Inception
Cobb ’s wife Mal ( play by Marion Cotillard ) kills herself prior to the outcome ofInceptionafter coming to believe what she think was reality is really just another layer of dreaming . Christopher Nolan ’s sci - fi movie leaves viewing audience constantly wondering whether what they ’re seeing is a dream , a dream within a dream ( sometimes within another dream ) , or the motion-picture show ’s version of reality … assuming that ’s not just a dream in the head of its protagonist , Dom Cobb ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) . With business concern like that , it ’s piddling wonder Cobb oft ascertain to see if he ’s unknowingly still dream and seem ready to wake up by " vote out " himself , should he distrust otherwise .
But how does one determine if they ’re dream without actualise it ? AsInceptionexplains , Cobb and his team have personal itemsthey call totem . These on the face of it routine objects ( like a top or a dice ) have been altered or modified , but only in a elbow room their proprietor knows ( for example , Joseph Gordon - Levitt ’s Arthur has a tight die ) . That way , if they want to try out whether they ’re in a dream or not , they only postulate to check their totem and see if it " feel " veracious and/or abides by the Torah of cathartic as only they have it away it should . For this intellect , it ’s imperative the owner be the only individual to ever relate their totem ; otherwise , they ca n’t confide they ’re not in the pipe dream of someone else who have it off how their totem has been modified and can change the pipe dream in ordination to trick them .
Related : Inception Theory : Cobb ’s REAL Totem ( It ’s Not the Spinning Top )
This all comes back into child’s play during a polar scene where Cobb excuse to his team ’s newest member , Ariadne ( Ellen Page ) , why Mal kill herself before the beginning ofInception . He and Mal had been experimenting with dream - sharing applied science when they found their way into Limbo ( a term that refers to infinite subconscious ) . There , Mal became more and more haunt with the superpower of being able to work their dream world and resist to return to the veridical one , prompting Cobb to do a rudimentary variant of Inception ( planting an idea in someone ’s subconscious mind ) by reactivate her totem . And while he succeeded in planting a simple estimate - that her world is n’t real - in her head , it persist in to affect her even after they woke up , and not in a helpful style , either .
Upon returning to reality , Mal gradually became convinced what she thought was the real world is really just another dream and tried to win over Cobb they should " wake " themselves up by killing themselves . When he refused , she invest self-annihilation and framed Cobb for her death in an attempt to get him to do the same . After that , Cobb was continuously haunted by his own subconscious ' projection of Mal , who always sabotaged his effort to infiltrate the dreams of others and reminded him of his own doubts about whether reality is , well , real . She - or , rather , the expression of Cobb ’s guilt trip about his theatrical role in have Mal ’s death - is n’t of necessity wrong , either . Even bythe movie ’s ( infamously equivocal ) final scene , neither he nor the consultation know for certain if the moving-picture show ’s interlingual rendition of world is truly " real " , not least of all because the totem he now uses is the same one Mal did before her expiry .
That being sound out , Inceptionseems to debate it does n’t count ; Cobb knows what ’s important to him ( being reunited with his children ) , and he will simply subsist out his life story and wait to see what comes next . He might even discover Mal was right and she ’s been waiting for him in the actual - humankind for a few hour since she " killed " herself ( what with clip working other than in dreams versus world ) . Whatever the case might be , she ’s a cautionary narration that illustrateswhat Dom means when he talks about the power of ideas(comparing them to a"highly contagious"virus that can"grow to define or destroy you " ) and whyInceptionisn’t a appendage to be carry out nonchalantly on anyone .
NEXT : The Inception Prequel Comic to Revisit Tenet ’s Delay
