SPOILER ALERT: This is my interpretation of the ending to the movie Inception. If you have not seen the movie and do not want it spoiled for you please stop reading here. However it is a superb film and is now available on video so I strongly urge you to watch it. I do not think you will be disappointed. If you do not care about having it spoiled for you, by all means read on.
Not unlike many others I'm sure, after seeing it in the theater this past summer I immediately began to attempt to decipher the ending to the movie Inception. Did it show Cobb actually reunited with his children, or did he only believe it to be true while trapped in the dream-state of his own sub-conscious? Initially I thought it didn't matter and perhaps it was simply a clever way to allow each viewer to choose their own ending. There was just enough wobble to the spin of his reality-token before the credits rolled that it is easy to believe that either possibility could be the truth. If you wanted to see it as a real-life happy ending you could and yet if you thought the whole thing was still a dream, then it is just as equally plausible. This is a little unsettling because we like our stories to have definitive conclusions. We want to know for sure what happened in the ending so that our journey with the film's characters can have some kind of closure. With this issue very much unresolved in many a movie-goer's mind, one has to wonder if Christopher Nolan himself actually knows how things really turned out.
I recently purchased the film on Blu-Ray and after seeing it a second time, the dialog in one particular scene struck me as being especially significant. Toward the end of the movie Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio takes Ariadne, played by Ellen Page, into the crumbling world of his own sub-conscious mind to confront his own memory of his late wife Mal, played by Marion Cotillard. As they slowly enter the house in which they believe her to be hiding, Cobb cautions Ariadne with these words: "An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious and the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you." Then as Cobb confronts Mal and Ariadne must make her escape as the dream world collapses, Mal introduces an idea much like Cobb had warned about when he insists to her that he knows the difference between reality and a dream: "No creeping doubts? Not feeling persecuted, Dom? Chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces, the way the projections persecute the dreamer? Admit it, you don't believe in one reality anymore." Then in the same conversation: "Then what if you're wrong? What if I'm what's real? You keep telling yourself what you know, but what do you believe? What do you feel?"
It seems perhaps Cobb was not just warning Ariadne about how pernicious an idea can be, he was also warning us. The idea is now suggested to the audience that it is possible Cobb may no longer be able to distinguish between what is a dream and what is reality. Yet from this point until the end of the movie we forget this as the falling action is resolved. Cobb's team accomplishes their mission, and he is legally allowed back into the United States where he can see his children again. Just before glimpsing them he spins his reality-token on the table, and the seed of the idea that Mal had planted in us begins to grow as we ourselves start to wonder: will it continue to spin, or will it fall? Of course we never find out and we don't need to because the purpose of the film has already been realized.
Maybe I am over-analyzing things a bit here, but I think perhaps the point of the entire movie was to do in the audience exactly what the main characters in the movie were trying to achieve: inception. Specifically to put in us the idea that everything we saw may have simply been Cobb's dream. I have to wonder if that scene where his memory of Mal tries to convince him of his own doubts about reality had not been a part of the movie, would the ending's final moment had carried the same impact? Of course this is simply my interpretation and as I have been wrong many times in the past, perhaps I am way off-base once again. However if I am right, than Inception is more than a very well put together action movie with an open ending. It is also a very creative piece of film-making that does to the audience exactly what the main characters of the movie are trying to do while they are trying to do it. I did a little research to see if there was a name for a storytelling device like that and I couldn't find one. I think that is a little disappointing because it seems to me as interesting and novel as this trick is, there most certainly should be.
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