Inception Explained: a really cool scrolling animation of the plot(inception-explained.com) |
Inception Explained: a really cool scrolling animation of the plot(inception-explained.com) |
1) It is never said that 3 levels is the maximum depth of a dream until Limbo occurs. My interpretation has always been that Cobb and Ariadne hooked up a shared-dream machine to Fisher's dead body, which brought them into Limbo.
2) Why are there 2 Limbos? There's the one Cobb and Ariadne follow Fisher and Mal into (which has the architecture of the Limbo that Cobb and Mal shared all those years ago). There's then the Limbo that Cobb and Saito share, where it looks like Saito architected the environment (Asian influences). And if they were the same Limbo, why was Cobb washed up on a shore with no memory of how he got there in Saito's Limbo?
3) In the Limbo that Cobb and Mal shared, all they needed to do was kill themselves to wake up. Why then was the defibrillator needed to wake Fisher up from death in Limbo to Dream 3?
So you're not supposed to worry too much about the logic of the dream levels, since all dreams are basically metaphors for life: mazes where people "get lost" and from which they need to "die to wake up". The only thing that makes limbo special is that it is particularly symbolic. Nolan is presenting a metaphor of life itself as a Penrose staircase, and portraying faith as the way out. When Ariadne shatters the mirrors that trap Cobb in a recursive chain, the image is symbolic: she is a gift from Cobb's father ("ask and ye shall receive") and her role in the film is to guide him out of the maze that is the mortal world. This is presumably why she is the character who accompanies him to immigration.
For more evidence that this is intentional, look at the overwhelming creation imagery and the narrative emphasis on father-son alienation and reconciliation (with Fischer as with Cobb). Look at the curious way Michael Caine seems to be playing God when he shows up in Paris. And then look closely at the ending, which shows us neither a dream nor reality. What Nolan presents is symbolic: we see Cobb's judgment and forgiveness of sins at immigration, and then his reunion with his family in the heavenly garden. The film closes with Cobb ignoring his totem (as a crutch of faithlessness it is no longer needed) and then his son James (who represents faith and like his sister shares an apostolic name) telling him that they are building a castle on a cliff.
A what? That last bit circles back to the opening shot of the children on the beach. It is a bookend reference to Matthew 7.24 and the parable of the wise and foolish builders. The contrast (beach -> cliff) reinforces Cobb's character journey while telling us that the ending is NOT a dream (something reinforced by the lack of the water imagery associated with the other dream levels). It also reinforces the parallels Inception creates between the buildings of limbo and the sandcastles on the beach, and explains why all are ultimately washed away by water just as death washes away life in the Christian parable.
Brilliant movie.
I think though that we can go a step forward.
I agree that we all should look at it much more in a symbolic and metaphorical way than a logical way (there are several points in which the internal logic is severely weak).
And exactly because of all the reasons you mentioned above, I've always considered the whole movie being representing something related to Cobbs.
Cobbs is the one receiving the Inception.
No matter if by God or Ariadne, or God through Ariadne or viceversa. Or if this happens in the real life, afterlife, parallel life, dream levels or what. The whole movie is about Cobbs and his subconscious. It's also interesting that Nolan used the name Cobbs for one of the characters of his first movie, Following, in which Cobbs was some sort of serial burglar. Just to keep the metaphor going.
3) The sedation is the difference. Cobb and Mal weren't sedated when they were in limbo, so killing themselves worked to wake them up. In this case, Fischer's under heavy sedation and dying wouldn't wake him up, even from limbo. Hence, the defibrillator was used to 'kick' him up from limbo to level 3.
The dilution of the gravity effect seems consistent with exponential expansion of time.
1. The bulk of the story is framed as Cobb & Saito's recollection in limbo. My theory is that the recollection (rather than the gun) is what wakes them up.
2. There is no explanation for why the first kick in dream level 1 (the one they miss) doesn't wake up Arthur, who is awake in dream level 2.
It was (I thought) very straight-forward. The bigger problems with the movie come from the plot holes pointed out by Pewpewarrows. Do those holes perhaps contribute to the confusion?
Maybe because of the scroll speed the animations have fewer frames to animate which makes it look choppy? I'm not sure.
