A layman’s analysis of the mechanics of Inception, 14 years post
Supplementary reading is almost always necessary after watching a Christopher Nolan film. This is the conclusion I’ve arrived at after rewatching Inception for the 5th or 6th time this past past weekend.
There’s some debate [1] [2] as to whether movies are actually getting longer, but it’s reasonable to say for the sake of film brevity — and my bladder — I couldn’t possibly ask Christopher Nolan to explain all of the gaps in each of his films. For better or for worse, I always find myself unsatisfied with the stress testing of the concepts of Nolan’s films within the plot itself, and it takes several rewatches to come up with plausible explanations that makes behavior consistent with a single theory. Of course, I find it hard to believe that Christopher Nolan has thought of every single edge case, and that he merely proposes a thought experiment with his movies, which I’m perfectly certain is the correct decision in filmmaking, but nevertheless I always find myself wondering if the gaps can be filled.
I’ve taken it upon myself to collect such theories from the various watchers of Inception and apply them to answer some of my questions from this rewatch. The following is mostly a mix of the rewatch this past weekend, Reddit explanations [3] [4] [5], and the Inception wiki with my own opinionated sprinkles on top. Spoilers ahead.
How do Mal and Dom first enter limbo together?
Yusuf claims that with a potent sedative, dreamers can enter deeper and deeper levels of dreaming while maintaining the stability of the dream. Dom does not seem to be aware of such a strong sedative at the time of Yusuf’s introduction, so it seems safe to assume that this was not the methodology by which Mal and Dom entered limbo.
There’s no use speculating what they actually did to enter limbo, but the claim that Nolan makes is that it is possible to enter limbo without the use of such a deep sedative. As such, I believe Dom and Mal could have taken a standard does of a relatively strong sedative while they were exploring and died quickly in each dream level before the sedative wore off until they reached limbo. The importance of making sure that they then killed themselves in limbo implies, however, that once they reached limbo and could go no “deeper”, it was up to them to kill themselves (even after the sedative wore off) to come back to reality. Without anyone to kick them back to reality, they were the sole people responsible for getting themselves back to reality. It seems, then, that the sedative, along with the time dilation effect of limbo, places a lower bound on the amount of time one must spend down in limbo, but does not upper bound the amount of time one can spend down there. I presume at first, Dom and Mal were just waiting out their years in limbo, estimating when their sedative would wear off, and after they began to enjoy worldbuilding, chose to stay longer, resulting in Mal forgetting her original reality.
How do Dom and Eriadne enter limbo while chasing after Fischer? From where is limbo accessible?
It appears that limbo is a universal land for all subconsciouses to reside, as the limbo they enter after the third level during the Fischer job is a remnant of the old limbo that Mal and Dom built an entire world in during their time together.
The first theory is that limbo is simply the fourth level of dreaming that one can enter, with Fischer’s death in the third level sending him to the fourth level immediately and Dom and Mal using the dream-sharing machine to follow him. Discussion on Reddit and the Inception wiki seem to agree with this, and there’s no conflicting evidence suggesting otherwise, but I find limbo being the fourth level exactly somewhat unsatisfying because it places an arbitrary limit on a concept that should theoretically be able to stretch down forever.
The alternative possibility is that since limbo is accessible from any level, falling into the dream of the dreamer will allow you to enter whatever level they currently reside. In this case, perhaps, they hooked up the machine to Fischer, the dreamer, to “share” his dream down in limbo. Since limbo is “unconstructed dream space”, however, they were effectively sending themselves to limbo “free of charge”, without really being attached to the architecture of Fischer’s dreaming. I suppose Eames could have also just shot them to send them down there, but perhaps that’s a little gruesome and unnecessary. The mechanics of this alternative possibility seem a little murky, because how does one really attach themselves to the dream of a dead person?
Where exactly does a kick send you, and where does death send you?
It seems that with a kick, the most you can be sent up is a single level, as demonstrated by the Cobol job when Arthur kicks Dom out of the second level. The Cobol job also implies that death can only send you up a single level, when Dom shoots Arthur in the second level and it only sends him back up to the first dream level. Dying didn’t send Arthur to limbo here despite him still being sedated in reality, because the first dream level sedative was already wearing off, and the formulation Dom and Arthur were using was probably not one that would be stable or as strong in lower levels.
Saito and Dom miss the kick in the Fischer job, with Saito’s injury in the first dream level at first also wounding him in deeper levels, then later sending him completely to limbo after succumbing to death in the first level. Dom also finds himself in limbo after following Fischer down to that shared subconscious state, and stays there because he doesn’t kill himself in time for the kick from the third dream level. This indicates that in limbo, the only way out is death from within limbo, and no kick from a higher level can pull you out.
