Author: metatim

Categories
analysis

Inception Diagram and Explanation (spoilers, obviously)

If you’ve somehow found yourself looking at this page but actually want to avoid Spoilers for Inception, you should leave now.

Right.

People are posting Inception Theories all over the internet, but even the ones that agree with me aren’t explaining it properly. So naturally I’m here to try to put that right.

Of the major categories of theories out there, my preferred interpretation of the film is this: Mal Was Right. More specifically, at Mal’s external direction, Saito incepts Cobb to believe he must wake up, and Ariadne purges him of his demons. Here’s a diagram that shows what I think the underlying setup actually is (click for full size):

I’ll first explain what’s happening in that diagram, and then explain as briefly as possible why I think that’s the case, closely referencing lines in the film at each point.

The Diagram

Prior to the moment shown here, the flashbacks seen in the film took place. Mal (Marion Cotillard) and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) went into limbo, Cobb incepted Mal so she would want to wake up, which she did first by joining Cobb on the train tracks in limbo and then by jumping from the building after failing to convince Cobb they were still dreaming. She thus reaches the top level of the diagram.

Cobb remains in a nested dream. In that level, he believes Mal is dead, blames himself, and although he wants to get back to his kids he’s punishing himself for what happened. At the same time, he is haunted by his subconscious projection of the pre-incepted Mal, who just wants him to hang out with her in limbo forever.

At the top level, Mal realises that Cobb is effectively in danger, as he could potentially be drawn back into limbo and lose his mind. She calls Miles (Michael Caine) for help; Miles brings Saito (Ken Watanabe) and also realises the character we know as Ariadne (Ellen Page) might be able to help. They formulate a plan to incept Cobb so that he will wake up.

The Reasoning

When interpreting a film like Inception, a good guideline is to try to take as much of the film as possible at face value. The more of it it you treat as being a misrepresentation, the more interpretations become possible, and things quickly get out of hand.

The following is based on notes I took while watching the film for a second time, so while the dialogue may not be word-perfect the sequence of events and key lines are accurate.

The Setup

The first scene to note is in the helicopter, when Saito requests that Cobb perform an inception. Cobb asks for a guarantee, but Saito has no way to prove he can and will arrange for Cobb to go home. His final plea to Cobb is interesting:

Saito: Do you want to take a leap of faith, or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?

Cobb seems to be moved by this, and ultimately agrees.

The next scene to note is when Cobb visits Miles, where the following exchange takes place:

Miles: Come back to reality Cobb… please.
Cobb: This last job, that’s how I get there.

That’s top-level Miles, creating the subconsious idea that after this job, Cobb can come back to ‘reality’.

Miles then arranges for Ariadne to join the team. As they begin to train her, Ariadne investigates Cobb. At one point he is connected to the dream machine alone and she joins him, to discover that he is attempting to lock away the projection of Mal, but evidently can’t resist going back to her. She presses upon him the idea that this won’t be enough:

Ariadne: You’re trying to keep her alive, aren’t you? You can’t just create a prison of memories to hold her in. Do you really think that could contain her?

Once the inception begins, Saito is shot, and it is explained that under their heavy sedation death will put you into limbo, where time passes much faster and you can effectively lose your mind. At this point there is a reprise of the earlier dialogue as Cobb expresses concern that Saito will fall into limbo and forget their arrangement, but Saito reassures him:

Saito: I will still honour our arrangement
Cobb: No, you will be an old man
Saito: Filled with regret…
Cobb (seemingly unsure of why he is saying this): … waiting to die alone.
Saito: No, I will come back, and we will be young men again.

The Missing Scene

Later, Ariadne pushes Cobb for more detail on what happened in the past, and we are given a more detailed flashback. He explains how he planted the idea that they were not awake, and this idea remained with her even after they both escaped limbo by lying on the train tracks.

Mal is seen at a chopping board, toying idly with the spinning top in her left hand. At this point, one particular scene is conspicuous by its absence. We know Mal uses the top to determine if she is still in a dream. The natural thing to do would be to spin the top, but we are not shown this happening.