I actually switched over to a wheel mouse because I tried using this on an Apple touchpad and it was not a happy animation.
I'm pretty forgiving about the smoothness though. Scroll pages like this are still uncommon and it seems nontrivial to refine the scrolling to the point where it feels smooth and natural.
I would not have the same expectation for an FPS or side scrolling game put out by a studio.
Ah but how often do have a chance to feel weightless? Unless you are on a space station, bungee or parachute jumping? So the feeling of weightlessness itself is pretty startling.
Also it is the moment from when you are standing on something and get pushed over the edge and then all of the sudden you are falling that is quite startling.
Think back on a dream of you falling. Everyone has those. For me, it is always the weightlessness that is shake me up and wakes me.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invent...
The content might be interesting, but it's impossible to tell since this might be the worst way of presenting data I've seen this year. Which is quite an achievement, congratulations :-)
Visuals: Cool Performance: Hot
My guess would be: not much.
I do disagree that was a 'quick' way to make cash however.
But the idea of producing an 'explained' website with a very nice and subtle affiliate link is excellently executed. I'd have thought the HN crowd would appreciate that.
You're suffering the mathematician's disease, ably satirized by Feynman in that quote I can't stop paraphrasing: "Mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because once proved any theorem is immediately seen to be trivial."
But I think Inception succeeds as a film only because following the plot thread in real time isn't of the essence, just as I was able to enjoy Beethoven's Fifth Symphony long before I was taught its formal structure. Without the education required to really dissect that structure, you nevertheless sense that it's there, and it enhances the emotional experience that the work is trying to convey – in Inception's case, the experience of being a man (well, two men, actually, and possibly also a woman) immersed in a dreamlike world full of symbols, mazes, masks, bluffs, and distractions, a world that he himself is creating to distract his own attention from the pure, simple, but unthinkably awful pain at the center of his life.
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EDIT: Fixed my prose, which got away from me. So tempted to just delete this whole thing, but I try to avoid erasing history even if it's really embarrassing and exhausting.
Personal anecdote: My friend who is in marketing and is not at all a geek also thinks if you have half a brain the plot is obvious. She has no special math training beyond an MBA, and has done absolutely zero programming in her life.
Or a carpenter.
Or a secretary.
... chef, janitor, burgerflipper, librarian, bassist, cop.
Similarly my mother (not a dumb woman by and large) got tripped up because there was a line in the movie that the dream machines were military technology, instead of taking this a handwave she spent the rest of the film assuming that it was a secret CIA sting operation.
Basically not recognizing which parts of a universe you're supposed to just roll with and which parts you're supposed to puzzle out yourself.
Possible side effect: you spend the whole movie/book trying to solve it through a completely broken lens and nothing ever adds up or you're too busy (mentally) to notice the real- straight forward- breadcrumb trail and you come out thinking it was much twistier than it was.
If you want a movie with actual complexity, watch Primer. Oh, you’ll probably think you get it the first time through, because the writing is great. Then you’ll rewatch it a couple times and see just how much you missed, because the writing is brilliant.
eXistenZ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/)
Naked Lunch (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102511/)
(And other David Cronenberg movies. While I'm at it, although it's completely linear, I'm going to plug: "Crash" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115964/).)
Jacob's Ladder (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/) is almost a great brain-bending movie, but for some damn reason at the very end there's a, "Let's explain what really happened!" scene. F'idiots. (I recommend stopping the movie when you get to the scene where the Jacob and his son (played by Macaulay Culkin) dreamily walk up a back-lit stairway together. Let the movie percolate in your brain for a while. Then, start the movie up again and see how they ruined it.)
The complexity doesn't seem to arise organically out of the plotline. A lot of the confusion is generated out of not hearing the one time in the movie someone explained something, or from the movie not explaining something that is easily explainable. It's almost as if the writers could have made the plotline easier to follow while keeping the plot the same, but at times purposefully chose to obfuscate it solely for the purpose of making a "complex" movie.
Edit2: originally said "obligatory" but maybe that's too meme-ish for HN.
...and the audio is pretty inconsistent :P
But seriously, seconded. One of my absolute favorite films of all time, and made on a budget in the thousands. Completely stunning.
