So, I wanted to say some things about Inception. Firstly, great movie, absolutely loved it, and I plan to see it again several times. I want to talk about how straight forward I found it. Everyone talked about how complex and complicated it was, that it had to be seen more than once to be understood. I disagree, I thought it was very, very straight forward, at least as a narrative. Yes, it was complex and layered, but not convoluted or confusing. But I think I’m going to save that for my upcoming, more complete commentary. This is about the ending. This is the spoiler-heavy discussion of how people interpreted the film. Because there are many ways to interpret and understand what we saw, and I’m not saying any one is the absolute right one. What I do want to say is that there is one interpretation I believe to be absolutely wrong.
So, my proper commentary will be friendlier to those who haven’t seen the film, but prepare for an unadulterated, full-blown discourse of the movie ahead. If you haven’t seen Inception, go watch it, then come back.
Let’s start with the nature of the ending. I know a lot of people felt cheated, and a lot of people felt like it was an unnecessary game Mr. Nolan was playing with us. Among them, Mr. Orson Scott Card, who was very vocal about it at his Boot Camp last week, as well as some of my fellow Bootcampers.
The two common interpretations were that either the wobble indicated that Cobb was obviously in reality, or that the ending existed to point out that Cobb was not in reality. My issue is not with the ending itself, or the different possibilities this brought up, but with the people who reacted negatively to the ending. Who, as I said, felt cheated or tricked.
I did not share these feelings. I understood exactly what Nolan was trying to do with the spinning top. He was asking, as many directors, authors and screenwriters do, who we, the audience, are. This wasn’t a deep, introspective, philosophical question about our true nature and the endless complexities of our humanity. It was a simple “what did you see in this story?” That’s not uncommon, for people to have different interpretations of the same material, but because Nolan pointed it out to us in the end, we got confrontational. “Yes, we know!” we cry, “but when you point it out to us, we feel antagonized!” I think that’s unreasonable. From the start, Inception treats its audience as an intelligent, adult audience, and it carries on with this up through the end. It’s as if we expected him to end his film several seconds earlier or several seconds later just to appease our own consciences. Why? To validate that our ending was the right ending or avoid the question altogether?
Inception’s ending posed a simple question that did not deviate from anything we’d seen before. I think that’s a fair thing for a story to do as long as we’re satisfied with the ending of the narrative. And Inception did that, it concluded the narrative it began. It answered every question of character and plot. The same cannot be said of Lost, and even that gave satisfying conclusions to our characters’ journeys.
And that was what I had to say about how people felt about the ending. Now to talk about what people actually thought the ending meant.
When I came out of the theater, I came out with a clearcut interpretation of what I’d just seen. Since then I’ve seen so many more ideas springing from Inception’s audience, and they’ve all been very interesting and insightful. I think that there are many ways to look at Inception, and almost all of them are equally valid. I want to talk about one that I believe to be completely wrong. It’s an interpretation I did not even think of until it was very recently brought to my attention, and it seems it’s actually a popular theory. I have to admit, I’m shocked so many people seem to be on board with it. It’s the idea that the whole movie is a dream. Cobb’s dream, to be precise. Some people even said the whole thing could be limbo.
No.
Yes, the ending leaves ambiguity as to whether Cobb is dreaming or in reality, but it really only makes us question whether or not he escaped limbo after entering it in the previous segment of the movie. This is not The Matrix, this is not a huge question about our reality and whether or not it is actually reality. Inception is much tighter and much more focused than that, and I don’t see how that narrative can imply something so grand, and frankly something so sinister on Nolan’s part.
Nolan has shown us that he is not only a competent storyteller, but that he has respect for the narrative. He likes to tell stories in strange and interesting ways, but he doesn’t deceive us maliciously. I don’t believe that the man who gave us The Prestige or The Dark Knight would give us such an ending as “And it was all a dream…” No, I think Nolan understands what an ending has to be, and I think he understands his audience. Knowing that, I don’t think that’s the ending he would have envisioned for Inception. Nor do I think Nolan was unclear as a storyteller. I think people are reading too much into the film, to the point that they confuse subtext for narrative.
Inception, because it is a clever film, gives viewers plenty of clues to the subtext of the story. It gives us lines and images and other little hints because it can and because we actually, usually, enjoy seeing these things. It’s fun to catch characters saying things and doing things that have a greater significance than they know, but we, the audience, do.
Now, I’m not going to go into all the little things going on beneath the surface of Inception. If you’re so inclined you can do as I did and look it up online. I will mention some of the big ones right now, since I want to get the subtext out of the way. Ariadne is, of course, named for the character in Greek mythology that shows Theseus how to navigate and eventually escape the labyrinth. So Ariadne’s here to help our team navigate the dreams, okay.
Two lines often come up in this line of thought as well, Micahel Caine’s “Come back to reality, Cobb” and the line in the “dreamers’ den”, “Their dream has become their reality.”
I took these lines in stride, as part of the narrative. Some people, it seems, took this all a little too literally. Some people understood this to mean that Cobb was in limbo, or a dream, from the start, and his subconscious was trying to get him to realize that, and Ariadne was somehow there to get him out of the dream?
No, the subtext is much simpler than that. Cobb is lost in his own emotional labyrinth. He has buried himself in his job to escape the reality of his life. He hasn’t actually escaped reality, he has escaped reality in the same way so many people do when faced with a situation they don’t think they can handle. When they can’t cope.
Ariadne shows Cobb that he is lost. She is the one that tells him he can’t continue living the way he does, with Mal trapped in his own personal Inferno of memories, never moving on, never letting go, never living in the real world. Again, I’m talking about social interaction and not the dream world versus the real world.
So we, the audience, get hints and foreshadowing, we get little clues as to where the story is taking us, but these are not necessarily for the characters to understand, and clearly they don’t understand most of it.
I thought I liked dark and tragic stories, I thought my interpretation of the film was one of a truly terrible person. Maybe mine wasn’t so bad after all if we, the audience, have a more complex and depressing idea in mind. Maybe we are more nefarious than I thought if we believe such a grand deception has taken place here. Maybe that interpretation of the film is answering exactly the question Nolan poses at the end. “What did you see in this story?”
Because to answer that question we must also answer, “How much of a cynic are you?”