A Skeleton Key to Inception

Despite the sheer number of reviewers that have attempted to untangle the meaning of
Inception, Christopher Nolan's masterpiece remains almost universally misunderstood.
A look at the film from the perspective of literary analysis, at least, suggests it is much
less ambiguous than most critics believe.

The first clue to recognizing this comes in Inception's opening shot of the ocean, a
traditional symbol of the subconscious and death in English literature. No stranger to
water symbolism, Christopher Nolan has used it similarly elsewhere, such in his Batman
trilogy where the dark waters of the subconscious lurk in the caverns below the city,
aptly symbolizing the impulse to violence that also lurks in the subconscious of its
flawed hero. The symbol also appears in many other contemporary films ranging from
Artificial Intelligence to Skyfall, but there is no need to leap to them to assert the
intentionality of this reading, for Nolan gives it to us directly midway through his film,
cutting to a shot of the ocean at the exact moment the word “subconscious” is heard on
the soundtrack.1

This hidden layer of meaning is the reason water imagery grows more intense and
destructive the further Inception takes us into the world of the mind.2 As the dream
levels mount, we pass through a light rain, thunderstorm, and snow-drenched avalanche
before plunging into an ocean that exists “on the shore of our subconscious.” The
connection between water and the inner-mind is also strengthened through the relative
dryness of Inception's waking worlds, with the notable exceptions coming only at those
key moments in the narrative where Cobb's subconscious intrudes with hallucinogenic
force, such as in the Mombasa sequence where he suffers a vision of Mal while washing
his face, or the two drinks which send him and Fischer to sleep on the plane.

The significance of this opening shot – the turbulent ocean – is then reinforced by the
first major allusion Nolan uses to structure his film: the image of the false children of
limbo building sandcastles on the beach. This visual, which recurs frequently throughout
the movie, is so crucial to unlocking its hidden meaning than Nolan even highlighted it
in an interview with Wired magazine, stressing that:

There’s a relationship between the sand castle the kids are building on the beach in the
beginning of the film and the buildings literally being eaten away by the subconscious
and falling into the sea.3
1 “We wound up on the shore of our own subconscious,” 1:16 into the DVD version of the film.

2 As Ariadne observes, the journey into the dream is also a journey into Cobb's subconscious, with the danger to the
mission being that “as we go deeper into Fischer, we're also going deeper into you.”

3 Emphasis mine. Interestingly, in addition to alluding to water as the subconscious here exactly as this reading does,
Nolan also implies that the house the true children are building at the end of his film is qualitatively different from the
As later scenes in the film emphasize, with one even depicting Cobb and Mal literally
building the city of limbo out of sand, the relationship is one of symbolic equivalence,
with the castles on the beach representing the city of limbo in microcosm. And while the
reference may not be obvious to critics without a background in literature, the allusion is
to the dominant Christian parable about building on sand: the story of the wise and
foolish builders from Matthew 7:24:

And every one that hearest these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened
unto a foolish man, which build his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and
the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was
the fall of it.4

If we look beyond the obvious points of comparison – the way this parable accurately
predicts the culmination of both heist sequences with scenes depicting the destruction of
the world by water – we can see that this Christian allusion connects to the message in
Inception in a deeper way. For what we have in this parable is – in short – a story
cautioning that death (the ocean waves) will inevitably destroy the world of human
consciousness (the castles on the beach). The message is of the transient nature of
existence and consciousness, with the original passage going on to encourage its readers
to live a life free of sin, metaphorically presented as building their houses on the
unshakable “rock of God.”

And what does this allusion unlock but the core meaning of the film? First and foremost,
by associating limbo with the mortal world, what Nolan is telling is us is what the script
hints at in many other ways: that the dreams in Inception are meant to serve as
metaphors for our own mortal world, a “shared dreamspace” into which all of us fall
through birth and exit through death, and in which we all have the power to be architects
of our own lives.5 The script repeatedly draws connections comparing life to a dream.
And on a more subtle note, it's worth mentioning how this allusion also explains several
of Nolan's stylistic decisions, such as his depiction of Mal as a negative temptress in the
noir tradition. While most critics recognize the significance of Mal's ominous name,
none seem to have picked up on the reason for her dramatic malevolence: as the
character who prefers to live in limbo and build castles on the beach, Mal is the

sandcastles the false children are building at the beginning. This is another key conclusion of this reading that we will
get to later when explaining the significance of the final scene. [http://www.wired.com/2010/11/pl_inception_nolan/all/].

