Fumanchu said:
Reasonable said:
Fumanchu said:
I find the whole concept of totems is such an annoying and unexplained paradox. It contradicts the ideology presented in the movie that you can't consciously be aware of something 'strange' until you wake up, so how could you then possibly assign 'strange' physics properties to an object subconsciously?
I really like the idea that the ending is Nolan's inception on the audience. He plants the seed of doubt to make you question its reality, through the totem and other red herrings throughout the film supporting either side.
I also like the fact that Cobb doesn't wait around for the totem to stop, meaning it doesn't matter as long as he's happy and with his children.
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I thought the Totem's were a nice idea. On one hand, purely functional, they were a nice way of recognizing that, if you could enter a dream state, you'd need some way to feel sure you had returned to normal waking reality.
They also clearly helped position one of the film's key concepts, that we mediate reality in our memory via defined objects and moments - our own store of Totem's. In this regard Mal's Totem, which Cobb takes for his own, nicely symbolizes his position and inability to let go of his past life with her and move on.
I would imagine you'd very much need something like a Totem if you where ever going to plunge into any VR or dream type state if it was really so real that you might find yourself unsure about whether you ever returned.
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I think you miss my point - I also think the totems were crucial for the audience in illustrating the questioning of reality concept and gives a nice simple, visual explanation. What I take offense to is the unstated logic that allows the individual to be consciously aware of this one objects behaviour to be able to provide them of this validation.
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I see. But the dreamers are always concious, so far as I could tell, that they'd been inserted into a dream (unless they end up in Limbo) - therefore in the dream they would be perfectly aware of their Totem and it's function and hence able to validate whether they were in a dream or not, wouldn't they? Only in Limbo, after the passage of a lot of (percieved not real) time where any dreamers shown to have forgotten themselves and their Totem's function.
I did feel that there was no reason given why a Totem would only function correctly while awake. There seemed to reason the Totem wouldn't, if dreamt properly, function just the same in a dream, leaving the owner completely adrift.
But hey, a made up world has made up rules so I guess you can nit pick too far.
