Inception isn't science fiction (spoilers)
blog.samstokes.co.uk
blog.samstokes.co.uk
Stokes' interpretation doesn't look deep enough. He attempts to figure out what is really happening before, after, or even during the movie. I find more use in interpretations that try and figure out what something means and what the underlying message the writer/director is making (if any).
Stokes focuses too much on plot and not enough on meaning. Reminds me of people who think the Six Sense is awesome (pretty much everyone) because of its amazing plot twist. But that's all it really had--not too much meaning. A movie worth analyzing shouldn't just stand on plot alone. Thankfully Inception has both an awesome plot and some decently profound meaning.
I think it's safer to say the concepts of creation and inspiration are common to dream making and filmmaking and leave it at that.
Not that these excerpts really do the analysis justice, but:
>Except that this is exactly what Nolan is arguing against. The film is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director works, and what he's ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is about making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that truly interests the director.
>The whole film being a dream isn't a cop out or a waste of time, but an ultimate expression of the film's themes and meaning. It's all fake. But it's all very, very real. And that's something every single movie lover understands implicitly and completely.
To answer your question more directly, the familial issues in the plot are a vehicle for emotion. These emotions are just as real in a dream as they are in a movie, as they are in real life (to borrow from the analysis' phrasing).
The film touches on some ideas like the intoxicating power of the imagination but I think saying the whole film's a metaphor for filmmaking goes a bit far and the evidence is stacked against his analysis.
The whole concept of Inception, of course, is unremarkable. Ad-men have been putting ideas in people's heads for some time with quite a degree of sophistication, and magicians have been doing similar for far longer; done well, marks are fooled by both without realizing how or when.
Reading the movie as an allegory of movie-making I think is a stretch. There are matching elements, in particular, not changing the world too much or provoking antagonism; but the whole plot theme of father / child guilt is rather out of place, as is the recursive breaking into of fortresses.
Of course the safe had special significance! Safes were of crucial importance throughout the film. (you might ask yourself why it wasn't in just a cardboard box)
Cob claims that you don't affect the mind by murdering projections, so why should you be able to affect the mind by changing the physical projections?
The dreamworld, even limbo, is not the subconscious, its a representation of the subconscious, and a one way camera. If it were not, inception would be much easier. You could just initiate a deep dream and change the environment: there'd be no need for the team to go through the danger of the third level, where two of them died (And didn't expect to be able to resurect)
In the other dreams the safes contained pieces of information, but Mal's safe was different as the contents were something with mechanical/programmatic agency, a moving part if you will.
What you describe is a very common trope for heist movies, and Inception--despite its depth--satisfies on that level, just as The Matrix satisfies as a sci-fi shoot-em-up despite its depth.
A lot of the best movies satisfy on multiple levels this way.
Exepct that's the plot of every single "just another job" movie. But of course inception is a lot more than that.
Re the rule that inception requires a vault to plant the idea inside - on the one hand, if the whole concept of inception is something dreamed up by Cobb, then that rule can be broken (dreams are rarely consistent). On the other hand, that's why it's so significant that Ariadne's role is the creator of mazes (specifically, mazes which Cobb's conscious mind can't solve): she creates a maze he has to break into in order to confront his issues at the centre. If he did so without first struggling to get there, he wouldn't accept it as his own victory: just like Fischer had to pull off an increasingly elaborate heist in order to believe his own inception.
Re accepting his dream children after rejecting his dream wife: I think the difference is that his real children are still alive and need him. His guilt over Mal's death keeps him distant from them - literally in the film/dream, but maybe metaphorically in reality. Maybe he's been emotionally distant from his kids since her death, and the dream is his mind's attempt to fix things.
I did think the little dream machine in the movie looked like game console. You and several of your friends slide in the IV to play a round of, what exactly?
