(no subject)

[ivyfic]

So I am rewatching Inception. In most of the fanon I've seen, there's a pre-movie timeframe where Mal was one of the team of thieves, with Cobb and Arthur. But in the movie, in the scene between Cobb and Mal's father (?), he says, "I didn't teach you to be a thief." Cobb replies, "After what happened, there weren't a lot of legitimate options for my skillset." (paraphrased)

But that means that he only became a thief after Mal died. Whatever he was doing with the dream technology before hand was not extraction. So that fanon doesn't fit.

Granted most fanon for Inception is very hand wavy, because the movie calls into question the entire fabric of the movie, and if you don't assume some of it's real, there's no room to build anything in. It seems like most stuff is either vaguely pre-movie, with the above mentioned continuity error, or is vaguely after movie, without addressing the end of the movie at all. Hand wave! Hand wave! On to Arthur and Eames getting it on.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

My interpretation of the movie is that Cobb never left limbo. The entire movie takes place in his dream reality. Therefore none of it--even the rules about extraction, or the fact that criminals do this--is reliable information. It's all explained either by Cobb or by Cobb's avatars. With Saito echoing dialogue from Cobb's memories with Mal, I don't see any other way it could work. But that means I have no reason to trust that Mal exists, either.

To me, it's kind of like Usual Suspects--at the end of that movie, the only thing you know happened is the opening scene. In this movie, all of it happened in Cobb's mind, and his perception of what is real is clearly faulty.

The fanfic assumes the top layer was real, otherwise there's nothing to build with. But I just don't see how that could work.