First of all, thanks to Jeremiah, Jonathan, Jesse, Andrew, and Esther for commenting on my earlier Inception post. Your comments have led to a lot of discussion between Christina and I. While I cannot transcribe what all we said (although it was better than anything that will end up here), I can try to give you some bullet points. Oh, and Jonathan, thanks for the correcting my placement of Limbo.
Christina and I started then to consider possible alternate interpretations to the film:
- What if Mal was correct and Cobb wasn’t? What if they didn’t wake up when he thought they did, but were still dreaming? What if her jump off the building actually brought her back to reality and he never woke up at all? Imagine for a moment, the real reality: Cobb asleep, unable to wake up, with Mal waiting at his side. Both children are with her. What would be more likely to intrude on his dreams in this situation – might Mal be the most real person in the film? After all, we have this instinct to trust the narrator (Cobb), but what if he’s wrong?
- What if Cobb himself is the victim of an inception, causing him to believe that he is awake when in fact he is asleep?
- Alternately, what if Cobb only convinced himself, not Mal, about Limbo/waking? What if there was no original inception?
Additionally, there seems to be something going on with names.
- Cobb: my first thought was a corncob-the thing running through the middle of an ear of corn that is discarded after the outer useful part is harvested. Christina saw it differently; she connected it to a cobweb and then referenced Shakespeare: “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” Or, to take it a third way, Cob is the slang George MacDonald used to refer to goblins. We couldn’t decide whether it was significant or not that he didn’t have a first name.
- Mal: Cobb’s wife. Latin for bad or evil. Is this significant?
- Ariadne: Esther correctly pointed out that this is the name of King Minos’ daughter, who helped Theseus escape the labyrinth, only to be later abandoned by him. Should we wish to develop on the labyrinth theme, we could point out that King Minos had it built to contain the Minotaur (the son of his wife) and that Daedalus, the labyrinth’s creator, was thrown into it as punishment and unable to escape until he built wings and flew, only to lose his own son Icarus, when the latter was too confident in himself and flew too close to the sun. Is Cobb Theseus, needing help out of the labyrinth? Is he Daedalus, trapped in a maze of his own making? Is he Icarus, enabled by another but brought down by his own confidence? Is he Minos, keeping his children locked up? Is he the Minotaur, the non-human monster at the center of the maze that devours everyone else who comes in?
Despite all of the comments, I’m still holding to my original premise: Inception is a highly nihilistic postmodern film that erases the lines between truth and falsehood. Let me explain a little more. First, the common thread through the comments defending the film is that Cobb wakes up at the end. If he does, then I agree with the conclusions you came to in the comments. However, I still have not been convinced that he does wake up. The spinning top, which falls over only if he’s awake, doesn’t fall over. Nor is he rescued from the sinking van, indicating that he drowns within at least one dream, leaving him in limbo (where he stayed attempting to save Saito).
And yes, this is significant, for whether he woke up or not is the dividing line between reality and dream, truth and non-truth, sanity and madness. The force of a conviction does not make it true: both St. George and Don Quixote sincerely believed they were fighting monsters, but only one truly did so. Puddleglum likewise, if he is not correct in his belief in an Overworld, is “of all people most to be pitied.” The glory of his declaration is that it is true, and ultimately vindicated. I cannot say the same of Cobb – he may believe he is with his children, but then, he thought that before (and his wife doubted). Which of them is right? Who is sane, and who is mad? We don’t know. And to imply that it makes no difference, as the filmmakers do, reinforces not a search for truth, or an ability to find truth, but simply the invention of our own truth.
Compare, for a moment, to A Beautiful Mind, where the character was also mad and saw visions. The fact that there was a reality for him to come back to, and people calling him back, allowed at least a partial recovery. How different that film would have been had the audience seen it entirely through the eyes of John Nash rather than getting out for an objective view.
Consider again the world of Inception, where one can control both dreams and “reality,” but which is also highly chaotic; where people are figments of imaginations and killing them is an everyday occurrence; where none of the rules of reality apply. And then look at the mind of Jared Loughner, the man who opened fire in Tucson a few weeks ago. One reporter described him this way: “Loughner had a growing fascination with dreams and alternative realities. He believed in lucid or conscious dreaming, the idea that you could consciously enter your own dream and change the path of its characters.” “[H]is deepest, most disturbing questions were about the very nature of reality: He appeared to have lost any clear sense of the line between real life and dreams or fantasy.” A mind that was infatuated with conspiracy theories; obsessed with controlling dreams; who doubted reality; full of arguments logically valid, but not true; who believed that truth could be created simply by manipulating language; and who ultimately shot those in his way (or tried to shoot his way out).