I thought the movie portrayed a pretty decent game already, just getting from one level to the next. More: http://www.kmeme.com/2010/07/inception-game.html
As a movie about dreams, it's a missed opportunity. We find dreams compelling because they're profoundly uncanny in a way that we can never fully express; and I think most people would agree that when we dream there is a loss of agency, that dreams simply unfold before us. But there's hardly anything dreamlike about the movie at all, unless you're a lucid dreamer. Inception models a dream as a location rather than as a series of emotionally charged impressions, and it employs a Hollywoodesque narrative grammar rather than dream-logic. It's essentially a heist movie.
Another way to put it is that when I was watching the movie, I kept thinking, "That's so not real." Which is a funny way to respond to a movie about dreams. I hate to be that guy, but I think you're better off reading something like Kafka's "The Judgment" or maybe even watching a good horror movie.
> when we dream there is a loss of agency, that dreams simply unfold before us
I never feel that way while dreaming, even though when I wake I realise I was basically on rails the whole time. The closest I've experienced to this is that sometimes in my dreams I am simultaneously reading a book and a character in the book - as the former I am a passive observer, as the latter I (feel as if I) have agency.
> unless you're a lucid dreamer
Inception is explicitly inspired by lucid dreaming (the concept of the totem is very similar to a trick people use to train themselves to dream lucidly). However, even though I've only once or twice had a lucid dream, I found a lot about the film reminded me of dreaming in general.
First: Dream time is approximately real time. (There have been studies to confirm this. Exercise to the reader: How would you design such a study? (Drop me an email if you want to know how the scientist did it.)) Second, you can tell you are in a dream, if: (a) Flipping a light switch doesn't work, strangely your dream imagination can't cope with rapid changes of illumination. (b) Gravity works strange. Try jumping up and down. When you can stay airborne for more than a second you are probably dreaming. (c) If, in general, strange things happen. There are some more signs that you find in dreams.
Fortunately, habbits you have in reality carry over into dreams. So if you make it a habbit to check for dream signs in real life, you will probably check them in your dreams too, and recognize that you are dreaming. Enjoy! (Although I often feel the urge to wake up, once I realize that I am dreaming. It takes a while to resist it.)
SPOILER ALERT
The Prestige has a much better "alternative ending" theory, because it is not well known and very unexpected.
The Prestige ends with all the questions supposedly answered, i.e. the twin thing, the machine that Tesla made, etc. Except that, there is one alternative: the machine never existed! Throughout the entire film, Michael Caine's character keeps insisting that there is only one way to do a transportation act, and that is with a lookalike. We already know that Hugh Jackman's character has a lookalike.
We also never see more than one "replica" of Hugh Jackman. The only time we actually see replicas being created is during the memories written down by Hugh Jackman, except, they could be fake!
In short, it's possible that Christopher Nolan has managed to fool pretty much every audience of The Prestige into believing in Science Fiction, when there is a perfectly logical explanation for the entire film that doesn't require magical explanations. But like the film repeatedly says, "Audiences want to be fooled".
On the other hand, the parent's post illustrates how easily the film could be changed into a different interpretation, one which is arguably better.
(This isn't quite as good as the reinterpretation of _The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya_ in which Kyon is God, since it requires some changes in the movie, but then, it requires much less careful analysis to prove it.)
The reason the tanks are there is for the same reason the diary was written: to fool Borden.
There are even some people who say that there are differences in makeup between the real Angier and his look-alike, and that you can see that the only real, visible body in the tanks is clearly the twin. Can't say I noticed it myself.
As for the book, still haven't read it, but it doesn't matter: from what I've heard, the book also doesn't have the whole "killing doubles" theme, since the replicas are lifeless anyway. But it doesn't matter, the film is its own story.
I got this whole theory from this forum post, which you should read for a better explanation of everything: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/showthread.php?t=531777.
What I see in that forum thread is not a sound argument for this interpretation; instead, it's someone proclaiming a theory, getting it shot down and then using ad-hoc immunization and condescension ("that's just what they wanted you to think", "oh, you believe what you saw, poor thing", etc.) to try to puff it up into something respectable.
