Inception Questions July 24, 2010
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.
Don’t read this if you haven’t seen Inception. Go see it (it’s good), then read this.
It’s been about a week now since I went to see Inception.I thought it was quite good, but not fabulous, which seems to have me in the minority, at least within my demographic. It’s definitely kept me thinking about it, which is a good sign.
But the reason I didn’t think it was fabulous is that it left me with too many questions. And not the good kind, the ones that leave you pondering something about the world or humanity or some deep life mystery. And not the intentionally-left-hanging kind, like “was it all a dream?” No, these are a different kind of question, the “even within the framework of the film, how does that make sense?” kind of questions.
Some of these may be flaws in the script. Others may simply be flaws of misunderstanding, or even of poor recall (it’s been an entire week after all). Regardless, any light anyone can shed on any of them would be much appreciated.
1. What’s to stop a totem in a dream from behaving like a totem in the real world?
As I understand it, an individual should never let anyone else get ahold of their totem lest it be mimicked within a dream. Thus, the only way a totem can behave consistently (like never toppling) from dream to dream is if the totem’s owner is the one responsible for bringing it into the dream — that’s entirely the point really: a totem is carried into the dream by its owner, right? But if that’s the case, what’s to stop the owner from projecting it within a dream as exactly the same as it is in reality? Particularly in limbo, wouldn’t you be likely to replicate the totem exactly as it is in reality? Or am I wrong about totems, and they’re actually placed into the dream by the architect somehow, who benevolently recreates the totems of his/her allies with the necessary flaws?
2. What’s Fischer’s dad doing in that room at the end, saying those things? Who put him there?
This is kind of an important one. Let’s recap what we know going into the situation in the winter dream: Fischer believes his subconscious is under attack by his godfather, lawyer Peter Browning. He’s, um, trying to uncover what Browning’s after, or something like that (I’ll admit even this was a little fuzzy but I think Fischer thinks he’s invading Browning’s dream?). If that’s the case, why would Fischer project his father into that room and have him say that? Clearly Cobb and company hadn’t really done much at that point to persuade Fischer to break up the company, why would his subconscious have his father do that? And why would Cobb take it to mean anything if he thinks he’s in Browning’s dream?
Alternately, if his father isn’t a projection of Fischer’s own, who does he belong to? Who put him there? I don’t think anyone else in the dream would be capable of projecting an accurate version of his father, except Eames (the only one who’d met the father) and if he were going to project the father, why didn’t he just “forge” him in the first place (as he did Browning the van dream)?
3. Why doesn’t Fischer get suspicious when he wakes from the van dream?
In the winter dream, Fischer is aware he’s in a dream and allied with Cobb. In the hotel dream, he’s been convinced he’s in a dream and allows himself to be convinced by Cobb that Browning is attacking him. In the van dream, he doesn’t recognize it’s a dream at all. But in all of these, his subconscious “projections” are hard at work defending himself from attack, so clearly he’s been trained to recognize dream malfeasance. So as he goes through the wakeup sequence, why does he tell Browning/Eames in van-dream that he wants to breakup the company if he thought Browning was suspect? And why, after waking up from that dream, isn’t he suspicious that all the people around him on the plane were in his dreams, but Browning isn’t there? Even if it “was all just a dream,” as someone clearly trained to recognize dream-attacks, wouldn’t he at least be wary?
4. Why so literal?
I don’t know about you, but in my dreams the people, the setting, the things around me are often all in flux, changing from one moment to the next. I recognize that part of Cobb’s objective in dream-crime is to keep things are “normal” as possible so that the target doesn’t realize s/he is dreaming, but other than some clever stuff by Ariadne-in-training (and limbo, I guess), everything seems excruciatingly normal. I guess this isn’t a question so much as a disappointment. I mean, if you’d given this basic plot outline to, say, Tim Burton, things would have been much more weird and dream-like, no?
5. Why is Cobb’s wounded psyche the only thing that seems to be able to project people into a dream, other than the target?
I get it: targets are defending themselves against “attack” by projecting assailants into the dream world, regardless of whose dream it is. Cobb’s messed-up soul inadvertently projects a sort of malicious Mal into the dreams due to his guilt. But what about the other members of Cobb’s team, aware that it’s a dream? Why can’t they summon legions of their own combatants to protect them from the target’s? Or physical objects? If Mal and the target’s defenders can bring their own firearms, why can’t Arthur fabricate a giant slingshot to “kick” the floating hotel people?
6. Why’s limbo so hard to leave?
Okay, I get that to leave limbo, you have to choose to kill yourself to get out. Whatever, fine. But why’s that so hard? If you’ve got a totem with you (as Mal did the first time around), shouldn’t it tell you you’re dreaming, and after a while there wouldn’t you want to try leaving? Cobb and Ariadne seemed to have no problems late in the film recognizing where they were and knowing what they needed to do to leave. Why didn’t Saito know? Or Mal, the first time around? Or the obviously-dream-trained Fischer?
