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Comment by sabat | Hacker News Reader

Fun ideas, but this is over-analysis. The movie is as it appears to be. There is no justification for taking a minor aspect of the plot (that the dream-sharing device is only briefly explained) and using it to concoct a whole new layer underlying the movie. The spinning top at the end is a red herring -- it's Christopher Nolan having a little fun with us. The true indication of what happened, that Cobb has reached reality, is in his ability to see his children's faces at last. That's the give-away.

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I think the ending is several things at once, which is why I like it.

One, it's a red herring as you say, though I'd put a slightly different spin on it. Cobb has chosen his reality, he's had his catharsis and made a very intentional decision to let Mal go. That's true regardless of if the ending is a dream or not.

Two, it's an intentional denial of catharsis for the audience. It's a setup without a payoff, tension without release. Here's the interesting part about that- the audiences I've seen it with provide their own physical catharsis, their own reality-based relief of tension, by laughter or by applause. These physical reactions both release the real physical tension that has built in their bodies and also returns them to the real world, outside of the filmic dream.

Three, it captures the feeling of a certain kind of dream. How many times have you dreamed of almost having the answer, of almost knowing something you want to know...and then abruptly waking up? Yes, exactly.

It's the best ending shot to a movie in quite a long while.

My personal catharsis was a grunt of "hmph". For a split second I considered the "question" of the spinning top - is this real or not - then noticed that I didn't care, that it was a banal and uninteresting question, because the question relied on its very existence for its interestingness, as either answer - it's a dream, or it's the final reality - were both cop-outs, were both unsatisfying and cheaply done. "It's all a dream" is the most childish of story resolutions, while the idyllic literal interpretation of the shown ending is unacceptably saccharine for something purporting to be adult entertainment.

As to feeling that you have the answer in a dream, that's down to the extreme suspension of disbelief the dozing mind is capable of. That suspension was something that a movie allegedly about dreams hardly ever brought up. If some character can dream up bigger guns, and another character a freight train in a city street, then why not more? And why are the defensive projections of the dream's owner so tame, merely human, when they could potentially be changing the whole world? And if being weightless at one level creates weightlessness in the next level down, why isn't it transitive? And wouldn't dreaming that the entire building / local area / whatever starts accelerating skywards at 9.8 meters per second per second restore gravity? Why can't that manipulation be used as "the kick"? Seems like a simpler manipulation than what the architect was up to.

The sequence where he sees his children seems decidedly like an alternative ending to the sequence we've been seeing the whole way through the film. This already made me suspicious, the spinning top then seemed confirmation that you are not looking at reality.

I agree that the scene in which he sees his children's faces is suspicious -- everything after he wakes up is a bit convenient. Cobb breezes through customs, Michael Caine's character is right there waiting for him, and his kids are right where he left them. It's certainly plausible that Cobb is lost in a dream.

But I don't think the top is evidence of that. At the level of reality in which the plane ride occurs, we've seen the top fall. Consequently, it seems clear that, in the last scene, the top will fall, and we do see it start to wobble before it cuts to the credits.

The question, then, becomes whether the top actually is the reliable indicator of reality that Cobb thinks it is. If the top really is a totem, then Cobb made it back to the real world. But where did the top come from? He got it from his wife after she died. If his wife really did escape from a dream by dying (if Cobb was dreaming the whole time, this is possible), then Cobb acquired the top in a dream, and whether it falls or not proves nothing.

I'm pretty sure that I'm reading too much into the ending of the movie. Personally, I think he made it back to the real world. But the director has made other movies that invite a similar degree of scrutiny, so who knows?

I haven't seen the movie in a while now but I remember Cobb or maybe Mag placing the top inside of a safe, spinning it, and locking it up while they were in limbo. The top would appear to spin forever at in dreams closer to reality or reality itself because of how much slower time flows at the lower levels. However, the top will not spin infinitely. It will eventually stop when it finishes spinning in the deep nested dream reality, therefore I don't think it is necessarily a great indicator of reality if it topples over or not because it will stop spinning eventually.

At least this is how I read it. To be honest I didn't really think the top made a lot of sense but I think this is what it was intended to mean.

It's not necessarily true that the beginning of the plane ride and the end of the plane ride are the same level of reality.

The top is quite simply the movie's final inception.

Only this one is placed in the mind of the viewer.

>The spinning top at the end is a red herring -- it's Christopher Nolan having a little fun with us. The true indication of what happened, that Cobb has reached reality, is in his ability to see his children's faces at last.

That's the most absurd rationalization I've heard all morning.

If you go back and watch the movie again, there are a number of clues that the entire movie is a dream (mysterious, nameless agency chasing Cobb, the sudden importance of an irrelevant power company's heir, Cobb getting trapped between closing walls as he flees, etc.). In fact, that when he finally "sees" his children they start out following exactly the same scene he kept hallucinating seems to be the bigger giveaway. In any case, why does Cobb insist that seeing their faces will mean he's really awake? That sounds like the kind of nonsense one might believe in a dream.

spoilers

I disagree..

Remember Africa? He was in France, then in Africa, magically. Dreamy...

Remember how he escapes from his "enemies" stuck between two walls? Typical of a dream.

And then magically, Saito appears to save him. Again, typical of a dream. The whole movie is a dream, at the end he allows himself to see his children face because he's at peace, but he's still dreaming.

The real scenes in the film are made intentionally dreamlike at points to emphasise the idea that Cobb hasn't sorted his life out and hasn't "come back to reality", still obsessed with his lost wife.

That plus reality in Hollywood films is seldom very real anyway and usually involves cuts to faraway locations.

Spoiler Alert The spinning top is not a red herring, it tells us much about the movie. My questions is why is he using Mal's totem throughout the whole movie ? He manipulated it when it was in Mal's Safe and everyone in the group there knew how it worked. This makes it an useless totem. He could not figure out if he was in a dream . The ability to see the faces of the kids doesn't dictate he is in reality, it only shows that he is in a place where his mind is ready to accept him seeing his kids.

Except that the children haven't aged and are wearing the same clothes as in all his images of them, meaning that he is still dreaming. The top spinning without falling is just to make sure the audience realizes that Cobb does not make it out.

Actually, if you look at the cast you will see that there are different children (different ages) who play the children at the two different points in the movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/fullcredits#cast

The other credited actors play the VOICES of the children when Cobb calls home from the hotel room in Japan.

Interesting, how did you determine that they only provided voices for the phone call?

I'm sorry, this is an unconfirmed rumor. If I could delete, I would.

First person to under-analyze Inception.

Update: there's some intel from a costume designer that does seem to add new insight to the meaning of the last scenes. Link here: http://io9.com/5602799/did-inceptions-costume-designer-just-...

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