The -confusion- around Inception is probably just because the narrative is fairly dense.
It does lend itself well to interpretation and general musing, but sometimes I feel people are reaching too far for allegory and symbolism. It's good to find those things, and to take art and run with it, to let it seed ideas and interpretation, but some are a little over zealous.
Seriously, get off your high horse.
Edit:
Am I the only one who sees the irony of the annoyed pot calling the annoyed kettle black?
At first watch it's clear (apart from the ending sequence) what parts of the movie are dreams and what parts are reality, but when you watch it again you may start to consider that it's a little more fuzzy than that.
But then I read trevelyan's post above and I feel stupid.
I recently re-watched David Lynch's Lost Highway. That is a wonderful and complex film that on the surface seems nonsensical and surreal, but - once you make certain revelations - reveals its beautiful and elegant construction.
Note that having the whole thing be a dream completely drains it of all interesting dramatic tension, turning an interesting movie into one in which nothing (or very little) is at stake and nothing really happens for any particular reason. (Remember, if the whole movie is a dream there's no longer any reason to believe his wife is waiting one level up.) It's an awfully stiff price to pay for a painfully dull, obvious twist.
With the first name Dominick ("belonging to God") no less! Tons of this stuff in the script -- amazing that Nolan lost best original screenplay to The King's Speech. The mind boggles.
> One method used to awaken from a dream within a dream is called a "kick", which is the sensation of falling, hitting water, or a sharp jolt that can startle the sleeper awake.
Although I still think it's terribly inconsistent, if the details matter. There's too many different kicks with too many subtle differences and similarity for me to go into in a reasonable-length post.
So there is something about it that makes it hard to understand for some people, although my non-technical wife also had no problems with it.
He was dreaming ever since Yusuf demoed the sedatives the first time, showing lots of people who dreamed all day (the "no, they come here to wake up" scene).
Fisher tries to check his totem at that time but can't do it because he's trembling so bad.
Thus, if he were under sedation, dying would not wake him, though my argument doesn't explain how he moved up multiple dream levels to the plane...
I apologize. Let's try that again.
What I meant to say:
Some people do not claim to understand Inception all that well. Some do. And some understand it so well that they go out of their way to publicly state their annoyance that everyone on earth doesn't see how obvious it all is. I venture to guess that computer programmers are disproportionally likely to be members of the second and third groups. (Please note that I have said nothing about carpenters! I didn't mean to say a thing about carpenters!!)
EDIT: Incidentally, I'm upvoting you even though your razor-sharp criticism makes me do more work. ;) These downvotes! They are like mosquitoes!
I'm surprised that Memento didn't make your Christopher Nolan short-list. Perhaps you didn't care for it, you haven't seen it, or you simply forgot to add it.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.
When jumping out of an aircraft you are already going around 100mph, close to terminal velocity. There is not a pronounced sensation of falling. It feels more like laying on your stomach in water, it a bit windier.
When jumping out of a stationary object, the feeling of falling is quite pronounced until you stop accelerating. A hot air balloon or helicopter produces this effect (and is pretty damn fun). While I've never done it, BASE jumping provides a similar sensation.
Did you typo and mean to write agree?
When you hit terminal velocity you are no longer in free fall, I would expect it to feel like pressing lightly on something - which is what you describe.
To be in free fall you have to be accelerating (that's why it's called free fall and not zero gravity), and again that's what you describe.
This is not a correct sentence: "When acceleration is involved, weightlessness is not." In fact it's exactly the oppose of that.
You can't have zero gravity near the earth - the earth has gravity, and you can't get away from it. Instead you accelerate at exactly the same speed as the acceleration from gravity. In order not to hit the ground due to your acceleration you move in a big circle and keep missing the ground.
The reason you don't keep getting faster and faster is that you keep accelerating in a different direction, your average is zero, but you are always accelerating, just in different directions (and you make sure to always put the earth in the right place to match your acceleration).
People on the space station feel like they are falling the entire time. Presumably they get used to it after a while, but that's what it feels like.
I don't know where you get the idea that being weightless feels like falling. Astronauts always feel like they're falling? Do you have a source for that?
