Until now. Oppenheimer is a tense, complicated tale of science, ethics, and politics. It’s a landmark of Hollywood cinema—the kind of American epic that supposedly doesn’t get made anymore. Stuffed with characters and bursting with contemporary implications, it sustains comparison to its great predecessors: The Social Network (2010) and There Will Be Blood (2007). By a wide margin, it’s Nolan’s masterpiece to date.
As with many of his prior films, Nolan employs nonlinear storytelling in Oppenheimer. But unlike in those prior films, especially Memento and Tenet, the fractured storytelling doesn’t disorient. Rather, it carries crucial thematic significance. In the first storyline, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) leads the successful project to develop and test an atomic bomb. In the second, Oppenheimer’s reputation and influence are sabotaged by shady forces from inside the government. Telling these two halves simultaneously rather than sequentially conveys that the second half was preordained—that Oppenheimer’s rise and fall were intertwined. They comprised a single government endeavor: to use and, by necessity, discard a great mind.
This underscores the cynical vision of Oppenheimer: a vision of administrative power run amok. And the United States government in this film isn’t only greedy and ruthless; it’s petty and egoistic, too. One official plots Oppenheimer’s destruction for embarrassing him in a trivial committee hearing. Harry Truman mocks Oppenheimer for expressing guilt over Hiroshima—not based on ethical disagreement, but because Oppenheimer, in feeling any responsibility at all, has, in the president’s view, overestimated his contribution. In both cases the takeaway is clear: the government will not be upstaged. Not by a great scientist, not even by science itself. Truman’s rebuke to Oppenheimer functions as the United States’ position toward every American citizen: “This isn’t about you.”
I don’t often take time to praise actors, but Cillian Murphy’s performance in this film is something special. Like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Murphy conveys the increasing torment of a would-be hotshot navigating the twisted modern world. His Dr. Oppenheimer, forced to confront the morality of his work, can’t draw firm conclusions, nor can he even explain his own actions. Multiple characters remark on his persuasive abilities, including self-persuasion. So has he been duped? And if so: by others, or by his own self? Murphy’s sensational acting in late scenes animates these impossible reflections. Watching him, we feel the historical genesis of a new state of moral confusion: used as pawns, how can any of us judge the game?
After Tenet, I’ll be honest: I thought Nolan was done. I thought he, like the magicians in The Prestige, had lost his way amidst the pressure to startle and impress. Gimmicks had overtaken his films’ characters, style, and even basic logic. But now I have to revise my view. Because with Oppenheimer, Nolan has vaulted himself into a new sphere. Formerly a mere showman, dependent on dubious slight-of-hand, he has proven himself a legitimate commentator on history, morality, and modern life. This movie must be seen. The best magic trick, after all, is a good story—prepare to be amazed!
I’m not a fan of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi action film Tenet (2021), but for the past year it’s been my most requested movie for analysis. So this piece will serve as both a walkthrough of the plot of Tenet, as well as a debunking and criticism of various aspects of the movie.
The central premise of Tenet is that some time in the future, scientists discover a way to irradiate objects or people in such a way that their progression through time is “inverted,” meaning they go backward through time instead of forward (or back to forward again, if they’re irradiated once more). This phenomenon is explained to a new agent known as “the Protagonist” (John David Washington), who’s recruited by an organization called Tenet that uses this technology to stop those from the future who aim to use it maliciously.
The Protagonist’s training officer demonstrates how bullets and other apparently inverted objects don’t appear to follow standard laws of physics, because, unlike us, they’re experiencing time in reverse. As an example, the Protagonist is made to aim an empty gun at a target with bullet holes—and miraculously, the inverted bullets zip out of the target and into the gun.
Now, let me interject immediately to say that right from this opening premise, there are myriad problems and inconsistencies. One that immediately comes to mind is: if, as Protagonist’s training officer demonstrates, there are random objects and weaponry out in the world traveling backward through time, because they’ve been inverted by future combat forces, then why weren’t inverted bullets and AK-47s discovered by ancient civilizations? Why did early paleontologists not dig up skeletons and artifacts from the future? After all, we managed to find dinosaur bones from 65 million years ago—how did we miss the inverted futuristic bazookas that had been going backward through time for only decades?
Another enormous problem: if an empty gun can “catch” inverted bullets out of bullet holes, then…when did the bullet holes get there? Who shot them into the target in the first place, and how was that possible if they were inverted?