Most of my other questions (which are legion) are just frustrations at aspects of the film’s scenario not being explained, such as how the architect actually gets the “blueprints,” so to speak, into the mind of whoever’s doing the actual dreaming… since obviously it’s not the architect who’s doing the dreaming. While I’d have preferred a little more explanation on those fronts and perhaps a little less action, I’m fine with them. It’s these fundamental-to-the-plot things (particularly questions 1 and 2) that are really driving me nuts.
I’m sure I’m going to go see Inception again (Martha hasn’t seen it) and maybe the second time around some of these (and other) things will make more sense to me or at least seem less inconsistent with the film’s universe. But for now, they serve to detract from the film’s quality. Maybe you can help me with some answers?
Benihana. I heart you!
1) I guess the basic premise is that ultimately you can trust yourself to know deep down inside whether you’re dreaming or not.
2) Cobb plants the idea in Fisher’s subconscious, and when Fisher thinks he;s in Browning’s dream but is instead in his own dream, he can’t help but think of the original idea. Because he can’t control his subconscious. Kind of like Leonardo’s suicidal wife. Yeah, it’s weak.
3) Because it’s a dream. And after all nothing was stolen. And he will think that breaking up the company is his idea because he only knows about dream theft, not inception. Suspend disbelief, Ben–it’s more fun.
4) I don’t dream like Tim Burton. do you?
5) totally. More importantly, why is Leonardo the only person with issues? I could not be on that team.
6) Too many questions. You try to kill yourself (in your dreams) and let me know how that works out.
Ok this is what I got, not complete, but I’m not sure it can be.
1) I dont think the totems should be brought into the dream. But are carried in real life only. The worry being that someone could fake your totem in a dream.. and that is why you never let anyone know the exact details of the totem
2) Fischer populated the dream, including his father. His mind was trying to figure out what browning was hiding from him, and thus created his father in the safe room complete with the will.
3)I think he still suspected Browning at that point, that is one of the reason that Browning apologizes. But it seems that Browning has excepted the fate of the company in Fischers hands. on the plane, I dont know if he really remembers much of the dream (if any)
4) Good point, I think it could have gotten a bit more crazy, maybe not all the way to tim burton tho.
5) I dont think they want to bring anything more in to the dream, as things change the more forceful the attacks would become. There could have been some balance in this. Cobb cant keep her out.
6) I think if you dont intentional put your self in to Limbo (ie, if you die in the dream and are forced to limbo) then you dont remember how you go there, or what the reality is. Thus Saito vaguely remembered something (a half remembered dream) but it hadnt been enough to convince him to kill him until Cobb showed up.
Thanks for your thoughts guys. It’s funny, after writing this post and thinking further I came to several conclusions that are different from yours (that also differ from one another). I’d sorta decided that *only* your deep subsconscious can mess with dreams, e.g. Cobb bringing in Mol, which answers #5 and means #1 has to be that the architect builds them in. But then I remembed that during training Ariadne was able to do all sorts of manipulations, and Eames is able to “forge,” both of which require conscious, rather than subsconscious, dream manipulation.
I’m definitely still hung up on question 1…. clearly people have them in the dream worlds, we know that because we see them. But is it really that somehow your subconscious just always knows? That seems… I dunno, kinda lame and inconsistent somehow.
I think your answers to #2 are right. I have trouble buying that that’s what his mind would come up with, but I just need to let it go I think.
I like your explanation for 6 — we can guess that even totems aren’t that convincing in limbo because you’re so far down, or something.
Thanks for your help. Keep ‘em coming, people! I’m interested in what others think…
The answer to most of these questions — 1-3, and 5-6, anyway — is that the movie is riddled with great whopping plot holes, and held together with a chewing-gum-and-duct-tape melange of mostly nonsensical, rapid-fire exposition. No getting around it.
The virtue of a premise so intricate, I guess, is that there’s plenty of material for viewers who long for coherence to MacGyver-up their own working theories. This thread is a great demonstration of smart viewers filling in the holes for themselves, and I don’t think I can do much better than you guys have already done. So instead, since I’m so late to this party, I’d like to start by acknowledging the many loose ends, and then try to make the case that they don’t really matter.
Speaking for myself, anyway, the conceptual sloppiness wasn’t a big problem. I never felt like Nolan was trying to pass this off as some masterwork of bulletproof internal consistency and hard-SF rigor — on the contrary, you’re being asked to go along with an aggressively ludicrous premise that’s pledging to take you someplace interesting, and you either buy in or you don’t. That may sound a lot like the kind of glib argument that often gets thrown around in defense of movies that are ultimately dumb and assume their audiences are dumber, but what makes Inception a different case is that while you’re asked to suspend disbelief, you’re never really invited to ignore the artificiality of the experience — which is kind of the central theme of the film, after all — or to consume it in an entirely passive, escapist way. If anything, this movie wears its constructedness on its sleeve, starting with the early warehouse montage where they’re plotting, with notepads and whiteboards, how best to psychologically manipulate the mark — a scene that might as well have been a fly-on-the-wall glimpse into any writers’ room in Hollywood. You may not buy that that subtext is intentional, but if you don’t see the filmmakers winking at you with the line “when Arthur stops the music, you blow up the hospital and we’ll all ride the kick back up the layers!” …well, I can’t help you.