They dive bomb a 747 to simulate zero g to train astronauts. I've done it is smaller planes. It feels like your are weightless - floating a pool. It does not feel like you're falling, like you just fell off a roof or a hot air balloon. When you fall, your stomach drops. You go from 0mph to fast.
When skydiving you do not feel like you're falling. Sometimes you get little stomach drop when you leave the plane (the 30mph increase in speed) but after you hit terminal you feel weightless and the sensation of falling is gone - you are no longer accelerating.
Now, we call this state freefall and you say freefall is the state prior to this, when you are accelerating towards terminal. I don't know the physics behind it, nor do I have a grasp on the nomenclature as you do.
That said, I have felt it with my body many thousands of times.
When you jump off something that isn't moving you feel like you're falling because you're accelerating (like a rollercoaster). When you hit terminal you no longer feel like you're falling, you feel weightless, an entirely different sensation, similar to laying in a pool. You have no sense that you are moving at all, let alone at 120mph.
I have never been in space, but I've been in zero g bouncing around the inside of a plane and I can tell you it in no way feels like falling. At all. Not even a little. No way astronauts feel like they're falling the whole time they're in space. They probably feel - weightless :)
One of the things I loved, though, is that the characters don’t bother to mention things they already know, or explain things they already understand. They say real things like “um” and “y’know” and “could you hand me the…no, the other—yeah, thanks”. This is undoubtedly a major source of confusion, but it serves less to increase complexity than to convey a sense of the characters’ relationship.
The plot could absolutely have been told simplier without changing it, but the feel would have been very different. I know the movie isn’t perfect, but I like it for what it is.
The 13th Floor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/)
A Scanner Darkly (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/)
Brazil (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/)
Time Bandits (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081633/)
Dark City (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/) - A little disappointing at the end though =/
It's worth watching for many reasons, but it'd be worth watching for this scene alone:
01. Eraserhead-- This feature film was the debut for Writer/Director David Lynch. The film is noted for its usage of sound as a theatrical device and "the baby" which is rumored to be created from an embalmed cow fetus. The films script is a scant 21 pages despite a running time of 85 minutes (script pages typically match runtimes).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074486/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eraserhead
02. Dead Leaves-- Produced in 2004, this Japanese animated film clocks in at 55 minutes long. The films (thin) plot is composed almost entirely of a chase/fight scene that begins on earth and ends on a space station. The movie's weirdness climaxes when when the mutant baby of the the film's protagonists is born and proceeds to kill a giant space catepillar which is attempting to eat the earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Leaves http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439533/
03. House -- This 1977 Japanese film certainly ranks as one of the weirdest (if not the weirdest) movies of all time. It was unreleased in the U.S. until after a screening at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival. In an iconic scene, a Japanese girl is consumed by piano monster as a green eyed catch watches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(1977_film)
04. Jacob's Ladder- Fans of the game Silent Hill should well be aware of this movie from 1990 that inspired many of its elements. Tim Robbins stars as a vietnam war vet suffering from demonic images increasingly polluting his fragile reality. One paticularly gruesome scene includes Robbins being wheeled through a bloody hospital corrirodor filled with limbs and mutating torsos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobs_Ladder_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/
05. Barton Fink- This Cohen Brothers film stars John Turturro as a novelist. The 1991 film closes with a set of iconic scenes including John Goodman exiting a burning hallway (like a badass).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barton_Fink http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101410/
06. Naked Lunch- The first of two Cronenberg films in this category. This 1991 film adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel features a protagonist who uses bug spray as a chemical escape from reality. Talking insects and failed "William Tell Routines" are just some of the madness this movie contains.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102511/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Lunch
07. Videodrome- David Cronenberg wrote and directed this movie staring James Woods. The movie centers around Wood's character, a sleazy TV exec, who inreasingly loses touch with reality after he comes across a station which airs extreme violence and torture. Key scenes include his merger with a TV set and a VHS tape being thrust into his stomach.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086541/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodrome
08. Donnie Darko (Jake and Maggie Gyllenhall sp?)- Donnie Darko served as philosophical fodder for a whole generation of "Emos". Written and directed by Richard Kelly. The movie stars this brother-sister hollywood team. The movie covers a wealth of ideas including fatalism and time travel. Movie goers will inevitably remember the creepy bunny head that pervades entirety of the film.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnie_Darko
09. Human Centipede- This 2010 dutch horror film quickly became a meme rivaling Two Girls One Cup for gross-out factor. The film features a mad doctor who connects three unfortunate souls in the most unfortunate way possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_centipede http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1467304/
10. Brazil- The second installment of Terry Gilliam's "Imagination Trilogy". This 1985 film represents the dreams of adults including navigating beurocracy and chasing true love. Robert DeNiro also provides a notable role as a rebel repairman in the film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
11. Black Swan 12. Paprika 13. Being John Malkovich 05. Teeth
So where is the problem? Nolan himself has said in media interviews that the significance of the top is that Cobb walks away. He's also remarked on the centrality of creation imagery in the film and explicitly stated that "there's a relationship between the sand castle the kids are building on the beach in the beginning of the film and the buildings literally being eaten away by the subconscious and falling into the sea." Funny how he even specified the beginning of the film in that quote. No-one is post-rationalizing those words into his mouth.