I’m waiting…
Tenet moves extremely quickly, to the extent that it feels like a significant portion of the film has been ungraciously cut. Since it clocks in at 2 hours and 30 minutes, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Warner Brothers imposed a hard cap of exactly this runtime length on Nolan, who’s known for long films. Whatever the reason, Tenet‘s jam-packed pace makes it virtually impossible to properly digest what we’re being fed. The Protagonist’s trainer says of the time shift phenomenon, “Don’t try to understand it”—a convenient request given issues like the ones I mentioned above—but even if we wanted to understand it, there’s no time to do so during the film itself. Thus, to it’s necessary to meditate on what we’ve seen after the fact; hence this essay.
Tenet’s story eventually comes to focus on a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), whom the Protagonist suspects is up to no good. Indeed, we soon learn that Sator is acting insidiously on behalf of the leaders of a future generation. (To recruit him, his bosses from the future simply inverted his instructions for the job and buried them in the obscure Russian town where he grew up, knowing that decades earlier he would volunteer to dig there for plutonium and find the instructions.)
In return for Sator’s cooperation, his bosses from the future have bestowed on him massive wealth. This is another simple operation, performed like so: Sator descends a box into the ocean and saves the coordinates electronically (“for posterity”), so that in the future his bosses can obtain this saved information, locate the box in their time, and place inverted gold bars inside. The bars then travel back through time to Sator in the present, where he simply hoists up the box to find his payday inside.
Sator’s mission is to assemble a nine-piece “algorithm” that was invented by an unnamed future scientist. This algorithm, as explained by Protagonist’s comrade Neil (Robert Pattinson), is an equation that, if activated, would effectively reverse the entropic time flow of the entire world. If this were accomplished, Neil assures us, all living things in the present day would be obliterated, as well as all living things that ever existed in the past.
The reason the future folks want to enact this ghastly plan is that Earth in their time has become uninhabitable, and reversing the flow of time—and obliterating all previous life—would allow their civilization to continue, but with environmental conditions improving over time, not worsening. Essentially, the human race of the future, in a state of desperation, wants to bulldoze the past to make way for itself to turn around and retreat backward into time.
Sator’s involvement is necessary because the inventor of the algorithm got cold feet at the last minute and decided not to use it, killing herself for good measure so that it couldn’t be reproduced. She became worried, like Robert Oppenheimer before the first testing of the atomic bomb, that her creation might do more damage than intended. Specifically, she worried that the algorithm might not only have destroyed the past as planned, but potentially her own generation as well (we’ll get to her concerns in more detail later).
Before committing suicide, this scientist divided the algorithm into nine sections and inverted them all into the past, splitting them amongst the nine nuclear powers. (How this was accomplished is very unclear to me.) Sator, growing up in Russia in the midst of high nuclear tensions, was therefore an ideal candidate to acquire the pieces. (I can’t quite follow the reasoning here, either.) He’s collected eight of the nine segments and therefore only needs one more, which Tenet tries to prevent him from acquiring throughout the movie.
Making matters worse, Sator has inoperable pancreatic cancer, and, selfish bastard that he is, he’s perfectly happy to annihilate the world as he departs it. Tenet deduces that once Sator obtains the final piece of the algorithm, he’ll kill himself rather than let the cancer do its work. When he dies, his fitness monitor will sense the stopping of his heart and automatically trigger a bomb located right where he’s buried the assembled algorithm. This will in turn trigger the algorithm and destroy the present and past—making way for the future to do a 180 and forge backward to pre-global warming times.
Tenet’s operations to thwart Sator are highly convoluted and, in my view, unnecessarily concentrated on Sator’s attractive wife, Kat (Elizabeth Gebicki). To gain Kat’s cooperation as an informant, which is apparently of the utmost importance, the Protagonist and Neil endeavor to steal and destroy a painting that Kat, an art dealer, incorrectly evaluated for her husband as genuine and that he is therefore able to use as blackmail to control her in various ways. The painting is under ungodly heavy security, such that one wonders whether there was perhaps an easier way to solicit Kat’s help. And this notion would only seem to be strengthened when, after the mission ultimately fails due to Sator having already removed the painting, Kat begins working with Tenet anyway, for nothing.
There’s a sense that the Protagonist may have a thing for Kat, but he never makes a move, and nothing comes of it. So Tenet’s laser focus on Kat is, in my opinion, very difficult to understand.
The quixotic episode of the art heist, though, does serve one memorable purpose: it sets the stage for an action sequence in which the Protagonist fights a masked inverted soldier. Later, it’s revealed that this soldier is actually the Protagonist himself, moving backward in time at a different point in the film while on a different mission (to save…yup…Kat).