We can infer what must have happened. If the top had kept spinning, Cobb would have been forced to admit she was right; therefore, it must have stopped. Why was this not enough to convince her? The clue is in this piece of dialogue:

Cobb: If this is a dream, why can’t I change anything?
Mal: Because you don’t know you’re dreaming.

Mal’s hypothesis would appear to be that as the dreamer, Cobb shapes the world to his own assumptions – he doesn’t think he can change anything, so nothing changes; he doesn’t believe they’re dreaming, so the top falls. (This idea is also endorsed by Saito’s line from near the beginning: “In my dream we play by my rules.”)

While this might seem a bit of a reach, we can also infer that the use of totems, invented by Mal, changed after this point. It instead became about the heft of the object, and rules about others touching the object were introduced. Cobb learned from the mistake of using the top.

(We might also ask why such a scene wasn’t shown. My guess is that showing Mal make this argument in any more detail would lend too much weight to the “It’s a dream” interpretation at the end; it would also risk alienating the audience seeing it for the first time, for whom the top is a key navigational aid).

The Final Setup

Finally in the flashback we see Mal’s apparent suicide, where she asks Cobb to make a leap of faith. Now we understand something strange is happening – Saito echoed this line in the helicopter, then associated with it the risk of becoming an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone.

If Mal was right, and her suicide woke her up, then the situation depicted in the diagram arises. The best way for her to get Cobb to wake up is to incept him, just as he did to her. But this would be difficult, because he knows how it is done. We’re also told the mark for an inception must believe they came up with the idea themself. As we’ll see, this is exactly what happens.

At the close of this interlude, Ariadne lays out exactly what Cobb has to do in order to move on:

Ariadne: Your guilt is what powers her. If we are to succeed you have to forgive yourself, and confront her

After the apparent failure at the snow fortress, it’s Ariadne who proposes they enter limbo to bring back Fischer. There they confront Cobb’s projection of Mal. Guided by what Ariadne has said earlier, and helped by Ariadne in the moment, Cobb finally rejects her:

Mal: We can still be together… right here.
Ariadne: You can’t stay here to be with her!
Cobb: I’m not. […] I can’t stay with her any more because she doesn’t exist.

The Inception

Ariadne and Fischer kick out of limbo, leaving Cobb to bring back Saito in a climactic scene given special emphasis by being introduced at the very start of the movie. Here, the inception takes place: Cobb echoes the lines he has been primed with, convinced that it is his own idea that he and Saito are not really awake, while actually delivering exactly the message the real Mal wants him to receive (full dialogue taken from IMDb):

Saito: So have you come to kill me? I’ve been waiting for someone to come for me…
Cobb: Someone from a half remembered dream…
Saito: Cobb? Impossible – He and I were young men together, now I’m an old man.
Cobb: Filled with regret…
Saito: Waiting to die alone…
Cobb: I’ve come back to remind you of something… something you once knew…
[the camera dwells on the still spinning top]
Cobb: that this world isn’t real…
Saito: To convince me to honor the arrangement.
Cobb: To take a leap of faith, yes. Come back, and we’ll be young men together again. Come back to me…
[Saito reaches for the gun]
Cobb: Come back…

As Cobb delivers these lines, he looks confused, as if he’s not sure where they are coming from. He has been incepted.

The plan as originally stated seems to be complete, and Cobb returns to his kids. He spins the top, but does not wait to see what happens to it. It’s apparent that at least the first result of his experience is that he is no longer concerned with which world he is in; having forgiven himself and let go of his regrets, he allows himself this moment of happiness.

If the inception worked, it’s possible over time he will come to believe that Mal was right after all, ultimately committing suicide. On the other hand, thanks to Ariadne guiding him to reject the temptation of his projection of Mal, he’s no longer in danger of falling prey to limbo. As such, even if the inception doesn’t work, eventually enough time may pass that he will simply wake up when the dream comes to an end naturally.

Bonus Points

The idea built up in Cobb’s mind is that if he does not escape the dream, he will become an old man filled with regret. It’s interesting that the song chosen to signal the end of a dream is “Je ne regrette rien” / “I regret nothing”, associating waking up with having no regrets.

