Does it even matter if the totem fell over at the end of Christopher Nolan’s “Inception“?
I’ve had a tumultuous history with Nolan’s sci-fi classic. When “Inception” was released in the summer of 2010, my initial viewing of the film was that of disappointment but also of sheer fascination. The film, at times, felt laborious. In brief, I enjoyed watching "Inception": admired the filmmaking, the acting, the audacity but, at the same time, I didn’t think it was as "brilliant" as many claimed: It wasn’t “mindblowing”, it was just complex, which was a whole other thing. Also, for it being a film about dreams, none of the sequences really felt surreal or, more precisely, like a dream. There were more ideas, and certainly more feeling-- and more dream-like qualities-- in another, more accomplished summer 2010 movie, “Toy Story 3.”
The fascination I had with “Inception,” having had more questions than answers in my first viewing, prompted me to go revisit it two more times in theaters that summer, these subsequent re-watches helped me admire the film, but I still didn’t love it, I still didn’t feel it in my bones the way Nolan intended it to. But my admiration for what Nolan was trying to conceive seemed to stem from the fact that this was a big studio movie with major ideas and major risks, the byproduct of a filmmaker whose DNA filled every frame. Maybe the puzzlement I had upon first viewing was exactly what Nolan intended the viewer to feel, at the very least its star Leonardo DiCaprio felt the same way.
During an appearance on Marc Maron‘s WTF Podcast, DiCaprio spoke about his experience working with Nolan on “Inception,” a movie that DiCaprio is still trying to figure out. “That’s like ‘Inception’ for me. What happened? I have no idea,” DiCaprio explained. “You’re just focused on your character, man. I do get involved [with the story], but when it came to Christopher Nolan and his mind and how [‘Inception’] was all pieced together, everyone was trying to constantly put that puzzle together.”
Fair enough, but maybe Nolan just didn’t intend for us to have all the answers to his peculiar jigsaw. What ensuing viewings of “Inception” have taught me is that maybe the point of the film isn’t really whether that totem top fell over, maybe we shouldn’t revolve the stakes of the movie on whether or not DiCaprio’s Cobb’s is stuck in the dream world or if he’s really reunited with his family once and for all. Maybe what counts most with that ending is that Cobb finally found a time and place, dream or no dream, which suited his desires for a better life and gave him what he was searching for the entire movie: to reunite with his family. Dream or no dream, he seemed to have found peace, wherever he was.