Different Takes on Inception

This week in class we watched the movie Inception, a movie about the alternate realm of dreams. I was interested in what others thought of the film and I did a quick search to see what some of the fun, interesting, and totally not shady or dangerous lovely people of the internet had to say. I encountered an article on moviefone.com that laid out the most popular theories and their bases. One of the main theories was that the entire movie takes place outside of reality- in a dream, that is. It asks a really awesome and interesting question: if characters like Cobb and Arthur have totems, what is we the audience's totem? It also calls in a common principle from the film: asking yourself "How did I get here?". The movie starts in Saito's subconscious and moves on to his party and then shifts again to his apartment before finally shifting to the train on which Cobb and Arthur are attempting to steal secrets from Saito's mind. But since we don't see any sort of transition between the third and fifth scenes can we truly say for sure that the train scene is our first glimpse at reality? I think that these questions are questions that Christopher Nolan wants you to ask; and I think that he wants each viewer to have their own interpretation. Personally I take the movie at face value: the job is completed successfully and Cobb gets to return to his family and true reality. I feel this way because as someone who likes endings with closure and also as someone who sympathizes with Cobb and his plight my mind just might implode if that wasn't the case. If there is a second theory that I embrace, it is that everyone but Cobb returns to reality and Cobb returning to his family at the end is all his dream.