“INCEPTION – The Top Stopped Spinning”: THE GOATMILK DEBATES
“THE GOATMILK DEBATES” will be an ongoing series featuring two debaters tackling an interesting or controversial question in a unique, irreverant manner.
Each debater makes their opening argument, followed by a rebuttal.
The winner will be decided by the online audience and judged according to the strength of their argument.
The first motion: “The top stopped spinning at the end of INCEPTION”
For the motion: Mark Maccora
Against the motion: Zaki Hasan
FOR THE MOTION: MARK MACCORA’S OPENING ARGUMENT
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.” -Federico Fellini*
Is Inception all a dream or what? I can debate this point all day. Actually, it’s been over a week so far, and the debates keep coming. You’re probably reading this to better understand the resolution- it’s why I’ve seen Inception three times. That’s exactly the filmmaker’s desire. Christopher Nolan worked hard to sow visual ambiguity into his picture. This seductive confusion creates a demand for repeat viewership, endless analysis, and public debate. Kubrick achieved the same thing with the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nolan is a Kubrick fan, as cited in his quotations section on IMDb. It is quite admirable that Nolan tries to use a communal dream with a hidden message, sorry, I mean a major movie with a theme to inspire thought. Wait, movies are a lot like communal dreams, huh? Hold on to that idea. I’ll get there. Thought provocation has been missing from tent pole pictures for, oh, 2 decades or so. Upon my first watch, I thought the whole thing was a dream. I found it thrilling. Then, instead of getting caught up in my own thoughts, I went reinspected the movie without so much awe at the crosscutting action sequences. I revised my conclusion because the images did not support it. Visual evidence exists to conclude that what we are told is true. The film ends in the reality of the near-future. Clues to the truth are purposefully opaqued, both by the style of the filmmaker and the language of cinema itself, but they exist. The main confusions & clues are in the costuming & casting of the child actors and the repeated test of the spinning top. They prove that despite his purposefully ambiguous, debate inspiring style, the story is that Dom Cobb ends the picture awoken from his dreams, free of his neuroses, and enjoying a real moment with his children. In his life. Not in a dream. Really. I promise.
My first stop on the explanation express is a brief discussion of Nolan’s intentionally dreamy cinematic vocabulary. I know movies. I study the breadth of the medium to write and direct commercial movies that transmit pertinent messages to an audience. I read A LOT of Joseph Campbell and highly respect Nolan’s goals. If you search my name on ye olde IMDb, you’ll see my decade of experience in various positions. Please do. Like all people in Hollywood, I love watching my IMDb searches spike. There are some well-established techniques Nolan uses. He chooses color palates to associate with characters and locations. He does so because colors mean things to us emotionally and culturally. More on this in my next point. Nolan uses the tried and true trick of starting his movies with a scene from the climax of the film’s 2nd or 3rd act to tie the audience in immediately. It’s a great technique, as it is disorients and hooks the audience, sucking them into tension and conflict. Who is this Leo DiCaprio looking character washed up on the beach? Who are these appearing and disappearing kids? Why does Ken Watanabe look so old? An audience wants answers, and they are kept in anticipation for nearly two and a half hours. Lots of movies do this. Check out Mission: Impossible III- same deal. Nolan also manipulates his editorial concept to compress story time and get to more plot quickly. He cuts shots short and overlaps sequences to create a rapidly flowing pace that sweeps the audience up in the story, which is long, detailed, and full of confusing concepts. He’ll often imply important action instead of showing it to further his pace.
A great example is the sequence when Cobb reminds Saito of their deal, Saito lifts up the gun, and then we cut to Cobb waking up in the real world. We don’t see Saito shoot Cobb or himself. It’s implied. The magic of using these concepts is that they are so dreamy, by which I mean they are the aspects of cinema’s language that closely resemble dreams. By using these techniques, he makes the film more ambiguous, since his movie is about dreams. It makes the film more debate-able, and thereby engrosses the audience for a longer period. And here we are, debating it. Win for Nolan.
A primary confusion rests with the child memory. Those kids look SO similar in the dream memories and the last scene of the movie. It must be a dream because the kids are dressed the same in the same situation. Cobb’s just rewriting his memories with his desires in his dream. Well, it’s not true. Watch the movie again. It’s a very cheap, yet clever trick.