As an ostensibly science-fictional text, though, it’s a real enigma. The fact that it’s never made clear exactly what the fuck this technology is or how it works is the kind of thing that would’ve made earlier generations of SF fans apoplectic, and the fact that we keep struggling with the finer logical points of the premise is an indication that that conditioning still runs deep — a behavior that’s reinforced, in a slippery way, by Nolan’s insistence on breathlessly explaining and then tweaking the “rules” for the first hour of the movie. But instead of erecting the stout and orderly epistemological framework of an Asimov story, the more these rules get explained, the more convoluted and self-contradictory they become, like in a Borges story; ultimately they quake and crumble like the dreams themselves. I want to see this as intentional too: Nolan’s coyness about the baseline technological novum that drives the narrative — it involves wires, drugs, and a briefcase with a button in it, and that’s all you really need to know — is significant in itself, not just as a flaw in the storytelling. It’s a clue that getting and keeping “the rules” straight may not be as important, or not important in the same way, as the relentless explainer dialogue of the first act might, somewhat disingenuously, lead you to believe. In fact, if I can go even further out on a limb, the buckshot barrage of slapdash exposition and the abrupt mid-game rule-changes are themselves intentional: part of a larger package of features (wild visuals, densely layered intertextual cues, relentless pacing, and good old car chases ‘n’ gunfire action sequences) that dazzle and disorient viewers in order to create an effect. You could argue there’s something coercive and perhaps a little sleazy about that, but it goes back to the question of your willingness to be bullshitted and fucked with in order to be challenged and entertained, and again I see Nolan going out of his way to indicate that he thinks his viewer is sophisticated and self-aware enough to handle that responsibility.
At the same time that it confounds a conventional SF reading, this is a movie that would be *completely and totally* incoherent to a mass viewership that wasn’t already long inured to science-fictional reading practices. It’s odd, ’cause admittedly I’m usually pretty unforgiving of blockbuster movies that play fast and loose with genre conventions that have already been treated, more skillfully and usually decades earlier, in fiction or in far superior films. But I cut Nolan some slack out of a sense that he respects both that body of work and its own audience enough to acknowledge the inevitable shortcomings in any attempt to fully realize something so conceptually ambitious in the space of 180 minutes, and ask us to simply move on. That sort of deferential self-awareness — signalled by the visual riffs on 2001 and Blade Runner, and the structural and thematic mimicry of Neuromancer (itself a totally shameless pop-cultural pastiche) — extends to a recognition that Inception not only isn’t breaking new ground conceptually, if we’re being brutally honest, but indeed that it relies on a highly literate audience steeped in the tradition that the movie is, sort of, ripping off. As if to say: we all saw The Matrix, we’ve all figured out the narrative logic of video games (some of us even remember playing Goldeneye on N64), and we’ve been living in cyberspace ourselves for a good twenty years now. We’ve internalized the conventions — the important ones, anyway — and we intuitively recognize this world. We have the cultural training, in other words, to grok the story even if we can’t keep track of every plot thread. If we’re going to move this project forward, moreover, we can’t afford to bog down in the minutiae of rules — we have to have the audacity to disregard them when the situation demands it. This is the point Eames is making when he pulls that RPG launcher out of his ass at a convenient moment: “you have to dream bigger, darling.”
This also speaks, maybe, to question #4 — which seems to pop up in a lot of reviews, and IMHO is totally misplaced. The straightforward SF excuse for the prosaic quality of the dreams — which the film is pretty explicit about putting forward, if you care to look for it — is simply that the dreams are entirely artificial, painstakingly constructed by a team of professionals. If the dreamscapes hewed to the wacky logic and elaborately textured symbolism of real dreams they’d be totally unworkable for purposes of corporate espionage. (This point is the basis for a totally brilliant Marxist reading of the movie in Slate, which you should go read now.) Me, I think it’s absurd that Nolan is getting criticized for putting forward the first fully post-Freudian presentation of the dreamscape, instead of being content with the low-hanging fruit of lush surrealist imagery and cheap pop-psychoanalysis that has historically defined how these kinds of movies get made (remember that Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come? Me neither.).
Jesus, I didn’t intend to write a whole essay, but there you have it. Thanks, Ben! Awesome topic.
Taking your questions one at a time. My answer to number 1: The purpose of a totem is not to tell reality from dreaming, but to know whose dream you are in. It’s easy enough to tell reality from dreaming because if you start to realize you’re dreaming from within your dream, the dream falls apart anyway. The totem is there to let you know that it is YOUR dream and not someone else’s subconscious.