Writer’s note:
It’s been a long time since I have been actually inspired to write anything of a substantial length, which just goes to show just how awesome and mind-blowing Inception is as a movie. (It may also be because I have too much time on my hands, but you’re never going to catch me admitting to that.) If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend that you watch it, not least because this discussion contains spoilers, and reading this discussion alone will not do justice to the movie. This discussion assumes you’ve watched the movie, and understood at least half of what was going on. I’m not going to bother much with literary devices, bombastic vocabulary or what-have-you to make this a well-written essay, instead, I’m just going to hash out all my points and describe them as best as I can in the shortest time so that you can go and watch the movie a second (or third) time straight after reading this.
The most resilient and contagious virus is an idea. That is the basic premise upon which inception works – the insinuation of an idea deep into an individual’s mind. Once rooted, it would be nigh impossible to remove. Such ideas have potentially far-reaching effects, because as quoted in the move: ideas can create a person, or destroy him. An idea may eventually come to redefine a person’s entire life.
Such planting (or extracting) of ideas into people’s minds is made possible in the movie with a special technology that allows people to share each other’s dreams, literal expressions of the subconscious where secrets can be kept in security vaults and broken into just like in reality.
In the dream world, the dreamer’s mental defenses are lowered, allowing others greater access to the secrets that his subconscious unwittingly expresses, be it in the form of confidential documents hidden in a safe, or a projection of a dead wife as a result of guilt and grief. At the same time, the subconscious is also vulnerable to external influence, and becomes increasingly so the deeper one goes into dreams. That is the reason why Cobb and his team chose to enter the 3rd level of Fischer’s (the mark) dream, risking stability issues in order to plant an idea so deep within Fischer’s consciousness that he would be fundamentally influenced by that idea, and be unable to distinguish it as a planted idea (rather, he would believe it as his own idea). Similarly, Cobb was only able to permanently resolve the guilt and grief issues concerning his wife, Mal, in the deepest level of his subconscious, his own personal ‘limbo’. In the third level, experiences there will make the most impact on the subconscious, and leave the deepest imprint upon the mind.
In the movie, it seems that the main conflict is between Fischer and the team, as the team struggles against Fischer’s subconscious projections in order to plant an idea within his subconscious mind. Yet, as the movie progresses, it is apparent that there is another conflict present, and it is this conflict that is actually the main highlight of the movie, and distinguishes Inception from most other movies. This conflict revolves mainly about the concept of the conscious vs subconscious, to be specific, Cobb’s struggle against his own subconscious as he tries to come to terms with his wife’s death. In this conflict, the conscious mind is incapable of knowing, or controlling what the subconscious does, whereas the subconscious knows everything the conscious mind knows, building up to perhaps one of the greatest internal conflicts in protagonists throughout movie history.
Throughout all of Cobb’s dreams, subconscious projections of his wife and his kids continue to recur, representations of his two greatest subconscious desires, so great that they continually intrude upon his (and that of others) dreams beyond his control. The very fact other characters are not faced with such problems suggests that it’s a serious problem (duh). The continual reappearance of his kids signifies his overwhelming desire to return to his children, while the former is slightly more complicated.
Unlike most other faceless / anonymous subconscious projections, Cobb’s subconscious projection of Mal is unusually vivid and personable, such that in most cases, it is nigh impossible to distinguish the projection from the real Mal. This is possibly because of Cobb’s degree of closeness with his wife, such that even a subconscious projection of her appears to take on a life of its own. Furthermore, Cobb’s projection of Mal is almost always involved in sabotaging his missions, and continually tries to persuade him to follow “her” by killing himself. It cannot be stressed enough that it is not the actual Mal doing all this, but Cobb’s own subconscious trying to persuade him to give up on his current pursuits / missions and just kill himself.
This strongly suggests that no matter how strongly Cobb insists upon his grip on reality, his subconscious betrays him by showing that at a fundamental level, he continually doubts his reality, and tests it by spinning his top frequently, almost obsessively. On one incident, before his children called him (after the first failed mission), he tests his reality with his totem, and from the way he picks up his gun, it is evident that he is already fully prepared to shoot himself should the totem keep spinning. It is further confirmed that Cobb’s grip on reality is not as strong as the audience is led to believe initially, when in the ski fortress, he hesitates in killing his own projection of Mal, because, as he tells Ariadne, he can’t be sure it isn’t the real Mal.