4 The passage about building on rock reads: “Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will
liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the
winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded on a rock.”

5 This is a message hammered home by the script in many other ways. Note its description of dream worlds as places of
“shared consciousness” into which characters “fall” and “spend a lifetime” before they die and “wake up.” Edith Piaf's
recurring swan song announces the soul's lack of regrets as it swoons into death. And there are multiple images of the
city of limbo standing tombstone-like behind the main characters, with the visuals of the city resembling nothing so
much as a cemetery of death, a message also made in the film's own waiting-for-a-train parable.
personification of the foolish builder from the biblical parable, and thus a symbol of
faithlessness and death.6

So forget the overly-complicated explanations of Inception that litter the Internet, trying
to dissect the plot and map out who-is-dreaming-what-and-when-and-where. What we
have in Inception is a story that operates on the level of symbolism and allegory. And
this is why the opening heist plays out as it does, introducing Cobb as a thief who is
obsessed with wealth and consumed by the importance of “buying his way home.”7 As
Cobb's mission progresses, we see him make moral error after moral error: placing his
faith quite wrongly in the corporal reality of Mal's existence (a mistake which triggers a
biblical fall and blasphemy) and then embracing violence when betrayed. His coarse
treatment of Saito in the scene which follows – throwing the man to the rug and
threatening him with a pistol – also backfires, serving only to undo the entire nature of
his multilayered deception. And then as our heist closes we witness Cobb's selfishness as
he abandons his colleagues to be hunted by the organization which hired him (“it's every
man for himself”), and for a mission which failed due largely to his own faults.

True to the nature of allegory, Inception requires its protagonist to undergo an internal
moral transformation as a prerequisite to achieving exterior success. In the case of Cobb,
this spiritual transformation starts with his refusal to take vengeance on Nash (“that's not
how I roll”), a rejection of violence which opens the possibility for a greater “leap of
faith” in the form of the second heist. And by the end of this second mission, Cobb's
transformation is complete, and we see him as a gift-giver rather than thief (incepting
rather than extracting) with no financial stake in the heist. All four of his major character
flaws (greed, violence, faithlessness, selfishness) from the first heist are deliberately
reversed here. Rejecting Mal where he trusted her before, Cobb now renounces violence
even when attacked, and then risks his life to rescue an imperiled team-member, a final
act of self-sacrifice that transforms him into the prophetic figure of his final encounter
with Saito, a figurative Christ descended into the mortal world bringing the message of
salvation.

In this light, it is hardly accidental that Cobb's victory over Mal triggers Fischer's
reconciliation with his father, for by the end of the second heist Inception is operating

6 Cobb's rejection of Mal is primarily a rejection of faithlessness, with her temptation (“you don't believe in anything
anymore, so choose to be here”) serving as a thematic temptation of faith. But Cobb's rejection of her is also a rejection
of limbo in its manifestation as a world of death and suffering, something we get not only through water imagery, but
also downward directional symbolism, as well as limbo's association with the Greek underworld as the dwelling place of
“shades” and “figments”.

7 The idea of purchasing one's way to heaven is frowned upon in the bible: “And when Simon saw that through laying on
of the apostles' hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, saying, Give me also this power, that on
whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost. But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because
thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy
heart is not right in the sight of God.” (Acts 8:18)
almost entirely in the realm of metaphor, and veering towards an ending the significance
of which is almost entirely symbolic. For what is Cobb's dive into the river but a
baptismal inundation symbolizing the death of the body and rebirth of the soul? Passing
downward through the waters of death, Cobb awakens in the metaphorical heavens
restored to youth as in the Christian tradition.8 The rush of images which follow continue
this Christian theme, presenting Cobb's judgment and forgiveness of sins (at
immigration), his reunion with his father, and his restoration to the heavenly garden
where his children James and Philippa (both aptly named after Christian apostles) fulfill
the significance of their names by building a “house on the cliff” in the film's final line
of dialogue. The ending thus brings us full-circle to the opening parable of the wise and
foolish builders, except now in the reversed and positive form of the faithful who
construct their house on the “rock of God.” The cinematic journey which began on the
“goddamned beach” of the spiritual desert reaches its end with a return to the Eden-like
garden from which Cobb was earlier expelled.9

The prevalence of Christian imagery at the climax of Inception makes it an open

question whether Nolan intends us to read Cobb's journey as a literal passage to heaven,
or whether his “leap of faith” is suggestive of a more abstract kind of psychological
death and rebirth. But regardless of how seriously we take Inception's religious subtext,
a look at the other philosophical and mythological themes in the film confirms that
religious skepticism about the fundamental reality of our human lives forms the basic
framework on which the film is constructed.

