Interesting! That is totally not what I thought at all--clearly at the end Nolan wants us to question everything we've just seen, and to think that Cobb is still dreaming. But I think he is trying to fake us out.
My theory is that we have to trust Ariadne's name and the rest of the story--as you know Bob, she's the one who brought Theseus out of the labyrinth with the string. So when she tells Arthur that Cobb will be all right, we have to take that as truth. And at the beginning when we see Cobb wash up on shore, by the end we're supposed to realize that she was right, that Cobb did find Saitou, and that Saitou did take the leap of faith with Cobb back up the ladder of dreams to the waking world. The imperfections in the spin of the top at the end make me think it will fall eventually--and also the subconscious projections handled it when they brought Cobb to Saitou, so its objectivity as a correlative can't be trusted absolutely anymore anyway. I thought Cobb was using that as a reminder of his guilt (which I thought him using as a psychic totem was brilliant).
Was it a pawn? Interesting. I thought it was a bishop, but I didn't look closely.
But know, thinking about it, I could totally buy your interpretation too. The only thing I'd say is that we did get some scenes at the beginning that weren't from Cobb's perspective, which would require more explanation. But yeah, totally plausible--and this is where the movie becomes a Rorschach test, of course. *g*
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regna
Re: My Speculation!
Date: 2010-07-24 03:04 (UTC)My theory is that we have to trust Ariadne's name and the rest of the story--as you know Bob, she's the one who brought Theseus out of the labyrinth with the string. So when she tells Arthur that Cobb will be all right, we have to take that as truth. And at the beginning when we see Cobb wash up on shore, by the end we're supposed to realize that she was right, that Cobb did find Saitou, and that Saitou did take the leap of faith with Cobb back up the ladder of dreams to the waking world. The imperfections in the spin of the top at the end make me think it will fall eventually--and also the subconscious projections handled it when they brought Cobb to Saitou, so its objectivity as a correlative can't be trusted absolutely anymore anyway. I thought Cobb was using that as a reminder of his guilt (which I thought him using as a psychic totem was brilliant).
Was it a pawn? Interesting. I thought it was a bishop, but I didn't look closely.
But know, thinking about it, I could totally buy your interpretation too. The only thing I'd say is that we did get some scenes at the beginning that weren't from Cobb's perspective, which would require more explanation. But yeah, totally plausible--and this is where the movie becomes a Rorschach test, of course. *g*