There are, of course, spoilers. This will really only make sense if you have seen the film.
I will propose here two theories to provide a “closure” to Inception. Feel free to argue them as you will. Forgive me for any difficult language, I only had so much time to edit this before I worried I would forget important sections.
Theory 1
In Inception, Cobb is the subject of a second (or perhaps the only) inception plot, perhaps engineered by his father-in-law (played my Michael Caine) but more likely by Cobb himself, to make Cobb forgive himself for the guilt he carries for partially causing his wife’s death. Ariadne is the “architect,” but she could very easily also be called the “analyst,” and Cobb is very clearly the “analysand,” if we are to adopt lingo from Freud and Lacan. Ariadne is tasked to “inceive” the idea that Cobb is ready to move on from Ariadne. For all of the emphasis put on the heist, on Fisher, and on the action sequences, it is clear throughout that Cobb and Ariadne are the “main characters.” This is obvious, especially considering the limited development the other members of the heist team receive. They are “projections,” more like shadows of people than real people. Cobb is a man who suffers everyday from the crippling guilt of having been incapable of saving his wife: so, at least, we assume, although given the unstable state of dreams, and the confusion of reality vs. illusion in the movie, any number of things might have happened to cause his wife’s death. For the sake of this examination, we will assume that Cobb’s wife did in fact commit suicide after he planted the idea in her head that her reality is not real. Further, in my reading, all of the film, save perhaps, the scene where Cobb visits his father-in-law, is a dream. This explains why Cobb repeats so constantly that “an idea spreads” and also why he and Saito finish each other’s sentences in the final scene, and finally why his wife and Saito both tell him to take the “leap of faith” which I will also cover earlier. The only slice of “reality” that appears in Inception is when Cobb awakens on the airplane and heads home. The spinning top in his house falls, but why it does not actually appear to in the film, I will arrive at a little later on. The film’s narrative, itself, follows the psychoanalytic process surprisingly clearly:
The analyst in the psychoanalytic session has three basic tasks: suggestion, question, and clarification. What is most critical is that the analyst does not always lead the analysand, but is frequently led by him/her. By asking the correct questions, the analyst invites the analysand to uncover the unconscious truths that are inhibiting the analysand’s “real” life. In real psychoanalysis, the analyst often hides from view, to allow a free flow of the analysand’s thoughts, as free association is a critical aspect in the session (I have borrowed most of my understanding of psychoanalysis from Zizek, Ecrits, and Wikipedia. I do not claim expertise by any means). The position of the analyst mirrors Ariadne’s position in the film exactly. Is it not uncanny that in all moments where we learn about Cobb’s character, she is present? She is always present to ask him the truly important questions, like, “Are you going to tell anyone about these problems?”, “We have to fix the problem of your wife or it will be the end of everybody,” etc. The spectator bemoans that we learn very little about Ariadne herself: her character is “poorly developed” to say the least. Yet her absence of emotional presence emphasizes her position as the alienated analyst: looking from outside the subject’s psyche, avoiding over-extending her own experience into the subject’s. She is, in fact, the only person who seems to notice Cobb’s serious emotional trauma, even though it should be clear to nearly everyone.
Ariadne begins by investigating Cobb’s unconscious when he explains to her how dream architecture functions, and he is surprised by how quickly she catches onto the concept (so is the viewer). I view this section as the first clue that Ariadne’s task is primarily to assist Cobb, not necessarily to engineer the heist, and this further explains her inclusion in the journey even though she provides little skill to the team, and only plays the role of Cobb’s emotional counsel. That the entire, complex plot, could be engineered as an enormous set of dreams is difficult to comprehend, but after all, Ariadne is a more skilled architect than Cobb. The fact that Cobb can escape such a tremendous amount of danger nearly unscathed (the chase scene in Mombassa where he narrowly escapes a thin passage, where Saito’s car happens to pick him up, that a single corporation could have such a global influence to pursue him, etc.) suggests that the “limits” of “reality” have been suspended. Perhaps, because at first, there are three levels of dream, instead of two. When Cobb finishes the dream on the train, he is still in the process of one more dream, aboard an airliner returning home to his children. The other members of the aircraft are not involved at all in the dream, but are merely faces whom Cobb recognizes and places as projections into the dream. When Cobb disembarks from the plan at the end of the film, nobody says a word to him, they merely nod in the way you would say goodbye to a fellow traveler on a ten hour flight, and when Saito makes his phone call after he looks at Cobb, it is merely because he has perhaps remembered some business entirely unrelated to the flight. This is, I think, the most “reasonable” way to read the plot. After all, why would his father-in-law be wearing the exact same outfit in his classroom as in the LA airport when he picks up Cobb. He tells Cobb to “come back to reality,” which seems a very peculiar comment to tell someone very much inside of reality. The movie itself mimics a dream by starting off at a very peculiar place with no explanation of how he arrived there, much as he tells Ariadne about the functioning of dreams.