For further evidence of intentionality here, consider the script's emphasis on its multiple
characters who fall into dream worlds and forget truths that they once knew. Although
the intellectual connection is perhaps too obscure for casual viewers, the philosophical
idea Nolan is referencing here is anamnesis, the Platonic argument for the immortality of
the soul. Developed in the dialogues Meno and Phaedo, anamnesis holds that the soul is
immortal and all-knowing, but loses this knowledge through the shock of birth as it
reincarnates into the mortal world. Allegedly “proven” through Plato's example of a
slave boy who learns geometry through nothing more than Socratic questioning, the idea
underpinning the theory of anamnesis is the idea that all learning is simply the act of
remembering truths once known but somehow forgotten. And this is where the theory
connects to Inception. As the faithless temptress in the Christian tradition, Mal is also
portrayed as the Socratic negative. Her positive counterpart is conversely Saito, whose
recollection of Cobb as a man “from a half-remembered dream” stirs him to recall the
8 This is anticipated in Cobb's opening encounter with Mal. Her thematically-appropriate musings on the deathly aspect of
the ocean do more than anticipate her suicide, but actually lay out the thematic trajectory of the film, inviting Cobb to
reply that it may be possible to survive even death in the event one makes a “clean dive.” The end of the film of course
shows us Cobb making exactly such a dive.

9 Nolan uses similar Eden imagery in his Batman trilogy, which starts with the expulsion/fall of the children from the
metaphorical garden (following the unearthing and theft of a symbol of violence) and returns them to it at the climax of
the film following an act of self-sacrifice which restores Wayne Manor to its original pastoral verdure.
exact same truth that Mal forgot: the fundamentally unreal nature of the world itself.
This merging of Christian and Platonic thought is seamless and Nolan even prods us to
make the connection by naming Saito's company (Proclus Global) after a neoplatonic
philosopher whose theory of the soul builds closely on the idea of innate knowledge.10

The themes of architecture and creation ("building things that would not be possible in
the real world") also combine with these Christian and Platonic themes and reinforce our
confidence in their intentionality.11 As the figurative Father, Miles is a clear symbolic
representation of the Christian God, a master creator who makes his son in his image
and teaches him everything he knows.12 Seen in this light, the exchange between the two
in Paris plays out as an obvious discourse on free will and sin. Although berated by his
father for his ethical failings (“I never taught you to steal”) and urged to “come back to
reality” (the Christian garden on the cliff or Platonic world of ideal forms), when Cobb
("beloved of God") asks his father for help, it is provided (Matthew 7.7) in the guise of a
woman whose mythological name suggests that her role is to guide him from the
labyrinth of the mortal world, an act she symbolically fulfills shortly thereafter when
shattering a set of mirrors which trap Cobb in the boundless maze of his own
subconscious.13

Inception's doubled themes of father-son alienation and reconciliation (with Fischer as

with Cobb) offer more evidence that Nolan is mythologizing Christian and Platonic
themes. In the scenes of Robert Fischer and his hospitalized father, for instance, what do
we have but the “Fisher King” of the Christian Grail Legend? A spiritually wounded
prince with a bedridden father, Fischer depends for his healing on the successful
completion of the main knight's task, with Cobb replacing Perceval in this modern
reworking of the Arthurian romance.14 The central themes in the original story (the limits
of rationality when applied to questions of faith) are then layered over Inception's

10 The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a discussion on Proclus and his theories on anamnesis and the nature of
the soul [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/proclus/]. The original observation about the connection between Saito and
Plato comes from David Kyle Johnson's book on the philosophy of inception, where David poses the connection as a
puzzle still waiting explanation.

