Saw Inception

[dvandom]

Here's the spoiler-free assessment: I liked it, it was clear enough I don't feel the need to rewatch it just to figure out what happened, but two hours later I'm still mucking about with theories regarding what really happened (which I will put behind the cut). Granted, I have plenty of experience with the sort of parallel storytelling that goes into the second half of the movie, and others might find it harder to follow, but by the standards of "dreamscape stories" it's fairly tightly done.

Okay, the Big Question at the end of the movie is supposedly, "Is he in reality or in a dream?" But that's not really the question you should ask, because its answer is obvious: yes, he is. And it has nothing to do with the ominous parting view of the top, Cobb's "totem".

His kids look exactly like the do in all his memories of them. Even if his entire shady career after Mal's death only lasted a year (which is implausibly short, four or five seems more likely), kids that age change a LOT in one year. So, at the end of the movie he's in a dream.

The real question raised by the spinning top is, "Was he ever awake during the entire movie?" Fake-Mal raises that at one point, although viewers are supposed to take her as an extremely unreliable disputant in that particular argument.

But it's the top that brings the matter back to the fore. Because it doesn't follow the rules of totems (which is itself all part of "Cobb does things he tells you not to do," of course).

Totems, as explained in the story, are supposed to behave weirdly in reality, so that if you're in someone else's dream and they behave "normally" (a die is fair, a chess piece wobbles back when tipped only a little) you know that your reality is being written by someone else, and not by the laws of physics. So, in reality the weighted die will come up consistently on one number (not necessarily 6), but in a dream where the dreamer has no reason to expect a weighted die, it'll roll fair, a sign that something's hinky.

Cobb's totem is a top. It's supposed to spin forever in a dream. Why? Why would any dreamer expect a top to never stop? An off-balance top would be a good totem, because it couldn't be gotten to spin for any amount of time, but Cobb's is supposed to spin for a while and then stop like a regular balanced top. Its "signal" behavior is to not stop. That makes it pretty bad for signalling that he's not in reality.

In fact, Cobb's totem is not for that at all. An idea is like a virus, and in planting the idea of unreality in Mal's mind he also infected himself. If the top spins too long, it's a sign that his own Inception, his own dream, is breaking into the outer dream to a dangerous extent. More than just having Mal show up, it means he's starting to believe the fundamental unreality of things...because he was the one who gimmicked the top in the first place. Perhaps it works as a standard totem for him because he knows he can't be in any dream for long without infecting it. But it's really a sign of that infection, not of unreality per se.

And that raises an interesting question. Was Cobb ever awake during the movie? If not, when did he last see real daylight? Maybe dream-Mal was right and he never woke up from the first deep dive. The train didn't kill them, it just sent them into a deeper layer of the dream abyss, a layer harder to discern from reality. Alternately, Kaito's "audition" never ended, and Cobb's failure meant he got locked into the dream in order that no one else could gain the benefit of his skills. The train was Kaito's dream, with the extraction team being a dream within that. The logical, unimaginative right hand man for Cobb would actually be a projection of his own logical side. The oh-so-clever name Ariadne for a maze-maker would be a signal that Cobb's starting to recognize that maybe this is all unreal (and when she makes a real place in her first day on the job, it's a place he knows is real as well, so it could easily be his own memories).

However, if the scene on the train is real, then pretty much everything from there until entering the main job should be taken as real. Just kinda laden with genre convention stuff.

Comments

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

"The audience sees things the POV character couldn't" is the big argument against the similar "director-intended ambiguity" of Total Recall, and I did consider it. But if the whole movie is in someone else's dream, there could easily be things happening outside of their conscious awareness. The rules of the dreamscape in this movie, in fact, argue that the dreamer simply can't totally control or maintain awareness of all aspects of the dream.

[scavgraphics.livejournal.com]

Yeah like I said, you could argue it..and counter with your comment..but I don't think the story supports either all is a dream story, unless the whole thing is a big cheat, in which case it stops being a story and just Nolan masturbating on a million dollars worth of film.