The kids are wearing similar clothes. Warm colors shot in gold afternoon light- colors that make us feel safe and comforted (Remember those palates?). The easiest difference to see is the difference in the cut of the girl’s dress. While their faces are obscured in the last shot, they kids are positioned in front of the camera (blocked) differently. The boy is in front of the girl with his back turned, and his head keeps hers from view. In the early shots, both have their backs turned. The real tell, though, is in the credits. Check them out. There are two sets of kids playing the kids at different ages. The two Phillipa’s are credited at 3 & 5 years, and the James’s at 20 months and 3 years. One appears to be the director’s son Magnus (The next Next Karate Kid perhaps?), and the other three are siblings in an acting family. I didn’t notice until it was pointed out to me. I assumed he would use the same kids. They looked the same, right? It is much cheaper and easier to shoot the same kids. He changed them for a reason. This was not just the old experience with a new resolution. This is the present, two years since he last saw his children. Though he’d seen them in his dreams moments before, those were his fake kids. The ones of his memories. the real present the Cobb has sought the entire movie. Going to all the effort to change the kids, yet keep the experience similar, means that he’s probably doing so to eff with us, the audience. To keep us talking. As we are. That’s two times win.
Dom Cobb is quite aware and worried that his reality may be a dream. That is why he uses and reuses the test of the top. Within the dream, we never even see the top wobble. It spins in perfect perpendicularity. During the scene at the beginning of act 2 while he waits to leave Tokyo, Dom spins the top with the gun in his hand. It wobbles and drops thus proving he is in the real world. Dom is nearly addicted to his dream world. He knows this. He could be seduced into staying there quite easily, but the happiness it can grant him is limited, like his version of Mal. He repeats his test at the house during the resolution. Only when he sees the top wobble does he know that this experience is not just a dream. He is clearly in reality, which is his utmost priority. Only in reality will he finally give himself permission to enjoy his happiness. Nolan cuts away early from this moment to imbue it with ambiguity for a specific purpose- which I discussed- our continued discussion. Nolan win trifecta.
Maybe it is all just a dream… reading that comforts you, doesn’t it? Anything too powerful in a dream can be rationalized away as impotent spurts of our subconscious. Inception equally disturbs an audience by calling into doubt the reality of the protagonist’s transformation, a fact that we deeply desire in our stories, as we do in our selves. The ambiguity is what ties us in, makes us continue to think about it, which ultimately is the goal of Inception. A movie is very nearly a communal dream, a dream that can transmit a message through the ideas cleverly hidden by the “dream’s” designer, the director. Inception transmits keys to achieving happiness in our real lives: releasing our guilt of the past and accepting the transient nature of existence. Only through Nolan’s purposeful ambiguities do we continually re-approach these concepts. The evidence is in the pictures, though. The details which Nolan layer in clearly demarcate the space of the dream and the real world within the fiction. It’s all a movie, but not all a dream.
*(If you don’t know who this genius filmmaker is because he never directed a comic book movie, please copy and paste into google. Information dissemination is why we made the Internets.)
As a former bookseller who specialized in theater & film, I can’t stress how much Joseph Campbell sold to the screenwriting crowd after Geo. Lucas’ pronouncements. Hollywood is–or was–saturated with Campbellite jargon & assumptions, to the exclusion of even other schools of Jungian-influenced story analysis (for ex: Bachelard).
One customer chatting me up looked puzzled when I said, offhandedly, that I wasn’t particularly enamoured of Campbell’s notions. After a pause, she said, “You don’t like mythology?”
Films that truly innovate in narrative style & technique are so little shown here–wherever they get made–that viewers take the first thing coming that wears its concept on its sleeve.
Resnais is almost 90, & still innovating in narrative & technique, as his latest–& very funny–film, which just made the festival rounds, proved. It’s gained an American distributor. Rivette’s a few years younger; his latest, ‘Around a Small Mountain,’ with Jane Birkin, is completely refreshing, another advance in his semi-improv style with actors. At last look, it hadn’t got N. American distribution.
Others brilliantly pushing the envelope–like Raul Ruiz–aren’t as well-known here as they once were, in Ruiz’s case, something of a mystery, if the switch to more commercial production values (bigger budgets, stars … ) is the key to notoriety. Ruiz had recognition value in N. America more when he was making scads of super low-budget features, all over the world.
Storytellers like–& as different as–Resnais, Rivette & Ruiz don’t conceal conceptually banal narrative schemes or themes under the flash of a hyper-active surface of image & editing.
Ken Bullock
July 28, 2010 at 6:38 am
Good read. However, Doesn’t the top belong to his wife? In the movie didn’t they say if someone touches your totem then it’s irrelevant. I don’t think he had a totem, well not his own anyway. I need to see it again, but why did he have to go another level to get Ken Watanabe character from limbo?
Ashwak Hauter
July 28, 2010 at 6:42 am
yes but his wife dies so know one else would know the weight ant the feeling of the top so only one person that enter the dream knows.
ps so that mean is the chick would of felt the dice no big deal if she stays out of the dream but if she enters then she will beable to alter the dream because she knows the weight and ect
jp
August 11, 2010 at 11:23 am
He and Ken died from drowning in the dream so they went to limbo
Remus
July 28, 2010 at 4:44 pm
ohhhh….Why is Leo’s character younger than he is when they meet, if they died drowning? Would they have not spent the same amount of time in limbo.
