Inception - Not one idea!
Spoiler but not a Review.
Perhaps what Nolan meant to do with the spinning totem is to put us in a prolonged-state of limbo by planting a million ideas in our head. What it also did in the process is to entertain us immensely by being brilliant and distorted. But what is our totem? How do we get out of this state of limbo that Nolan put us in and know for sure that we are now in the real world? And would it matter if all this were a dream?
Moreover, was the totem for real or was it a spin-off from Cobb's imagination?
For a totem to work as a squeaky clean method to track one's reality, its creator alone should be able to identify and predict its behavior. And if that's the case, at some point in the movie we realize that the top was Mal's totem, so it could not have helped Cobb ascertain if he was awake or inside a dream...unless Mal too was a spin-off from Cobb's imagination -- a projection while he was in limbo. (there are a few pointers to this... some evidence even seems to suggest that he has always been in limbo)
As we see with Cobb in the end of the movie and with Mal when she jumps off the cliff, it seems like after a point it becomes less important to prove reality to oneself and more important to just achieve it. Mal achieves her reality when she jumps off the building and Cobb when he finds his children. It could have meant nothing to Cobb that the totem didn't spin flawlessly in the end like it usually does in a dream, or that it didn't stop spinning! He had by then come to terms with the loss of his wife and found his children. (It was interesting to note that in all the years the children had never aged, which only brings me to surmise that the top never stopped spinning in the end, and it was all Cobb’s dream. But that doesn’t still explain why the top didn’t always spin continuously in other parts of the movie).
But does one need a totem? After all, Cobb and Mal didn't seem to need it for years before she came up with hers. It was in fact her idea to use totems to tell the two worlds apart, and ironically enough, hers never stopped spinning in both worlds. We never find out what Cobb's totem is or if he even had one? Ariadne wasn't seen using her uneven chess piece, or Arthur his loaded dice. What it seemed to do for Cobb though is to serve as a compass to guide him back home. Either that or it was just a token of Mal's memory that was purposeful only because he imagined it to be.
In our real world, our totems are more cognitive. A classic test to tell dreams from reality is to perform an action and check if the results are consistent with what happens when we are awake. For instance, when you are in a dream state, the text in digital watches is said to be scrambled with the characters changing at every glance. The reflection of oneself in a mirror is distorted. The ground beneath one's feet is unstable. The tempo of the music one's listening to is different or warped. We don't always wake up to physical pain or "kicks". They blend into our dream and shape the unfolding drama. In the movie, Yusuf's urge to badly want to pee caused it to rain heavily in the dream... The van falling off the bridge caused zero-gravity in the hotel...music was used to synchronize the kicks across different dream levels... and ìkicksî (physical action) were supposed to jolt them out of their dream state! There is also an interesting point about how people perceive us in our subconscious (the curious glances with all eyes fixed on the dreamer, when the subconscious mind becomes aware of external intrusion into a dream).
At some point in the movie, the time-warp seemed faulty. On a very superficial level, five minutes of dream time was said to be an hour of reality. What this meant was that the 10 hours in the plane to LA translated to 120 hours of dream time in level 1, 1440 hrs of dream time in level 2, and 17,280 hrs of dream time in level 3, which means the team that went down three dream levels had almost 2 years to implant the idea in Fischer's head. But, somehow in the third level they seemed to be rushed for time, and did everything like they had only a few hours to get the job done. I just didn't get why that was so! I had imagined the whole dream sequence to turn into a long Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind equivalent, and was preparing myself to see them hop through Fischer's memories for months to accomplish the three tasks in the three dream levels. (Still Saito seemed to have aged significantly from being in limbo)
The movie initially felt unresolved. It felt like a lot of time was spent focussing on bringing closure to Cobb's relationship with Mal and taking him back to his children. It looked like he did little to contribute to the actual job at hand, which was to implant an idea into Fischer's head of dissolving his father’s empire. The team seemed to do a contrived job where there roles weren't clear beyond having to sedate him and administer the kick. It almost seemed like Fischer implanted the idea of dissolving the empire by himself without needing any prodding from the team.
