re: Official "Inception" Thread (***SPOILERS***)

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i disagree. Whole movie=dream

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Not sure if this has been addressed or not, but if Nolan plays by his own rules that he designed, then the whole movie can not be a "dream" - According to Cobb, during a dream, the top would never stop spinning... it would just keep spinning and spinning. At several points during the movie, Cobb spun the top at random times and it eventually fell over - and we see Cobb almost gasp out of relief that he's in reality.

We start out in the middle of nowhere - and we don't know how we got there... but then the rest of the movie goes back and shows us exactly how we got there - which again discounts that the entire movie is Cobb's own dream.

Right?

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Not sure if this has been addressed or not, but if Nolan plays by his own rules that he designed, then the whole movie can not be a "dream" - According to Cobb, during a dream, the top would never stop spinning... it would just keep spinning and spinning. At several points during the movie, Cobb spun the top at random times and it eventually fell over - and we see Cobb almost gasp out of relief that he's in reality.

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I am not a proponent of "the whole thing was a dream", but there are a few ways to answer your question:

1. If you make the presumption that everything was a dream, everything we learned about totems was also part of the dream.

2. My post above discusses an underlying issue with totems. In short, the totem and everything else in a dream is either designed by the architect or projected by the participants. Since the participant knows the specifications of his own totem, he could project it in the dream and have it react the way it would in reality, particularly if he thought he was in reality.

3. Cobb's totem was especially tricky since he did not even make it. Nolan was very intentional in letting the audience know that the totem belonged to Mal.

The entire movie being a dream is my least favorite theory because it leaves me least satisfied, but I don't think the totem disproves the theory.

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Just saw it for the second time:
Question: Wouldn't Fischer know his father's biggest competition was sitting next to him on the plane?

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my guess would be no

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I am still trying to figure out why Miles was at the airport to pick him up. (By Miles being present to pick up Cobb, makes me think this is still a dream...this is the only thing still holding me back on fully thinking he is awake)

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Miles was heading back to the States. Remember when Dom was talking to his kids for the first time in the film, and right before they hang up, he says, "I'm going to send some presents home with grandpa."

And then a few scenes later, we see Dom meet up with Miles in Paris, and he gives him the stuffed animals to bring back to his kids.

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It's not designed by the architect. The architect's function is to simply design the levels, the "maze". All objects (like guns) and people are projections. It's the dreamer who must know the specific properties and weight distribution of the totem so that he can manipulate its movements in accordance with the subject's expectations.

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That's why I said either designed by the architect OR projected by the participants. By the way, the entire team could project weapons, people, etc., not just the dreamer. In fact, most of the people were projections of the subject, not the dreamer.

Ahh..True. I forgot he says he would send the presents with him.

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I have a bit of an issue with the totems as well. I like the idea of them, but since the person who depends on the totem knows the properties, he/she could project the totem in the dream to function the way it does in real life. It would be vaild if an architect who did not enter the dream designed everything. The fact that the participants in the dream can project guns, people, etc., means that the participant could project his own totem and have it react any way his subconcious chooses.

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And we should have seen everyone's totem, that would have helped us attach more meaning to them.

As it stands now, you can look at the three totems we saw:

Cobb - Top
Arthur - Die
Ariadne - Pawn

And there are some interesting things to draw from them.

Cobb - The top's thing is to continuously spin in a dream, which could symbolize his existence in a dream state or not. Or at least symbolize his nature.

Arthur - Arthur is a loaded die. No matter what you throw at him, he makes it work in the dream world. His elaborate set up to kick them out of the further levels is proof of that.

Ariadne - Which makes her the pawn. Pawn of what? Well, if you look at theories that posit her existence as a conscious participant of Miles' Then this could also be right.

I would also add that the pawn's function in the game of chess is to get to the end of the board and change, to a queen, which would support my point of level 4 possibly being her dream, she's the queen there.

But I know that:

These are somewhat of a stretch, but it seems that Nolan WANTED to do something with them, but just didn't. I think the choice of the pawn seems far too deliberate for that. It's like a half idea that kind of made it out in the final film.

Same goes for his limbo concept. I just don't think it was fully realized. Which makes using it as a basis of interpretation problematic.

Found an interesting article on wired.com: The Neuroscience of Inception

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What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. It’s a process in which your senses are hyperactive and yet your self-awareness is strangely diminished. Now here’s where things get interesting, at least for this interpretation of Inception. When we fall asleep, the brain undergoes a similar pattern of global activity, as the prefrontal cortex goes quiet and the visual cortex becomes even more active than usual. But this isn’t the usual excitement of reality: this activity is semirandom and unpredictable, unbound by the constraints of sensation. (This is usually blamed on those squirts of acetylcholine, an excitatory neurotransmitter, percolating upwards from the brain stem.) It’s as if our cortex is entertaining us with surreal cinema, filling our strange nighttime narratives with whatever spare details happen to be lying around. Furthermore, the dreaming state is accompanied by an increase in activation in a wide range of “limbic” areas, those chunks of the cortex associated with the production of emotion. This is why even the most absurd nightmares cause us to wake up in a cold sweat. We care about what happens in our dreams, even when what happens makes no sense.

I’d argue that Inception tries to collapse the already thin distinction between dreaming and movie-watching. It gives us a movie in which most of the major plot points are simultaneously nonsensical – Why are we suddenly watching a thriller set in the arctic? Why are all the subconscious mercenaries such bad shots? Why don’t Cobb’s kids ever age? – and strangely compelling, just like a dream. And so we bite our fingernails even though we “know” it’s just a silly movie. Thanks to the subdued activity of the frontal lobes and the excited visual cortex, we sit in our plush chairs munching on popcorn and confuse the fake with the real. We don’t question the non-sequiturs or complain about the imperfect special effects or the shallow characters. Instead, we just sit back and watch and lose track of the time together. It’s almost as if we’re being manipulated by Dom Cobb himself, as he effortlessly travels deep into our brain to plant an idea. But this Dom Cobb – we’ll call him Christopher Nolan – doesn’t need a specially formulated sedative. He just needs a big screen.

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I've stopped keeping track of everyone's theories in this thread, but I've been liking the theory that Inception is ultimately about the audience's inception. The movie is the dream.

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was Eames/Berenger able to get him back? Did Yusef bring the others in the van back?

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Eames had to make sure that the idea was actually planted in Fischer's head. When Fischer said something like "my fathers will was for me to be my old man, thats what im gonna do uncle pete." then berenger turns back into Eames. The idea was successfully planted. Yusif brought everyone back except Cobb and Saito, who were in Limbo.

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he is doing that from the plane?

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no from the van. the flight attendant was controlling them from the plane.

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StPaul

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clearly you need to watch it again.