11 Here and elsewhere, when the script invokes the concept of “reality” it does not mean the waking world. It instead refers
to the Christian concept of the heavens or the Platonic world of ideal forms that exist beyond time and space. The real
world is thus a “broom closet” with “no place to think” distinct from the world of human creation where it is possible to
build “cathedrals, entire cities... things that couldn't exist in the real world.”

12 Quite suitably for the patriarchal God-figure in the film, Miles is shown in his Paris office sitting in front of a
blackboard covered with architectural diagrams of St. Peter's Basilica from the Vatican.

13 This is itself a visual reference to Citizen Kane, in which Welles emphasized Kane's spiritual and emotional isolation by
pioneering a similar shot.

14 In the Arthurian legend, Perceval makes two trips into the Grail Castle. In the first, he fails to heal the Grail King
because of an over-reliance on rational norms and social constraints. His second journey succeeds when he – like Cobb
– develops a more emotional and holistic approach to life.
philosophical framework, with Cobb's major character weakness – his thematic lack of
faith – now linked to his tendency to over-rationalize.

And this is the point of the tension the film draws between Arthur and Eames, who
represent the rational and creative aspects of the human psyche respectively. Given the
film's mythological grounding in the Fisher King story, it should hardly surprise us that
the creative Eames recognizes the possibility of inception even as the rationalist Arthur
rejects it, arguing logically but incorrectly that it is always possible to think one's way
through to the “genesis” of an idea.15 Over-rationality in this film is blinding, the same
thematic point of which is also made in the architect Nash's failure to “know” how to
make a necessary prop as well as in Cobb's hesitation to shoot Mal on the snow fortress
level, a failure the script promptly classifies as one of over-ratiocination.16 Like
Perceval, Cobb does not achieve spiritual transcendence until he abandons his rational
desire to sure about the nature of the world and instead acts with an emotional
naturalism that is grounded in his love for his children.

And just as in the Grail legend, where Perceval's embrace of childlike wonder leads to
the rejuvenation of the Fisher King and his kingdom, so does Cobb's interior journey
lead naturally to Fischer's deliverance, with the mythological allusion telling us that this
narrative reconciliation between father and son is meant to be understood allegorically
as man's reconciliation with divine grace. And indeed, while there are those who read
Fischer's catharsis cynically, arguing that he has been deceived by the incepting team,
their reading is fragmentary and mistaken. For not only does the heist team consider
itself as doing a favor for Fischer, but the undercurrents of anamnesis in the symbol of
the safe (what gets locked away is the truth) remind us that all acts of memory are
genuine, and what Fischer recalls is therefore a genuine truth once known but somehow
forgotten: the reality of his father's love for him, made symbolically manifest in the form
of the pinwheel and photograph.

While the most likely meanings of Ariadne (the guide from the Theseus myth) and
Fischer (the wounded prince from the Grail Legend) thus work perfectly in this
interpretation, we also have supporting evidence for it in the names of lesser characters.17

15 The distorted humanism of exclusive rationalization is also shown through Arthur's taste for the distorted paintings of
Francis Bacon, something mentioned in passing during the first heist sequence.

16 “How do you know,” Cobb asks Ariadne? Further strengthening this connection, Nash would seem to be named after
economist John Nash and connected with mathematical logic and rationality. Arthur shares this association through his
name, which seems to come from Arthur Escher, son of M.C. Escher, as well as his association with the Penrose
Staircase.

17 In the Greek myth, Ariadne helps Theseus escape from the maze of the Minotaur. In Arthurian Legend, the Fischer King
is a wounded (impotent) king who is healed by the grace of God. Inception seems to be playing with a variant of the
myth, in which there is both a wounded king and a wounded prince, the former of whom is confined to bed.
Uncle Peter, who holds Fischer's company in trust from his father, echoes the disciple
Peter who acted as steward for the early church. Joseph, who holds the keys to the world
of the dream, also mirrors his biblical counterpart. We see this narratively not only in his
role as provider of the necessary sedative to unlock the lower dream levels (a figurative
key of sorts), but even literally in one scene where he jangles a set of keys to his
basement, a place which symbolizes the cave of the inner-self (a hell which can become
the world to those trapped in it) and a journey into which leads Cobb to encounter his
own inner demons, personified in the guise of Mal who appears in the mirror/window of
his soul as the Minotaur lurking in the labyrinth within.18