Like most hand-to-hand combat scenes nowadays, this faceoff is loud and chaotic with quick cuts, so it’s hard to follow what’s happening. This, however, is fortunate, because given the proper scrutiny, what we’re watching makes no sense whatsoever.
Think about it. If I punch someone in the arm, they’ll feel pain. If the other person were to somehow experience that sequence backwards, they’d be feeling the pain at the start, then the impact would happen in reverse and the pain would go away.
But in Tenet, we see a regular and an inverted person in actual combat as though they’re landing blows on one another. This can’t be! What we should see is the forward Protagonist feeling beat up at the start of the fight (and well before), only to have any injuries alleviated by the blows happening in reverse. When we later see the fight a second time, from the view of the inverted Protagonist, he should likewise feel progressively better throughout the fight as the hits come backwards.
Nolan has thought about this much more than I have, and he knows that I’m right. This is why he goes out of his way to accurately show the inverted Protagonist with a knife wound on his arm before engaging in the fight with his previous self. The inverted Protagonist then receives the wound in reverse during the fight, and it goes away. A similarly correct depiction occurs much later, when a dead inverted soldier (soon revealed to be Neil) reanimates upon receiving his fatal wound.
But because filming the fight this way wouldn’t be as dramatic, Nolan won’t take the idea to its logical conclusions, still presenting us with something barely different from a Jason Bourne set piece, with both of the combatants, for example, grunting after being hit, whereas the sting should occur before the impact, because from the opponent’s perspective, that’s after the impact, and he’s the one who landed the punch. Other scenes in the movie confirm that the wound’s direction is determined by the orientation of what caused it; for example, Kat is wounded by an inverted bullet and needs to be inverted herself so that the wound can heal in the right direction.
There’s even one portion of the fight where the inverted protagonist is seen to parry blows from his counterpart. How can he block something that’s going in reverse? How can he block what he has no way of reacting to, because it’s already happened (in his opponent’s direction of time)? This can be argued for both combatants: they’re both inexplicably trying and succeeding to block or dodge attacks that their opponent has already made.
Yet another problem with the fight is that the visuals don’t compute. If the fight were a plausible occurrence, the person moving in our direction of time would appear to have totally normal physics, while the one going backward would, of course, be noticeably off. But in this fight, you’ll notice that several times the non-inverted fighter also displays apparently impossible physics upon being hit by his opponent, as if the two were taking turns obeying each other’s time orientations.
In these instances it looks like the character following our direction of time is being “sucked” into a hit, as from a vacuum cleaner, or levitating up from the floor. You’ll also notice that Nolan spends a large portion of the fight with the two combatants simply grabbing each other at a deadlock; this is because such a position is the only type of combat that can be plausibly played off as mutually occurring in both directions of time.
Having sufficiently picked apart this fight sequence, I’ll spare you similar analyses of even more egregious sequences, such as an inverted Sator somehow conducting a properly ordered conversation with a non-inverted Protagonist and shooting a non-inverted Kat when he doesn’t get the answers he wants (this means, from his viewpoint, Sator shot her before the interrogation even began!). Let’s also mention for, ahem, posterity’s sake, the poorly executed car chase sequence in which inverted characters are somehow driving non-inverted cars, even though they can’t so much as breathe non-inverted air.
Go ahead, accuse me of overthinking. Relax, you say. It’s only supposed to be entertainment!
The problem is that for the reasons I’ve just detailed, it’s not entertaining. We can’t be entertained when we can’t understand what’s happening on the screen. The only entertainment available to us watching situations like these, really, is the amusing realization that we’re incredibly lost. And it’s not our fault. We’re lost because what we’re watching is totally ridiculous.
Plus, many of Tenet‘s biggest fans are its biggest overthinkers: this film was made for Redditors, as proved by fan work like this. So I’m not engaging on a level that’s alien to those who love the film.
Let’s get back to why the future inventor decided not to use the algorithm. It involves something called the “Grandfather Paradox,” which Neil explains for us. Essentially, this is the notorious puzzle of what would happen if you traveled back in time to kill your grandfather as a young man. After all, if your grandfather dies, you’ll never exist to carry out the murder, so the murder would be theoretically impossible. Something would have to stop you from successfully completing the hit.
The Protagonist, even though he’s new to the time travel game, perceives this immediately, wondering to Neil how the future could possibly kill off its own ancestors. But Neil more or less brushes this off:
Neil: But in the future, those in power clearly believe you can kick grandpa downstairs, gouge his eyes out, slit his throat, without consequence.
