AaronFaulkner wrote:Here are some notes I've taken after the fourth viewing of the film.
The things I jotted down are things that have been said on here already or haven't been said. Specifically, I jotted down: rules of the world as dictated by character dialogue, dialogue that seemed to hint at special ideas, visual cues, and questions I had about occurences within the film.
I'm going to try to only include the notes that I haven't seen answered on here but I'm sure I'll repeat some questions that have been already answered. So please, bare with me.
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[Mr. Charles from the get-go?]
In the beginning Saito is in a dream with Cobb telling him about extraction. Saito ends up knowing he is in the dream. Is this not a variation of the "Mr. Charles"? Something else? Nothing?
[Who is grandma?]
[Who trains Fischer's mind to prevent extraction?]
[Ariadne's totem is a BISHOP]
I saw this tonight when I went to see it. The reason I know it's a bishops is: 1) The piece she takes out of the vice has a knob on the top of it (pawns have a smooth round top not a knobbed one) and 2) As she takes the piece out of the vice she tilts it slightly toward screen. If you look carefully you can see the slit up the top of the piece. Like a bishop.
[When Ariadne finds Mal in the basement she starts to tell Mal her name but Mal cuts her off: "I know who you are." How does Mal know who Ariadne is? Does the "know" simply mean I've seen you before or I "know" your name?]
From the dialogue exchange, it would seem to imply that Mal knows Ariadne's name as that's what Ariadne starts saying: "My name is..." But if this is so, how does Mal know her name when it hasn't been stated before? Simply because she is a part of Cobb's subconcious -- so she's privey to the information? Or something else?
[When Cobb is explaining to Ariadne about Mal's death, there is a sequence in the flashback where Cobb takes the children away from Mal.]
She screams: "You think i don't know my children." The next conversation is an argument, still in the house, betwen Cobb and Mal. The exchange is...
COBB: If this is a dream, then why can't I control this?
MAL: Because you don't know you're dreaming!!
The interesing thing to note is that Cobb says "control." It's interesting because we never see Cobb control anything. What does this mean? We get a possible answer later in the movie that if Cobb knows the layout of the maze, it's easier for Mal to corrupt the mission. Is this it? Or is there more?
[In Eames' dream world, Cobb makes sure Ariadne stays with him. When she offers to take Fischer into the hospital because she created the layout Cobb tells her: "No, you stay with me."]
Why does he do this? Why is it important for her to stay with him?
[How does Professor Miles know Cobb will be arriving at the airport?]
[Do the kids clothes change or stay the same from beginning to end?]
We see the kids a few times. The reoccuring images of the kids are very similar but not the same. James' outfit is the one that remains the same and it is Phillipa's outfit that changes. She wears for most of the flashbacks and interruptions to the Fischer job with a solid red dress/blouse. In the flashback of the argument between Cobb and Mal, she wears a stripped shirt. At the very end in the last moments, she wears a red and white outfit.
[Is Mal in the window after Cobb wakes up from Yusuf's sedation test?]
Yes, it's a long shot of the window with the curtains covering her but you can look through to see the figure. This is followed by a medium closeup of Mal sitting in the window.
[Ariadne's and Arthur's totem??]
We never get to see Ariadne or Arthur use their totem. Why?
[When Mal commits suicide and jumps off the ledge, is the room behind her trashed?]
No. The room behind her is fine. She purposefully lures Cobb to the wrong room so that she can simultaneously talk to him and try to convince him to come with her without letting him have any chance of physically stopping her. That's why she gets an apartment directly across from the one he's in.
[When Cobb and Ariadne go after Fischer into limbo, do they connect the device to Fischer?]
No. They do not. The place the box down quite a ways from Fischer and we only see them hook themselves up. The reason they end up in limbo is because they are putting themselves into sleep, going another level down, without having the architecture of the next level down created. Because it's not created, they can only go to limbo.
[What does Professor Miles say to Cobb at the airport?]
He most certainly does say "You're welcome." I'm positive. He says two words. The last of which is "welcome." Even if you didn't catch the first word he says, if you watch carefully, you can see his mouth move and see he says two words. The "welcome" is a bit louder than the "you're" and as I said, the "welcome" is the last word out of his mouth. So it's a pretty good bet that the first word he says is "you're." There's really not much else that first word could be that would still make sense.
Thoughts??????
My thoughts (after watching this way too many times, lol).
