more complicated plot threads that may be seen as loose ends or even as ever-dreaded plot holes. What seems to be the biggest question is one of the ending; is Cobb dreaming or awake when he finally meets his kids in the end. Obviously Nolan leaves you  the option to name the glass half full or half empty with his infamous cut-as-the-top-wobbled. And even as I approach writing this I am finding that I can’t definitively remove the choice from your own shoulders. But, in the context of my interpretation, I can at least change it from one of optimism vs. pessimism to one based more on intuitive logic.

My explanation hinges on a subtle question of definition (shout out to Wiley). It is explained that while heavily sedated a person may not kill themselves out of a dream; they will, in fact, be reborn in “limbo.” Limbo is what I have such a hard time with. This is not a real concept, obviously, and therefore only Christopher Nolan actually knows how it works. How a regular viewer would intuit it to work (I think) is that, if one cannot kill oneself directly out of the dream while sedated, one should not be able to kill oneself out of limbo. Here is really the crux of the matter. When Mal and Cobb are initially in limbo, and he incepts her into killing herself, the camera work seems to suggest that they are awakened lying in exactly the same position as they died. A consecutiveness is implied by this editing.

It is later revealed that they were not young when they killed themselves, however, and that they actually lived to be very old and wrinkly and gross. Why didn’t they look that way when they laid their heads on the track? The first answer, and the one that I initially sprung to, is that they must not have actually awoken after they were run over. The train killed them, but they couldn’t wake up because they were sedated. They rewoke into limbo, they lived to be old, and at some later date when they were wrinkly and the sedative finally wore off, they awoke in the real world. The inception that Cobb performed on Mal convinced her to kill herself out of limbo #1, into limbo #2. When she died in limbo 2, she woke in the real world, which she interpreted as a dream, the same as limbo 1. She tried to convince him that she was right, and eventually suicided again.

In this context, when Cobb convinces Saito to shoot himself at the end of the film, he is essentially performing the same inception. He is convincing Saito that he can kill himself and he will awake. However, he can’t actually kill himself out of limbo until the timer runs out. Cobb and Saito kill themselves and they are reborn again still in limbo. Cobb dreams that he arrives in LA and exits the plane, everything achieved swimmingly. He remembers that he is still in a dream, and he spins the top, but then he walks away. He has excised the ghost of Mal from himself finally and he is OK with whatever reality he is in. He doesn’t care that it is a dream, as long as he is happy and with his family. The earlier Cobb would never have looked at his children’s faces until he was positive the top was about to topple. He would have watched it with all the intensity of every one of the audience members in the theater who leaned to the edge of their seats with white knuckles clenched on sweaty armrests. But he didn’t. And the movie ended.

Explanation number two requires a little more that the rules of the dream world not be intuitive (which seems perfectly fair, I suppose, although it initially buckles our sensibilities, which tend to be more accustomed to the real world where intuition functions quite well). If one could be heavily sedated and then die into the world of limbo and “awake” aware of this turn of events (as Cobb seemed to do with ease, although every other character had a hard time of it), it is possible that killing themselves would succeed in waking them. My common sense says that regardless of the state of dreaming they are in, they are still sedated, but Nolan’s fantasy world has no attachment to the world of my common sense. It is possible that this works.

In this case, when Mal and Cobb are hit by the train, the tricky camera work that is in play is that they are depicted as young at the time of their suicide, when in fact they must have been already very old. And this is hinted at in one very brief shot when Cobb confesses to Mal that they did grow old together: right after the shot of them walking as an aged couple there is a shot of two wrinkled hands clasped before a backdrop of railroad ties. In this case, Cobb’s inception convinced Mal to kill herself in order to return to the real world, but the idea that he incepted grew from its deep location in the back of her mind to consume her with some sort of paranoid schizophrenia in which she refused to believe that even the place in which she awoke was real (although the shock of having woken up after 50 years, the brain-t0-mush syndrome that Arthur describes, probably has a hand in this disintegration).

Now when Cobb convinces Saito to kill himself in limbo, it really does work. They do actually awake on the plane, everything works out perfectly, the dream-like qualities of the ending and the resemblance to Cobb’s memory are only there to confuse the audience, and the top falls just after the screen goes black. Although the important thing is still the transformation of Cobb’s character that I mentioned above, i.e. that he no longer waits for the top’s fall with a pistol to his temple, etc.

So the question at this point seems to be narrowed down to a less personality test-y question than one of optimism/pessimism: how do you interpret the dreamspace? I like to think that one’s level of dreaming doesn’t affect the way sedation works and that one cannot kill oneself out of limbo. I know that it needn’t follow any logic, but because Nolan has given me the option, I choose the logic that makes sense to me over the happy ending. But I honestly can’t see any way to refute the other explanation. In a world that is this complicated and that has been so intensely scrutinized, not everything will add up perfectly. So I guess you just get to pick your own adventure, Goosebumps style.

An interesting side note to this explanation is that I actually found a feasible rationale for Saito’s advanced old age in limbo. Conceivably the age of the dreamer is malleable in a similar way to the dreamspace, so it is possible that someone who was aware that they are dreaming would not age, or would not perceive themselves to age, while in the dream state. Saito was unaware that he was dreaming, so he aged dramatically as time passed. It is easily possible that the same amount of time passed for Cobb (who washed up after an indeterminate amount of time on the shores of Saito’s subconscious) and that he only looked younger because he perceived himself as younger, he being a god in the dreamspace and all. It’s kind of like the way one appears in the Matrix according to one’s self image and not one’s actual physical appearance. Additionally, this argument could be used in favor of the top-falling explanation above, with the rationale being that Mal and Cobb perceived themselves differently at the time of the train-suicide. Them dying at a young age was Mal’s view rather than a directorial trick, and the later-revealed fact that they were old was Cobb’s view of the same occasion. Or, more convoluted yet, when Cobb recognized they were in a dream he viewed them as young (as did Mal, after he convinced her of this fact), and it is only later, when he is talking to Mal about how old they grew, that he re-perceives them as old in the same context. I’m not sure that I don’t count this all as a directorial trick anyway.

Someone argue with me.  🙂