The Protagonist: Could they be right?
Neil: Doesn’t matter, they believe it. That’s why they’re willing to destroy us.
I’m not sure how this “doesn’t matter,” since the Protagonist is suggesting that, logically, the future leaders’ evil plan has no possibility of succeeding. Also, Neil’s response is odd considering that he himself is the film’s leading proponent of the Grandfather Paradox’s foundational logic: “What happened, happened.” This maxim means that it’s useless trying to change the past, because the events are already set in stone (since they created the circumstances that led you to travel back in the first place), and therefore any attempts to alter the past can only accidentally contribute to the things that happened anyway.
If “what happened, happened,” then people from the future can hardly annihilate everything that ever happened. They may indeed be “willing” to do it, but, for some reason or another, they won’t.
And Neil is proven right about his understanding of time travel on every occasion. The most direct evidence of “what happened, happened” is Kat’s story. Early in the movie she recounts how after a fight with Sator on a boat, she became jealous of the freedom of another woman, presumably a mistress, whom she saw from afar diving off the boat. But later on, Kat travels backward into time, kills Sator on the boat, and dives into the ocean, revealing that the “other woman” was actually herself all along, after killing Sator. This means that Sator was always defeated; Tenet always succeeded in thwarting him. The characters just didn’t know it yet. Time never screws up. What happened, happened.
(This also raises the question of why Sator’s bosses in the future continue to send him stacks of inverted gold bars. Why compensate him when he clearly did not succeed in what they wanted him to do? Time has not reversed by the time his bosses are alive—which means that it will not reverse, since Sator is much earlier in the timeline than they are. What are they hoping will happen?)
The problem with the Grandfather Paradox from the filmmaking point of view is that it negates the entire drama of the story, which is why blockbusters like Back to the Future (1985) and Terminator 2 (1991) have simply ignored it. As the Protagonist correctly suggests, the characters’ mere existence shows that the future won’t succeed in obliterating the past; after all, they’re in the past, and…it’s there. So despite Nolan’s attempts to scare us into caring about Tenet’s operations—for instance, Neil is made to briefly ponder whether “parallel universe theory” may refute his ideas, only to never mention the concept again—the stakes for the finale are minimal.
Even if the stakes for the finale were high, though, it’s doubtful that anyone could have a clue what’s happening while Tenet commences its “temporal pincer” operation to recover the algorithm before Sator detonates it. The temporal pincer idea is actually a pretty cool concept; it consists of an inverted squad being released into battle near the end of the regular squad’s mission, so that the inverted soldiers can experience the mission backwards and collect helpful information—which they can then brief to the forward squad before their mission begins. It’s trippy, but it checks out.
The problem is that visually, the resulting battle is hilariously unintelligible. Nolan has tried to help us by color-coding his soldiers in James Bond fashion, but even so, the spectacle of two teams of soldiers working together in opposite temporal directions can’t be followed by a human brain in real time. Buildings are exploded, un-exploded, re-exploded. People are dying—or are they coming back to life? Is the enemy even on the battlefield? Not only are there no stakes; there’s no graspable game.
Tenet’s forces do recover the algorithm in time, thanks to sacrificial heroics from Neil. This despite Kat deciding to kill Sator for her own satisfaction, even though her job was to keep him alive as long as possible—a curious move, given that all life on the planet was supposedly on the line.
It’s revealed that Neil has been mostly moving backward in time since joining Tenet, compared to the Protagonist’s moving forward, meaning that, essentially, the entire functioning of Tenet has been a temporal pincer operation, with Neil as the inverted information-gatherer, and the Protagonist as the eventual receiver of the intel from Neil. This transfer is the subject of the film, with Neil training the Protagonist with the experience he’s accumulated. Cool stuff.
But nuggets of cool don’t make a film. We come to the theater, first and foremost, for interesting stories, and Tenet, by any important measure, isn’t one. To the contrary, it’s a very cliché story with forgettable characters, and it makes little sense. But can anyone piece it together to discover that? The movie’s bland narrative, like the doomsday algorithm, has been sliced up and scattered every which way, so that its defects take tremendous effort to reconstruct and experience properly. And why would anyone (besides me) embark on such a task?
Nolan can do better. The maker of The Prestige (2006) and even Inception (2010) has shown himself capable of real, character-based drama, but at other times, such as with this effort and with his first major feature, Memento(2002), he’s simply used his powers of invention to obscure the inadequacy of his central story. It’s discouraging to see him repeating early artistic errors that he had seemed to move beyond.