There is a tremendous amount of this sort of detail in Inception. But rather than dissect
the film scene-by-scene, let us simply move on to the final major subtheme of note:
Inception's extension of the maze into a metaphor for life itself. An extension of the
Theseus myth as well as of the medieval Christian concept of life as a moral test through
which only the virtuous escape (through death), this subtheme is communicated in
Inception primarily through the script's insistence that all dreams are mazes in which
characters “get lost” and “spend a lifetime,” as well as its insistence that architects of
dream worlds build them in paradoxical and maze-like forms. This intellectual subtext –
the idea that life itself is a paradoxical maze – is the reason that labyrinth imagery – as
unlike water imagery – transcends the dream worlds and appears in the rooftop visuals
of Paris and Mombasa.19

And this abstract imagery is where Inception really takes flight. For when Ariadne
proves her worthiness by drawing a circular maze (a thematic recognition of the
paradoxical nature of life itself), her circle should draw to our minds not only the
circular image of the Penrose staircase or the circular nature of purgatory (limbo) as
manifest in the rings of Dante's Inferno, but even the circular nature of consciousness
itself, expressed in Plato's vision of the soul as a circle or in the loop Cobb draws to
explain how consciousness must simultaneously perceive and create the world of its
own existence. Operating at its most abstract in these scenes, Inception draws its
multiple themes together into the suggestion that it is our human sense of consciousness
itself that constitutes the prime paradox of existence.

In an age where film criticism centers primarily on aesthetic commentary and eschews
the value of examining texts for implicit meaning, it feels decidedly old-fashioned to
suggest that any film – and a commercial blockbuster no less – might contain a serious
message and deserve to be treated as art. Yet for those capable of seeing film as more

18 Her placement at the lowest floor of Cobb's dream elevator also makes the point that she symbolizes the central psychic
obstacle.

19 Ariadne's red sweater recalls the red yarn from the Greek myth, while the connection between the Theseus myth and the
Christian worldview also explains why Ariadne is the character who accompanies Cobb to the gates of immigration.
than a black pool reflecting the gaze of their own prejudices, it is refreshing to note how
this reading leads us independently to the exact same claims about Inception as those
made by Christopher Nolan in his rare attempts to discuss the film. In an interview with
Wired magazine, for instance, Nolan acknowledged that the ending of Inception is
ambiguous on the narrative level, but nonetheless characterized his film as having an
unambiguous and “sincere interpretation” which operates on a meta-level far above the
perception of its protagonist. For Nolan, it is only us – the audience – who have the
proper perspective to understand the significance of what we have seen.20

And this reading certainly suggests a similar conclusion. For while the totem is
ultimately a minor symbol in Inception, what it represents in this view is the same sort
of spiritual faithlessness associated with Mal, the woman who created it. Introduced to
us as a tool used by those who lack conviction in the true nature of reality, the totem it is
only of use to characters who are – as Mal describes Cobb – “confused” or “lost” or who
“don't believe in one reality anymore.” All of these characteristics are associated through
maze imagery with the spiritually faithless, which makes the spinning top irrelevant by
the final scene. Having already taken his “leap of faith” into a metaphorical heaven,
Cobb's rejection of the totem at the close of the film marks his only sensible action: a
symbolic reaffirmation of his earlier rejection of Mal in favour of his children “up
above.”

Seen in this light, Inception offers a brilliant mixture of religious, philosophical and
mythological ruminations bent into a cinematic whole: a hyper-intelligent blockbuster
which hides a distinct yet unambiguous message beneath its maze-like exterior. Yet –
once the religious, philosophical and mythological subtexts of Inception are recognized,
it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that Inception is also more ambitious that has
been previously recognized, being the first example of a meta-heist film ever produced.

