What happened to the main character of Inception? **Spoiler**?

Mal was right.

Not unlike American Psycho (2000), it was fake all along.

I was thinking that throughout, however what do you think about the fact that there was no more pressure from the police or corporations? Was the Asian dude in charge of the dream or something, and if so how was he able to call everything off. And in addition, how would he have his totem? Don’t you only get pressure if it is someone else’s dream?

I’m just going to go on believing that the top stopped spinning, because that’s the way that I would have wanted it to end. :] They were so tricky cutting off the movie like that…xD Not appreciated. .

I’ve only seen it once, so it’s not with any authority, but I don’t remember anything to suggest it wasn’t DiCaprio’s dream in its entirety. (Except possibly the last shot – see below).

In a dream a spinning token can fall or stay spinning forever. In the real world it must fall. So the last shot of it NOT falling (to me it went beyond and did not fall) it proves the story was still nested within a dream – even though prior in the movie his token did fall, “proving” we were at the top level falsely.

(But if that is the case then the other weighted object tokens will only tell if they are in their own dream, not if they are in reality. So maybe I’m over thinking it.)

You can also take it to be a cheeky artistic moment of Nolan transcending the “fourth wall” in the last shot – making the statement that since it is a movie, it is a dream – you the viewer’s dream.

Your other points make me want to see the movie again, because I have no idea.

The point is that it doesn’t matter.

I just saw it this afternoon Ipso so your guess is as good as mine. I think they were making you lean toward the fact that it was a dream, but there is still one open loop. How did they get out of the “limbo” that the asian dude was in? If you could just kill yourself, why did they care about the asian dude dying in the first place? They should have let him die and then just have him kill himself to get out of it. I liked how they broke down the dream time versus real time. I have heard this argument before and it was tie in nicely. The music angle playing was a nice touch also.

The thing is, the asian guy didn’t kill himself, though. He grew old in limbo. When Leo saw the old asian guy at the start/end he had to persuade him to shoot himself and go back to reality.

And from what I saw, they left the end up to interpretation. The token was faltering a little on the table, while in the dreams it stayed spinning as smoothly as possible. So the theatre was just waiting for it to drop (cheering it on, per say?) but then the screen cut off. Haha, the theatre I was in was NOT happy about cutting it off. xD That was entertaining.

I think they meant for the movie to be interpreted many different ways, though. If you want a cut and dry answer, there might be a quote from one of the makers somewhere, but you’ll just get tons of different opinions from us. ;)

That is exactly what I am looking for. If the Asian dude didn’t kill himself then how did they go back and make it through all of the “falls”? How did they get out of that Limbo? and How did the Ben from Growing Pains get into his limbo? He had to have killed himself.

Haha, okay, now you’re losing me. I saw it when it first came out, so my memory isn’t that sharp. x.x;

But I thought the asian guy and Leo didn’t make it through the falls with the rest? (did they?) I thought they both died and went to limbo, but the asian guy made it there a few seconds/minutes earlier than Leo (which translated to an entire lifetime in limbo) and then Leo had to convince him to kill both of them in order to go back to reality.

Is any of that wrong? Or did it answer anything? ‘Cause that’s how my mind remembers those parts of the movie now. I think I was more focused on seeing what kinds of dreams I would have after seeing the movie. :]

You are right, however how would each of their limbo’s be the same place #1 and #2 the limbo seemed the same as Ben’s limbo that he had with his wife. Is everyone’s limbo the same place?? I guess the moral of this story is that the movie is fucked up!

”How did they get out of the “limbo” that the asian dude was in? If you could just kill yourself, why did they care about the asian dude dying in the first place? They should have let him die and then just have him kill himself to get out of it.”

That is basically what they did. The thing was, they were too heavily sedated for him to just wake up normally if he died. Drugged up like he was, he would drop into limbo, which is a shared and unconstructed dream space that he might not ever be able to return from. So the best option was to try to finish the job and get back before Saito died.

The trouble is that once you are in limbo, it’s easy to forget about reality; limbo becomes your reality. We assume that’s what happened to Saito when he went there—he wouldn’t think about killing himself because he wouldn’t realize there’s a reality to return to.

So, then! To summarize the kicks:

Level one: The van hits the water.
Level two: Arthur blows up the elevator.
Level three: Eames blows up the fortress.
Level four: Fischer and Ariadne go off the balcony.

All these kicks work, everyone wakes up on the first level, except Cobb and Saito, who are still in limbo. Cobb convinces Saito that this is limbo, not the real world. And then everyone wakes up on the plane in reality (or Cobb’s dream, depending on if you think the top fell or not).

The reason why, when Cobb and Ariadne follow Mal and Fischer into limbo, they end up in the world Cobb and Mal created is because of the entire group Cobb was the only one who had been there before. What they saw was everything that was left from that experience. Presumably, if someone else in the group had also been there, it might’ve been something different.

FYI: It took two people to write this answer, and we’ve seen the movie a collective five times. We could be wrong… but probably not.

Wait, I’m totally missing the part where Ben from Growing Pains is in the movie?!!?!? (Or a different limbo reference?)

And, yes, the movie is very messed up. :] I adore how thought provoking it is, though.

@MacBean Yes! That pretty much explains what I was trying to say. But you two are much better with words. :] (And you know their names. xD Always a plus.)

Yeah, Ben from Growing Pains wasn’t in Inception. I’m not sure where that’s coming from.

I found this explanation quite detailed and satisfied most of my unsolved questions:

http://screenrant.com/inception-spoilers-discussion-kofi-68330/

The only thing I still don’t get is about the scene where Mal is killing herself on the traintracks. Was that what was waking them out of their limbo? If so, why did they look young, because we knew they grew old together? Or if not, could it somehow have been on another level?

There’s a few leaps, but most of it works out decently well.

The one guy from inception was in growing pains.

Leonardo DiCaprio was in the last season, as one of Mike Seaver’s students. He wasn’t Ben.

@ben: It’s kind of a trick. Unreliable narrator. At the end, when Mal’s shade is dying in Cobb’s arms and she’s like “You said we’d grow old together,” he says “We did, don’t you remember?” you get that glimpse of their hands as old people. But that’s not how it shows up in the flashbacks because they’re flashbacks to a dream (and a projection’s, at that) which are always based more on the perceptions of the people in them, rather than anything real.