Is he regressing? Or is his whole career…just one big temporal pincer operation??
—Jim Andersen
For more movies explained, check out my piece on Inception.
Christopher Nolan’s Inception is a movie that leaves viewers’ heads spinning. The story is fully presented, but the film moves so quickly that the meanings of various events and conversations are easily missed. So this essay will lend a helping hand by providing an extended explanation. And don’t worry: I’ll then give a careful interpretation of that wobbly totem seen in the ending shot.
The premise of Inception is that a new technology, initially invented by the military for training, exists that allows individuals to enter others’ dreams. This enables hired criminal “extractors” like Dom Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to try to access the valuable secrets of important individuals.
In the opening sequence, Cobb and Arthur attempt such an extraction. Their target is wealthy industrialist Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe), and their plan involves a complex setup: a dreamwithin a dream, meant to lure Saito into revealing his business secrets once he’s tricked into believing he has woken up. The plan fails, however, because Saito identifies a mistake in the dream design of the first dream level: the floor rug is composed of the wrong material.
Here are the rules of dream technology that we learn during this opening sequence and in later scenes. They aren’t dwelled upon, so it’s important to go over them:
Each level of dream must be dreamt by one particular person, and the others “follow” that individual into his dream.
Whoever is dreaming the dream that the group is currently in cannot follow the others into the next level; he must remain in his own dream level.
Each dream must be “designed” beforehand in a way that feels consistent with the rules of reality. Otherwise, the subconscious projections of those who have followed the dreamer into the dream will hunt down the dreamer as a foreign invader.
If anyone dies in a dream, he or she will wake up in the previous level (or in reality, if there are no previous levels).
If anyone feels pain while sleeping, this pain will feel the same as any other pain, since pain is generated in the mind.
A sleeping team member can be woken up by giving them a physical jolt—a “kick”. The team member administering the kick can alert the sleeper that a kick is imminent by playing music in his partner’s headphones, which that partner will hear while still dreaming.
Time is perceived differently in different dream levels: each minute is perceived in the next dream level as about 20 minutes. This effect compounds for every level, such that one minute in reality translates to 400 minutes (~7 hours) in the second dream level and 8,000 minutes (~133 hours) in the third.
It’s revealed that Saito was previously aware that an attempt might be made on his secrets. He had welcomed this attempted mission, since it would serve as an “audition” of Cobb and Arthur for a future project that he would bankroll: the planting of an idea in the mind of competing tycoon Ross Fischer (Cillian Murphy) that would lead Fischer to break up his dying father’s empire. Saito is suitably impressed by Dom and Arthur, so he recruits them for the job—but admonishes them to choose a better team, as their previous dream designer (or “architect”) blew the mission by using insufficient detail on the apartment rug.
In return for the future success of this “inception” mission, Saito offers not only a large sum of money, but also the chance for Cobb to “return home.” As we later learn, Cobb has been a fugitive for years ever since an extremely unfortunate sequence of events: his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) became wrongly convinced that she was living in a dream world, leading her to commit suicide to “wake up.” In addition, she framed Cobb for murder so that he’d be motivated to kill himself and join her in the supposed real world.
We also later learn that, tragically, Mal’s mistaken views were the result of Cobb successfully incepting in her mind the idea that her world wasn’t real. At the time of the inception, this was true: they had been existing in a “Limbo” of unconstructed dream space. But the idea unexpectedly affected her even after waking up.
We see in the opening sequence and its aftermath that not only has Mal’s suicide ripped apart Cobb’s family and legal standing, but it has also severely impaired his ability to complete dream extraction. This is because his ongoing guilt results in Mal herself appearing as a subconscious dream projection and sabotaging Cobb’s missions. Cobb can therefore no longer be the architect of dream levels, as his subconscious (Mal) will then know the layouts and thwart the missions.
These revelations are imparted to new architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), and in one remarkable scene involving a very creepy elevator, Ariadne learns that Cobb is regularly reliving painful memories by dreaming, so that he can feel as though his wife is still alive. We’ll come back later to this important point.
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Back to the plan. Cobb recruits Eames (Tom Hardy), an expert “forger;” and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who creates sedation that enables them three levels of dreaming.
The three levels that Ariadne designs for the mission are as follows:
A city level, dreamt by Yusuf.
A hotel level, dreamt by Arthur.
A hospital on a wintry mountain, dreamt by Eames.
The team decides that the most effective implanted idea that will lead Fischer to break up his father’s empire is that his father always wanted him to be his own man, not simply an imitation of his dad. They decide on this strategy based on Eames’ desire to whittle the situation down to a simple essence, not a complicated business decision, and on Cobb’s desire that the idea be based on positive rather than negative emotion.
