Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Inception

Kyle Johnson has written a book, Inception and Philosophy. He's apparently watched Inception many many times and had several collaborators who watched it more. Here is a Google Talk he gave. It's about 40 minutes and as a presenter I find he yells at his audience too much but there's a lot of good stuff here.



Here are his slides .

He argues that all of Inception is a dream and the spinning top at the end is a distraction from the kids saying they're "building a house on a cliff" which echoes back to what Sato said at the beginning. Cobb is an unreliable narrator and many things that happen in the supposed real world are rather dreamlike (the chase in Mombasa, the characters have one name and are one dimension which isn't Nolan-like, Mal is across the street when leaping, etc.) and when you wake up from Limbo you merely pop back a level. So if Cobb was dreaming the "real world" then he'd pop back to it at the end. He does point out that Cobb's wedding ring (which appears and disappears) and a couple of other things could suggest the real world is real, but he things Cobb is still in a dream.

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