Thread: Inception Totom. Does It Work.

Originally Posted by dreamcatcher81

do you think that if he thought he may be sharing a dream he would put a bullet in his head. No because if you are pulled into someone else dream you are heavily druged and if u kill yourself you go into deeper limbo. Cobb told the mark this would happen in the bathroom scene.

This is not correct. If you were normally sharing a dream, putting a bullet in your head would just wake you up. When you are so heavily sedated as to have an Inception performed on you (which is not the 'normal' level of sedation), killing yourself drops you into a lower dream-state. Cobb's plea to Fisher was a con, in the bathroom. He was telling him the truth (that Fisher would drop into a lower dream state if he killed himself) but that truth is only because he was so heavily sedated. That part was a complete lie, on Cobb's part. Fisher was correct in suggesting that he would wake up - during an extraction - but this was in Inception, so Cobb had to stop him from killing himself.

In any normal extraction job - which is what the totems were created to defend against - killing yourself (or being killed) wakes you up, even under sedation.

Originally Posted by dreamcatcher

It should be noted that in the scene where cobbs right hand man explains the purpose of the totem, Cobb himself goes to a back room and spins his totem top for 15secs before it topples over. I counted.

During the end scene cobb spins his top again but this time it spins for more then 49 secs and we never see it topple. Interesting how the top topples in 15 secs earlier in the film - vs. 49secs of continous spinning once he takes his attention away from it.

You do understand that counting means nothing, during a movie. This is editing. I have read an interview where Christopher Nolan (the director) has said that the top was made specifically for its ability to spin for a long time, and that the length of the spin - even in the final scene - had no significance. When they initially showed the top spin and fall, they cut away from it and show Cobb's face. This completely kills all reference of time, and is not meant to imply that they showed the top for the entire duration of its spin.