Cobb wasn't playing being "Mr. Charles" in the beginning scene, but at the same time was trying to pull a similar con job at Saito. Apparently, Saito already knew who he was from the start, so it was no point of to use that character. It's was proven that Saito already known who Cobb was later on when he told him he purposely was testing them all along.
The grandmother (Mal's mom). From what we know from reasoning is that she has custody of Cobb's kids. We also know that she faults Cobb for the death of Mal (whether it be because of suicide or alleged murder as the police presumed as it was). It's implied that her and Miles are separated, being that she's in California and he's in Paris, it's also implied as well as she's French due to the fact that Mal is French and the mother's voice sounded as thou it's a french accent. Who is the grandmother isn't hard to deduct. The question is the custody of the children and why they are all still "supposely" living in Cobb's house? We have to assume that once Cobb left without saying goodbye that the grandmother was there watching over the kids. There's nothing else that tells us otherwise. However, we do not know if she was living there with them at the time or decided to stay there after he left or nothing. Whatever the case maybe, it's very odd (if it's not all a dream in the 1st place).
As for the question of who trained Fischer's to militarize his projections, it's been implied throughout the film that Cobb and his team aren't the only ones that are in the dream-sharing/extracting business. It's apparently an underground criminal business with several team extractors working for miscellaneous competing corporations. Obviously, if Fischer suppose to be the aire of his father's empire that his father, or most likely Browning, had hired a team to train him to avoid extraction (similar to what Cobb was
pretending to do for Saito in the beginning of the movie).
Ariadne's totem is indeed a bishop. Unfortunately I do not know the significance behind it, if any.
Mal knows who Ariadne is simple because she is Cobb's projection. Everything Cobb knows, she knows because it's all in his head. This is why Ariadne was so concern about Cobb knowing details of the mazes because of the threat of Mal showing up and jeopardizing everything.
As for Cobb being aware or unaware if he's dreaming or not during his spat with Mal. A dreamer can control and manipulate everything in their dream if they want to. Cobb shown Ariadne this during their training session. But if Cobb is unaware that he's dreaming, there there's no way he can control or manipulate the dream. This was Mal's argument, that her and Cobb are still lost in limbo where she believes that Cobb accepted limbo as their reality. This is sorta a twist to everything, because it is the total opposite from when they were in actual limbo and Cobb had to create inception to get Mal to believe their world is not real.
The reason why Ariadne have to stay with Cobb is so she can monitor him. He's a hazard to the entire mission because of his built in guilt over Mal. Ariadne wasn't even suppose to be with them in the 1st place, she was only suppose to create the mazes and show them to the team. Cobb promised Miles that she wasn't going to be with them for the actual mission, but Ariadne insisted because she feels Cobb is a threat to himself and everybody else. Cobb doesn't even trust himself which is why he agreed for Ariadne to monitor him.
We don't know how Miles know to pick Cobb up at the airport. It's part of the ambiguity of if it was all a dream or reality. We can assume that prior to leaving Cobb told Miles to pick him up. We do know from earlier that Miles was going to head back to the states to see his grandchildren which was why Cobb brought presents to him for the children.
The clothes are different in the end. Not only this has been proven by frozen photos of the kids in the end in comparison from the rest of the film, Nolan and the fashion design themselves stated this. This does not mean that the ending is REAL, because Cobb has the power to project anything he wants in a dream, especially if he wants it so bad for it to be real. The only thing that was preventing him from that is Mal. Like what Cobb stated to Miles when asked why he couldn't create new dreams anymore, "Mal won't let me".
Mal is shown behind the curtains sitting on the window sill after the sedation test at Yusef's basement. It's clearly after effects from the dream/ flashbacks. This is what made Cobb to pull out his totem to verify if he was still dreaming or not which, unfortunately he was unable to due to Saito's interruption.
We never see Ariadne and Arthur using their totem because for what reason? This film isn't based around Ariadne, Arthur, Eames, Saito, Yusef, or even Fischer. It's based about Cobb's journey and his emotional struggles with reality and dreaming. The only we need to know is that they do have totems and it's easily assumed that they use their too since they have them. It doesn't push the story forward at all to have scenes of each one using them.
No, Mal did not purposely lure Cobb in the wrong room. As Cobb said to Ariadne, him and Mal share that room suite every anniversary. What Mal did was opened another room adjecent to their room without him knowing. She trashed their own room to make it appear they had a fight before pushed off the ledge.