Frankly, there's tremendous power to any interpretation that leads one independently to the same conclusions the director later makes, all the while explaining away what are inconsistencies under other readings (why Mal is bad, why the continual biblical references, why there is so much damn water in the dreams, etc. etc. etc.). The fact that Nolan is using fairly conventional symbolism (water = death/subconscious) is just icing on the cake.
http://www.screened.com/primer/16-61068/all-images/132-63755...
Meanwhile, sure, it's easy to understand that Inception is a cake. I'll concede that. But: it's not so easy to frost all three layers of the cake at the same time. The part where Inception gets tricky for me is where they start intercutting from layer to layer, and taking actions on one layer that have ramifications on the others.
My new hobby (in the XKCD sense) is upvoting every well-reasoned argument that I disagree with on HN. :)
We know Cobb doesn't need his totem by the end, because his rejection of Mal at the climax is an expression of faith. To understand the implicit alternative, look to the parallel heist sequence which opens the film. There we had a very different Cobb place his faith in the "reality" of Mal when he lowered himself out the window above a fatal fall. Nolan emphasizes that this is the wrong decision by showing us Cobb's immediate (biblical) fall, blasphemy and then betrayal and loss. Death destroys the world by water as foreshadowed in the parable that opens the film.
At the end of the film the logic of this sequence reverses. Cobb resists Mal's temptation to stay with her in limbo. He rejects her for the first time ever, telling Mal she is not "real" where even moments before he was expressing lingering doubts to Ariadne ("how can you know"). And whereas his lack of faith had previously led to his defeat, here his expression of it leads directly to Fischer's symbolic reconciliation with his father. And while the film presents another death sequence as required by Matthew 7.24, this is but prelude to a heaven sequence that breaks the endlessly circular logic of the dream world / penrose staircase. The rules are violated because they no longer apply: Cobb is free of the maze.
What’s more stunning still is that most of the $7,000 budget was film stock. Because it was filmed. On film. Ain’t nothing like the 16mm look, truly.
And what's even more stunning is that most of it was done in one take because, well, they only had $7,000 to budget on film stock.
Though I still think that the ending scene is badly handled. If the point is that Cobb doesn't care any more about the outcome of the spinning top, then Nolan should have just slided from the image of the top to Cobb and his children.
By zooming in on the top and cutting the shot right before it should falls, it just adds this unneeded baggage of questioning whether all that happened is real or not. Like some sort of magic trick. "Do you doubt what you've just seen?" And I just didn't find that that was the point of the movie.
So Inception might not be for everyone since it's heavy on narrative and light on character development (we don't see why Cobb changes, he just does), but there's all of this wonderfully meta sleight-of-hand just below the surface as Nolan tells us how he is making the film. Even beyond the symbolism, the very rules he outlines for how to create dreams apply equally well to the film itself (make the plot a paradoxical maze, get the audience lost in it while you plant ideas in their heads, and make the message stick by forming it around a core message of positive emotional catharsis). And yet we are still surprised, or I was at least!
Anyway, hopefully if you see it again you'll like it better next time. I personally think it's hands-down one of the best films in the last decade, and it's a real pity it got shunted off at the Oscars when it should have swept the field.
