I think that one of the most important things done in the movie was the blending of *our* reality with the reality of the film with the surreality of the film.
Mal means evil in Latin— her very naming in the film is exactly that which she personifies, being an imaginary antagonist that seeks to stop Cobb. She is named as a character more than an incidental name her parents would have given her.
Even more importantly, it should be noted that the movie largely hinges around an Edith Piaf song, Je Ne Regrette Rien — and Marion Cotillard (who plays Mal) played Piaf in La Vie En Rose a few years earlier.
At the end of the film, Je Ne Regrette Rien, which is used as the “kicker” to wake them up, slows down into the WOMMMMMP WOMMMMMP that we associate with the movie — implying that that noise is what they’re hearing to wake up from the dream (the orchestra noise slowed down by about ten times).
The idea plays with the fact that everything about her character is way too coincidental both IN the movie (naming, motivations, astonishing beauty) and OUT OF the movie (casting, relation to plot devices by way of other films), and that the soundtrack itself has relation both to the characters and the actors. It plays with our sense of suspension of disbelief in a way that Kaufmann often does (and which I love him deeply for) — reminding us that this is a written character, and any layers of reality that we go digging through *within* the movie are all topped by an inherent layer of surreality, making all of the lines much blurrier.
That is what, walking out of the theater, occupied my mind.
