I saw Inception last night with Chef Goodguy at the Cleveland Cinemas Captiol Theatre. The Captiol is a gorgeous, renovated theatre in the Gordon Square Arts Distric featuring great movies with no attendance. We saw the film with 8 other people.

Maybe it was just my date or the romance of the abandoned theatre, but the aspect of Inception I walked away the most affected by was the tragic love story between Cobbs and Mal. While the movie’s genre is all capers and chase scenes, the motivation is a gut-wrenching story of love and loss.

Now, I only saw the movie once. I did read and listen to a bunch of analysis on No Popcorn, Please, but since they hardly mentioned this angle of the film, a run-down:

Boy meets girl while working as an architect of dreams.  (At some point, they marry and have two children.)  Together, boy and girl explore his medium, pushing the limits.

While experimenting, they wind up stuck together in dream limbo. To save her sanity, he hypnotises her into knowing that nothing is real. When they wake up (by dying in the limbo dream), she is still hypnotised.

Despite his explanations, she wants nothing more than to wake up (by dying in real life). Ultimately she frames her husband and kills herself.

Rather than kill himself to be with her, as she had hoped, he spends all his free time with his dream version of her.

Unfortunately, his day job involves spending a lot of time in the dream world, too, and  this gets all emotional and screwed up until he has to chose between his sanity and his wife.

Isn’t that romantic?  I mean, it’s not teenage girls with werewolves and vampires, but a very adult situation nonetheless.  They accidentally kill themselves and go to limbo together, then they kill themselves together to get out of limbo, then she kills herself thinking that life is limbo…  It just makes me want to wear black and write poetry.

I love you. Die.

My friends Matt and Bob have somes theories about Christopher Nolan’s skills or lack thereof in presenting humans with emotions.  Is Nolan incapable of showing the romance directly, or is he so skilled that he can hint to an entire romantic back story while focusing solely on the final guilt?

DiCaprio portrays the role of guilt-stricken lover with usual mastery, but Nolan robs us of some of the most emotional scenes in this tale.  As Matt points out, we never see Cobbs’ decision to let go of his wife.  Also missing is the moment when Cobbs decides he must brainwash his wife to save her.  Instead we get some cheesy dollhouse imagery.

In hiding this story’s romance, Nolan is dangling a carrot; “See, I have a soft side. Here’s a peak. Now let’s get back to blowing shit up. In three realities. Simultaneously.”

Finally, my own hair-brained theory for the “real reality” of Inception.  While I like the idea that Ariadne could have performed inception on Cobb, I propose that nothing says Mal was really dead.  If one can suppose that Cobb was dreaming the whole movie, it’s not hard to imagine Mal alive the whole time, entering his dream with the others.

Maybe Mal just jumped a level of limbo without Cobb, and she’s been real the whole time.  She’s always sabotaging his projects – maybe she was in there trying to bring him out of limbo to come back to the real world with her.  Now, I realize there are rules governing whether and how that could have been possible, but I dare someone to tell me Mal had to be dead.

(…maybe they had already lived a lifetime together, and they were bored, and still stuck in limbo together, and they took turns killing each other and pushing each other further into their comas, and each time one killed the other, the first would have to convince the second to kill themselves so the game could reset on the next level.)

The truth is I liked the movie because it reminded me of another morbid romance called What Dreams May Come.