Apparently, Cobb’s inability to truly believe in his reality is not common. Throughout the entire movie, we only see Cobb continually testing his totem, and no one else. This problem may have arisen due to the long time he spent in limbo with Mal, as well as his own penchant to live in his own dreams constructed out of memory (as Ariadne discovers the night before the mission), such that he cannot truly distinguish between reality and dream. In that aspect, he has become no different from the dozen dreamers slumbering in Yusuf’s basement.
This brings us to the concept of totems: small, heavy objects that serve to help dreamers distinguish dream from reality. As much as I understand, the underlying principle behind these totems is that personal totems are meant to be kept a secret. That way, when the dreamer finds himself in another (possibly hostile) individual’s carefully crafted dream, and tests his totem, it will betray the truth of the dream, as that other individual who creates the dream is ignorant of specific details of the target’s personal totem. As such, a spinning top may continue spinning, or a loaded die may fall on the wrong side, because it is an overlooked detail on the dream creator’s part.
Understanding how a totem works has a very important implication: a totem truly works if you are in another person’s dream, or if you are in your own dream and know that it is a dream. It will fail to function correctly if you are in your own dream but fail to realize it, as your subconscious will be aware of your totem’s secret and, believing in the reality of the dream, change the dream to allow for the correct outcome of the totem test, tricking you into believing the dream as reality.
Upon this hinges an important outcome of the entire movie (the main topic of discussion in this movie): whether Cobb’s entire believed reality is a dream. At the end of the movie, it is irrelevant whether the top continues spinning or falls: if Cobb is living within his own dream, and believes it to be his reality, it will fall.
Certainly, there are many hints which seem to support the theory that right from the beginning, Cobb has been living a dream, and that the entire team are all simply projections of his own mind. Yet I shall proceed to refute them and show why this is not so.
Arguments for why it is all a dream:
1) In the helicopter, when Saito makes his initial proposal to Cobb, he asks Cobb whether he wants to see his family again, or if he wants to become ‘an old man, living in regret, and dying alone’. This phrase is strangely reminiscent of the exchange between Cobb and Saito much later, when discussing the effects of being stranded in limbo for years, and may hint that Cobb is already stuck in limbo.
-It is a hint, nothing more. It is not concrete, and I believe it is simply meant to tantalize the audience and give them doubts about whether the entire reality is a dream. Much later, when Cobb and Saito converse in Saito’s limbo, they use the exact same words because these words are familiar to them, and represent something they hold very close to their hearts, and are used to fully convince Saito that he is still dreaming.
2) When Cobb meets Miles (Mal’s father and Ariadne’s professor) in the movie in his search for an architect, Miles asks him to come back to reality.
-Taken alone, it may seem like a hint that actually, Cobb isn’t already in reality, but still dreaming. However, if one looks at the context of the conversation, it is clear that is not what Miles means. Instead, he wishes for Cobb to stop participating in dream crime and lead an honest life, and the ‘reality’ he mentions is simply a metaphor.
3) When Cobb and Ariadne enter limbo to confront Cobb’s projection of Mal, the projection whispers Cobb’s own unspoken fears to him: that his own believed reality is but a dream, where he is persecuted by countless nameless, anonymous projections (from the corporation).
-As mentioned earlier, a personal totem only serves to distinguish reality from dream only if the dream is someone else’s creation and not if it is Cobb’s own dream. From Cobb’s tests in the movie, it is readily apparent that if it is a dream, it is definitely not someone else’s but his own (I shall not go into the possibility that someone who is aware of Cobb’s secret totem is recreating his reality as a dream). If Cobb’s reality is a dream, it is no one’s but his own. As such, it will not make logical sense for the ‘faceless projections’ (his projections) to hunt him down.