The final scene preserves this ambiguity, while underscoring the fact that the obsession with reality is no longer important to Cobb - he is finally at peace with where he is - real or not.
You're still right he meant to leave it up to the viewer, but it completely destroys the rest of the movie if everything is a dream. People want to play games with the rules the movie presented and hypothesize about the whether Mal is in the "level above"... but everything we think we know about the rules comes from that level. We learn about the multi-layer inception, the wife, the concept of limbo, everything in the movie, on that level. If it's all a dream, then there's no target to the obsession in the first place, no children, no wife, nothing.
Incidentally, note I'm sort of making a metapoint... if Nolan came out and said "Yes, it was all a dream" I would accept it. But it would still dramatically destroy the movie.
I'm also sort of hostile to the "all just a dream" idea, whereever it appears in fiction, because it's redundant. It's already just a dream, a movie, a book, a TV show, whatever. It's already not real. Saying that in the context of the not-real work of fiction the entire story was also not-real is silly. (Note the word "entire".) It started at the maximum level of not-realness from the very first word or frame. And it's a short trip from there to the Bergman/Braga incoherent style of ass-pull storytelling. (Or Tennant-era Doctor Who.)
:)
I agree that resolving the entire film as simply a dream would be a huge let down. If it were another film, would be content to stop there. For my money though, resolving that the ending puts Cobb firmly back into reality is also highly unsatisfactory. The more interesting (and I believe) intended result is force the viewer to question their own sense of reality. Haven't you ever had a dream that was so realistic that you were certain it was real - until you woke up? How do know for sure that we are not simply living a dream that we will one day wake up from?
There is a book by Stanislaw Lem that beautifully explores this sort of idea. In the story, there is mad scientist fellow that has a room full of electronic brains, each being slowly fed a life story via a series of slowly rotating magnetic drums. To the individual brains, the story that they are being told IS their life - they have no idea that they are simply boxes in some mad scientist's laboratory. The book goes onto suggest that our own lives may simply be programmed by a mad scientist who exists a level up from us.
I believe this it is this sort questioning of reality that Nolan is trying to impress upon the viewer. Reducing the whole thing to just a sci-fi film about a couple of dreamwalkers makes it seem frankly one-dimensional and uninteresting.
>It's already not real. Dreams are real while we are in them.
(1) It would make a mockery of what Nolan seems very clearly to intend as a positive ending. In the script he actually tells us he is centering the film on a simple, positive emotional message. So what is that message?
(2) It would create a glaring inconsistency with the symbolic landscape of the rest of the film. Case in point, the dream worlds are strongly associated with water symbolism, which even creeps into the real world when the dream world intrudes: it is a glass of water that sends Fischer to sleep on the plane, while Cobb's waking hallucination occurs while he is washing his face. And yet... unlike any other dream... there is no water at the end of the film. In fact, we have the exact opposite, since we are told the events take place in a garden on a cliff.
(3) An aside, but anytime you have people who are named after apostles frolicking in a garden with Dad, you should jump to asking yourself if there might be Christian imagery lurking there. So what's with all the biblical imagery, or the constant references to "leaps of faith"? Is it really accidental when characters blaspheme, or invoke religious imagery?
(4) the visuals of the children building castles on the beach would suddenly serve no purpose. There would also be no explanation for why Mal is supposed to be bad, when her name clearly suggests she is a malevolent character. Likewise, the names of James, Philippa and Ariadne would be meaningless. Ariadne's mythological role is helping Theseus out of a maze, so what is Cobb still doing stuck in one at the end?
(5) Cobb clearly develops as a person. Why does Nolan go to such pains to show this, and what does it matter if these changes accomplish nothing of significance? Which brings us back to point one, why doesn't Cobb just stay in limbo with his wife?
(6) This is a bit esoteric, but you'll get stuck arguing that Saito's palace is destroyed by water because Cobb was pushed into a bathtub rather than the opposite: that Nolan engineered the bathtub scene in order to find a way to destroy Saito's palace in a storm. This requires a violation of the principle of Occam's razor unless you're prepared to argue that there isn't really any water symbolism in the film, in which case you would be wrong. :)