Welcome to the world of Inception.
4 comments:
I would agree with you and also not like the movie if I bought your starting premise: that there is no evidence that Cobb woke up at the end.
My two reasons for believing that he did are:
1). The top is a distraction at the end. It is there to keep people talking as they walk out of the theater. But the in the rest of the story the top is not his totem, it is his wife's. It doesn't tell us what his is.
2). What then is his totem? In all the dreams (and level's of dreams), that Cobb finds himself in he never sees the faces of his children. They are very careful to do it, even though he never says it. And in the end (right before two very significant things)* Cobb does see the faces of his children.
In the end, it could be completely nihilistic and depressing, or it is a classic tale of redemption. Almost Les Mis like in the man who has done wrong, but who is struggling to overcome that and is in the end rewarded with his children. (Dare I say Ithica found?) Anyway, (now I am going postmodern on you) even if the movie was depressing and nihilistic for you, it was though provoking and inspiring for me.
:-)
Jeremiah Lorrig
*The screen going black and the falling of the top, it was starting to fall. ;-)
One quick correction. Cobb did have a first name. It was 'Dom'.
Jesse
Interesting thoughts.
I'm inclined to think -- based on the Batman movies -- that this director does lean postmodern/nihilist... OR at least that he sees the strength of that viewpoint and wants to give it airtime.
One might, on the other hand, argue for a more existentialist viewing of the film. I'm just thinking about this as I type it, but that seems more plausible to me. I've never been convinced that Nolan is actually philosophically coherent enough to be pushing something like nihilism. Rather, I think he wants to craft a really marvelous piece of film-work (which he has, in Inception) that forces his viewers to struggle with what they think and believe. Is reality real? Or is it not? As I saw it, the point of the end was to leave that an open question, and force the viewer to take the question home. If the top had fallen, that would've answered it one way. If it had kept spinning perfectly, that would've answered it the other way. But the scene is just short enough, an the top wobbles just enough, that you can honestly take it either direction. In short -- the film poses a question, and leaves it to the viewer to answer.
Now, the way it frames the question may in itself be a problem. Maybe it's just the wrong question. I appreciated the movie for its brilliant craftsmanship and technical mastery; not sure whether I enjoyed it, exactly, or not. But, for better or worse, I think it does a pretty impressive and consistent job of dropping its question(s) on you and leaving it (/them) there.
In response to others:
* Not sure what to make of Jeremiah's point about the children's faces. I think between you, you've given pretty good evidence that one CAN take the movie either way. My working hypothesis at this point is that such multivalence was deliberate, and a highly artistic bit of work, on the part of the film-makers.
(Again, this doesn't answer the question of whether their art is ultimately good or true.)
* Is "Dom" short for something? "Dominic" maybe, having somehow to do with lordship? (You could take that in some pretty fascinating directions, methinks....)
+++++
Toy Story 3, on the other hand, is amazing, brilliant, and jolly good. :-D
Further note: I like the movie's theme of the alluring nature of false or self-created dream-world reality. This is a real temptation, one we see in all kinds of ways in our own world (um, "virtual reality"?). But the danger is that you lose touch with reality.
Of course there IS an existential struggle -- can we be sure that the reality we ourselves exist in isn't a dream? But this too is a real philosophical struggle of our epistemologically shattered age. (Not that it's a new question; there's the famous play La Vida Es Suena "Life is a Dream"... but it's really not postmodern.)
The movie IS postmodern. But I'm not convinced it's trying to get us to give up on reality. To face hard questions about it, yes, and uncomfortably so. I suspect the movie itself lacks the resources to offer an adequate basis for answering its own question. But I still like some of what it's wrestling with. It's at least honest to its own cultural moment and the philosophical difficulties that people actually do face -- or should, if they were more self-consistent than they are.
Although your point about the recent shootings is not invalid. It IS a dangerous question. And, as I already said, I'm not sure it's the right question. (Plato or Saint Thomas, for example, think about reality quite differently; I incline to think the Medieval common-sense angle most helpful.) But it is at least the natural and obvious question to ask -- if one is honest -- in a postmodern world.
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