The plan to incept this idea is that Eames will use his “forgery” talents to impersonate Peter Browning, Fischer’s godfather and his dad’s right hand man. In this guise, he’ll be able to suggest new truths about Fischer’s dad’s plans for his son, which the team will then emphasize in later levels. If all goes well, Fischer’s subconscious will begin to increasingly reflect these new truths, so that eventually Fischer will “convince himself” of the idea about his dad (this way, he won’t be able to trace the idea to its outside source, in which case the inception would fail).
But things start off terribly. In the first level the team is immediately attacked by Fischer’s militarized subconscious, a result of prior dream defense training that didn’t show up in Arthur’s background research. Cobb is livid at this unexpected development, since he alone has conferred with Yusuf and understands that because of the unusually heavy sedation required to achieve three dream levels, dying in these dreams will not result in waking up, but rather descending into Limbo, which, as mentioned before, Cobb inhabited with Mal when she was alive.
Worse still, Saito has been shot in the melee and appears to be quickly dying. If and when he descends into Limbo, there’s no telling how long he’ll perceive himself to be there, and whether his mind will be able to hold up for a potentially enormous period of existence.
Once this grim reality sets in, Cobb explains to the team that the only way for all of them to avoid being killed by Fischer’s subconscious in level 1 and descending into Limbo is to complete the mission as fast as possible—much faster than they had planned for. That’s because if the inception takes hold, Fischer’s subconscious will cease its attacks.
Thus, Eames must conduct a rushed impersonation of Browning, during which he witnesses Fischer’s resentment of his father’s perceived coldness, and his feeling that his father was “disappointed” in him. Eames as Browning tells Fischer of a legal will that would break up the Fischer empire, which his father supposedly meant as his “most precious gift” to his son. Fischer doesn’t understand why in the world his father would do this, but he appears to believe Eames’ lie. Next, Cobb and Arthur force Fischer into naming a random 6-digit code to open a safe, which will be important later.
Pressed for time, they then climb into a van and enter the second dream level. Yusuf stays back to drive (remember, the first level is his dream), evading Fischer’s armed subconscious. It’s clear, though, that he won’t be able to hold out for long. Luckily, the multiplied time in successive dream worlds affords the team some flexibility.
In the second level, the team is almost completely improvising, their meticulous plan in shambles. Cobb insists on a ploy he calls “Mr. Charles,” in which he poses as a dream security officer and alerts Fischer that he’s dreaming. This is risky because Fischer’s subconscious projections will then hunt down the dreamer (in this level’s case, Arthur)—but Cobb is able to convince Fischer that he is a friend, not a foe, keeping Fischer’s subconscious at bay.
Carrying on the mission, Cobb and Arthur ingeniously convince Fischer that Browning staged the kidnapping of Fischer and himself in level 1 (which Fischer at this point believes is the real world) in a traitorous attempt to get access to, and destroy, the will that would break up his business empire. Just as the team had hoped, Fischer’s subconscious projection of Browning then admits to the crime—evidence that Fischer is buying it.
The projection of Browning frames this supposed will as Fischer’s dad’s “last insult”: a “challenge” for his son to build something for himself. Fischer still claims he wouldn’t enact such a self-defeating strategy (“Why would I?”), but the mere fact that his own subconscious is suggesting this possibility is encouraging to the team. Plus, Fischer is visibly emotional about the prospect of his father having previously unknown plans for him.
The team then tells Fischer (lying of course) that they need to enter Browning’s dream world to find out what he knows about Fischer’s dad’s plans, and they all hurriedly enter level three, the skiing/hospital level, dreamt by Eames. Arthur stays behind, as level 2 is his dream.
The problem that arises now is that Yusuf, driving the van in level 1, has run out of time faster than they’d wanted. He plays the cue music, which Arthur hears on the second level and the rest of the team hears on the third, signaling that he’s about to provide the kick by driving through the guardrail. But they’re not ready.
Arthur, who’s been busy single-handedly battling armed guards in whirling hallways, can’t provide a kick in time to bring the rest of them back to level 2 (to thereby receive Yusuf’s kick from level 1); and anyway, the team in level 3 needs much more time to get Fischer to his dad in the hospital and complete the inception. They therefore miss the kick as Yusuf drives through the rail. They know, however, that there will very shortly be a second kick: the van hitting the water.
