On the Ending of Inception

A few quick words on Inception, particularly its ending. Even today, I hear confusion from some people as to what the ending meant, or even frustration as to Christopher Nolan’s alleged failure to provide us with a hard-and-fast answer to the question of whether Leo ever did manage to reach the real world or if the entire end of the movie is just another dream.

First off, I’d like to say that the ending is perfectly timed. When the spinning top wobbles, the image cuts out before we get to see if it will continue wobbling and eventually fall or just right itself and carry on forever. This is reality vs. the dream world in a nutshell, and withholding the final verdict from us creates ambiguity.

But that’s precisely what those confused by the ending or particularly expressing frustration at it are missing: the ambiguity is the point. Leo doesn’t care anymore whether he’s in the real world. This level of reality is where he gets to be with his children. This level of reality is where he has a life. So even if it’s not entirely real (and who’s to say?), it’s the reality he will choose to live out.

This is the choice that all of us face to one extent or another. True, we could all be living in the Matrix, we could all be living out a lie and really just be brains in vats. But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter. As long as I can make a good life for myself here, it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not. It’s where I live, and I will make the most of it.

Nolan really knows how to end a film, though. I think part of the reason he’s so universally acclaimed is because, psychologically, we as humans tend to remember the first and last items in a sequence better than anything in the middle. I imagine Nolan understands this and thus understands also the value of a good ending. He certainly puts a lot of effort into them. Sure, the ending of “TDKR” was lacklustre, but the ending of The Dark Knight is perfect. The endings of Batman Begins and Memento are terrific. The ending of “The Prestige,” well, your mileage may vary depending on how thoroughly you’ve thought out the mechanics of Hugh Jackman’s magic act. By the end of the film, I had thought about it and had already realized that the Hugh Jackman character had basically been drowning a replica of himself every night for the length of his entire performance run in a wonderfully grotesque metaphor for how he’d been tearing himself apart piece by piece after the death of his wife, so the final shot where we realize that the long rows of tanks each contain a dead Hugh Jackman didn’t have much revelatory value for me. Sure, it’s still a cool ending and the sudden cut to black, plunging the audience into darkness at the precise moment of maximum horror, is an effective technique (and consequently one that the ending leans on heavily). 

On this spectrum, the ending of Inception falls toward the upper end. It makes an unavoidable misstep in teasing us, provoking an automatic and involuntary reaction just when it needs us to step back and look at the situation more analytically. At the same time, if you’re basically a sociopath like me, you’ll have no problem looking at it analytically. So for me, it works in a way that the ending of The Prestige doesn’t, but for someone who didn’t get Inception that would probably go the other way around.