Even under a more straightforward interpretation of the film, Ariadne is very mysterious. Aside from having an obviously fitting name for someone that will lead Cobb out of the labyrinth, Cobb observes that he has “Never seen anyone pick [dream architecture] up so quickly”; she’s also aware of the plan while in the dream, despite the fact that Cobb later says to Fischer (possibly as misdirection) that to do so takes “years of training”. Her active part in investigating and then purging Cobb’s hangups is also particularly obvious on a second viewing.

Finally, a nice line which is by no means definitive, but still gives you pause if you’re thinking along these lines at the time you hear it:

Cobb (on the phone to his kids): Mommy’s not here any more.
Child: Where?

Categories
analysis

Learning from Disney's mistakes

Up until Home on the Range in 2004, Disney was releasing a hand-drawn animated feature pretty much every year. The Princess and the Frog marks their return to the form after a gap of five years. I read the story behind this output interruption in a few places, but it became clear that nobody was bringing the data behind it together in a clear way, so that’s what I’ve tried to do here.

The turning point is 2004, and the question is this: What will become of animated movies in general, and Disney animation in particular?

Before we go any further, we should first consider the difficult subject of what makes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ film. We might expect ‘the public’ to be more fickle and hold more irrational biases than critics, so if we want to do any kind of analysis on film quality we need to decide which metric to use.

Here I consider the salient pre-2004 animation output of Disney, Dreamworks and Pixar, and plot the IMDb user score (as an adequate proxy for public opinion) against the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate rating (as a fairly accurate proxy for critical opinion):


(Note that you can click to view the full size version, as with all the graphs on this blog).

The relationship between critical and public opinion is not as loose as we might have expected, so either metric can be used.

Public Perception

We can get an idea of the public perception of animation in 2004 by plotting the IMDb rating against the release date for these films, and taking note of the path followed by each studio:

The trends are clear. Pixar is riding high, Dreamworks is solidly mediocre in 2D and 3D animation with the notable exception of Shrek (and so, inevitably, Shrek 2), while Disney’s output is inconsistent but mostly below Dreamworks’ 2D output – a pretty poor position considering their heritage.

Studio perception

If we were making a hard-nosed business decision on the future of Disney animation in 2004, we might instead consider a graph of Production budget vs US Gross:

Caveats: US gross is used instead of International gross as that depends on too many other factors to give a clear output. Production budgets are released by the studios but are likely to deviate from the ‘true’ figure depending on their motives. Marketing budgets will also be significant, as will revenues from merchandising and (particularly for animation) DVD sales, so this data alone cannot be used to derive profitability – but it should be a good guide.

With the exception of the surprisingly excellent Lilo & Stitch (2002) and Dreamworks’ first foray into 3D, Antz (1998), the profit-making upper field are all 3D, while the loss-making lower portion are all in 2D. Why is this the case?

Pixar were desperately trying to prove the potential of the 3D medium, and then maintain that success. A single failure on their part could undo all the years of work it had taken to get to Toy Story.

Disney could be described as complacent, apparently expecting the world to enjoy whatever they put out – with the fascinating and ambitious exception of Treasure Planet (2002), in which 2D animation was drawn on top of 3D renderings, with disastrous (financial) results.

Dreamworks had Shrek and that was about it – a lucky break, and an outlier compared with their other animation output.

What would Disney do?

Well, in the case of Walt Disney himself, it’s generally agreed that he would have invested in 3D animation long before, as he had pioneered so many major animation advances in his lifetime. For the current Disney studio, it seemed clear that they should at the very least get into 3D animation. This was a fair conclusion.

What seemed far less reasonable was the decision (made even before Home on the Range came out) to abandon hand-drawn animation entirely – along with decades of accumulated tacit knowledge and expertise – and to utterly fail to address the far harder creative problem of making Good Films, regardless of the medium used.

