proximoception | (no subject)

Loads of Inception spoilers:

The audio was garbled in our theater and I had to guess at a lot of the mumbly dialogue, especially that delivered by Sato and the kid from that space alien sitcom, so maybe the right reading was clearer to others, but...

...there's three things that could be happening, right?

1. The top thing is about to really fall, meaning all has transpired as shown. Happy ending.

2. The top thing, though wobbling, won't fall. He became lost in the raw dream limbo when his wife stabbed him, but has made it a sort of happy state for himself.

3. The top thing, though wobbling, won't fall, but he deliberately lost himself in the raw dream limbo after the death of his wife, and all these different levels we've seen represented (excepting certain flashbacks) have been happening in that dream. He's been desperately trying for auto-inception, but the idea he's been trying to plant is that the apparent reality around him is real. He can't believe he'll get his wife back, but can at least pretend he's with his children. The feeling that the memory doesn't do justice to the thing remembered, which makes him refuse to imagine his children's faces, is the worst enemy of his happiness. Everything he's coming up with is an elaborate excuse for allowing himself to not just create a world closer to his heart's desire, but believe in it. Since otherwise it's pretty worthless. He uses Sato to repeat leap of faith/better than dying alone but for regrets stuff at him, on the model of the train story he told his wife; he has Ariadne make a maze for himself - distracting him with mere plot, and many, many explosions, while the right phrases get repeated, and while the spectacle of Fischer being improved by a parallel operation allays his fears.

3. is the interesting one but has its problems: First, there are scenes without him in them - which I don't think ever happened in Memento. Second, though the film starts in medias res like we're told by the alien kid any given dream-moment does, it also cuts in bits of scenes from later on, e.g. the beach sequence with Sato, which is a narrative device aimed at the audience. So the jumbled middleness of the beginning doesn't represent his dream state, it's just the normal, time-honored story kind. The two could be mixed, sure, but that's annoying - my pet peeve about The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense would apply: the film default is that we're being given an objective record of a character's subjective experiences, what the featured character(s) thought was occurring, and though new rules can be established that can suspend this default assumption (like in Rashomon), a) in the case of the former, no pre-twist indication is given that this is a movie playing in the cop's head rather than the convict's memory (the default), and b) in the case of the latter manipulation of the timing of scenes' beginning and ending are not a fair representation of denial, even of a ghost's denial. Anyway, so if all kinds of things are being cut at us this artificiality either represents how the character is experiencing things or is something palpably aimed at feeding us information out of sequence - a genius could smoosh together both, I guess, but that's not what's happening if we're dealing with Possibility 3. There's an unfair mixture of devices.

Though I guess you could argue that if this is all a performance he's putting on for his own benefit he might be envisioning how getting all this to work might look before he's narrating himself through it. The first run-through of the beach/old Sato sequence is his imagining of how the mental play will look, the second is his performance/direction of the play, and if they're identical that's just because writing, directing and acting are all pretty much one in dreams. But I'd need some kind of indication that that was happening - though presumably the movie would advise a leap of faith in it. (You could also argue he's at least nearby for the scenes he isn't in - these could be things he's hearing while dreaming.)

There's also the related Usual Suspects problem of not knowing if any of the flashbacks are real, I guess. If he's just in raw dream the whole time, flashbacks included, for all we know he's just getting over his wife leaving him for a less frowny man. The suicide scene is as stylized, as movie-ish, as everything else in the movie, after all; and the movie itself teases that the 'reality' level of his life with all its international intrigue and narrow escapes from ubiquitous armed men is pretty implausible. But everything about the wife is of a piece with that. As is, of course, all this dream magic.

I'm not sure if I liked it. I did like the part about the zero gravity elevator.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

we can rule out #1 -- the film answers this for us. one might disagree with me (in which case i would call it poor filmmaking) but the "top level" (heh, "top level") scenes must be themselves in a dream because: when he arrives at the children's home in the u.s. (somewehere in lalaland) we see the children are sitting in the yard exactly as they have been shown previously in the movie, wearing exactly the same clothes, behaving in exactly the same fashion. it's clearly a memory.

which is, in part, why i was disappointed in the ending - the spinning top* symbolizes the question (what if this is all a dream?), and makes for a nice unique little package to anchor the audience to the story, but the film does a hard fade to black on it as if to say the audience doesn't get to know -- but that's false because they do. and you'll notice that cobb doesn't wait to see if the top falls (isn't that the whole point of the totem, to ensure he isn't dreaming?) -- either he's certain it's a dream and knows it won't fall and doesn't have to look, or he thinks it may be a dream, but has given up on "real life" and doesn't want to have his dream shattered, or he's certain it's not a dream and doesn't feel he has to look, but will be in for a rude awakening later (if he does).

given that it's a dream, i think you've left out a significant possibility: when mal jumped off the building she awoke from their shared dream. it's cobb who's the poor sap who has lost touch with reality and thinks the "top level" is real life. in the "real" world, mal, cobb's dad, his children, everyone he knows & loves is waiting for him to come out of his sleep state, but he's lost. think about what cobb's dad says to him when they first meet up in the classroom: "[oh, sigh, another attempt to fix your dream world.] dom, when are you going to come back to reality? [well, anyway, i'll humor you. meet ariadne.]". clearly a projection based on what his father is (would be) saying in the "real" world. the kids are (in a sense) a gimmick, because cobb needs something to live for in the "world without mal"; if they had been a childless couple, cobb could well have said, dream or not, i don't want to live in a "world without mal", and killed himself after she did. the end. short movie.

