Jeremy’s Tophunder №20: Inception

10 min readJun 19, 2020

Inception used to be one of my select few favorite movies — it easily cracked the Top 10 and would have been very close to the top for a number of years. But it’s fallen just a bit over the course of time, because I think it’s actually one of the rare movies that I loved to a ridiculous degree when I first saw it, but I actually enjoy it less with each re-watch.

There are some movies that you need to watch multiple times in order to truly unpack everything. Christopher Nolan is especially good at making these kinds of movies. The Prestige is probably the best example (or at least the one I enjoy the most), but Memento is right up there with it, Interstellar isn’t too far behind, and even Dunkirk has some narrative elements that you might have missed the first time around. There are a ton of movies that made my list that make me feel like a single viewing isn’t sufficient. Inception certainly was one of those movies, but I’m not sure if it is anymore.

With a movie like the Prestige, because of its non-linear storyline and twists and turns toward the end, re-watching the movie multiple times helps to clear up all of the things that you missed or were confused by (plot-wise) the first time around. I’m not sure that’s the case for Inception. There are a few moments in the movie that I can’t quite wrap my head around, but re-watching the movie only seems to make those issues more glaring, rather than clarifying them. It kind of makes me think that the movie just has some problematic plot holes — Christopher Nolan painted himself into a corner with the complexity of the plot and the layers of reality, and the only way to get out of it was to improvise and hope that the complexity would mask the fact that the rules might be switching back and forth to suit the needs of the movie at different times.

But I just can’t seem to stay mad at the movie, because there are still so many incredible non-plot elements that aren’t apparent on the surface, but become clearer and clearer the more time you spend thinking about it.

For example — it seems almost obvious to me now, but characters in the movie assemble a rather compelling allegory for the process of making movies. Each character represents a different element of the filmmaking process. Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the director. He’s running the show. He’s overseeing everybody and making all of the big-picture decisions. Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the producer. He’s the one that seems to be in charge of putting together all of the resources they need and keeping the project organized and on schedule. Saito (Ken Watanabe) is the studio. He’s bankrolling the job and is there to confirm that the job is being completed to his satisfaction. Ariadne (Ellen Page) is the screenwriter. She’s constructs the world of the dream and hands it off to Dom in order to execute his vision. Eames (Tom Hardy) is the actor. He transforms himself into other characters. Yusuf (Dileep Rao) is the special effects coordinator. He engineers the effects required to create the artificial reality. And Fischer (Cillian Murphy) is the audience. He’s the one along for the ride as the team tries to impart him with an idea he didn’t know he had.

And that’s kind of the whole purpose of filmmaking, isn’t it? To get people to leave the movie thinking about themes and messages that seem eternal and omnipresent, but in reality, the audience wasn’t looking at the world in such a way until the movie prompted them to. In a way, Inception is itself an inception.

The ending of the movie prompts a great number of questions, but none bigger than whether or not Dom is still dreaming when he returns home to be reunited with his kids. The movie leaves the answer rather ambiguous. In an explicit sense, the movie ends with a shot of Dom’s top spinning on the table. In a dream, the top will spin forever, but in the real world, the top will eventually fall. It looks like it’s about to topple, but the movie cuts to black before giving a definitive answer. But a deep and thorough review of the subtext of the movie still leaves the question unanswered. There are very, very compelling arguments on both sides.

If you believe that Dom is still dreaming, you might cite the theory that death in multi-layered dreams doesn’t actually wake you up, it simply brings you to the layer of the dream immediately above you (as seen when Ariadne and Fischer leap to their deaths in limbo and return to the snow fortress). So if Dom and Saito were stuck in limbo, then killed themselves, they would simply return to the snow fortress. But with that dream having collapsed (because the rest of the team had ridden the kicks back through the layers to return to the “real world” on the plane), if Dom had returned to that dream layer, it would stand to reason that the dream would be populated by Dom’s subconscious. If that’s the case, it would be fair to assume that he would create a dream based on what he assumed he would find — the “reality” of the plane. From there, he returns home, where he is reunited with his kids, but in truth, he’s still dreaming, and will wake up whenever the sedative on the “real” plane wears off.

On the other hand, if you believe that the ending depicts the “real” world, you might cite the theory that the top is a red herring. The top might not be Dom’s totem, it might be his wedding ring. Throughout the movie, Dom wears his wedding ring only when he’s dreaming, and he’s not shown wearing it at any point after waking up on the plane.

The problem is, neither of these interpretations expressly contradict each other. And the further you dig, the more evidence you find to support each side. There is no amount of analysis that you can do on the subtext of Inception that will point to a clear and definitive answer as to whether or not the final scene of the movie is reality or a dream, or even more impressively, whether or not *the whole movie* is actually a multi-layered dream sequence.

