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A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Why would Dom need to distinguish between his dream and someone else's at the end of the movie? Doesn't he need to know if he's awake or not?
That's a good question for further exploration. I'm just saying that's the purpose explicitly described for them in the film, when Cobb tells Ariadne what they are for. It is never stated elsewhere that they are for telling when you are awake.
I thought it was to tell if you were in someone else's dream or not. Which is different from if you were in someone's dream or yours.
But isn't that the point of the ending? And, if the one, then the other? That is, if they can tell, irrefutably, that you are dreaming, then can they not also tell, irrefutably, that you are awake?
There are three possibilities: you are dreaming, you are awake, you are in someone else's dream. Your top would spin forever in someone else's dream, and fall in your dream or if you are awake.
Right?
I'm now totally confused.
Your top would spin forever in someone else's dream, and fall in your dream or if you are awake.
That doesn't help Cobb either, though - if the top obeys the laws of physics in his own dreams AND in reality, why spin it at the end?
I'm not saying it helps. Just trying to lay out the limits of metaphor--if you can't let someone else touch it because then they will have it behave correctly in their dream, won't it behave correctly in your own?
Yeah, the three possibilities are awake, dreaming, in someone else's dream. But I'm not sure you've got the top spinning forever in the correct dream. But I'm not sure you're wrong either.
Either way, the line struck me as not being about telling if you're awake necessarily, but telling if you're in someone else's dream or your own.
I also think Nolan was deliberately murky about this.
I don't think the "someone else's dream" is a valid situation. I think dreaming is dreaming, whether it's your dream or someone else's. It's strictly two situations. I think the top really comes frequently into play when you are either stuck in limbo or are in someone else's dream. Two situations where you don't realize you are dreaming.
And the end, it's for us to figure out if Cobb is awake or dreaming.
Actually, here's something else I noticed (or noticed more) the second time through -- There is never a mechanic supplied for how dreams are shared.
I mean, they're all strapped up to that machine, but so? By the visual indications supplied in the film, all that box does is supply the drugs, but even if it does more that that, how exactly does it do that? Ultimately, it's a MacGuffin -- it doesn't matter. It's not important. And yet, it kind of is, in determining what's a dream and what's not. And, of course, not providing that info makes the waters murkier yet again.