At this point, two important things happen. The first is that because the van in level 1 is now airborne, level 2 loses gravity, making it extremely difficult for Arthur to provide a kick to bring the team back. The second is that Cobb orders Ariadne to lead the team on level 3 to a direct pathway through the labyrinth to save time. Such a measure, of course, is what Cobb was trying to avoid by having Ariadne design the levels. After all, with his own dangerous subconscious knowing the solution to the maze, the mission is in jeopardy.
But the too-early kick on level 1 has forced his hand. He knows that if Arthur kicks them back to level 2 before the job is done on level 3, they’ve failed. And if Arthur can’t kick them back to level 2 before the van hits the water, they’re all done for.
In a James Bond-esque sequence, Cobb and Ariadne then split from Eames, Saito (who’s still dying from the gun shot on level 1), and Fischer, with the five of them assaulting the armed hospital. When Eames and Saito successfully escort Fischer to the hospital, however, the worst-case scenario occurs: Mal drops from the ceiling and kills Fischer, sending him into Limbo.
It looks like they’ve failed the mission, but Ariadne has a plan to salvage it. This part gets complicated, so stay with me. Ariadne insists that if she and Cobb follow Fischer’s mind into Limbo, gaining the additional time afforded to a deeper dream level, they’ll be able to find Fischer, enabling this sequence to take place:
When Eames on level 3 hears Arthur’s music begin, signaling that a kick will soon bring them back to level 2, he defibrillates Fischer.
Ariadne and Cobb sense the defibrillation in Limbo and ensure that Fischer rides that as his kick back to level 3.
Fischer achieves catharsis with his father in level 3, completing the inception.
Eames blows up the hospital in level 3, providing a kick for Ariadne and Cobb to return to level 3.
Arthur’s kick occurs in level 2, bringing everyone in level 3 back to level 2.
Yusuf’s van hits the water in level 1, bringing everyone back to level 1.
The one hitch is Saito’s health. It’s been a foregone conclusion that he’s not going to survive the mission, and Cobb knows Saito’s going to be dead before they get Fischer out of Limbo. So when Ariadne rides Eames’ kick (blowing up the hospital) back to level 3, Cobb, after finally confronting Mal, stays in Limbo to find Saito, who, due to the unpredictable nature of time in Limbo, has become an old man living alone, having forgotten that he is not living in the real world. This serves as the introductory scene of the movie.
Let’s go back to Fischer. Here’s a summary of how the inception succeeds:
In level 1, Eames (impersonating Browning) tells Fischer that his father had a hidden last will and testament to break up his empire. After that, the team extracts a random 6-digit number from Fischer.
In level 2, the team convinces Fischer that Browning orchestrated the kidnapping in level 1 so that he could gain access to the supposed will and destroy it. Fischer’s subconscious projection of Browning admits to this crime, and frames the will as an “insult,” a “taunt,” and a “challenge” for Fischer to build a better company than his father could. Importantly, in this level the 6-digit code that Fischer randomly named is fed back to him twice: it’s the phone number written by the girl (Eames in disguise) in the lobby, and the hotel room that they use.
In the third level, Fischer meets his dying father and projects what was told to him by his own subconscious projection of Browning in the previous level: that his father wanted his son to break up his empire. But he imagines it not as a taunt, as the projected Browning characterized it in level 2, but rather as a highly emotional bonding moment that reveals that his father harbored untold fatherly love for him, and that if his dad was indeed “disappointed” with him, it was only because he “tried” too hard to emulate him. Crucially, the 6-digit code that Fischer himself generated in level 1, and then which was emphasized in various moments in level 2, is the code to the bedside safe—so that he feels as though he alone knows the code, creating a false sense of father-son closeness.
As you might have noticed, Fischer’s subconscious plays along very well with the team’s goals. This is probably because Fischer already had a deep longing for belated connection with his father. In level 1, Yusuf finds in Fischer’s wallet a sentimental picture of him as a kid with a pinwheel; later, Fischer projects this pinwheel as in the safe with the will, readily linking the will with a positive father-son moment from long ago.
Thus, in trying to convince Fischer that his dad wanted him to “be his own man,” they’re unknowingly giving him exactly what he’s always wanted: an explanation for his father’s frosty demeanor that allows for the notion that his dad truly loved him. A lucky break for the team. (Cobb: “The bigger the issues, the bigger the catharsis.”)
Once the team is safely out of the sinking van in level 1, Fischer confirms to Eames/Browning that he now believes that his dad wanted him to go his own way and that he’ll run the business empire accordingly. It’s also worth noting, here, that based on the mission timeline (they’re on a 10 hour flight), they still need to wait around in level 1 for a whole week before waking up—no challenge now, since Fischer’s subconscious will no longer be attacking them. Understandably, this isn’t shown to us.
