10. "They're still together?" "No... she's... she's dead."
Mal's story is the tragic compromise of Cobb as well. As Ariadne best puts it, his guilt defines her, gives her power. His guilt, that in saving her, he destroyed her. This is the true danger in Inception, the fact that an idea can grow and define, or consume and destroy.
The story of her demise is simple enough, but what is most confusing and interesting is her return. Mal's first quote is "If I jump, would I survive?" Her very first words to Cobb immediately fill him back up with guilt. In these few words, we remember Mal has died from the fall from the window, and Cobb cannot rid this from his mind. But Mal is just a projection, but this grows incredibly difficult to remember. Everything Mal says, Cobb knows.
The scene switches (dream logic) to a quiet room. Mal comments on the art around the building, that it is "Arthur's taste." Does she know Arthur? No, however, Cobb does. (Actually, Arthur does mention she was "lovely" in reality, implying they have met.) Therefore she does. Almost as if the conflicted piece of Cobb is speaking to his guilty, angry side. She goes on to further instill guilt into him, asking "Do the children miss me?" The second part of Cobb's guilt sits in coldly, that she is not real, but the children she has left behind are.
Mal goes on to sabotage the mission, disappearing from her chair while Cobb attempts to rappel down the side of the castle. He goes back to work immediately, pulling a silenced pistol from nowhere, breaking into Saito's safe to recover his engineering plans. Saito arrives almost immediately, along with Mal, who has Arthur as her hostage. As she only a projection, she knows that Arthur is the dreamer and the dream relies on him, thus she injures him (pain is in the mind) and forces his "death". The dream collapses, and Cobb's plan fails terribly, as Saito has known about the Extraction all along.
It is surprising at first a projection, designed for defense, would go to such lengths to sabotage its owner. Then one must consider Mal is powered by guilt, the fact that Cobb would still be with his children had he never experimented with dreaming.
As mentioned previously, the totem is the strongest connection to the old Mal, and Cobb also sees memories of Mal in his other dreams (in Mombasa, he remembers their suicide in limbo, then in reality, he remembers her suicide from the window, he is interrupted by Saito at this point.) We also see hints of Mal (when Cobb enters the snow level, he remembers the hotel suicide, since he is in a hotel. Also the wine glass breaking when he enters the room.) Mal is always apparent in his subconscious.
Mal, if not obvious, translates to "bad" in Spanish, and Mal certainly commits some contradictory acts in the movie. She becomes more and more deadly as Cobb reaches his goal of returning to reality, and away from her. She firsts cuts Cobb off from the action by appearing as a freight train in the rainy city. She interferes less as Cobb focuses on his children in the hotel, but her final appearance is most haunting. The audience gasps as Mal drops from the ceiling in the snow fortress, and calmly shoots Fischer. Her immediate interference in the Inception job forces Cobb to kill her. He later arrives over her body, shaking his head and commenting "I couldn't kill her." Well sure he did! Actually, he didn't. He didn't truly release her from his mind, thus she took Fischer's mind down into limbo. Had he shot her before her interference, the job may have ended differently.
(Eames adds a chilling comment, "Well it's not me that doesn't get to go back to my family.")
It's here Ariadne saves the day with her logic and resolve, and pure instinct. She suggests they go down deeper and recover Fischer's mind, then perform the Inception. In traditional limbo fashion, two enter limbo rather than one.
Cobb eventually reaches Mal, who, with cold irony, is waiting in their house, just in front of the door. Almost as if she stands between him and his children. Its here we almost believe for a second this is the true Mal, not simply a projection. That is because Cobb believes this too, for a moment. She takes a moment with him, asking Ariadne if she believes COBB is real, chased around the globe by faceless executives, projections persecuting the dreamer. (Ironic that Mal IS Cobb's greatest projection-persecuter.) However, Cobb almost appears lost in her fantasies, until he refuses to look at his "children". He tries to explain he needs to see them up above, reminding him once again of the job at stake.
Ariadne locates Fischer on the porch, yelling it's time to go. Cobb appears almost lost, until he reveals he cannot stay with her because she doesn't exist. This is the final climax for Cobb, a lasting, miniature Inception upon itself, detaching himself at last from Mal. He has at last chose his children, his reality, over her.
The projection, swollen with guilt, goes down with a fight, stabbing Cobb viciously with a kitchen knife. Ariadne somehow acquires Cobb's pistol (dream logic... but what was Cobb going to do with the gun anyway?) and puts Mal out with a bullet. Her last remark is that she is "improvising". She boots Fischer off the roof, then tells Cobb to find Saito before she jumps herself.