Arguments for why it is reality:
1) Cobb and Mal took years to build their own city in limbo. The cities and surroundings displayed in reality in the movie are all far too detailed, and on too large a scale for it all to have been created by Cobb’s subconscious alone (unless there is someone else participating in Cobb’s dream / limbo who is consciously supplementing it by constructing every single detail). For me, there was no discernable lack of detail of that I could spot. Notice that in Saito’s limbo, all the detail that is shown is just a sea fortress.
2) If the rest of the team is all projections, then they are very convincing projections. Their personalities are highly detailed and complex, even Fischer’s relationship with his father, perhaps too complex to be simply projections. They exhibit no odd behaviour, such as coordinated staring when the dreamer (Cobb) is stressed or doubts his reality. Cobb’s projection of Mal is the only one rivaling the characters in terms of personality (only because Cobb knows Mal in such intimate detail), and even then, she is almost too single-minded in wanting Cobb to kill himself, and the circumstances of her appearance are always abrupt and illogical, such that it becomes clear she is a projection.
3) As clearly illustrated previously, Cobb maintains little control over his subconscious where his wife and his children are concerned. In his dreams, whenever he feels a desire to return home to his children, they will appear randomly almost anywhere, in the oddest of places: a hotel, on the beach of his own limbo, and even on the beach of Saito’s limbo. In reality, they don’t do this…at most, they give him a call.
There are two possibilities:
Cobb is living his dream, and several very skillful people are participating in the dream with him, supplementing every single detail carefully. Since his subconscious believes this dream is real, it makes the top wobble and fall every time. Or he is living the dream of someone who knows the secret to his totem.
Second possibility is that his reality is real. I choose to go with the latter, the former being unlikely (but not totally ruled out).
So what really happened?
As mentioned in the movie, Cobb planted an idea within Mal’s subconscious while in limbo: a spinning top, the idea that your reality is a dream. Unfortunately, it is folly to believe one can brainwash a person that casually without disastrous consequences. That act eventually wrecked havoc within her mind, changed her forever, and resulted in a lot of unhappiness for everyone (never mess around with people’s heads – a possible moral of the movie?). Cobb failed to understand the full gravity of inception when he carried out that particular act, but went ahead anyway.
(In my opinion, since Mal locked away the top and promptly forgot about it, what he should have done was to take out the top and spin it in front of her instead of playing around with her mind [the safe]. True, he’d get hell from his wife for breaking and entering into her mind, but in the end, it’d have been better for the both of them. But if that happened, there’ll be no good movie.)
Cobb successfully brainwashed Mal for his own ends, but subsequently, his plan began to spiral out of control. When the couple returned to the real world, Cobb failed to realize that within Mal’s “safe”, her deepest subconscious, the top was still spinning…and he’d forgotten to take it out. As long as the top remained spinning within her head, she was doomed. Regardless of whether she was in a dream or reality, she would keep killing herself, over and over again, an endless cycle, until she truly died. So she jumped to her death. And that was supposed to have been the end of it all…
But as Cobb says at the beginning of the movie, and repeats later on before he faces his own projection of Mal in his limbo, an idea is the most resilient and contagious virus. That is the true reason why his own subconscious construct of Mal kept trying to persuade him to kill himself (not so much his guilt). Because at a subconscious level, Cobb himself has been infected by the very same creeping doubts he planted in Mal, an idea impossible to totally eradicate. Coming from a person that he trusted and loved for more than fifty years (in limbo, at least) with such conviction, it is inevitable that Cobb would also be affected by the idea, especially when Mal gave her life for it.
This explains his continual doubt of reality throughout the entire movie, his almost obsessive habit in testing reality with his totem. This explains the recurrent projections of his doubts about reality in the form of Mal, the avatar of his disbelief at a subconscious level. He claims that he believes he is in reality, but fundamentally, his own subconscious projection betrays his true doubts (as mentioned earlier).
