The following post contains commentary on Inception. As a matter of course, it contains spoilers. If you want to avoid spoilers (and I suggest you do), skip this one for now. Look at this cute animal picture. For the rest of you, the post continues after the jump.
A Pallas's Cat kitten, courtesy of Zooborns.com
Even if Inception were simply a special effects-driven heist film, it would still likely be the best film I’ve seen in 2010. I love heist films, after all. But Inception ups the ante by being a high concept heist film (instead of stealing something, Cobb’s team is employed to break in and leave something behind). That director Christopher Nolan manages to add another layer of high concept onto the film is the most impressive thing about it. The film – its characters, plot, beautiful settings – are an elaborate shell game designed to misdirect the viewer and prevent them from noticing that they are real marks and that Nolan and his team are the actual con men.
Their goal? Inception, of course. The idea? That Cobb is trapped within a dream.
Without having seen the film a second time yet, I feel like there’s very little evidence to support the theory except for the ending, which is itself ambiguous. Just like with dream logic, that immediate response to the scene doesn’t have to make sense, doesn’t have to follow a straight line of reason, it just has to resonate. It just has to make you believe it’s possible.
The groundwork laid for the ending to work is Mal’s speech in third act, which points out all the thin, implausible things in the ‘real world’ (the same things that the film’s critics might) in her attempt to convince Cobb that he’s now in the real world, not a deeper dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. When she says it, we know she’s crazy – she’s the villain, after all – and we know that the real world is the real world – we saw Cobb spin his top and saw it fall over, proof that he was awake when he did it.
The genius in this is that the idea sticks even though we reject it. Much like the ‘Mr. Charles’ gambit that Leo runs on both Saito and Fischer, Nolan is taking us into confidence, explaining what is real and what is fake and showing us exactly how he does what he’s doing to us, lowering our defenses and distracting us.
The best thing I can say about Inception is that I want to watch it again. To figure out when exactly Cobb’s dream (if Cobb is in fact dreaming) started, whose dream it is and what significance, if any, the traits of his ‘team’ of projections has. And ruminating about the ending sells short the killer performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and Tom Hardy (for me, the surprise of the movie), who are good enough actors to make thin parts feel more inhabited than they are. They’re a huge and unsung part of why the movie works when you watch it, note-perfect set pieces and the hotel fight (which is a little bit oh my god) aside.
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Someone who apparently watched the movie many more times than I have (and I really want to see it again soon) noticed Cobb’s true totem: his wedding ring. He’s only wearing it in the dream. He is not wearing it at the end.
Basically the top (his wife’s totem) is a total red herring. So the ending is not a dick move, as I previously believed, although I do suspect that the creators derived some evil pleasure that we would be possibly fooled by a first viewing.