OOC - FAQ, updated 3/21/2011
Since Mal at TLV is, as of late February, now diverging a lot from Inception canon, I figured I'd write up a thing for her. It's as much for my own benefit as for others'-I like having a resource or two where I can keep track of my own ideas and thoughts on her characterisation, and I figured it can only help to have a place to point people if they have questions.
So, let's do this.
So what was going on with Mal before the Terrible Thing with Costigan?
She was convinced she was still trapped in some kind of dream space. Basically within Limbo, or a pocket of it, or some other shared unconscious-to accommodate her delusions, she was willing to explain it to herself as some further depth of dream-exploration that she'd never been able to access before. Through this, she was also able to explain the failure (as she saw it) to commit suicide-by-Aztec as some kind of manipulation of her own consciousness by whoever had organised this dream-space.
Also, Mal's ability to dream without a PASIV is severely curtailed these days. Gels asked me once if you dreamed in Limbo and I went "graaahhh, I dunno, fuck you Nolan"-but I think perhaps the answer to that is actually No. And if you don't dream without the PASIV, what you experience when you're sleeping normally is ... probably going to be a lot like what you'd experience in Limbo. Watch as I explain away all the reasons Mal's delusion would have persisted! It's magic!
Anyway, moving on ... Initially she believed that most of the people around her were projections, but as time progressed, she came to believe instead that most, if not all of them were dreamers who had lost their sense of identity, who had been in Limbo for so long that they'd forgotten who they were.
And Costigan?
Well, follow that logic above and combine it with the fact that Costigan's another DiCaprio, and you can imagine it wasn't long before she decided he was actually an amnesiac Cobb.
Why'd she kill him?
To give him a kick, of course. By that point (at the tail end of a pack of crazy floods and ports, and also experiencing Issues with Angelica's dear husband going away and coming back), Mal had managed to convince herself right around the bend into thinking that all she needed to do was give him a kick, and then herself, and all would be well.
So now that she knows about the inception that Cobb performed on her, she's sane now, right?
Well ... yes and no.
I Am Not A Psychologist/Psychiatrist, but I'm pretty sure it only works that way in the movies. Admittedly, for all intents and purposes, the Barge is "the movies", so I'm trying to straddle a line between that and what little I know about the real-world business of delusional insanity.
Mal knows now that her delusion was, in fact, a delusion, and is smart enough and educated enough in her chosen field to grasp the whole thing intellectually. She can even sketch out what mode of treatment she'd recommend for someone in her position. However, that doesn't alleviate the fact that the idea is, as Cobb himself once said, an extremely resilient parasite. The surreality of the Barge doesn't help either. She is constantly having to remind herself that what she has experienced is all real.
The unfortunate corollary to that is that it's forced her to acknowledge her own demise and the role her husband played in it. This is making her very, very, very angry. This anger is going to cause issues for a long time to come, and will be the main impediment to her graduation.
She's not delusional about Costigan anymore, is she?
Nope. Again, there's still the lingering idea and the fact that she has to remind herself consciously, and fairly often, but she knows who he is. And boy, does she ever feel guilty.
So one thing I've always been wondering is, why is Mal an inmate, anyway?
Obviously Cobb bears a vast weight of responsibility for screwing up his poor wife's head. This is why I hope that someday further down the line, whether via a flood or port or via a player showing up, Mal gets a chance to punch Cobb in the face.
However, to me, there's two main reasons why she's an inmate.
The first is that, delusion or no delusion, framing someone for your own murder is bad shit. What she did requires a fairly impressive degree of calculation and play-acting, and she went about destroying Cobb methodically and thoroughly before killing herself.
The second reason only occurred to me a few weeks ago. Part of this may be me bringing my own baggage to the table but eh, whatever.
If there's one thing that's a constant for Mal, sane or crazy, it's that the Real World (by which we mean the world in which she was born, lived, married, had children, etc.) has never been quite satisfactory for her. She wanted to stay in Limbo and forget she had any life outside of it. Why's that? Well, if you're feeling gotten down by your job and your family, and if the real world is full of things that are never quite the way you wish they were, wouldn't you want to stay in Limbo, where you were the God-Queen of your own universe?
So then she's back in the real world, back in the mundane, with her job, the kids, the husband, the household chores. Like most modern wives, she probably still shoulders most of the housekeeping, no matter how egalitarian the lip service from Dom might have been. So she's unhappy again. Why's she unhappy, she asks herself. And then it dawns on her, thanks to the traces left by the inception: this must be a dream. Somewhere in the REAL waking world, there's her real life, which is somehow better than this second-rate one in which she's trapped.
So this is another lesson for Mal, perhaps. It's not just owning her responsibility for her actions: it's understanding that the life we're given is the only one we've got, and she threw it away. Life is disappointing and that's normal. Running away from your problems doesn't solve them. The Barge is, in the grand scheme of the multiverse, a very very rare chance to make good on one's mistakes.
Obviously she can't go back to the world from which she came: she's lost it for good, and she needs to accept and mourn that loss properly. Graduation for her means either a chance to start over in some other place-time, or perhaps she'll want to stay on the Barge as a warden. I don't really know yet, and that's a long way off, because she's going to have a lot of rage and refusal to forgive to burn through first.
Wow. That's pretty heavy. So, uh, one last thing: how is Real Mal different from Projection Mal? As in, what are some of the specifics?
Real Mal doesn't have the projection's sadistic streak; she's not going to, say, torture Arthur by shooting him in the kneecap. She's actually not a very good shot in real life either. She also doesn't work the whole noir femme fatale thing; she's very beautiful and very French, but she's not cartoonishly sultry. She has less of an hysterical edge, although she does have a temper, and can be petulant and selfish at times.