Depending on your point of view, this is either Christopher Nolan’s greatest triumph or his greatest criticism. There comes a point where you eventually have to decide how much you believe this ambiguity was intentional on Nolan’s part, or rather the result of a sloppily-arranged plot. I think again, there’s evidence on both sides. It’s certainly true that Nolan has created highly complex stories before Inception and since, so I obviously understand the desire to give him the benefit of the doubt in this case. On the other hand, it’s not as if Nolan is infallible. It’s certainly possible that with Inception, he simply aimed absurdly high and missed, and for that reason, I understand the viewpoint that the inconsistencies are criticisms rather than evidence of Nolan’s next-level thinking.

Me, I think I come down somewhere in the middle. I do think that Nolan intentionally baked ambiguity into the story, and intentionally allowed for multiple interpretations of not only the ending, but the movie as a whole. He’s done similar things in several of his movies, so it tracks that he would do so here. He has implied multiple times in interviews that the spinning top in the final scene is really just misdirection — the point of the movie is not to try to deduce whether or not Dom is dreaming in the final scene. Nolan believes that the part of the final scene that really matters is that Dom doesn’t stick around long enough to see whether or not the top falls. He chooses to not care whether or not he’s dreaming. The side-show to figure out the “truth” of the scene is an interesting intellectual pursuit, but it’s ultimately not all that important from a character perspective.

I agree with Nolan here, to an extent. From a character perspective, it *is* important that Dom made a choice to not care about whether or not he was still dreaming in that given moment. But where I differ from Nolan is that the movie isn’t really about the characters. To me, the movie is about the experience of dreaming, the nature of reality, and how we subconsciously create experiences, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and all of the small-scale stuff that our brain does that we’re not even aware of. The characters are just a vehicle through which to deliver the substantially more complex elements of the story. Inception is about Inception, and how ideas get planted into our mind without us realizing it. For example, this is the whole purpose of advertising — trying to get us, the audience, to associate a specific product with a specific feeling. And from that perspective, I think it does matter whether or not Dom was awake or dreaming during the final scene, and furthermore, throughout the movie.

In fact, you could even use Nolan’s own argument against him. If Nolan’s concern is for the characters rather than the universe they inhabit, it would be interesting to ask him why the supporting characters in Inception seem to be so under-developed, at least compared to characters in other movies he’s written and directed. Did he simply drop the ball on giving these characters a backstory and more dynamic personalities? Or is it possible that the entire movie is a dream, and the reason the supporting characters seem as one-dimensional as they do at times is because they’re simply projections created by Dom’s subconscious?

One of the thing that I really love about Christopher Nolan movies is the tightrope he walks between putting the same people in all of his movies and also attracting top actors to work with. Yes, Michael Caine shows up in just about every Nolan movie. Cillian Murphy shows up a lot, as does Tom Hardy. But it’s worth mentioning that Nolan also jumps around, seemingly lucking into actors as they peak. He teamed up here with Leonardo DiCaprio, who always seems to be at his peak. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was just starting to break out, and Inception might be the movie that thrust him back into the limelight. Ellen Page and Marion Cotillard were both just a few years removed from Academy Award nominations (Page for Juno, Cotillard won for La Vie en Rose). A similar thing happened with The Dark Knight (with Christian Bale and Heath Ledger) and Interstellar (with Matthew McConaughey and Jessica Chastain). Nolan is obviously well-known to have a phenomenal visual style and a talent for constructing complex but engaging narratives, but I think his most underrated quality is how well he casts his movies. In retrospect, it’s kind of incredible how loaded some of the casts are— he definitely seems to have an eye for breakout talent.

Nolan is one of my favorite directors, and Inception is a movie that I can go back and forth on. Sometimes it frustrates me that the movie is more convoluted than it needs to be, and it seems just barely too easy to dismiss those criticisms by saying “the movie is about dreams and dreams aren’t always supposed to make perfect sense,” even though it’s entirely possible that that was Nolan’s intention the entire time. It’s just seems too good to be true, even if it is — like penicillin being discovered accidentally or how giant space rocks crashing into each other billions of years ago eventually led to a sequence of events where this all exists right now. For the most part, though, how I feel about Inception now is still pretty close to how I felt about it back in 2010, when I was blown away by the imagination of the story and the wonderful visuals and cinematography. 10 years later, I’m still debating the true meaning of the movie in my head, which I choose to see as a good thing. There’s enough uncertainty folded into the movie that it will never be boring. Sometimes I get angry at it, but for the most part, I just remember how much I loved it at the time, and I can’t help but love it now.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

5. The Shawshank Redemption

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

10. Inglourious Basterds

11. The Big Short