Interstellar - Part 6

[Marvolo]

Haha! pretty much the reaction my cinema got. lol

Here's another one of a girl watching it at home for the first time. Look on her face is priceless. t:

[YT]d9CyDhaZo00[/YT]

Have yall read the Cracked.com article about the ending. They make a pretty good case for Cobb's actual totem being his wedding ring.

In Inception, Cobb's Totem is His Wedding Ring

Inception is known for having a soundtrack that went BWONG every three minutes and accompanied an infuriatingly open-ended final scene designed to make you argue with your date as you left the cinema. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a widower who invades people's dreams to plant ideas in their subconscious. Each dream-planter has a personal object, or totem, to let them know if they're in a dream or in the real world, because getting lost in someone's head without realizing it is a legitimate concern in this line of work.

Cobb's totem was a spinning top: If it kept spinning forever it meant he was dreaming, and if it fell down he was not. In the last scene, Cobb makes the top spin on a table ... and then the movie cuts to black. So did it keep spinning or not? The Internet has been furiously debating this for years and we are no closer to an answer.

The Theory:

... and that's because we've been looking in the wrong direction. The top was never Cobb's totem -- it was his wedding ring all along. This is based on the fact that, every time we see Cobb's hand in the dream world, he happens to have the ring on it; you can see it in the opening scene, and again in that crazy dream in the cafe.

Meanwhile, every time we see Cobb's hand in the real world, he doesn't have it. It's not there on any of the present-day, non-dream scenes at the beginning, and it's not there in the last few scenes ... meaning that the ending wasn't a dream. Check it out, this is right before he makes the top spin and the director pulls a The Sopranos on us:

Keep in mind, Cobb never said the top was his totem. Seriously, go back and rewatch the movie: He doesn't. We see him clutching the top in his hand when Juno asks about totems, but there's a good reason for him to do that: The top belonged to his dead wife, and, as the movie doesn't hesitate to show us, Cobb is still slightly hung up on her.

In the movie we're told that totems must be something unique that only the owner knows well. Since the top was previously his wife's, that means Cobb must have had another totem before, right? The ring seems like a perfect choice. He stopped wearing it when she died, but was too cheap to buy a new totem.

So if this is true then it settles it. The last scene was in the real world.

 

[flickchick85]

Nothing is "settled" when you have to start with the phrase, "if this is true..."

I always liked that wedding ring theory though, for the record.

 

[Black Narcissus]

I always thought the ending was real, just felt Nolan decided to ended in a more artistic way.

 

[Boom]

I also thought the ending was real and the spinning top was just an artistic way of showing that Cobb's dream of seeing his kids again came true.

He was "living his dream," as it were.

 

[kvz5]

Ditto. I just assumed that it was just a clever nod. Heck, I didn't even realize there was a debate about the ending until I checked online to post my review. I do think though that on hindsight, there's more room to debate about Inception's ending than say TDKR who I just can't figure out how it was considered "open" to some for interpretation. No offense meant to said people....

 

[Anita18]

Ditto. I just assumed that it was just a clever nod. Heck, I didn't even realize there was a debate about the ending until I checked online to post my review. I do think though that on hindsight, there's more room to debate about Inception's ending than say TDKR who I just can't figure out how it was considered "open" to some for interpretation. No offense meant to said people....

One of my friends actually thought Alfred was fantasizing about TDKR's ending....and she said she hadn't seen Inception and I was like, "Where the eff did you get that idea then?"

 

[Tequilla]

BatLobsterRises already said it , but the ending of Inception is really just the realization of Cobb. That's it. The film proposes us a universe where it is possible to mimic , to recreate reality. The only difference between reality and dreams (or fiction or alternate reality whatever) is our ability to perceive we are in there. If we accept it , it becomes our own. Just like our universe , and humanity's search for something more than this terrain existence (either from a religious perspective , a more cosmos oriented view , whatever).

The spinning totem in the end , which is also pointed to the audience ask us exactly the same question it does to Cobb. Is our reality the last level of existence ?

We don't have the answer. Just like the end shot of the totem spinning.

 

[jmc]

It's not really the last shot but the cut to black that makes everything uncertain. If the shot fades to black that would greatly imply it was all a dream, because obviously they can't just have that go on forever, if the shot has the totem fall it's obviously real. The totem wobbling ever so slightly before it cuts to black also throws a spanner in the works, we don't know if it's about to fall or is just happens to wobble slightly more at that particular moment. The important thing always to remember about that scene though is that it's unimportant whether it's actually real or not, Cobb found happiness one way or another.

 

[AnneFan]

I always thought the ending was real, just felt Nolan decided to ended in a more artistic way.

How I've always seen it, too.

 

[BatLobster]

I always love discussions on Inception's ending. All the various interpretations tend to have validity and end up making me appreciate it more for all the levels it works on.

That's how you know it wasn't a mistake.

 

[Dr.]

Have yall read the Cracked.com article about the ending. They make a pretty good case for Cobb's actual totem being his wedding ring.

So if this is true then it settles it. The last scene was in the real world.

I’m not so sure... According to Inception’s “internal rules,” it’s easy to mistake a dream for “reality.” Hence, the importance of a reliable indicator - a totem. And on several occasions, Cobb appears to be fixated on the top (and pays no attention to his wedding ring). Now, it might be argued that the ring only functions as a special and subtle clue for the audience - to allow us (but not Cobb) to decipher what’s what. But if the point of the movie is to question objective reality, I’m not sure why Nolan would provide such a convenient yardstick. Moreover, if the entire movie is a dream (perhaps the real Cobb is locked away in an asylum, fantasizing a life narrative with a happy ending) then no clue is trustworthy because all means to distinguish truth from fiction (whether tops or rings) are creations of the fiction. It’s like the Matrix or “Last Thursdayism”; there’s no meaningful way to recognize a deception if you’re living in it.