The result was Chicken Little (5.8 on IMDb, 36% on Rotten Tomatoes) and The Wild (5.4 and 18%), with box office performance and ratings even worse than the abandoned hand-drawn animation features.

Change of plan

If you can’t beat them, buy them – so Disney bought Pixar in 2006.

Much as I am wary of attributing broad historical change to individuals for the convenience of storytelling, it seems clear that Pixar’s John Lasseter Knew What He Was Doing. He recognised that the true aim should always have been to make Good Films regardless of the medium, that abandoning traditional hand-drawn animation was a terrible and almost irreversible mistake, and with this understanding and his new position as Chief Creative Officer for both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, he began to turn things around.

The 3D got better. Meet the Robinsons came out in 2007 (IMDb 6.9, RT 66%) and was followed in 2008 by Bolt (IMDb 7.4, RT 88%); the recently released Princess and the Frog (IMDb 7.6, RT 85%) represented the triumphant return to the kind of hand-drawn animation that had driven Disney’s reputation for so many decades. This leads us to the final crucial point: to what extent is the quality of a film reflected in its box office returns?

The broad sweep is that better films get better results, but it’s clear there is some substantial variation. A key additional factor is reputation (or expectation). Chicken Little performed surprisingly well given it’s rating, as movie-goers were optimistic about Disney’s move into 3D.  Similarly, Shark Tale rode high on the success of Shrek. On the other side of the curve, Toy Story was highly rated and very successful, but with no reputation to support it sits at the bottom of the box-office curve. What’s of most interest here is The Princess and The Frog: very well received, but at the bottom of the curve, demonstrating how far Disney’s reputation has fallen. Bolt demonstrates the same problem.

Conclusions

Disney themselves must now maintain the strong output, as a single flop could undo the years of work it has taken to rebuild to this point.

The more general lessons to take away are first, beware of confirmation bias and correlation / causation errors; and second, in creative endeavours, the ends justfiy the means. Or to put it another way, the picture is more important than the camera.

-metatim

P.S. If you want to analyse the data yourself, I’ve put what I gathered (including worldwide gross figures) in this Google Docs spreadsheet.

Categories
experiment

Celebrations tubs in 2009: now with 12.3% less chocolate!

This is just a quick update on my previous posts about the distribution of chocolates in tubs of Celebrations.

I recently purchased two tubs and noticed a change in the distribution, mainly because there is now 12.3% less chocolate (by mass) in a tub than there was in 2008!

This means a typical tub contains around 95 chocolates, down from 107 previously, presumably in reaction to the Current Financial Climate. Two tubs is not enough to make any strong inferences about exactly how the distribution has changed, however, it does seem as if the previously over-represented Mars, Snickers and Bounty account for most of the reduction, with the much-coveted ‘Teasers’ remaining the same at 13 per tub, and the rarest Galaxy chocolates may even have increased from just 22 in a tub to perhaps 25 (adding all three types together).

Personally I still consider Celebrations to offer a superior selection, and there may well have been similar stealthy reductions in other chocolate collections. Perhaps in 2010 we can look forward to a return to 1kg tubs, no doubt accompanied by much fanfare proclaiming “14% more!”.

-metatim

Categories
participant

Sandpit 13: The Postman, Free London’s Monsters

(Continuing from my first post introducing Sandpit 13, which took place on the 24th June 2009, and the next which described The Following)

The Postman

This was unlike other games in one particularly interesting regard: it did not have a beginning or, apparently, an end.

It began when we noticed that scattered around the Spirit Level in the Southbank Centre were cards with a simple warning written on them: “Watch out for the Whistling Postman”. A while later, when we found ourselves between games, we noticed a strange man whistling ostentatiously and clutching a set of envelopes – and when approached, he looked through these envelopes, and found one apparently addressed to each of us. (Mine was addressed “You Here Now SBC”).

These envelopes contained cryptic messages, which eventually led us to another strange fellow sitting outside, who in turn directed us to search for ribbons in a certain place, where no ribbons could be found, but there were a handful of other people looking for red ribbons.

