Inception Explanation — Rebutted (for Matt Barkley .. also, spoiler alert)

*INCEPTION SPOILERS FOLLOW — BEWARE*

Okay, so I went to the doctor’s office today and I was reading twitter in the waiting room. (Big surprise, I know.) And USC QB Matt Barkley had posted a link to a blog post by Adam White entitled “Inception Explained.” Now, I’ve seen a lot of explanation posts in the past (for films and tv shows — Lost, for example) and I tend to be rather skeptical of them because “fanboys” tend to give a lot of extra meaning to things that weren’t meant to have that meaning.

Now, I can hear some of you out there saying, “Well, art should be considered in the eye of the beholder” and blah blah blah. Yes, I agree, most of our intellectual and emotional connection to art are based especially off of our own connections and meanings that we give to art, whether it be film or sculpture or music or anything else. BUT (and this is a big but) there is a limit to which you can over-analyze that art.

So I read Adam White’s explanation, and for moments I was okay with what he was saying. Then he went a step to far when I finally got to the thesis of his explanation. So I’m writing this — I don’t actually know what to call it, perhaps a rebuttal — for anyone who doesn’t like to read too far into things that aren’t meant to be. And for Matt Barkley, because I promised him my reasoning for stating that White’s explanation, while elegant, is wrong.

White’s main thesis, as I stated before, is the problem with his entire explanation: he believes the entire film is a dream, and that the only reality we as the audience are able to truly see is the final minutes of the film, when Cobb wakes up and exits the plane. I’ll break down why his reasoning doesn’t make sense, but first I want to address the two reviews that White seems to have problems with.

White refers to two New York reviews of the film: one by A.O. Scott in the New York Times (link) and one by David Edelstein in New York Magazine (link). He quotes them both, and refers to them consistently throughout the entire explanation, and it is the shared negative review of both critics that, I believe, strongly shapes White’s thesis: that Inception was too structured to have been a good dream film. Scott argues that the dreams are too structured to truly mirror our sleep world and Edelstein states, “Nolan is too literal-minded, too caught up in ticktock logistics, to make a great, untethered dream movie.” White’s rebuttal is simple, and elegant, but almost a counter-intuitive, self-defeating, and unnecessary: we’re in Cobb’s dream the entire time.

Now, the simple rebuttal to the critics is that they are thinking of the strangeness of dreams that we see in retrospect, instead of the reality that they are in real-time. There is a telling statement in the film, when Cobb notes that dreams seem real when you’re in them and that only afterwards do we realize the strangeness and that we were dreaming. The critics dismiss it, instead expecting to see a world I expect that would remind us more of Alice in Wonderland or What Dreams May Come. I’d argue that Inception‘s strongest aspect is that it is NOT extraordinary or so untethered, but the perfect balance of the waking world and the simple dream. Also, we can’t forget that during extraction or inception (which is what the film is truly about) the point is to make the subject they are still awake. (I know, you’re going “Oh yeah!”)

Now, back to White’s thesis.

The biggest fault with White’s explanation is the circular logic he employs in order to make it make sense. He starts by talking about the totem, the top, that Mol carried and that Cobb now carries. He notes that those who see the film will undoubtedly be divided into camps — either Camp Topple or Camp Spinning — and rightly states that it doesn’t matter. However, his reasoning for its insignificance is that all of it was a dream so it’s unreliable. Except at this point then White has used his conclusion to prove his own conclusion. Do you see it? The totem doesn’t matter because it was all a dream, and it was all a dream because the totem is unreliable, because it was all a dream in the first place.

Let’s turn to the arguments, then, and break them down piece by piece.

First, White states he believes that when Cobb is waking up at the end of the film we are seeing a new layer of dream, not reality (yes, this is conflicting with what seems to be his main thesis, but let’s look past that). His strongest evidence, he says, is that Cobb and Saito (who were in limbo) wake up without wires. “At no other point in the movie,” he says, “is a character allowed to wake up without wires after they’ve been occupying a dream space with another character.” He’s wrong. In fact, if we return to nearly the beginning of the film we will recall that Saito wakes up on the bullet train after the opening “dream within a dream” sequence without the wires, and with all his fellow dreamers having vanished from the compartment.

Then White says that the reactions of the other main characters in the first class compartment are too reserved if they truly believed that Saito and Cobb could possibly lose their minds in limbo “they’d be overjoyed to see their friends awake, even if they had to contain their emotions” to keep the con on. He says perhaps the knowing looks are because they are simply friends or business associates — that if you dreamed a ten-hour dream, that intense, including everyone around you, then you’d look for meaning in their glances toward you, and that you would wonder if they shared that dream with you. Yes, that’s true. However, to use that as reasoning is quite a stretch. But let us continue.

