'Inception,' that ending, and where critics go wrong

My take on things:
In the movie Inception none of the action we see is really taking place. From start to finish, we are inside the dream of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb. We begin at the edge of consciousness, on the shore of Karl Jung’s most well-known archetypal symbol, the sea. However, Cobb is not really ever awakened from this moment. The beginning that loops to the ending with Ken Watanabe’s Saito (thank you, IMDB, for the spellings) serves as one metaphor for growing old, as Cobb planned to grow old with his wife but never did. Yep, I said it. They did not live out a full lifetime together in a parallel universe as the movie seems to suggest. More about that later. Yet when he wakes up on the airplane with his cohorts, he has not come out of the dream, but simply arisen from four layers. The final layer is the only world the director/writer Christopher Nolan has ever shown us. It is not the reality.

We get some hints throughout that this other level—truth—exists. None of the characters are the least bit fleshed out. With any other auteur, I would accept that he dropped the ball to focus on those awesome special effects—the crashing buildings, the twisting hallways, and the stairways turning in upon themselves. Not Nolan. When Leonard, Natalie, Sammy, and Teddy all exist crisply in the audience’s mind after Memento; I do not buy that Arthur, Yusef, Ariadne, and even Browning and Robert Fischer were too many people to round out fully. Robert Angier, Alfred Borden, Cutter, and even Tesla (I know—I’m a little biased here as a Bowie fan) all have auras that reverberate long after the final image from The Prestige. Those in Inception seem flat. Rather, they are projections in Cobb’s mind, much like the many facets of ourselves we spy only in the fiction of our subconscious. As they represent only pieces of Cobb, they can only have one or two traits delineated. Anymore and they would shatter further into smaller characters still.

Next the obvious spinning top at the end signifies that Cobb has chosen to stay down. Why would he ever choose to remain behind in that sphere rather than the one in which his wife is alive, though? Well, we have learned that the reverie begins to crumble as soon as the dreamer begins to “get” that he’s not in concrete truth. Cobb has had to confront the fact that he has chained Mal in a cave staring at shadows on a wall (See: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave). Underneath his veneer, Cobb has chained himself down there, too. Facing up to her loss—and the time he has wasted sculpting castles in the sky—is all he can handle. Worse still is the actuality: Cobb and Mal never bore children; he has no remnant of their life as a couple. By staying just below the surface in the place where he has children to raise and the life of a parent to conduct allows him some semblance of a subsistence, albeit a false one.

Fine. So why construct this elaborate fantasy where he has to help Cillian Murphy’s character, Fischer? What lingers of his past life? Cobb still has the amazing, creative brain that he does not trust as the architect of his own existence. He sketches people like Arthur and Eames who do rely and depend on his talents. Furthermore, he imagines Ariadne, a young lady who his own father describes as even more skilled than Cobb. In mythology, Ariadne is the mistress of the labyrinth (ahem), helpmeet to Theseus in conquering the minotaur. None was more pure than she. So Cobb has projected an idealized self to accompany him on a mission he makes up so that he can “earn” his happy ending. Cobb is good at his job. He gets to excel here at some made-up task in order to assuage his guilt that he’s not going to re-enter the earthly battle. Instead he chooses spiritual limbo.

What of the quest itself? The corporation Saito wants Cobb to—through the domino effect—deconstruct is “too big to fail.” Sound familiar? Yes, this is Nolan’s commentary on the bank bailout and the Wall Street kerfuffle. Nevertheless, this also signifies the imagination.

Let me flick out of the way the pesky gnat of an obvious detail before I explain. Robert Fischer needs to resolve things with his father, played by a lovely Peter Postlethwaite, because Cobb needs to absolve himself of cleaving to his nonexistent children over his still-living father. Daddy issues all around!

Back to the corporation as imagination. By taking apart dreams into levels, by building them with internal paradoxes, Cobb is fracturing the conglomerate of his creative thoughts so that he can rest in the territory he has crafted. In other words, Saito wants to make Robert Fischer incept into his own mind that he should undo his father’s company’s monopoly. Saito’s simple argument is for free-market competition. Imagination itself needs internal opposition. We require both divergent and convergent thinking in order to innovate. Thus Cobb has the failsafe tug and pull of tearing apart a longstanding patrimonial business to make smaller enterprises both to honor Fischer’s father’s memory and deviate from it. This internal inconsistency reinforces the dreamscape by making it into an insoluble equation. Which Escher-ian staircase is ascending and which descending? Trace the hand that draws the other. Is it a skull or a lady regarding her visage in a mirror? Cobb is happily stuck in the netherworld of his creation.

Christopher Nolan obfuscates this ultimate reality check because his film mimics what our lives are. By absorbing ourselves in fiction, the audience members allow ourselves to resolve real problems. Staring at a vivid painting, reading an engaging book, listening to an involving concerto, watching a vibrant dance; these are not mere aesthetics but delusions we willingly dream so that our subconscious minds can decipher issues our conscious minds cannot. By spending time trying to figure out his film Inception, we are unknowingly unspinning Ariadne’s red fleece thread super-ego in our mundane existence, aiding the Theseus of our ego to conquer the minotaur of our id. Art sidesteps fact to deal with capital T Truth, that which feels true but is beyond any simple proof. Nolan makes us plant the idea within ourselves by untangling his “yarn.”

This movie was amazing. It did not explain certain aspects of the movie but it added real elements to the dream world. Im sure most people wake up from a dream when they die in it, it has happened to me on many occasions and so have other things that they did in the movies. I would love to see a prequel movie or something to that effect but the movie was done by someone with tons of imagination and true insight of what dreams may consist of. Bravo to the makers but the acting in the movie was not the best in the world by one character which i will not mention. People who are complaining i can tell did not understand the movie to its full extent. If you people think every movie has to have a true life explanation then they will not enjoy this movie. This movie is for people with true imagination and creativity. I dont care what anyone says or how they try to justify their dryness. If you dont understand what i mean by dryness then to bad to sad.

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