The book makes it as clear as possible that Angier's not using a double in the sense Borden is; he really is getting duplicated by that machine and having to dispose of the results. The film never prints it on screen in big block letters with a signed note from the director saying "this is how it happened, trust me", but it doesn't need to -- it's following the book and doing a good job at it. Thus, attempts to read a "ha ha he really put one over on you" secret into the film are just pointless.
(and unless you can show me you're not in the same take-your-logic-and-facts-elsewhere camp as the guy in that forum thread, I'm done here)
As for the theory itself, like I said, I haven't read the book and it doesn't matter to me; I'm interpreting the movie as a stand-alone work. Judging just by the movie, I haven't seen anything that outright contradicts the theory (for example, the whole "can't really see the bodies" thing). Then again, I haven't spent that much time digging into it. There is nothing that proves this theory either. I just think it's nice that it can be interpreted in another way.
Mulholland Drive is also a film worth watching if you enjoyed Inception.
Mulholland Drive is also much, much darker which might not be to your taste.
That said: WTF? We've got to bring down a company on the verge of being The Most Powerful Corporation in the World. So let's use this highly radical, unproven and improbable, voodoo-science inception approach. Oh, and by the way, we have to plant a mole within the highest ranks of the multinational beast within the next, say, two weeks, so we can get valuable information that is necessary to penetrate and manipulate the fragile psyche of our target.
Cut-scene: it's done. This is logic that only makes sense within the context of a dream. The sort of dream Coleridge, or Rube Goldberg, would have.
Science generally favors the application of Occam's Razor: buy the airline and crash the damn plane with the kid on it. Or just send in the ninjas. The ensuing infighting among the various executive factions vying for the top spot after junior is offed will ensure that any plans Acme Energy Inc had for world domination are put off course indefinitely.
Inception was entertaining. But Memento was the more philosophically interesting film. That's a film that truly merited this kind of philosophical scrutiny. Remember Sammy Jankis.
I think that stating that the entire plot is a dream just because the main plot is not realistic is akin to denying the film's right to being science fiction!
by this interpretation (the straightforward naive one), Inception is likely the best "hard"/logically consistent science fiction film to have characters that are very engaging and well realized of the past half decade.
If you've not seen Inception yet, fix that soon!
Still a great movie.
1) By getting Cobb to convince Fisher Jr. to feel like his daddy loved him and wanted him to be his own man and dissolve the business to start his own empire and
2) Get back at Cobb for trying to steal his secrets for Cobol by _incepting_ the little seed of "you want to go back home to your kids" in his head and making that his obsessive ends to justify all means. Saito, meanwhile, was willing to wait the dream equivalent of _eighty years_ to exact this revenge. Then, as DiCaprio fulfills his promise and gets Saito in his 80-year Limbo, Saito fulfills his promise, architects a layer where Cobb does reunite with his still-young-as-Cobb-remembers-them children, and the spinning totem wobbles but doesn't actually fall, then the "I N C E P T I O N" credits roll, because Saito ran the inception on Cobb.
Ta-da!
I N C E P T I O N
Why just can't the reality shown in Inception be the reality, and the spinning top at the end just a gag, in the way that the director doesn't show us long enough the spinning top to see, if it falls or not?
So the spinning top at the end could be seen as an encouragement to think about your own reality.
I'm growing increasingly disheartened at the blogosphere simply because it gives people as stupid as this author a way for even stupider people to reinforce his bad behaviors.
One, it's a red herring as you say, though I'd put a slightly different spin on it. Cobb has chosen his reality, he's had his catharsis and made a very intentional decision to let Mal go. That's true regardless of if the ending is a dream or not.
Two, it's an intentional denial of catharsis for the audience. It's a setup without a payoff, tension without release. Here's the interesting part about that- the audiences I've seen it with provide their own physical catharsis, their own reality-based relief of tension, by laughter or by applause. These physical reactions both release the real physical tension that has built in their bodies and also returns them to the real world, outside of the filmic dream.
Three, it captures the feeling of a certain kind of dream. How many times have you dreamed of almost having the answer, of almost knowing something you want to know...and then abruptly waking up? Yes, exactly.
It's the best ending shot to a movie in quite a long while.