The app has more, of course.
I have another question that you haven't answered.
Leave it in the comments, and I'll do my best!
So, let's do this.
So what was going on with Mal before the Terrible Thing with Costigan?
She was convinced she was still trapped in some kind of dream space. Basically within Limbo, or a pocket of it, or some other shared unconscious-to accommodate her delusions, she was willing to explain it to herself as some further depth of dream-exploration that she'd never been able to access before. Through this, she was also able to explain the failure (as she saw it) to commit suicide-by-Aztec as some kind of manipulation of her own consciousness by whoever had organised this dream-space.
Also, Mal's ability to dream without a PASIV is severely curtailed these days. Gels asked me once if you dreamed in Limbo and I went "graaahhh, I dunno, fuck you Nolan"-but I think perhaps the answer to that is actually No. And if you don't dream without the PASIV, what you experience when you're sleeping normally is ... probably going to be a lot like what you'd experience in Limbo. Watch as I explain away all the reasons Mal's delusion would have persisted! It's magic!
Anyway, moving on ... Initially she believed that most of the people around her were projections, but as time progressed, she came to believe instead that most, if not all of them were dreamers who had lost their sense of identity, who had been in Limbo for so long that they'd forgotten who they were.
And Costigan?
Well, follow that logic above and combine it with the fact that Costigan's another DiCaprio, and you can imagine it wasn't long before she decided he was actually an amnesiac Cobb.
Why'd she kill him?
To give him a kick, of course. By that point (at the tail end of a pack of crazy floods and ports, and also experiencing Issues with Angelica's dear husband going away and coming back), Mal had managed to convince herself right around the bend into thinking that all she needed to do was give him a kick, and then herself, and all would be well.
So now that she knows about the inception that Cobb performed on her, she's sane now, right?
Well ... yes and no.
I Am Not A Psychologist/Psychiatrist, but I'm pretty sure it only works that way in the movies. Admittedly, for all intents and purposes, the Barge is "the movies", so I'm trying to straddle a line between that and what little I know about the real-world business of delusional insanity.
Mal knows now that her delusion was, in fact, a delusion, and is smart enough and educated enough in her chosen field to grasp the whole thing intellectually. She can even sketch out what mode of treatment she'd recommend for someone in her position. However, that doesn't alleviate the fact that the idea is, as Cobb himself once said, an extremely resilient parasite. The surreality of the Barge doesn't help either. She is constantly having to remind herself that what she has experienced is all real.
The unfortunate corollary to that is that it's forced her to acknowledge her own demise and the role her husband played in it. This is making her very, very, very angry. This anger is going to cause issues for a long time to come, and will be the main impediment to her graduation.
She's not delusional about Costigan anymore, is she?
Nope. Again, there's still the lingering idea and the fact that she has to remind herself consciously, and fairly often, but she knows who he is. And boy, does she ever feel guilty.
So one thing I've always been wondering is, why is Mal an inmate, anyway?
Obviously Cobb bears a vast weight of responsibility for screwing up his poor wife's head. This is why I hope that someday further down the line, whether via a flood or port or via a player showing up, Mal gets a chance to punch Cobb in the face.
However, to me, there's two main reasons why she's an inmate.
The first is that, delusion or no delusion, framing someone for your own murder is bad shit. What she did requires a fairly impressive degree of calculation and play-acting, and she went about destroying Cobb methodically and thoroughly before killing herself.
The second reason only occurred to me a few weeks ago. Part of this may be me bringing my own baggage to the table but eh, whatever.
If there's one thing that's a constant for Mal, sane or crazy, it's that the Real World (by which we mean the world in which she was born, lived, married, had children, etc.) has never been quite satisfactory for her. She wanted to stay in Limbo and forget she had any life outside of it. Why's that? Well, if you're feeling gotten down by your job and your family, and if the real world is full of things that are never quite the way you wish they were, wouldn't you want to stay in Limbo, where you were the God-Queen of your own universe?
So then she's back in the real world, back in the mundane, with her job, the kids, the husband, the household chores. Like most modern wives, she probably still shoulders most of the housekeeping, no matter how egalitarian the lip service from Dom might have been. So she's unhappy again. Why's she unhappy, she asks herself. And then it dawns on her, thanks to the traces left by the inception: this must be a dream. Somewhere in the REAL waking world, there's her real life, which is somehow better than this second-rate one in which she's trapped.
So this is another lesson for Mal, perhaps. It's not just owning her responsibility for her actions: it's understanding that the life we're given is the only one we've got, and she threw it away. Life is disappointing and that's normal. Running away from your problems doesn't solve them. The Barge is, in the grand scheme of the multiverse, a very very rare chance to make good on one's mistakes.
Obviously she can't go back to the world from which she came: she's lost it for good, and she needs to accept and mourn that loss properly. Graduation for her means either a chance to start over in some other place-time, or perhaps she'll want to stay on the Barge as a warden. I don't really know yet, and that's a long way off, because she's going to have a lot of rage and refusal to forgive to burn through first.
Wow. That's pretty heavy. So, uh, one last thing: how is Real Mal different from Projection Mal? As in, what are some of the specifics?
Real Mal doesn't have the projection's sadistic streak; she's not going to, say, torture Arthur by shooting him in the kneecap. She's actually not a very good shot in real life either. She also doesn't work the whole noir femme fatale thing; she's very beautiful and very French, but she's not cartoonishly sultry. She has less of an hysterical edge, although she does have a temper, and can be petulant and selfish at times.
The app has more, of course.
I have another question that you haven't answered.
Leave it in the comments, and I'll do my best!