Unless you have seen Christoper Nolan's brain scratcher, Inception, my title will make no sense to you. In fact, the movie did not make complete sense to most viewers anyway.
Aside from all the dream-within-a-dream, planting-ideas, extracting-ideas, why-is-Michael-Caine-in-all-of-Nolan's-movies? scenarios involved with the film, the most talked about element was whether or not the top falls at the end. I've read many interpretations but have my own. I will cover all possibilities first.
Scenario 1: the top falls. Everything plays out exactly as it appears and we have a happy ending. We start to see the top wobble just before everything cuts to black to suggest that it will soon fall. The only other times we see the top spinning in a dream (Cobb at the table with the old Saito and in limbo with Mal) the top never wobbles and spins with perfect balance into seeming perpetuity. Therefore, this wobbling top is either an outlier or it is on its way to falling.
Scenario 2: the top never falls. Cobb is still in a dream and we begin to question how much of the movie was even real to begin with. If Nolan intended for it to fall, he would have shown us before ending the film so abruptly.
Scenario 3 per Salon.com's interpretation: it doesn't matter. Cobb does not care because he is home with his kids and all that is all that matters to him now. This is why he walks away from the top, his kids mean more to him then questioning reality. This seems to fly in the face of the last conversation Cobb had with Mal. He turned down a lifetime in limbo with Mal and his kids because he knew they were not real, just projections of his mind. He would never know all her "perfections and imperfections". Therefore, Cobb obviously does care whether he is truly dreaming or not when he sees his kids.
(My) Scenario 4: intentional ambiguity. Even Christopher Nolan does not know if it falls. The fact that people are even talking about proves his point: we are never certain what is real.
I am a big fan of both of Nolan's Batman movies, and I quite enjoyed The Prestige as well, but Inception and Memento are his two biggest achievements because they deal with the two biggest questions in philosophy; what is real and what is truth? There seems to be a little bit more closure in Memento but the viewer is still not quite sure what happened, what are facts and what are lies. The point is to stir up conversation and consider possibilities you might not have considered before.
If knowing that Nolan's plan to guide you to a coffee house chat about philosophy turns you off, then focus on the intrinsic features of the film. The snow scene seemed to be right out of a James Bond movie. The hotel scene with Arthur can be viewed repeatedly and still seem mind blowing. Watching Ariadne roll back a city scape like a tidal wave was startlingly impressive. There's a lot to enjoy about this movie beyond the writer/director's intentions.
No comments:
Post a Comment