But in retrospect, a lot of effort went into goading Fischer's mind in the right direction. There was the kidnapping sequence that went awry; Fischer was extorted into remembering the combination on the safe's lock to rescue his godfather; they then planted doubts about the intentions of his godfather in Fischer's mind (which is resolved in the final level. I especially liked the part where the team encounters Fischer's own subconscious projection of his godfather), and had Cobb alert Fischer to this imaginary series of actions in his subconscious mind. That's one hell of a job! .. and all this was done not just by hopping through three dream levels, but also by navigating through several people's dreams. The inception began with Yusuf's dream and moved to Arthur's, then Eame’s/Fischer's (who thinks he is going into Browning's dream) and finally Cobb’s. The only thing tying them together was Ariadne's architecture... while Cobb's emotional distraction seemed to test the latitude of these dream spaces and at times threatened to jeopardize their single-minded goal.
What this did was restrict the movement of the dreamers in each level, while at the same time giving them very important tasks to do beyond just dreaming. Would it have been easier on them had they assigned new teams of non-dreamers to perform the tasks (like administering the kick), while the important guys focused on more tactical undertakings (like manipulating Fischer's mind)? That would have made for messy drama, but on a purely logistics point-of-view, without considering the constraints of film structure, the execution of the tasks may have been more structured and simplified....and perhaps more thought-provoking.
When a film is as three-dimensional as this one, with so much cogitate on, the last thing you want to do is to scoff at little flaws in plot logic. It becomes inconsequential why Cobb and Mal look young in her death scene, if they looked like an old couple in another other scene... or why she staged a dramatic murder act in one hotel room and then rented another hotel room across it to jump off, if she was trying to frame Cobb for the murder (or convince him to jump with her after ridding himself of guilt about the children).
It wasn't clear what the point of creating dream worlds in mazes was, for they were never used except in one hotel sequence where Arthur walks through a staircase that leads to a dead-end. In fact, in some of the levels the constructs were not even mazes. But Araidne served her purpose as an architect in some metaphoric sense. Cobb needed a female companion to enter his subconscious and empathize with his agony. What she did was to navigate through the maze in his life and help him find his end.
It was not clear how Cobb and Saito got back to reality in the plane, given that they were both in limbo - Cobb from drowning and Saito from the bullet wound! Cobb somehow managed to resurface in Saito's dream and bring him back to reality even though he could not be resuscitated (unlike Fischer). That didn't make sense. It also didn’t make sense why Saito looked so much older than Cobb while they were in the same dream level. I'll just make-do with one of those "dreams are rarely sound or sequential" explanations to satisfy this doubt.
Speaking of which, there was little done to take advantage of the logical fallacies in dreams. There was the staircase that served to satisfy this point... there was the fight sequence in zero-gravity... some cool architectural constructs that Araidne created that defied the laws of physics... but little was done in the way of showing paradoxes in mental logic. Wouldn't it have been exciting if at each level, the dreamer said something illogical that sounded logical to everyone in the scene, and advanced their goal of implanting idea more easily?
On some level I wish there was some justification for why the team would put themselves through this risky job. Cobb was the only person who had a lot at stake for which it made sense that he risk his life!
But there was something for us in all this. There was the idea that we could all share dreams to experience reality. But that the deeper you dive into someone's dreams, the more likely it is that we may hit limbo or spend a whole lifetime navigating the maze of dreams within dreams. But, limbo isn't a deadend for all. In Cobb and Mal's case it was an unconstructed space that they spent years filling with memories and places from their past life. But it took over their lives in irreversible ways, where the line between real and unreal became imperceptible. Cobb and Mal both tried to get out of it, and became consumed by it... in the end it was hard to tell where they each found their peace!
There is a back and forth on whether Mal was ever real or if she was entirely Cobb’s construct. One the one hand, it is assumed that when a person is in limbo he is completely alone, which means Cobb created a projection of his wife and children in the same way he did the buildings and memories over time. Then again, there were times when she felt entirely real. By the end of the film, it was not clear what Cobb's limbo looks like, or if everything were events in Cobb's subconscious... that he was so lost in deeper levels of his dreams that he never found out that he did not get out. He probably just travelled between deeper and relatively-outer levels of his dreams. The question that begs asking to clarify this one point is if one can get into the dreams of one's projections.
There is speculation on what motivates killing... whether it is to go into limbo or to reappear in real life (even the protagonists didn't seem sure... they seem to have acted on their thoughts with little regard to consequence).
