Understanding Inception's Ending: Nolan's Blockbuster Tackles an Old Debate in Philosophy

Ah, that mysterious finale to Christopher Nolan's instant classic Inception. The Greatest Working Director in Hollywood has confounded us with a fantastically open ended close to his most mind bending picture since Memento. Netiquette dictates that I issue you a "spoiler warning" at this point. If you don't want to know about the ending of what will easily end up as the best film of 2010, then don't read on until you've seen the picture. But if you're mystified by the ending and you're trying to make sense of its meaning, then you've come to the right place.

Was he dreaming, or wasn't he?

In order to understand what Inception's all about, you need to understand a little piece of philosophy that's been around for the better part of a millennium. This concept goes by multiple names. Rene Descartes called it the evil demon hypothesis. More recently, Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam called it the "brain in a vat" problem. Since Putnam's version is a little more hip to the times, we'll run with that.

Before getting to Inception itself, let's begin with a few easy assumptions. The world you experience is sensory in nature. You see things, you feel them-you touch, you taste, you hear. You collect all this information and brew it all up in to something you call reality. But all that brewing goes on not at the tip of your tongue or the retina of your eye, but in the brain, in the form of neural impulses that are processed by the mind.

Putnam's question is this: given what we know about how the mind works, how do you know you're not just a brain in a vat? Imagine a big squishy brain, suspended in some life sustaining goo, sitting in a giant petri dish. Around the brain are all these wires and nodes, and the wires run to a computer. The computer sends neural signals to the brain that are identical to the signals you would experience if you actually were reading this awesome article by Doug Brockwell. But perhaps you're not actually reading it. Perhaps you're simply getting commands from the computer that make you, a disembodied brain, think you're reading it.

Let it be known that Hilary Putnam didn't believe we actually were brains in a vat. In a shorthand way, you could say he thought that brains weren't capable of imagining things that they hadn't experienced. The way Putnam saw things, sensory experience of something was a necessary precursor to having a thought about it. But other philosophers far smarter than you and I didn't find Putnam's explanation satisfactory. To them, the brain in a vat dilemma remains a confounding issue.

But enough with the brief history of 20^th century epistemology, and back to Inception. The central dilemma is whether or not Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, was still dreaming at the end. The top spins, it wobbles for a moment, continues to spin, and then-cut to black with no clear resolution.

Backing up a bit, we had just been through a wild ride of four different levels of dreams all running concurrently: a car chase across a bridge, a hotel wing devoid of gravity, a snowy fortress, and a desolate metropolis. Surely it wouldn't be so crazy to imagine a fifth layer to the tapestry: Cobb returning to an idyllic home with his father, devoid of guilt and with a clean subconscious. Looking back, we can see that Nolan has dropped hints in both directions.

Suggestions that it was NOT a dream:

-Nolan teaches us that in dreams, we aren't able to mentally articulate how we came to be in a certain situation. Chronologies warp and crumble just as Inception's skylines do. But after Leo wakes up from the mission, we get a clear sequence of events-Saito making the phone call, clearing immigration, meeting his father, returning home, and seeing his children.

-The Burden of Proof: If you're going to argue for a fifth layer of dreaming and introduce a whole new set of events to the story, clearly the burden of proof should be on you. Consider this Ockham's Razor as applied to Inception. In absence of information to the contrary, the simplest solution tends to be the correct one. Certainly it's simpler to assume that Cobb got off the plane and went home than to assume some quasi-omniscient dream architect has had him sedated this entire time...or is it?

Suggestions that it WAS a dream:

-Throughout the film, we're told that Cobb has violated every rule of an extractor and blurred the line between memory and dream in ways that are sure to obfuscate his sense of reality.

-We're introduced to a character, Mal, who presumably saw dream where only reality existed, so surely Cobb could fall pray to the reciprocal seduction.

-Cobb is reintroduced to his children in a way that is eerily almost identical to how he left his children, suggesting that he is reconstructing the experience from memory. Also, the children don't appear to have aged (though we never got to see their faces until the finale). However, in fairness to the opposing side, we really don't know how long Cobb's been wanted in connection with Mal's death-it might have been mere months.

-Miles (Michael Caine's character) hinted as a master architect. If Cobb really was dreaming all the time, then Inception would need to introduce a character with the means and motive to initiate such a dream, lest it be cheating the viewer. Michael Caine's character Miles gives us just such a person. We're told that Cobb was taught everything he knows from Miles, his father-in-law. Perhaps the real inception that occurs in the film isn't Cobb's team getting Cillian Murphy to dissolve his company, but Miles getting Cobb to unfetter his guilt-stricken conscience through a five layered dream.

Of course, that begets the question of where Cobb is in real life and why Miles would choose to do this to him. But if it's all a dream, then we never meet any "real" characters, and analyzing motivations and personalities is a somewhat fruitless exercise. And these are just a sample of the arguments you could use to support one side or the other--a closer scrutiny would surely reveal more.

The top spins, it wobbles, it continues to spin, and the curtains fall. Will the top fall, or won't it? Did Cobb really pull the events of the movie off, or was he dreaming the entire time? You might as well be asking, was he just a brain in a vat, with his reality manipulated by unseen forces? By concluding the film before we figure out what that darned top does, what Nolan is really telling us is this-the hypothesis isn't falsifiable, so ultimately, it can't be known. There's evidence on both sides, but you can't prove either one the way you can "prove" the Pythagorean theorem.

Ironically, it takes a leap of faith to assume our sensory experiences are real or imagined. Mal took a leap, literally and figuratively. And for all we know, she woke up when she hit the ground. You cannot disprove that hypothesis. Great movies give us answers, but they also leave us with questions-big questions that we can pontificate about long after we leave the theater. Cinematic beauty often lives in ambiguity. On that note, Nolan's Inception will rightfully earn its place as one of the best films of all time.