Mal, like a punished child, cries and makes her last stab of guilt at Cobb: he said they would grow old together. Cobb at last finds peace in the fact that they did, they had their time... 50 years of it. He lets her go and bows her head as the projection Mal dies.
Thus is the end of the projection, and in truth, the end of the totem's significance to anyone with half a brain. Now that she is gone, Cobb no longer is concerned with her haunting him, and eventually finds his way to Saito, explaining the story to him, and thus the story ends.
We've talked alot about limbo and its dangers. But different people seem to populate and perceive limbo in different ways, mainly Mal and Cobb, and Saito.
Mal and Cobb built their own world in limbo, towering skyscrapers, even their own homes they used to live in. Cobb points out with a sort of reverent pride, "In the real world we'd have to chose. But not here." Cobb began to feel the long years stretch out, imaging them grow old and wrinkly, so to speak. Mal was more concerned with preserving their love in their world, by locking away her truth she had chose to forget. She felt limbo was not so much a prison, but an escape. When she emerged, she was consumed by the idea.
When Cobb and Ariadne washed up into the ruined city, it was collapsing under decay. No longer maintained by Cobb and Mal's minds, it fell to pieces, like the sand castles they had built upon the beaches. The shock of the defibrillator awakens Fischer, and the exploding fortress above finally destroys the city, shown by sped-up erosion and thunderstorms. At long last, with Ariadne's shot into Mal, she, as a projection, dies, taking the remnants of their limbo with her.
Saito, the tourist, was first to be shot in Yusef's rainy city, though he grimly tried to honor the arrangement. As he was the only one who could return Cobb home, dream logic dictated his fate. Saito defended his own competitor in the snow level, then fell into limbo, slightly ahead of Cobb. In his time, Saito was trapped in a prison of limbo. An old man, filled with regret that he died trying to destroy an empire, his 50 years passed in minutes for Cobb, who washed up slightly after the destruction of HIS limbo. And of course, you know the rest.
Strangely, we never see the true danger of limbo, yet we see the vulnerability of one's mind while you are in it. The true danger of limbo is not realizing you are there, which of course leaves us hanging to whether Cobb has fallen to the recesses of his own mind.
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| "Google Images" |
8. "Impossible. Dreams within dreams... it's too unstable."
By now, we're getting into some deep, troubling waters of limbo. Before you become too immersed, let's remember what's going on up above. Work your way down.
THE FIRST EXTRACTION:
REALITY: A train in Japan.
Monitor: Japanese teenager.
Sleepers: Saito, Cobb, Arthur, Nash.
LEVEL ONE: Saito's apartment, somewhere inside a Middle Eastern city. People are rioting outside. Possibly populated by Nash.
Monitor: Nash.
Architect: Nash.
Dreamer: Arthur.
Subject: Saito.
Sleeper: Cobb.
Kick: The riot breaks into the apartment and grabs everyone. No sedative.
LEVEL TWO: Saito's castle, "subject to post-war British painters. Designed by Arthur. Populated by Saito.
Monitor: None.
Architect: Arthur.
Sleeper: None.
Subject: Saito.
Kick: Cobb is pushed into a basin of water in Level One, thus flooding the entire second level.
Cobb Projection: Mal herself; injures Arthur to sabotage the level's stability.
Saito Defense: Armed Asian guards.
THE INCEPTION JOB:
REALITY: A flight from Sydney to L.A.
Monitor: Flight attendant.
Sleepers: Cobb, Arthur, Eames, Ariadne, Saito, Fisher Jr.
LEVEL ONE: Rainy city (due to Yusef's needing to urinate on the airplane.)
Monitor/Dreamer: Yusef, driving the van.
Architect: Ariadne.
Kick: The van breaks through the bridge barrier, hits the water (alternate kick).
Cobb Projection: Freight train which hit him and Mal.
Fischer Defense: Armed shooters with cars and motorcycles.
LEVEL TWO: Enclosed hotel.
Monitor/Dreamer: Arthur.
Architect: Ariadne.
Kick: Arthur designs an alternate kick to send the elevator flying down the shaft.
Cobb Projection: His children in the lobby; breaking wine glass from reality.
Fischer Defense: Men in suits with handguns.
LEVEL THREE: Snow fortress, complete with a safe room hospital.
Monitor/Dreamer: Eames.
Architect: Ariadne. (Uses her knowledge to get Saito and Fischer through an alternate air duct system.)
Kick: Avalanche (from the van's initial fall), Eames' explosives which topple the fortress. (Fischer awakened by defibrillator.)
Cobb Projection: Mal herself; shoots Fischer and takes him to limbo.
Fischer Defense: Entire army of snow patrol, equipped with snowmobiles and automatic weapons.
