Michael Caine Finally Explained What Happened At The End Of Inception
Time- After more than eight years of debate over the ending of Inception, Michael Caine has offered some clarity on the movie’s mysterious final moments.
While speaking at a Film 4 Summer Screen showing of Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed thriller, Caine—who played the father of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb—shared some insider knowledge on whether Cobb was awake or dreaming in Inception‘s closing sequence.
“When I got the script of Inception, I was a bit puzzled by it,” Caine said. “And I said to [Nolan], ‘I don’t understand where the dream is.’ I said, ‘When is it the dream and when is it reality?’ He said, ‘Well, when you’re in the scene, it’s reality.’ So get that — if I’m in it, it’s reality. If I’m not in it, it’s a dream.” There you have it, Inception fans. Since Caine is in the final scene, it’s reality. Case closed. The totem falls.
Michael Caine, you handsome, wonderful, extremely distinguished man! Thank you for finally giving us an answer and scratching an itch that Christopher Nolan gave millions of us 8 fucking years ago. I know endings like the one in Inception are great because it allows people to discuss what they THINK happened like intellectuals while hopped up on a tub of Cherry Coke. But when all is said and done, I just want to know what happened to the fictional characters I spent the last few hours investing my life into and care about more than my own friends and family members. That’s just how I work. I am an average person with an average brain and I need people to spell things out for me while giving me closure. Even if there was just a sentence at the end of the credits that said “Leo is alive and his kids love him and everything is fine despite that bitch Mal trying to fuck everything up and now you can feel better about your own life because this fictional story has a happy ending”, I’d be thrilled.
Yeah I’m sure it’s not as artistic as the totem potentially spinning forever in our minds and being a harder mystery to crack than MJ vs. LeBron. But I’m a sucker for a payoff, whether it’s good or bad. Like I love Tony Soprano despite him being a lying, cheating, murdering piece of shit for most of the show’s existence. But I still wanted to know how The Sopranos actually ended instead of debating what happened all these years later and reading thesis papers on the symbolism in that final scene. If Tony got got, I wanted to see that red spray of blood come out of his head followed by his brains splattering all over his shitty son’s face while Steve Perry tells us to don’t stop believing. Yeah it’s gruesome. But I put in way too much time into that show for it to just fade to black. Again, I get the artsy side of it and blah blah blah. But after 10 years or so, just tell us what exactly happened so we can all move on to pick apart every little bit of whatever show or movie we are watching today. So thank you for your service, Sir Michael Caine. You are truly a gentleman with a delightful accent that brightens my day whenever I see you in a movie or in this gif.