The reviewers who have come closest to noticing this are the ones who have chosen to
read Inception as a commentary on the nature of filmmaking.21 Critics like Devin Faraci
point out quite properly that not only is the medium of film itself a sort of shared dream
for the audience, but that there are many curious ways Inception compares itself to its
own dream sequences. On a technical level, a minor example of this comes in the way
Inception ends with the very swan song it uses to mark the close of the dream, or the
way the film's runtime of 2:28 hours curiously echoes the 2:28 minute length of the

20 For example, “I’ve always believed that if you make a film with ambiguity, it needs to be based on a sincere
interpretation. If it’s not, then it will contradict itself, or it will be somehow insubstantial and end up making the
audience feel cheated. I think the only way to make ambiguity satisfying is to base it on a very solid point of view of
what you think is going on, and then allow the ambiguity to come from the inability of the character to know, and the
alignment of the audience with that character.” [http://www.wired.com/2010/11/pl_inception_nolan/all/].

21 This is the crux of Devin Faraci's reading [http://www.chud.com/24477/never-wake-up-the-meaning-and-secret-of-

inception/].
same song.22 The script is generally much less subtle. When Ariadne analyses the nature
of world creation during a dream sequence in Paris, for instance, her comments about
the primacy of emotion and tone are clearly the self-referential thoughts of the
screenwriter applied to the art of filmmaking. Much of the dialogue that follows serves a
similar double purpose, such as Cobb 's reminder that too many arbitrary manipulations
of audience expectations can provoke hostility from minds made aware of their own
manipulation.

We should be skeptical of claims Nolan intended Inception as a metaphor for

filmmaking – the filmmaker has explicitly denied this – yet there is a reason the film
compares itself so frequently to a dream, and this is the requirement of genre. For just as
heist films are required to hide their crimes in plain sight, with the twist of the genre
lying in the requirement to explain to the audience the truth of what it has already seen,
so is Inception required to explain the exact rules it will follow as it structures its own
dramatic crime against the audience.23 Reviewers like David Bordwell who praise Nolan
for his stylistic embrace of expository dialogue miss this point: when the gang reviews
the requirements for inception in the garage of the first dream level, the script is less
interested in explaining the plot than engaging in sleight-of-hand, informing us of
exactly how Nolan will implant his ideas in our subconscious. And we can see that the
film follows these rules quite precisely, even down to the point of centering its
emotional resolution in a simple act of positive catharsis.

The sense that it is us – the audience – who is the ultimate target of Nolan's heist is a
point made in the film's original theatrical trailer, which insisted that “your mind... is the
scene of the crime.” From its opening shot of the Syncopy logo as a labyrinth, Inception
makes the same point by transforming itself into an intellectual maze comparable to the
labyrinths in the film. Nolan's circular narrative structure is deliberately used to
misdirect the audience, as is the closing shot of the spinning top.24 And the core message
of the film is hidden in symbolism and allegory. In this sense, Nolan seems to offer an
explanation for how exactly inception is possible. For just as Eames relies on symbolism
and subtext (in the form of the pinwheel) to speak to Fischer's subconscious mind, so
does Inception communicate in supra-rational and creative language. The image is of the
artist/director himself as a forger – a shapeshifter who communicates in disguised forms.
22 David Kyle Johnson's book is filled with a tremendous amount of this sort of detail.

23 “I didn’t intend to make a film about filmmaking, but it’s clear that I gravitated toward the creative process that I know.
The way the team works is very analogous to the way the film itself was made. I can’t say that was intentional, but it’s
very clearly there. I think that’s just the result of me trying to be very tactile and sincere in my portrayal of that creative
process” [http://www.wired.com/2010/11/pl_inception_nolan/all/].

24 Saito's opening remark that Cobb is a man possessed by radical notions immediately precedes the film's diving into a
flashback sequence in wish Cobb speaks of the transformative power of ideas. While Saito's remark seems to refer to
this belief, as the end sequence makes clear he is in fact referring to the underlying point of the film, in Cobb's belief
that “the world is not real.”
And leaving the film on this point, consider one final piece of evidence for this claim:
the surprise appearance of the title credits at the end of the film. Although otherwise
unremarked upon, the strange structure of the closing title serves a double purpose in
this reading: and less significantly for its role in naming the film than in celebrating its
success at its intellectual heist on the audience. For just as the act of inception on Fischer
is complete only when his dream concludes, so is Nolan's inception of his audience
complete only when the film itself ends.

End Comments:

If you liked this you might also enjoy my interpretations of The Dark Knight Rises,
Pan's Labyrinth and Skyfall. All of them are works in progress, so suggestions and
feedback are very welcome. If you'd like to be notified when I put up a new piece of
film criticism, email me anytime at [email protected].