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So that’s the plot explained. But there’s still that spinning totem to talk about, and this requires a thematic analysis of the history between Cobb and Mal. So stay with me for one more section. This is the interesting part.
Recall Cobb’s confrontation with Mal in Limbo. He emotionally overcomes her pleading with him to stay, but not before she makes a hefty argument: that the entire exposition of the movie seems kind of like a dream:
Mal: No creeping doubts? Not feeling persecuted, Dom? Chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces, the way the projections persecute the dreamer? Admit it: you don’t believe in one reality anymore. So choose. Choose to be here. Choose me.
Of course, Cobb is actually talking to his own subconscious here; this argument is being made by his own mind. This makes sense, since on a number of occasions Cobb has indeed shown that he cannot reliably distinguish between reality and dream—especially when he fails to shoot the projection of Mal before she kills Fischer in level 3, instead wondering aloud at the critical moment whether she might be real. He also frequently rushes to his totem after waking up from dreams, demonstrating a lack of confidence in reality.
Why does he have this problem? It seems to be the result of something I mentioned earlier: that Cobb has taken to intentionally dreaming actual memories of Mal in an effort to keep her “alive.” Ariadne swiftly exposes this when Cobb warns her not to use real places for her dream designs lest she lose her grip on reality: “Is that what happened to you?”
The really interesting thing about this, which I believe is lost on just about every viewer, is that the idea that Cobb planted in Mal’s mind—that this world isn’t real—has now begun to possess him as well.
Consider an overlooked line toward the climax, when Cobb and Ariadne are searching for Mal in Limbo.
Cobb: Listen, there’s something you should know about me. About inception.… An idea is like a virus: resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can redefine and destroy you.
Here, as we know, he’s starting to explain to Ariadne that it was his incepting of his wife’s mind that ultimately led her to commit suicide. But less obvious is that Cobb is undeniably stating that he, too, has now been affected and destroyed by that same idea. Why else would he note that ideas are “highly contagious” and compare them to viruses?
And we can see exactly how this contagious “virus” has spread to Cobb: after Mal’s suicide, his subconscious dream projection of her continues to argue the idea that was planted in her mind (because in real life, this is in fact what she would have been arguing) and, perversely, begins to succeed in convincing Cobb of that very idea (!).
After all, it’s implied that Cobb’s grasp on reality is progressively weakening—that “it’s getting worse.” With more time listening to Mal in dreams, he’d likely become completely detached from reality. Accidentally, he’s almost incepted himself! Recall that in an early scene right after the failed extraction on Saito, Cobb is harrowingly brandying about a gun in his apartment. He seems to be considering suicide: going Mal’s route. He must be legitimately weighing the notion that “this world isn’t real”: not only has he been infected by the “virus” that he himself created, but it’s on the verge of killing him, as it did Mal.
Now we come to the final scene, where Cobb, after the success of the mission, reunites with his family and spins his totem, which teeters before a cut to black. Is Cobb dreaming this happy ending?
Well, all the evidence suggests that he isn’t. For one, only in this scene does he see the faces of his two children, in my opinion a clear indication that the dreaming is over. Also, Cobb only dons his wedding ring in dreams, and in this scene he’s not wearing it.
Maybe most importantly, though: there really just isn’t any good reason to think that Cobb is dreaming at this point. The mission timeline checks out, Saito clears Cobb for entry as he promised—nothing is noticeably off. Why would Cobb dream such a moment, anyway? He’s shown that he prefers to dream actual memories in which he wishes he had acted differently, not potential happy scenarios.
Nevertheless, Mal’s words hang over us: No creeping doubts?
The ending shot, then, is a test: Have we been infected? Have we, too, succumbed to the resilient, contagious idea that this world isn’t real? Despite all evidence, have we been persuaded by what started as a strategy to get Mal out of Limbo and grew into a destructive, dangerous virus of an idea?
I know that when I saw this movie in theaters, the audience’s reaction indicated that a large portion was indeed persuaded. Ideas, it seems, are indeed powerful: as Cobb says, the smallest seed of an idea can grow.
And perhaps I’m not so immune either: after rewatching Inception to write this piece, I couldn’t help—and I’m sure many can relate—but look around the room once or twice and wonder:
Is this really real?
— Jim Andersen
For more on the work of Christopher Nolan, see my explanation of Tenet.
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