Finally, Cobb is able to weed out that particular idea from within his own head within his limbo (where his subconscious is most vulnerable to influence), when he confronts his own subconscious projection together with Ariadne. There, he admits to having performed inception on Mal, and Mal’s delusion was the direct result of his interference. He is the true source of her idea, and Mal was not acting rationally when she jumped to her death, as there was no evidence that they were living a dream. These facts (as well as resolving the guilt he felt towards her) enabled him to free himself of the idea which had ensnared him as well, and permanently set his own doubts to rest. He tells her ‘but we’ve had our time together, don’t you remember?’, and in doing so, shows that he is willing to forsake any possibility of him joining her by killing himself.
My interpretation of what happens next may be slightly different from conventional interpretation. Several concepts were not described very well in the movie (either that or I’m just stupid), but from what I could discern about limbo, I highly doubt that there is a ‘universal limbo’, the whole point of limbo being a personal limbo.
As far as I can deduce, when Cobb and Ariadne followed Fischer into limbo, they probably connected themselves with Fischer before they went to sleep, thus explaining how Fischer came to end up in Cobb’s limbo (the abandoned city). Yet, following that, I do not see Saito being linked up with Cobb at any point in time (in the ski fortress, when Saito died in one corner), and I fail to see how Cobb managed to end up in Saito’s limbo almost magically.
(You can argue that in reality, in the van, and in the hotel, both of them are still linked, but judging from the movie creators’ treatment of ‘dream within a dream’, the ski fortress has to be treated as reality before Cobb can go further into limbo. Thus, he has to be connected to Saito in the ski fortress if he is to find Saito…unless there is a ridiculously complicated explanation about limbo being parallel to all the dream states.)
My interpretation is this: when ‘Mal’ stabbed Cobb in limbo and Cobb ‘died’, he did not magically transport himself to Saito’s limbo, but fell deeper into his own limbo. The rest of what happened in the movie is all a dream. There is an abrupt transition from when the old Saito picks up Cobb’s gun in limbo, to Cobb waking up, that leaves a hanging question in the audience’s minds…what happened after he picked up the gun? And the universal question that should be asked in dreams: How did Cobb get there (back to the plane seat)? (And it is impossible to escape from limbo by killing yourself, due to the nature of the special sedative used on that mission. Cobb and Mal were previously only able to escape their own limbo because they used a different sedative, I presume.)
When Cobb wakes up, there is an announcement on the plane saying that the plane will land in 20 minutes. That means that the sedative wore off. According to the movie, the rest of the team were able to end up safely back in the ‘raining LA dream’. As I see no practical way of giving the team freefall jumps in the plane (or for that matter, for the air hostess to know that the mission is complete, and wake them up), the only way for the team was to remain 1 week in the raining dream until the sedative wore off. The movie literally skims over this entire part about Cobb and Saito waking up in the raining dream and hooking up with the rest of the team, which leads me to doubt the reality of the scene of Cobb actually waking up when the sedative wore off.
Notice that after Cobb wakes up, everything seems strangely dreamlike. There is minimal conversation; instead, all that is shown is the team members smiling at Cobb in approval as he floats through immigration in an almost dreamlike manner (with inspiring music playing, to fill up the silence). The sequence passed almost too smoothly and quickly, and the team members displayed a noticeable lack of personality in my opinion.
Since Cobb has also laid down the doubts about his reality and come to terms with his wife’s death, projections of his wife no longer appear. He reaches home, and out of habit, spins his totem. Yet it becomes clear that he does not need his totem anymore, and ignored the outcome, as he becomes distracted by his own children. His mind distracted, his subconscious overlooks the minor detail of the spinning top, which will keep spinning, and spinning, until he remembers the top, upon which the top will wobble and fall, as he believes it will. Ultimately, it is the faces of his own children which will tie him down permanently in this dream, for Cobb has come home at last.
Inconsistencies and flaws in the movie
1) When Arthur (or Cobb, I can’t remember) explains the concept of dreaming to Ariadne, he cites the popular myth that we only use 10% (or thereabouts) of our brain’s true capacity when we’re dreaming. It is scientifically proven untrue.