As I think about it, there is so much that made sense and so much that did not in the movie. It felt open-ended but also flawed... or more politely – distorted...warped. It almost felt like the amusement was in navigating through the loopholes in this labyrinth of what the film could have been... or may have been... like it was open not to interpretation but to assault :)
Perhaps what Nolan meant to do with the spinning totem is to put us in a prolonged-state of limbo by planting a million ideas in our head. What it also did in the process is to entertain us immensely by being brilliant and distorted. But what is our totem? How do we get out of this state of limbo that Nolan put us in and know for sure that we are now in the real world? And would it matter if all this were a dream?
Moreover, was the totem for real or was it a spin-off from Cobb's imagination?
For a totem to work as a squeaky clean method to track one's reality, its creator alone should be able to identify and predict its behavior. And if that's the case, at some point in the movie we realize that the top was Mal's totem, so it could not have helped Cobb ascertain if he was awake or inside a dream...unless Mal too was a spin-off from Cobb's imagination -- a projection while he was in limbo. (there are a few pointers to this... some evidence even seems to suggest that he has always been in limbo)
As we see with Cobb in the end of the movie and with Mal when she jumps off the cliff, it seems like after a point it becomes less important to prove reality to oneself and more important to just achieve it. Mal achieves her reality when she jumps off the building and Cobb when he finds his children. It could have meant nothing to Cobb that the totem didn't spin flawlessly in the end like it usually does in a dream, or that it didn't stop spinning! He had by then come to terms with the loss of his wife and found his children. (It was interesting to note that in all the years the children had never aged, which only brings me to surmise that the top never stopped spinning in the end, and it was all Cobb’s dream. But that doesn’t still explain why the top didn’t always spin continuously in other parts of the movie).
But does one need a totem? After all, Cobb and Mal didn't seem to need it for years before she came up with hers. It was in fact her idea to use totems to tell the two worlds apart, and ironically enough, hers never stopped spinning in both worlds. We never find out what Cobb's totem is or if he even had one? Ariadne wasn't seen using her uneven chess piece, or Arthur his loaded dice. What it seemed to do for Cobb though is to serve as a compass to guide him back home. Either that or it was just a token of Mal's memory that was purposeful only because he imagined it to be.
In our real world, our totems are more cognitive. A classic test to tell dreams from reality is to perform an action and check if the results are consistent with what happens when we are awake. For instance, when you are in a dream state, the text in digital watches is said to be scrambled with the characters changing at every glance. The reflection of oneself in a mirror is distorted. The ground beneath one's feet is unstable. The tempo of the music one's listening to is different or warped. We don't always wake up to physical pain or "kicks". They blend into our dream and shape the unfolding drama. In the movie, Yusuf's urge to badly want to pee caused it to rain heavily in the dream... The van falling off the bridge caused zero-gravity in the hotel...music was used to synchronize the kicks across different dream levels... and ìkicksî (physical action) were supposed to jolt them out of their dream state! There is also an interesting point about how people perceive us in our subconscious (the curious glances with all eyes fixed on the dreamer, when the subconscious mind becomes aware of external intrusion into a dream).
At some point in the movie, the time-warp seemed faulty. On a very superficial level, five minutes of dream time was said to be an hour of reality. What this meant was that the 10 hours in the plane to LA translated to 120 hours of dream time in level 1, 1440 hrs of dream time in level 2, and 17,280 hrs of dream time in level 3, which means the team that went down three dream levels had almost 2 years to implant the idea in Fischer's head. But, somehow in the third level they seemed to be rushed for time, and did everything like they had only a few hours to get the job done. I just didn't get why that was so! I had imagined the whole dream sequence to turn into a long Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind equivalent, and was preparing myself to see them hop through Fischer's memories for months to accomplish the three tasks in the three dream levels. (Still Saito seemed to have aged significantly from being in limbo)
The movie initially felt unresolved. It felt like a lot of time was spent focussing on bringing closure to Cobb's relationship with Mal and taking him back to his children. It looked like he did little to contribute to the actual job at hand, which was to implant an idea into Fischer's head of dissolving his father’s empire. The team seemed to do a contrived job where there roles weren't clear beyond having to sedate him and administer the kick. It almost seemed like Fischer implanted the idea of dissolving the empire by himself without needing any prodding from the team.
