I just want to put this somewhere, but not on Twitter because it is a HUGE SPOILER for the brilliant movie Inception that I saw a few weeks ago. Seriously, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t read this — you’re doing yourself a great disservice.

I’m serious — don’t think the movie is all hype and read this anyway. It really is that good, go see it.

Done? Okay. Here’s the real deal about Inception — I originally came up with this idea right after seeing the movie, but I haven’t seen it posted anywhere else yet, so I’m going to share it with you now.

Cobb’s “totem” isn’t the top. The top is his wife’s totem. Yes, he may have learned what the totem felt like somehow, and yes, he may have used it to incept his wife and make her believe that the world wasn’t real (and maybe it wasn’t — more on that in a second). But I don’t think he can just take her totem — because the totem is supposed to be something that only the dreamer can know about, it automatically wouldn’t work for him. She’d know just as much about it as he would.

I saw something online today that his wedding ring was his totem, and maybe that’s true — I haven’t done all of the research yet, but I don’t think it is his actual totem, just because that seems like Nolan would be hiding it a little too subtly. No, I think Nolan hid Cobb’s totem in plain sight.

So here’s my thought: Cobb’s totem … is his kids.

That’s why we don’t see their faces the whole time (because we can’t know what they look like), and that’s why they keep appearing in weird places, and that’s why he doesn’t want to look at them in the dream — if he looks at them and they’re not the same as his memory, that will tell him that he’s not where he belongs. And it’s why, at the end of the movie, he finally sees their faces, and recognizes them as his memories, and all is finally, finally right with the world.

Although I agree that it may not be — maybe, just as he stole his wife’s totem, she stole his. Either she realized that they were his totem, or just knew their children well enough to reproduce them. Either way, just because I do think the kids are his totem doesn’t mean I know for sure whether he’s dreaming at the end or not.

In fact, I’d probably argue that not even Nolan really “knows” if Cobb’s dreaming at the end or not according to the top. The whole time the movie was playing, I was worried that it would be all for nothing. The cliche twist ending of a movie about a dream within a dream within a dream is that even in the “real world,” they’re still dreaming. I could have told you that cliche even before the movie started. So the whole time they were running around the hotel and shooting people in the snow and running through the city, I kept thinking, “If this all turns out to be his dream, I’m going to be pissed. If Nolan does all of this, and it’s all just for a dream, what’s the point.”

And then, I got to the end, and the top spun around, and it shuttered and kept spinning, and ——

The screen went black, and with the rest of the theater, I gasped out loud. This cliche ending that I was suspecting the whole time had actually been turned on its head. The answer I thought I’d known all along had actually been taken away from me, and I imagined Nolan somewhere laughing manaically. “Oh, did you want to know the ending, Schramm? I thought it was all a cliche. I thought you didn’t care!”

So he got me with that one. But I think the ending is purposely ambivalent — the top does stutter at the end, so it’s possible that it will stop, and which means Cobb’s world is real, and he’ll live happily ever after, probably dreaming up wild cityscapes with Juno. But if the top doesn’t stop (and honestly, how would Nolan show that it doesn’t stop? If he wanted to show to the audience very clearly that the top keeps spinning, what would he do — have it sitting there for an hour before the screen went black?), then of course Cobb is still dreaming, and I’ve seen all kinds of weird theories about why that might be. Maybe he’s being incepted by someone else (which would explain why he’s spills his guts to Juno so easily, even when he can’t share his secrets with Joseph Gordon Levitt), maybe it’s a revenge thing by his wife, maybe he’s still in Limbo, etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, none of that really matters — the point of the movie is that it works, completely, whether or not that top level world is real. It works according to its own internal, weird logic (that the subconscious attacks the intruder, that a kick will wake you up but not being thrown around in a car, that you can share minds with some kind of drug and unexplained machine, and so on). As complicated and as labyrinthine as it gets — get it, mazes? — it all works.

Plus, that hotel fight scene was really awesome. And that Juno is really cute.