Next, he turns to Cobb’s father. Here, I assume he’s talking about Miles (Michael Caine), but I should correct him: he’s Cobb’s father-in-law, that is he’s Mol’s father. While this might only slightly change the expected reaction, White is looking for an over the top reaction from Miles. He says it seems that he would be much happier to see his son-in-law home, cleared of charges of killing his daughter. But to be realistic, a reaction like that would be dangerous for a man who does not truly understand whether he just got through immigration or whether he’s cleared completely. And to be pragmatic, that just doesn’t make sense for the mood of the final moments of the film. He also speaks about the kids being rather reserved as well, but kids are kids — and their interpretations of time can be much like that of dogs, either they don’t understand it’s been that long or it’s been far too long. In either case, to expect over the top reactions is, again, just not good film.

Then Adam White decides to attack the logic of the film itself (a dangerous thing to do in any film, especially one which so obviously does not take place in the exact same world we live in). He looks at the sleep technology, questioning its creation by the army and the accessibility that seems to be far beyond the super rich (as seen by the elderly Mombasans). He looks at the corporations that “will kill to keep their secrets,” at whether the charges would exist against Cobb given what we know about the death, about Miles’ teaching at an “English-speaking School of Architecture located in Paris”, and about Saito’s ability to clear the charges. He looks at the “constantly shifting rules” that he says Cobb makes up as he goes along, the narrow alley in Mombasa, and the rules of limbo itself. He looks at all of this and says “Everything in Inception feels a little too dreamy to be reality. But he’s wrong. First, and simply, you must remember you do not live in the same world as Cobb and Miles and Saito, but are instead AN AUDIENCE MEMBER IN A THEATER. Once you get past that, then the technology makes sense, as does its accessibility. Any misunderstanding of circumstances (and an ambitious District Attorney) explains the charges. And yes, there are English-speaking schools in Paris; whether there is an architecture school, I don’t know but at no point are we told it’s an architecture school (as opposed to a university with an architectural program) and it’s not that hard to imagine anyways. Plus, if he is married to Mol’s mother, it only makes sense that he lived in France. The rules themselves only seem to shift because we don’t already know them coming in (that is, they aren’t constantly changing, but are constantly being explained). And the alley in Mombasa? Yes, alleys that thin actually exist.

White’s strongest argument in this section is his questioning of how to escape limbo: “Do we kill ourselves again? Or just remember to try and escape? It’s never quite clear.” Again, White is partially correct in that it isn’t clear, but the truth can be inferred. Assuming we believe the film, then sedation is what takes us to limbo. In the film, it’s because they need deep sedation to go three levels deep, and in Mol and Cobb’s case it was to go as deep as possible and explore the “dreams within dreams.” But eventually that sedation wears off, allowing for the dreamer to return to reality. My guess is that it’s been years and years for Saito, and perhaps Cobb has died trying to get to his friend, which explains his youth after such a long amount of time in limbo. But we can see that both of their minds are close to mush, but they are both able to find their way back.

White’s final explanation is far from elegant, though, and much more like the mush of Lost. Assuming it was all just a dream, he states we don’t actually know Cobb, and attempts to explain that he’s perhaps a successful architect who worked in Sydney and was returning home to his kids and family. He says that the plane trip accounts for the changes in gravity and equilibrium (notice here that he uses the rules of the “dream” to explain the overall dream which he said should not have had those rules).

Then the kicker, the worst part of it all: he says the plane had, during flight, gone into free fall. Yes, you read that right. White believes the plane must have almost crashed, that this would explain the free fall in the dream and the camaraderie (his theory, not mine) that Cobb seems to have with the strangers in First Class. He says that Cobb must have slept through it by having taken a very heavy sedative for the flight. Well, this was just too much for me. No plane that goes into free fall makes it all the way to Los Angeles from Australia. If it’s soon enough, it goes back Down Under. If it’s too far it goes to a Pacific Island, such as Hawaii. But no way does it make it all the way to its intended location. And in any case, no sedative would be able to keep him from being woken up by the flight attendant pounding his chest to return his seat to its upright position.

In the end, White tries to tell us that he doesn’t think it would’ve stood up to a second viewing, that the “vagaries and inconsistencies” would have left you feeling “a little… wrong”. Well, I’ve seen it twice. And ask anyone you know, I’m a notoriously harsh critic when it comes to film. And it lived up to my first thoughts on the film.

The key is not over-analyzing or trying to make it reality. And the key to why the film flows so well? The characters don’t over analyze or question either — they simply go along with it as though (and rightly so) it’s all just part of the world that they happen to live in, and that we are viewing through the magic and brilliance of the silver screen.

Advertisement