(Exercise) Analyzing my Favourite Movie for Narrative Perspective + Diction - Inception

Analyzing Inception with Narrative Perspective and Diction

Inception (2010) is easily my favourite movie of all time, and I've often wondered about the effect of following one character so closely has with the audience's understanding of the story. In this post, I'll be analyzing the film for narrative perspective and diction as if it were a short story.

Narrative Perspective:

The movie does not have a dedicated narrator who tells the story like The Grinch for example, but it does follow the life of Dominick Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio) very, very closely - it's almost like first person P.O.V. 

In the movie, Dominick Cobb and his team work as extractors who steal information from people in their dreams. Cobb has been doing this for so long that he needs a 'totem' to keep track of his reality so he knows when he's dreaming or not. Because the movie follows the story from his perspective, audiences just accept that what he's experiencing is reality and it's his story that we're invested in. However, in the final scene of the movie, his totem (a spinning top) does not fall over as it should when he is in reality, suggesting that the audiences had been following an unreliable protagonist through the story, and perhaps, most of what we had seen in the movie is just a dream and not reality at all...

Diction:

Diction is used to analyze writers' choice of words for the impact it has on readers/viewers understanding of the story. For Inception, there are many short quotations and one word phrases that stand out, but one in particular that really stayed with me is "you're waiting for a train..." said by Cobb and his wife, Molly. This is referenced as the beginning of a longer phrase that is used when Cobb convinces his wife Molly that the dream world they were living in for 50 years is actually not real at all, and they put their heads on a train track and wait for it to 'kill' them which actually just means waking them up from this very long dream. It's referenced over and over again, and it stuck with me because it's an interesting metaphor for waiting to die. It is a very powerful moment when Cobb has to convince his wife to kill herself despite it not being real, and I imagine what that would be like (utterly terrifying) if I were in that position and waiting with my head on the train tracks. Would I be able to go through with it? 

Movie Poster for Inception