Ashwak Hauter
July 29, 2010 at 6:25 am
no the other guy had at least 30 min head start thats like 80 years in dream time
jp
August 11, 2010 at 11:25 am
Just a few questions based on your supposition(s):
1. What does Nolan want us to talk about aside from his movie? That movies already use some of the grammar of dreams so therefore his movie-dreams don’t really have to evoke real dreams? That movies are a lie? That self-deception is the only way to free oneself of the trappings of guilt?
2. Why is Saito old at the end?
3. If Limbo/unconstructed dreamspace is so dangerous, why is it so easy to leave? Better yet, can you please explain the fucking Limbo thing to me?
4. Are you 100% sure that we don’t see the top spin a little unevenly in a dream-state? I thought we did.
5. If Nolan wants to give us tiny, almost imperceptible cues, why does he deliberately shield our view of Cobb’s left hand and his, possibly absent, wedding ring once he emerges from Limbo with Saito? (If that was Saito and if he does emerge from it.)
6. What is the justification for Cobb’s arc/realizing that the happiness provided by his addiction is limited?
7. Are you 100% sure that the 2 sets of kids (and their ages) aren’t also divided by visual performance and aural performance?
J. Oblivian
July 28, 2010 at 9:07 pm
for the moment I’m in the “its all a dream” camp.
I agree that the top wobbled a little at the end but I think it was more of a tease to introduce a little ambiguity into the debate.
As far as limbo goes… basically.. when you go down a dream level, time moves more slowly relative to the previous level. if you die in one dream, you normally would go up to the next level of dreaming (or would wake up).
But the team was sedated so if they died they wouldn’t just wake up they would go into limbo, where time moves *much* more slowly than just going down a level. That’s why Saito was so old. And it is hard to get out of Limbo in the sense that it is possible to subjectively experience long periods of time trapped there without being able to “wake up”.
But interms of why I would say the whole thing is a dream…
1. Some of the names were too “neat”. In Greek mythology Ariadne helped Theseus get out of the labyrinth and escape the Minotaur. In the Quran and Bible Yusuf/Joseph was knowledgable about dreams and their interpretation.
2. I’m not sure about what countries have extradition treaties with the US Leo did a lot of travelling (Europe, Australia, Africa) for someone who is worried about a murder charge in the US.
3. In the film itself, Leo said one of the signs of a dream is appearing in someplace without being sure of how you got there. (That was definitely true of many of his trips to different countries).
4. Even if the top wobbled or even fell outright, the top wasn’t his totem and he can’t rely on it to check his reality.
5. How realistic is it that Saito can get Leo off the hook with just a phone call?
abdul-halim
July 29, 2010 at 3:24 am
i agree with number 7 why are the kids ages the same the story made it seem like he was gone for years not mounths
jp
August 11, 2010 at 11:28 am
[...] For the motion: Read Mark Maccora’s opening argument here. [...]
“INCEPTION – THE TOP KEEPS SPINNING”: THE GOATMILK DEBATES continue « GOATMILK: An intellectual playground edited by Wajahat Ali
July 29, 2010 at 12:30 am
The movie was entertaining and I’m sure is appreciated in its technicality. However, the premises was for the story was quite strange. I mean why couldn’t Saito just pay a hot babe to seduce fisher and into breaking up the empire? And why is it that everyone had defences against dream/information extraction?
Billy
August 10, 2010 at 4:58 am
well first off that would be a horrible movie second this movie seems like its based in the neir future
jp
August 11, 2010 at 11:30 am
I enjoyed the film very much, and I’m looking forward to watching it when the dvd is released here in Italy.
There are many questions still unanswered and some details which are debatable. Such as the aging in the Limbo phase (if it’s a dream, why should the dreamer age at all, he or she could remain young for an indefinite amount of time, or get older and younger at will). The only possibility is that there is some sort of law or set of laws that limits the dreamer in dreaming all possible realities which his mind can create. And this could be due to the “dream machine” working on the subject’s mind in specific ways. In this sense, one may speak of “induced virtual realitiy” instead of induced dreaming.
Alex Neckels
October 3, 2010 at 2:06 pm
People in limbo don’t know they’re in limbo; if they did then they would simply kill themselves to get out. If you don’t realize your dreaming then your not going to alter the laws of nature that you know to be true, such as growing old. The only reason Cobb was able to tell is because of his totem.
Random
November 24, 2010 at 6:55 am