Dying in limbo is a pretty nasty edge case to this rule. It’s clear from Ariadne throwing Fischer off the building in limbo at the end of the movie that one does not have to commit suicide to escape limbo, they simply must die. I think, however, it was a misnomer for Ariadne to say that they would administer their own kick to Fischer from within limbo to help him escape — while Fischer did experience the stomach lurch when being thrown off the building, he also died after reaching the bottom, perhaps combined with the cardiac shock that Eames administered, sent him back up to the third level.
Where death in limbo sends you back to is also elaborated on minimally during the film — given that Fischer is sent back to the last level that he died on, to make things consistent I would guess that death in limbo sends you back to the level from which you entered it from, even if you’re already dead in it, if the dream is still intact. This can explain why Fischer wakes up seemingly fine in the third level of the dream and goes on to become incepted while talking to his own projection of his father. I find it hard to believe, however, that Dom would wake up in that same level after the dream has already disintegrated (not to mention that his body would be crushed under a pile of rubble) — my theory is then that since Eames’ dream has already collapsed, he returns to the nearest level in which the dream is still intact, which I suppose could be Yusuf’s in the first level. Since Saito was down in limbo for a long time (about as much as time as the sedative allows), when Dom and Saito “wake up” in Yusuf’s dream, their time is almost up, and they can immediately kill themselves to reenter reality, so there wouldn’t be that much more for them to experience. The movie does not include Saito and Dom’s journey back up from the dream levels, only them waking up on the airplane, but it would be pedantic for Nolan to add an extra scene to prove a metaphysical point, so I don’t think this discredits my hypothesis.
Ariadne and Eames also miss the kick from the first dream level during the Fischer job. What happens to them?
Ariadne and Eames wake up in the submerged van from the first dream level after receiving the synchronized kick from levels 2 and 3. Since their sedative is still in effect, I have to believe that they hide out for a week in Fischer’s subconscious first level dream before either receiving a kick from the first level or killing themselves once the sedative has sufficiently worn off.
Why does Dom insist on convincing Mal that her world isn’t real and reminding Saito of the same fact, rather than killing them himself? What makes Saito’s situation different from Mal’s?
Dom seems to believe that he incepted Mal while they were in limbo together, the film pointing to evidence of the spinning top inside the safe that Mal kept in her childhood home.
Dom and Mal were represented as young people throughout the film until the final scenes when Dom explains to his projection of Mal that they had in fact lived a full lifetime within limbo together, the screen cutting to an old couple laying down on the tracks together. Given that limbo can be “eternity”, there was no way that Mal and Dom could have died of “old age”, leading me to believe that the cut scene to the aged couple is a merely a perception: how the couple views themselves as the years pass is as if they had naturally aged.
Saito aged by himself (“filled with regret”) before Dom found in. Because of the time dilation, he entered limbo much earlier than Dom, and Dom knew that once he was down there, he couldn’t risk killing himself until the sedative had worn off, and that would also be a long time, so long that Saito might not remember the truth. Dying early in limbo is never even hinted at during the film, so I won’t bother coming up with anything. If Saito dies early, I have no idea where his subconscious goes.
Anyways, I believe that Dom may not have needed to convince Mal her world wasn’t real, but perhaps psychologically he was also beginning to question whether his world was real or not either. He could just shoot her and follow her footsteps, but maybe that would represent a betrayal he felt he could not perform. In Saito’s case, his reminder to take a “leap of faith” feels more symbolic.
Does sleeping in dream levels / limbo force dreamers into deeper levels?
Due to the time dilation of the dream levels, Dom states that he spent approximately 50 years in limbo, living out an entire lifetime with Mal down there. To get there, they could have placed dream-sharing machines into the architecture of their dreams, but my opinion is that sleeping probably does not send them down into deeper levels. In dreams, the mechanics of perception and gravity altered, so why not the human need to sleep as well? Even if they do sleep, my thought is that a dream without a special sedative is not stable enough to send oneself down into deeper dreams, although it would still be consistent with the rest of the movie to say that it is possible.
In conclusion
I never really associated Christopher Nolan’s movies with the director himself, but now that I have watched a few, I am starting to get a sense for his style and craftsmanship. I participated in quite a bit of supplementary reading after watching Tenet and Interstellar as well, with the former requiring two or three watches before anything made sense.
The more I wrote in this blog, the less confident I felt in my explanations. I also began to have the sense that I was taking things a little too seriously on my corner of the internet, jumping through mental hoops here and there just to explain the whims of a man’s artistic decisions. Still, I had fun and I got a little writing in for the first time in a little while.