As to feeling that you have the answer in a dream, that's down to the extreme suspension of disbelief the dozing mind is capable of. That suspension was something that a movie allegedly about dreams hardly ever brought up. If some character can dream up bigger guns, and another character a freight train in a city street, then why not more? And why are the defensive projections of the dream's owner so tame, merely human, when they could potentially be changing the whole world? And if being weightless at one level creates weightlessness in the next level down, why isn't it transitive? And wouldn't dreaming that the entire building / local area / whatever starts accelerating skywards at 9.8 meters per second per second restore gravity? Why can't that manipulation be used as "the kick"? Seems like a simpler manipulation than what the architect was up to.
But I don't think the top is evidence of that. At the level of reality in which the plane ride occurs, we've seen the top fall. Consequently, it seems clear that, in the last scene, the top will fall, and we do see it start to wobble before it cuts to the credits.
The question, then, becomes whether the top actually is the reliable indicator of reality that Cobb thinks it is. If the top really is a totem, then Cobb made it back to the real world. But where did the top come from? He got it from his wife after she died. If his wife really did escape from a dream by dying (if Cobb was dreaming the whole time, this is possible), then Cobb acquired the top in a dream, and whether it falls or not proves nothing.
I'm pretty sure that I'm reading too much into the ending of the movie. Personally, I think he made it back to the real world. But the director has made other movies that invite a similar degree of scrutiny, so who knows?
At least this is how I read it. To be honest I didn't really think the top made a lot of sense but I think this is what it was intended to mean.
Only this one is placed in the mind of the viewer.
I disagree..
Remember Africa? He was in France, then in Africa, magically. Dreamy...
Remember how he escapes from his "enemies" stuck between two walls? Typical of a dream.
And then magically, Saito appears to save him. Again, typical of a dream. The whole movie is a dream, at the end he allows himself to see his children face because he's at peace, but he's still dreaming.
That plus reality in Hollywood films is seldom very real anyway and usually involves cuts to faraway locations.
That's the most absurd rationalization I've heard all morning.
If you go back and watch the movie again, there are a number of clues that the entire movie is a dream (mysterious, nameless agency chasing Cobb, the sudden importance of an irrelevant power company's heir, Cobb getting trapped between closing walls as he flees, etc.). In fact, that when he finally "sees" his children they start out following exactly the same scene he kept hallucinating seems to be the bigger giveaway. In any case, why does Cobb insist that seeing their faces will mean he's really awake? That sounds like the kind of nonsense one might believe in a dream.
The ending ends that way because the producers clearly wanted us to question as to which is reality. Remember when he says do not create places from reality into dreams as that is the best way to lose which is reality and which is a dream. Also, when he meets his older self and tells him he has to jump. That indicates that the "reality" on which the film begins is not really reality, that his wife was probably right. But how can she be right when the spinner does stop spinning and yet in the end when we are brought to the same reality it does not stop spinning?
This contradiction is supposed to be there as it communicates this entire confusion as to which is reality and which is an illusion we have created for ourselves. Speaking of its applicability to the real world it speaks of brainwashing, propaganda, and formation of our own perceptions, how we can through them create a different reality and be lost in there, yet also struggle to find the real truth. The film, through the metaphor, communicates perfectly this entire confusion and it ends with such contradiction because ultimately we as humans and our thinking can not acquire perfection as to what is truth. We are blind in the end to inconsistencies within our illusions, hence the always spinning spinner.
Its a good film, but in the end I think it is really rubbish. The subject is awesome, but it does not go deep enough. The ending is too subtle. There probably should have been some sort of almighty intervention like in the ending of Don Juan for it to become a classic. To allure in the end that there are great forces out there which we depend on and only through taking a leap of faith in ourself can we acquire reality.
I'm starting to repeat myself now in this thread so I better check out (...before I become an old man, filled with regret...).
I found the ending to be quite anvilicous. They should have shown the spinning totem for a much shorter time, to make it ambiguous whether it keeps on spinning. (Also you can save it by pretending the protagonist's father spun it again off-camera.)