LIMBO: The decaying city; Saito's castle.
Architect: None. Previous builder was Cobb and Mal.
Kick: Ariadne jumps from the building, then kicks Fischer from it. Possible Saito shoots himself and Cobb, as Cobb obviously awakes first.
Cobb Projection: Deeper projection of Mal, brief shot of children.
Saito Defense: Asian guards.
7. "He was delirious, but he asked for you by name. He was only carrying this."
Not surprisingly, what happens at the beginning is as significant as the ending. Cobb washes up in Saito's limbo, delirious. But the crucial thing we see first??? Cobb's children. In the same position. Cobb bows his head down as if he has remembered something. Remember that they are his point of reality. He is realizing he is not in reality (because they still run away from him). He is remembering his goal, to see their faces up above.
Cobb is taken to the aging Saito. (Saito has aged because he does not understand the difference between 5 minutes and 50 years in limbo, where as Cobb recognizes days can become years.) Saito slowly recognizes the two items, a gun and top. (Notice Cobb is wearing the wedding ring). He asks if Cobb is here to kill him, then spins the top. It continues to spin, perfectly. (QUICK HINT: The top is spun twice in limbo by two people who are not it's original owners!) Cobb looks up as Saito recites:
"I remember this. It belonged to man I met in a half-remembered dream. He was possessed of some... radical notions... Cobb..."
Both of these events (the top spinning and Saito talking) begin to jog the two's memories. Then, the greatest hint of ALL! A VOICE OVER!!! Cobb's voice carries directly over into the "beginning of the movie", where the two actually meet in the same room.
(Quick point, Saito's castle was apparently designed by Arthur (a brief hint made by Mal twice). Saito's mind populated it with Asian guards and guests. Yet, in limbo, Saito returns to the castle for an unspecified reason. His projections are much more militarized, and the room is empty and dark. Also remember this is the first time we've seen projections in "limbo", sans Mal.)
But what did this exchange mean? Why not start the movie with the young Saito? Why confuse us and put the scene back in at the end (shown without the children at the end, notice)?
Simple. The entire movie, whether or not it is a dream or not, is a flashback. Cobb is recovering his memories of how he met Saito and arrived at limbo. Whether or not those events are real or spun by his imagination, this is the clear answer to the main part of the movie.
And you thought it was easy to escape limbo?
(Another hint? Never does one person go into limbo alone. They always have a companion who seems to realize they are dreaming.)
Cobb, as flawed and emotionally compromised as he is, managed to establish a few rules of his own during his work with Cobol and Mal.
A. "I didn't know he was gonna rub his damn cheek on it!" Find another Architect. As great as Cobb was at building levels, he could never learn the layouts, or Mal would know them. Thus, he always needed a buddy to help him out.
B. "They won't accept failure". When all else fails, have an ace in the hole. Cobb's first mission involving Saito proved this.
C. "Because I am the most skilled extractor." Give yourself a little credit. Cobb is usually the emotional director of each mission.
D. "Never recreate places from your memory, always imagine new places!" Building from your memories is the easiest way to lose your grip on what's real, and what's a dream! Cobb has never independently built anything, sans limbo. However, he does end up building an Elevator of Memories.
E. Hands off the totems. Only I can screw with everyone else's.
F. "Assemble your team, Mr. Cobb." Have a good team. More on this later.
Cobb breaks just about every rule in the book. The movie demonstrates this, so there is little need to refresh us on this concept. There isn't actually too much to this rule breaking, but more on Cobb's emotional compromise later.
5. "You need an object, potentially heavy, something you can have with you at all times." "An elegant solution for keeping track of reality."
It is established early on that a totem can only determine if you
are in SOMEONE ELSE'S DREAM. The next totem rule is that no one should know the purpose of your totem, or touch it, thus ruining your own perception of reality.
Cobb uses his totem every time he sees Mal in a dream. He uses it in Kyoto after seeing her, in Paris after she "kills" Ariadne, in Mombasa after he remembers their "suicide" from Limbo, and when he returns to his children. But what does it really mean?
Cobb tells Ariadne in dreams, Mal's top would just... spin and spin. He somehow knows this, perhaps she told him? But the top becomes his own after her suicide, perhaps in loving memory, but immediately making it a very contradictory item to him. REMEMBER: the totem = perceiving Mal as real. This is all Cobb uses it for!
When Cobb performs his first Inception, he finds the top, stowed away by Mal in attempt to protect herself from believing she is dreaming, so that she may stay in limbo forever with her husband. Cobb spins the top, planting the idea her world is not real. It is not apparent he should know what to do, how to touch it, or even where she hid it. He gives the top significance by using it against her. The fact he spun it makes no difference than him swallowing it.