2) In the first layer of the dream (the raining dream), when the van goes into freefall, the physics of the second dream are changed, and everyone becomes weightless in the hotel. Technically, this should further apply into the third dream in the ski fortress, but then the movie would turn into a comedy. It is possible (but unlikely) that Ariadne, being the architect, was consciously maintaining gravity in Fischer’s dream in the third level. It should be noted that only the dreamer could alter the physics in his particular dream. Otherwise, Arthur could have reinstated gravity in the hotel and made life a lot easier and a lot less exciting.
3) I am under the impression that there are only two ways to wake up from a dream. First is to have someone wake your sleeping body up (ie subjecting it to freefall, or the ‘jump’ and the ‘kick’). Second is for your dream self to kill yourself, or get killed. In the mission, with the use of the special sedative, the latter option becomes void. The problem comes when Ariadne tries to wake both herself and Fischer up from limbo. She subjects both of their dreaming selves to freefall, and it is this freefall which wakes Fischer first and Ariadne later. On the other hand, Cobb seems to believe that by killing themselves, him and Saito can wake from limbo. Furthermore, the charges set to blow up the ski fortress (to give the team freefall) seem rather redundant, given that the ‘kick’ is already being provided to their sleeping selves in the hotel elevator, to wake them up from the ski fortress dream. I’m confused.
4) Cobb and Saito were not connected before Cobb entered Saito’s personal limbo. But then again, my earlier theory gives a possible explanation.
5) The film does a rather mathematical treatment of dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream. I find it rather hard to visualize such a possibility occurring. Granted, the movie made allowances for such a possibility by introducing a special sedative that stabilized such dreams. Still, the idea that in the third level of the dream, your mind works 8000 times as fast as normal stretches the limits of neural science (as far as I know) and gives a convincing argument for sleeping in the examination hall.
Interesting points to note
1) It is noted that whenever an individual enters a dream (doesn’t have to be his own), his mind automatically populates it with people, projections of his subconscious. This is demonstrated in the training dreams between Ariadne and Cobb / Arthur. In Cobb’s and Mal’s shared limbo, no projections were shown, not even their children, for that matter. In the mission, only Cobb’s and Fischer’s projections appear, in the form of Mal and military / security dudes respectively. None of the other team members had any projections appear.
2) Apparently limbos (Saito’s, Cobb’s, and Mal’s) seem to be characterized by one thing: it is a land surrounded on all sides by an ‘infinite sea of the subconscious’. On this land is the only refuge for the dreamer, where he encloses and isolates himself in the middle of this infinite sea.
3) It seems that within dreams, the team members possess a certain capacity to manipulate the dream even if it is not their dream. Ariadne, as an architect, designs the mazes within Fischer’s dreams. Arthur, one on occasion in the hotel, manages to twist a set of staircases into a paradox, allowing him to come up behind a projection and defeat him. On the other hand, on the tundra in the third dream, team members are unable to create paradoxical shortcuts to reach the fortress faster; instead, they have to rely on Ariadne’s knowledge of the maze she designed.
4) At the beginning of the movie, when Cobb meets his projection of Mal while trying to steal from Saito, she asks him, “If I jump, will I still live?” Cobb replies, “A clean dive, perhaps.” He tries to evade the true meaning behind the question, and in doing so, shows that at that point in the movie, he is still unwilling to face his doubts, and tries to deny them, up till the point where it gets progressively worse.
5) On their wedding anniversary, Mal discarded her totem (the top) and left it on the floor of the hotel room. In her eyes, her totem was no longer useful in determining her reality, as it did not correspond with what she firmly believed in. It was then that Cobb picked it up and started using it thereafter as his own totem. It appears he had no problem dealing with reality before that, and therefore had no use for a totem.
On the whole, Inception is a beautifully crafted movie, with layers upon layers, much like dreams (not to mention the tantalizing hints and clues in both directions, leaving much room for speculation). As some people say, it can indeed be called a dream: a shared dream where Nolan is the dreamer and we are the targets, a dream where the actors, producers, and the rest of the set all have a part to play in filming a movie so real, and with such incredible detail, that it just blew most of us off our feet.
A train is coming. You know where it might bring you, but you don’t know for sure. You get on anyway, because you’d be together.
Feel free to criticize (I read too much into things), feedback (disagreements with certain arguments?), or suggest your own theories.