* i have a lot of problems with the top as any kind of reliable indicator anyway. first of all, it was her totem, not his, so it falling need not indicate he's not in a dream. second of all, where was the top before she committed suicide? did she spin it? did it fall? if so, why would she think she was still in a dream? if not, why would he think it was real life? third, where's cobb's own totem? the whole idea that either one of them could ever be uncertain of their location (dream/real) if totems actually work as they're supposed to is suspect. (loss of his totem could've (should've) been written into the story but it wasn't.)

Disappointed in Nolan's theory of dreams! That is all.

I think Cobb's totem might be his wedding ring. In some scenes he wears it; in other scenes, he does not.

i've seen that thought put forth throughout the web (as well as, in part, some of my own thoughts, now that i'm looking around). i didn't pay attention, but people are saying he wasn't wearing it in any of the top level scenes. i'm not so sure that means it was his totem (all of the other totems were game pieces/toys (top, die, pawn, poker chip); i think it's quite possible that like the mals below, its presence is a product of his subconscious desire to still be married, or simply a deliberate affectation.

I think Nolan's aggressively keeping open both possibilities - the kids doing what they'd done before (how long before? six weeks? ten years?) is no less stylized than anything else ever happening. So if it's not a tell that one is wrong, it's definitely another indication that either may be right.

Though if you're right about the hard fade, you could defend the movie as saying: we're letting you have the easy answer if you like easy answers, but the harder one is that reality makes large numbers of people extremely unhappy, and all of those people would be much happier if reality could be replaced by a fantasy they were able to believe in. The cut to black is an invitation to wake up from a childishly unreal approach to reality - though you can fail to take it also, and just think, "huh huh, what if it's still all a dream, that's wild man!" without looking back at what might have justified the gesture.

The possibility that she woke and he's just still lost...no, I hadn't considered that at all. Though go that far and you can also question whether she ever existed. This all might be one conventional dream one man is having one one night. As could any movie. Though what kind of day content could produce such a film? Maybe watching eXistenZ seven times in a row? Or alternating it with The Matrix, Identity, Naked Lunch, recent Lynch films, Memento...

The movie can ultimately only have two points: manipulation of (perceived) reality can be terribly dangerous to sanity, manipulation of reality can be a wonderful gift to those sufficiently hurt by the true state of things. #3 keeps that alive most cleanly, but the free fall of not being sure about any of the facts setting it up is probably intended. A further reminder of the dark price of once throwing out the compass.

But again, other people do stuff without him. So unless he dreams in 3rd person, fast-cut coherent 2010 action movies, some portion of the movie would seem to be happening.

(Also, he gives Sato a gun, so as to be awakened by a death-kick. But how does he wake? Ariadne tells the alien kid she's convinced he'll be able to free himself, so maybe if you've been down there before you don't need a kick, you just will yourself awake. And maybe that's the point where he never woke, but just thought he did, and is on Shutter Island at the end. But I don't like that because it takes the deliberate self-inception out of the plot.)

Thought the movie was entertaining, but: (a) insufficient structure had been given to the rules of the dreamworld to make "was it really all a dream?"-type speculation very interesting/fruitful; the rules were fuzzy and somewhat internally arbitrary so as to make intentional ambiguity indistinguishable from stuff that was just unexplained or vague, and therefore less interesting to think about; and (b) I found it very difficult to give a shit about any of the characters. I really didn't care about Cobb's kids or his mental instability. There was nothing to invest me in him. Ellen Page is annoying. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was pretty cool, but spent half the movie floating around a hotel. The British guy was entertaining. (c) Nolan didn't seem to know what to do with the structure. How many times did we have to be shown the slo-mo van to remind us of how the dreamworld is supposed to work? How many of the cuts back to the hotel were really necessary? I didn't really seem like Nolan had a plan for how to convincingly babysit 2 mostly-derelict settings, and I think he made the snow-world scenes more confusing by having to keep going back. I thought the whole thing was pretty sloppy.

Still, fun to watch, if not to think about.

With you on all that. Though some of the possible interpretations of what's happening might explain the vagueness - if the dream manipulation technology's itself the product of dream, it doesn't need to make a lot of sense, for example.