Based on the movie “Inception,” it is unclear whether the top falls or continues spinning at the end. The movie is about shared dreams and how the “extractor”, also the protagonist, Cobb, extracts dreams using a totem (Nolan & Thomas, 2010). In this way he is able to steal people’s ideas through the ability of distinguishing dreams form reality. The ‘top’ is the sure way of establishing whether Cobb is dreaming or awake through an act of spinning it. If it falls, he gets assurance that he is awake, but when it spins, he is in a dream. At the end of the film, his children distract him and he cannot establish whether the top falls or continues to spin. The film then goes blank without a clear conclusion (Nolan & Thomas, 2010).
The determination of whether the top falls or does not establish whether Cobb had returned to his children in reality or in a dream. This is because of the working mechanism of the totem, which requires that nobody else should touch it. Other people cannot touch the totem because they might know how it behaves in the real world and how it is weighted. Once another person learns how the totem works, the owner cannot tell whether they are in a dream or reality. An illustration is if Ariadne had the knowledge of the loading of Arthur’s death, she would determine the number that defines the top’s fall in the real world (Nolan & Thomas, 2010). Therefore, Arthur never lets her touch his totem and she never lets Cobb touch hers. Cobb feigns enthusiasm of her learning of the totem’s mechanism.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Since the people in the film knew how the totem works in the real world, they would predict its behavior in their dreams. Therefore, if the top fell off at the end of the film, Cobb could still have the experience in his dream. However, he earlier told Adrianne, the designer of dreams for the Fischer inception, how his totem works and therefore sabotaged his efforts to have full control of the totem (Nolan & Thomas, 2010). There is, therefore, a significant possibility that he is in Ariadne’s dream. He even assumed her death when she fell from a window, which he did not establish its reality. Additionally, the fact that Cobb took totem from Mal indicates the possibility of his entire existence in Mal’s dream. He can never tell whether he exited or is still in the dream (Nolan & Thomas, 2010).
Furthermore, the different totems in the film work in unique ways specific to the knowledge of their owners. For example Arthur’s die is weighted in a specific number in the real world, Ariadne has soul knowledge of the difference in her metal bishop and Eame distinguishes the spelling of “Mombasa” in his dream and when in the dream of others (Nolan & Thomas, 2010). Like the rest, Cobb’s top therefore behaves in a unique manner. As a dream detector, he confuses the expectations of his victims and therefore obtains and institutes ideas respectively from and into their minds.
It is, therefore, highly likely that the top did not fall at the end of the film because of the likelihood of no one else dreaming at the same time. He spends a lot of time explaining how the totems work throughout the film but does not show accuracy of his predictions. Another illustration is when he distorts his memory which makes the real event ambiguous to the audience. An example is when he and Mal commit suicide at the train tracks in Limbo to explore the concept of a dream within a dream, they appear as young and old (Nolan & Thomas, 2010). When Fischer and Adriane tried committing suicide at Limbo, they only went back the third level up the multilayer of dreams to Eame’s dream of snow fortress (Nolan & Thomas, 2010). In conclusion, the elements of the subconscious work their way in dreams and therefore, it there is a possibility for the film to be entirely based on a dream.
Reference
Nolan, C. (Director), & Thomas, E. (Producer). (2010) Inception [Motion picture]. United Kindom: Warner Bros