Cobb’s explanation of his involvement with his wife’s death to Ariadne forces him to realize that his “complicity” was not truly his fault, and that his honest motivations merely went astray. When he finally confronts Mol at the end of the movie, he “traverses the fantasy,” the final phase of the psychoanalytic process, where the subject accepts the “incompleteness” of reality and gives up on attempting to reclaim the object cause of desire. Cobb finally accepts that the process of retrieving and keeping alive the memory of his wife is impossible, that he cannot bring her back. What he encounters in the decayed ruins of his dream home is the broken, imperfect image of his wife. It is not his real wife, with her perfections and imperfections, it is a mere simulacrum. Zizek explains this well when he writes that love is not the love of some perfect Other, but instead to embrace the negative and positive aspects of the loved one. We do not love someone for the “ideal” image we have of them, but instead for the “real” them, with all their human faults. It is this ghostly image of Mol that has been haunting him, and until he accepts that her departure is permanent and that he cannot bring her back, Cobb cannot truly “live.” When Cobb finally confronts the fantasy of Mol that persists in his unconscious, he embraces her completeness, and now his, is impossible, that he must live for his kids. That the kids wear very similar outfits in his dreams to when he returns home is, far from being proof that he is still dreaming at the end, the clearest proof that he is “in reality.” Cobb remembers them in the outfits that are clearest to him, which happen to be the ones they wear when he returns home (perhaps a touch by his mother) though altered enough to not be exact replicas. They are, in fact, not even the same kids that appear in his dreams, or at least when they finally appear they are not exactly what the audience expects: they are not the idealized children that exist in his dreams, but he loves them all the more for being exactly the “normal” “human” ones he knows and loves.
Theory 2
This one is shorter and far less complex. The entire movie is a dream, up until Cobb wakes up on the airplane. He is merely a businessman of some sort coming home to his children and has an elaborate dream, which he only partially recollects, that is metaphorical for his “return.” In his dream, he has naturally added the people in the cabin around him as characters.
The End
The end has frustrated and enthralled so many filmgoers. There is a tendency for groans at the end of viewings of Inception, and many who did not like the film reportedly “hated the ending.” But what of this, does the top fall? When Mr. Chales tells Fisher that he is “dreaming” in the Hotel Dream scene, he does not really give control of the dream to Fisher: instead, “the thought ‘this is only a dream’ … is aimed at reducing the importance of what has just been experienced and at making it possible to tolerate what is to follow. It serves to lull a particular agency to sleep which would have every reason at that moment to bestir itself and forbid the continuance of the dream” (McGowan 13). That is, in a sense, what Nolan does with Inception: when the audience learns that we are “dreaming” in each separate scene along with the protagonists, we become more impassive to the continuance of the narrative. We “accept” what is going on, and this openness allows us to begin to question ourselves as well. I have not talked to anyone who has lost a spouse who saw Inception, but I can only imagine that the scene with Cobb and Mol at the end must be incredibly powerful. This sense of acceptance partly explains how easily many viewers accept the pseudo-science (never at all explained) of dream extraction (Sure, the military developed it, but how does it work? We do not know). For Todd McGowan, the cinematic experience mimics that of analysis, but only if the subject can embrace completely the experience of the film itself. It is then that the subject can adopt a critical distance and interpret the gaze, or the way our view is already influenced. McGowan isolates what he calls a cinema of the gaze in the modern era, where the spectator is actively involved in “creating” the view of the movie. The gaze is always partial and we cannot know all about what we are seeing. When cinema seeks to give the viewer a complete experience, the spectator becomes all-knowing and the gaze becomes just an ordinary perspective on the film. This is, I think, why the spinning top at the end falls, but cannot be seen to fall. By refusing us the entirety of the story, the end of Inception confronts us with our very position as viewers of the movie, by placing a magnifying glass on the incompleteness of our understanding of the film. Are there really only three dreams? Are there more? What does it mean to dream? What is reality? These are all questions that Inception asks the viewer to confront. The film forces us to confront not just the fate of the characters, but also, our own fate, and our own experience with the world. This, is it’s power.
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December 4, 2011 @ 6:46 am