Such was the nature of the game. Strange clues and apparently broken mechanisms, which nonetheless led to gradually larger groups of people teaming up to work together on whatever it was that we were doing, without having any idea what that was. This strange process reached a fantastically surreal climax when our group (now numbering ten, and each with a red ribbon) converged on a phone box just as another group of ten (with white ribbons!) did the same, and then the phone rang.

There was then a brief period of sanity as a recognisable structure had emerged: two teams, following clues and interacting with strange characters to progress towards the unknown end – which a short time later we appeared to reach, in the form of a website: FruitsOfTheHeart.co.uk, which had only a countdown timer to a point some 7 days hence.

I was fascinated, but the other players seemed disappointed. They followed the last stooge we had interacted with to see if anything else would happen. It didn’t seem to.

As far as I can tell, it seems it was all part of a larger Alternate Reality Game, some part of which it appears was being played out at the subsequent Edinburgh Fringe festival, but other parts seem (at the time of writing) to be ongoing, possibly making much of today’s aesthetically pleasing date. (I particularly liked a comment on the website from ‘A Critic’ that simply read “This isn’t really theatre any more”. I hope they take that as a compliment).

I like that this kind of thing goes on, even if I don’t feel driven to fully engage with it; crucially, dabbling was still fun. However, in the context of an evening of games, there’s no doubt some people found the open-ended nature of the thing frustrating, and the actors/stooges didn’t seem quite prepared for the barrage of questions put to them by the players. There’s often a barrier to entry of ARG’s in terms of catching up with back-story, so I would be interested to see someone tackle the challenge of creating a similar experience that was firmly bounded within a single evening.

Free London’s Monsters

Having played and indeed designed mobile GPS games before, we knew more than most others when we stepped up to deposit a credit card and pick up a smartphone in order to play Free London’s Monsters, by (?) Fish Are People Too.

“It uses GPS, right?” we asked; yes, it did.

“Does it work?”

They smiled. “Clearly you are familiar with this sort of thing.”

The game, it turns out, was smartly simple. (Much like early video games, this is generally the best recipe for success in a new medium). Given a piece of paper with photos of scenery from around the Southbank area, the task is to locate the locations from which the images were taken. Through the miracle of GPS, upon reaching one of these locations the smartphone would emit a wonderfully laid-back warning: “Monster. Monster. Monster. Monster”, and indeed if you held the phone up, the screen showed the scenery around you (through the phone’s camera) and some surreal kind of monster lurking on top of it (actually just a floating 2D image). To prove your successful finding of the monster it was necessary to answer a question about it on the sheet of paper, such as “How many teeth does it have” or “what colour are its dogs”.

This happily transformed what seemed to be a flaw in the design into a fun feature. Given the current accuracy of GPS, hotspots must necessarily be large (the Mscape Experience Design Guidelines [pdf] recommend a diameter of 20 meters), and this meant we would often bump into a monster before we expected to, or even one we weren’t expecting to see at all. We would then use a combination of the pictures on the paper and the context of the question to work out which monster we were actually looking at.

The problems alluded to in our opening conversation seemed to hinge on the time it takes for the GPS navigational signals to be received before the device can understand and begin to track its location. I have found myself that GPS devices sometimes need several minutes with a clear view of the sky before this modern equivalent of the modem handshake can be completed, and given these devices were being handed out from an indoor location it came as little surprise that many would-be monster hunters had trouble getting enough ‘Captoplasm’ (a nice in-game analogue of the satellite signal level) in order to play successfully.

Returning with a goodly haul of monsters, we discussed the game with the creators, who evidently have an excellent grasp of the technical and gameplay mechanics they are wrestling with. In particular, I think it’s very sensible to combine a pen-and-paper mechanic with the location-based technology, combining the strengths of each.

There will be an opportunity to Free Bristol’s Monsters at the imminent Igfest, which starts tomorrow and is highly recommended. The Sandpit concept itself is currently on tour until 12th November 2009, with forthcoming visits to Bristol, Liverpool, Southend, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Nottingham, Sheffield and Newcastle Upon Tyne planned, so be sure to check it out if you find yourself in the vicinity.

-metatim