But in retrospect, a lot of effort went into goading Fischer's mind in the right direction. There was the kidnapping sequence that went awry; Fischer was extorted into remembering the combination on the safe's lock to rescue his godfather; they then planted doubts about the intentions of his godfather in Fischer's mind (which is resolved in the final level. I especially liked the part where the team encounters Fischer's own subconscious projection of his godfather), and had Cobb alert Fischer to this imaginary series of actions in his subconscious mind. That's one hell of a job! .. and all this was done not just by hopping through three dream levels, but also by navigating through several people's dreams. The inception began with Yusuf's dream and moved to Arthur's, then Eame’s/Fischer's (who thinks he is going into Browning's dream) and finally Cobb’s. The only thing tying them together was Ariadne's architecture... while Cobb's emotional distraction seemed to test the latitude of these dream spaces and at times threatened to jeopardize their single-minded goal.
What this did was restrict the movement of the dreamers in each level, while at the same time giving them very important tasks to do beyond just dreaming. Would it have been easier on them had they assigned new teams of non-dreamers to perform the tasks (like administering the kick), while the important guys focused on more tactical undertakings (like manipulating Fischer's mind)? That would have made for messy drama, but on a purely logistics point-of-view, without considering the constraints of film structure, the execution of the tasks may have been more structured and simplified....and perhaps more thought-provoking.
When a film is as three-dimensional as this one, with so much cogitate on, the last thing you want to do is to scoff at little flaws in plot logic. It becomes inconsequential why Cobb and Mal look young in her death scene, if they looked like an old couple in another other scene... or why she staged a dramatic murder act in one hotel room and then rented another hotel room across it to jump off, if she was trying to frame Cobb for the murder (or convince him to jump with her after ridding himself of guilt about the children).
It wasn't clear what the point of creating dream worlds in mazes was, for they were never used except in one hotel sequence where Arthur walks through a staircase that leads to a dead-end. In fact, in some of the levels the constructs were not even mazes. But Araidne served her purpose as an architect in some metaphoric sense. Cobb needed a female companion to enter his subconscious and empathize with his agony. What she did was to navigate through the maze in his life and help him find his end.
It was not clear how Cobb and Saito got back to reality in the plane, given that they were both in limbo - Cobb from drowning and Saito from the bullet wound! Cobb somehow managed to resurface in Saito's dream and bring him back to reality even though he could not be resuscitated (unlike Fischer). That didn't make sense. It also didn’t make sense why Saito looked so much older than Cobb while they were in the same dream level. I'll just make-do with one of those "dreams are rarely sound or sequential" explanations to satisfy this doubt.
Speaking of which, there was little done to take advantage of the logical fallacies in dreams. There was the staircase that served to satisfy this point... there was the fight sequence in zero-gravity... some cool architectural constructs that Araidne created that defied the laws of physics... but little was done in the way of showing paradoxes in mental logic. Wouldn't it have been exciting if at each level, the dreamer said something illogical that sounded logical to everyone in the scene, and advanced their goal of implanting idea more easily?
On some level I wish there was some justification for why the team would put themselves through this risky job. Cobb was the only person who had a lot at stake for which it made sense that he risk his life!
But there was something for us in all this. There was the idea that we could all share dreams to experience reality. But that the deeper you dive into someone's dreams, the more likely it is that we may hit limbo or spend a whole lifetime navigating the maze of dreams within dreams. But, limbo isn't a deadend for all. In Cobb and Mal's case it was an unconstructed space that they spent years filling with memories and places from their past life. But it took over their lives in irreversible ways, where the line between real and unreal became imperceptible. Cobb and Mal both tried to get out of it, and became consumed by it... in the end it was hard to tell where they each found their peace!
There is a back and forth on whether Mal was ever real or if she was entirely Cobb’s construct. One the one hand, it is assumed that when a person is in limbo he is completely alone, which means Cobb created a projection of his wife and children in the same way he did the buildings and memories over time. Then again, there were times when she felt entirely real. By the end of the film, it was not clear what Cobb's limbo looks like, or if everything were events in Cobb's subconscious... that he was so lost in deeper levels of his dreams that he never found out that he did not get out. He probably just travelled between deeper and relatively-outer levels of his dreams. The question that begs asking to clarify this one point is if one can get into the dreams of one's projections.
There is speculation on what motivates killing... whether it is to go into limbo or to reappear in real life (even the protagonists didn't seem sure... they seem to have acted on their thoughts with little regard to consequence).
As I think about it, there is so much that made sense and so much that did not in the movie. It felt open-ended but also flawed... or more politely – distorted...warped. It almost felt like the amusement was in navigating through the loopholes in this labyrinth of what the film could have been... or may have been... like it was open not to interpretation but to assault :)