Mal thus believes her world is not real, causing them to recite a layered poem about trains, receive a kick from a convenient freight train, and wake up in their living room, after a so called "50 years" in their minds.
So what has this all established? The totem's only purpose is to remind Cobb that Mal no longer exists, that his version of her is a simple projection.
This simple idea explains why totems are not important. Eames, Arthur, and Ariadne were all shown with totems, but never used them, not once. Why? They have a clear grip on reality.
A clearer "totem" is my next point. Cobb is unsure until the movie's climax that his projection of Mal is real or not. Thus, he still wears his wedding ring. Another totem? Maybe, maybe not. This item isn't significant enough to be shown alot in the movie, so you need to be quick to notice it. But after Cobb returns home, he no longer wears the ring, signifying he accepts Mal's tragic death, in both reality and in his mind.
The final, elusive totem in the movie is Cobb's children. They are perhaps his only true point of reference. In the end scene with Mal, Ariadne, and Cobb, Cobb desperately tells Mal he wants to see his children's faces "up above". He refuses to look at his "projection children". This makes it extremely clear that Cobb's only goal is to reach his children in reality. When he is escorting Fischer in the hotel, he also sees them, a memory to remind him of his goal to successfully perform Inception to reach them.
"Those kids, your grandchildren? They're waiting for their father to come home, that's their reality... I think I found away home, and this job, this LAST job? That's how I get there..."
No matter how you look at it, Cobb never wants to see his children in his dreams. Where as he is constantly seeking Mal out in his mind, his children in reality is his constant reminder of reality. When he finally sees their faces, his journey to reality is complete.
So? What DID happen at the end???
You can analyze the ending a hundred times. Cobb sees his children as he walks in the door. Convinced he is still seeing them as a memory, he spins the totem on the table. However, he is distracted when he sees his children's faces. He runs toward them, embracing them and asking what they have been doing. Miles (the grandfather) smiles and walks away, convinced his job of returning Cobb to reality is complete. We see the camera pan to the top, and the audience's faces fall as they see it is still spinning. The last shot shows it wobble.
What do you think? All a dream? All reality?
It didn't matter to Cobb. He was happy, free from Mal, with the children he loved, up above. The fact Cobb was not hunched over, as he was before, clenching a gun and staring at the totem, is all the proof we need that it didn't matter. A happy ending for the main character. And still not a clear answer.
Don't worry. I'll fix that for you.
4. "So now you notice how much time Cobb spends doing things he says not to," says
Arthur to Ariadne. The movie does well to establish some ground rules so we better understand the movie. So here they are:
A. The dream machine can take people into dreams, with or without sedatives.
B. Up to four (including Limbo) levels can be constucted.
C. Shared dreaming often requires several people: a Monitor (to remain with the machine); an Architect (to construct the level); a Dreamer (who controls the level); a Subject (who populates the level); and the Mark (who is usually the target of the Deception or Inception).
D. Limbo is unconstructed dream space, shared by whoever is dreaming at the time.
E. Limbo can be reached by killing oneself when sedated, or simply "consciously" dreaming into it.
F. When not sedated, one can kill themselves, or another, to wake up into the next level.
G. When sedated, one requires a "kick", or falling sensation to wake up into the next level.
H. A dream level will affect the first level underneath it, potentially by gravity shifts, general shaking, or weightlessness.
I. Limbo can be escaped using a kick.
J. Projections attacks the dreamer once they sense someone messing within the subject's mind.
K. Projections can be trained and develop to ward off intruders.
L. An architect can construct a safe or bank vault, which the subject populates with information it wants to protect. Ariadne uses a hospital to insert Fischer's father into a dream.
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| Mal and Cobb's Limbo |
The list goes on, but that's all you need to understand my next point.
Cobb and Saito never leave Limbo! Here's why.
Before Cobb washes up on Saito's beach, we see Ariadne and Fischer both undergo a series of four kicks up into Yusef's level. She throws herself off the building, thus waking up to fall in the snow level, then falling in the elevator, then waking in the van. Cobb and Saito never undergo this process! Meaning, when Saito reaches for the gun near the ending, he would have killed them, sending them underneath rubble from the snow hospital.
So what did happen? One could argue the sedative wore off and they woke up, but then there would be no need to be fearful of Limbo! Since Limbo traps the mind, not the body, Cobb was forced into a loop: straight into another "Limbo". He imagined himself back on the airplane, and meeting his children (who were conveniently in the same position with the same clothes).
"But what about the TOTEM??? It wobbled... and stuff."
And my next point. Cobb's totem was not simply the top.