 

[shauner111]

His totem is wobbling like it's about to fall. They don't do that if it's still in a dream. It would just go on forever with a steady spin. Like i said, it's all about the wedding ring. He only wears it when he's in a dream because in Cobb's dreams, he's still married and his wife is still alive. Any time he's out of the dream, the ring is off the finger. At the end of the movie he's not wearing it. So it's a definitive happy, real ending.

 

[Tequilla]

Directly from Nolan

And was it really all just a dream? It's very important to me that by the end of the film you understand what Mal (Marion Cotillard) means when she says to Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), "You don't believe in one reality anymore," and that we see the potential for getting lost.


What's your take on the ending? I choose to believe that Cobb gets back to his kids, because I have young kids. People who have kids definitely read it differently than those who don't. Clearly the audience brings a lot to it. The most important emotional thing about the top spinning at the end is that Cobb is not looking at it. He doesn't care.


http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/01/play/inception-director-lives-the-dream

 

[BatLobster]

The funny thing about the ending is regardless of whether Cobb is on the "realest" level of reality or not, it's still an un-reality in that it's a movie (analyzing Inception gets pretty meta in that way sometimes). If Cobb has accepted it as reality and is happy, then it's no different than any other happy ending in a movie and we can be happy for the protagonist for having achieved their goal.

The last shot/cut to black (which breaks the "reality" of the film) is there to remind us that we as human beings can't ever know if there's a higher level of reality (if dreams feel real while we're in them how do we know life isn't also a dream? what happens after we die? could we "wake up" to a bigger reality? etc.) and this taps into one of the key themes of the whole film. Seems fitting for a film that ponders these things and explores the nature of reality to end with a more of a question mark.

If Nolan cut after the top fell, you wouldn't have all this discussion or people bringing their interpretations to it which is clearly what he wanted. That's why even though I personally think Cobb reaches his kids at the top-level of "our" reality at the end, I'm a fan of the artistic choice of cutting before the top falls.

 

[Dr.]

His totem is wobbling like it's about to fall. They don't do that if it's still in a dream. It would just go on forever with a steady spin.

Interpretation of the totem/top was never parsed down to the level of “wobbling.” If we were supposed to conclude “reality” from the final shot, it would be simple enough to show the top falling - rather than an enigmatic wobble.

...it's a definitive happy, real ending.

I agree it's a happy ending. And it could be called "real" - to the extent that if you're in a dream - and don't know/can't know about an external reality - then the dream is reality.

 

[Persona]

the whole point of the ending in Inception is not knowing for sure if it's "real" or not. the film is asking us to question our perception, our reality.

i'm fine with people thinking that it is real or it isn't and then backing up those claims with however they choose to support that, but no one can claim that the film itself is definitive one way or the other. it very clearly is not definitive on that point and doesn't want to be because that would defeat its main point.

i remember when The Fountain came out and i got in a tiff with Devin Faraci because he claimed that everything in the film had to be taken as literally happening when the film itself is pretty ambiguous in terms of some of the devices that it uses to draw connections between its narrative threads (i like to view the space voyage in The Fountain as a visualized metaphor for a sort of internal, spiritual epiphany for Hugh Jackman's present-day character while the conquistador narrative is obviously a representation of the book at the same time that it shows how narratives and myths provide the roots and soil for the growth of our worldviews and spiritual selves).

i love it when people have different interpretations of films and art in general, i hate it when certain members of the audience try to dictate what purposefully ambiguous art is "supposed" to mean, like they are somehow sole proprietors of the artist's intent...and even beyond that, defy the artistic intent that leaves things open to interpretation so as to claim that their interpretation is the only correct one. i don't get that.

 

[jmc]

It's not a black and white answer and it never will be, I think anyone who claims they know for sure the definitive answer is not really being honest with themselves.

 

[Micromind]

It's interesting that the kids never faced the camera (that is, looked at Cobb) when he saw them (or visited them) in his "dreams" but at the last shot they do, which would indicate that this was real.

 

[Persona]

or, since the dreams are all in Dom's head, anyways, you could look at it like him not seeing his children's faces in the dreams as symptomatic of him mentally rejecting the dream reality whereas at the end his mind chooses to accept and embrace it.

 

[Persona]

but, see, to me, it can go either way. which is the point. at the end of Inception it doesn't matter what the answer is, what matters is the question.

 

[James H]

Was it still a dream? Was it reality? Maybe it was both...

"The dream has become the reality. Who are you to say otherwise?"

 

[vinny]

this reminds me of many discussions I was involved in after seeing "Jacobs Ladder".....

 

[shauner111]

Whoever says it's wrong of me or somebody else to say "No, it's real, and that's definitive"...well sorry, but i disagree. It's real because of the wedding ring, because of the totem wobbling/about to fall. Nolan has the answer, and he gives it to us, but the ending is for the people who want to believe in something else. If you want to believe it's a dream or that there's a big question as to if it's real or not...that's what the final image is for. But the answer is there.

That's my opinion and im sticking to it.

I didnt know if it was real or not, the first few times i saw the film. And i liked it that way. I still like how people ask these questions. But for me, i now see it as a definitive ending and the proof is in the pudding. Either way, it doesn't matter because it's not about if it's real or not. It really doesn't matter at all. All that matters is that Cobb is happy and gets to go home and see his kids. He doesn't care if his totem spins or falls.

 

[E.NormusJohnson]

Sooo about that Interstellar

 

[The Shape]

Sooo about that Interstellar

What's that?