Application - The Last Voyages
User Name/Nick: Karin
User LJ: caycep
AIM/IM: ricksonjacket
E-mail: lingeanare at gmail dot com
Other Characters: Una Persson, Lord Fanny.
Character Name: Mal
Series: Inception
Age: Early thirties.
From When?: Immediately after her suicide.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Admittedly, Mal is not so much a bad woman as one who got seriously, deeply screwed up by her husband when he performed an inception on her. But Mal has a self-destructive, self-centred streak that was only exacerbated by the idea planted in the inception. Instead of doing anything even remotely constructive with her delusions, she framed Cobb for her own murder before committing suicide. There is also the possibility that without the inception, Mal might have easily stayed in Limbo forever (or at least, one presumes, until the physical death of her body); she had deliberately chosen to forget about her life in the real world over the subjective years that they spent in Limbo.
Abilities/Powers: Mal is very experienced with the use of the PASIV device to enter and manipulate dream space. She has a degree in psychology and some clinical experience. Speaks French and English fluently. Contrary to Cobb's projections, however, the real Mal is kind of crap with a gun. Though she's not a pushover in real life, she is much more physically able and dangerous in the dream world.
Personality: Okay, this is tricky, because most of what we see of Mal in Inception isn't her-it's Cobb's projection of her, and even he admits that his own mind is not capable of replicating her as she truly was when she lived. And what I really want to play here is not Cobb's projection of Mal-it's Mal herself. So I'm having to triangulate a lot of this from what little we do see of the real Mal, from the way Cobb projects her, and the tidbits we get from Arthur. Fun times.
So that caveat out of the way, here's what I think we have. Mal is intelligent, imaginative, and strong-willed. She's a good problem-solver; Cobb credits her with having come up with the "totem" idea. Where projection!Mal delights in interfering with Cobb's plans, the original was both supportive and a strong lateral thinker, able to troubleshoot, offer constructive critiques, and devise her own creative solutions. She is kind and loving, and she's also a romantic-Cobb asking her to marry her by saying he'd dreamed they grow old together was, for her, perfectly swoon-worthy.
She's a bit of a design nerd; having grown up with an architect father made her appreciate good design, and she has the stereotypical Frenchwoman's sense of style (come by honestly through her mother). She's a good storyteller with a fine turn of phrase in both French and English. And until her madness set in, she was a good mother to her children, and had a tendency to go maternal on Arthur-frequently inviting him over for dinner ("Non, there will be no takeaway for you tonight; you're coming over to dine with us, and do not argue."), fussing gently over his well-being, etc. She likes good food, attractive clothes, modern art, and well-made things; parts of her house were a sort of "cabinet of curiosities" of small toys, artifacts, and interesting objects she acquired over the course of her life. Her totem, the metal top, was one of those things, a toy from her childhood. (On the Barge, she hasn't got it.) And it's characteristic of the things she likes: simple, elegantly crafted, with a bit of wabi-sabi wear on it.
But there's a strong melancholy/depressive streak that made her especially vulnerable to the idea planted by Cobb that eventually led to her suicide. She was attracted to dream-share in the first place by a sense that the real world could never quite contain the breadth of her own creativity and imagination (she could, in fact, exercise her artistic ideas in dreams in a way that she wasn't as good at in real life), but that sense was ultimately inverted into her dissatisfaction and despair with the real world and her willingness to embrace life in Limbo. She can be petulant and self-centred, and while she's generally slow to anger, there's a temper there like a coiled serpent, and when someone finally gets under her skin, she'll let them have it without mercy.
She's also very good at hiding her feelings and presenting an amiable front; she was very pleasant to everyone outside her marriage (including Arthur) right up until the day she killed herself. Plus, she was sufficiently convincing to make her own family attorney believe that Cobb had been abusing and threatening her and she was also able to convince three psychiatrists that she was sane. She can be slippery and deceptive with a smile on her face, and that may be the most dangerous thing about her.
By the time of her arrival on the Barge, she's become seriously unrooted in her perceptions and sense of what is real and what isn't, and her moral compass is spinning out of control. In the initial phases of her time here, she is going to be seriously suicidal, completely out of touch with the reality of the Barge, and convinced that she can "kick" her way out to the real world where her family waits for her. And when she does get past this stage, her despair will be profound. She'll be more than a little paranoid and very unwilling to trust anyone (least of all anyone from her native canon, or for that matter anyone who looks like anyone she knows; Costigan and the Arthur-clones are going to make her very uncomfortable, to say nothing of Arthur himself). At the same time, she will also be more than willing to tell her warden what she thinks they want to hear, and may be quite convincing. Eventually (hopefully) she'll be drawn out of her shell and something of the original warm, sane Mal will be back again.
Path to Redemption: There are two stages in Mal's redemption. Stage 1 involves curing her of her delusion that she is still existing in a dream state. That's going to be really hard on the Barge, since she's surrounded by people with strange powers and so forth, so her warden will have to be really patient (and not afraid to call in the psychological big guns). She may even convince herself that the Admiral is Cobb himself, that this is his dream and everyone else is a projection of his mind. (Arthur's appearance on the scene? Probably won't help.) Key to this stage will be revealing Cobb's actions, but not too soon (see Special Notes). Stage 2 is at once easier and more complex. She needs to acknowledge how her actions damaged her family and recognize how she lost the gifts in life that she had been given, although the complication here is that once she finds out that Cobb performed an inception on her, she'll continue to dump all responsibility on him. He is definitely responsible for messing up her head, but she was still the one who made the decision to frame him and to kill herself. She can never have her old life back (an acknowledgement that will be hard to bear), but she can move on.
History: Here's what we know of Mal from the film and the shooting script:
Her father, Stephen Miles, is British, and a professor of architecture at what is very likely the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her mother Marie is French. Marie and Stephen are divorced, possibly when Mal was in her teens (the shooting script makes reference to them having been married for twenty years). Mal married Dominic Cobb and had two children with him, Philippa and James. She was a talented dream-share explorer, and her innovations in that field included the use of totems as a method of consciousness-orientation.
In the course of their work and experiments, Mal and Cobb entered Limbo, presumably by means of dream-death while under very heavy sedation. They lived there for fifty years of subjective dream-time (perhaps a day in the waking world), and Mal deliberately chose to forget that they had any life outside of it. Desperate to return to the real world, Cobb performed an inception on her, planting the idea that their existence in Limbo was only a dream and that they had to return to the real world. On their return, the idea lingered, and Mal became increasingly depressed and disaffected, convinced that this world was itself a dream, and that she had to die to escape it. To that end, she attempted to coerce her husband into committing suicide with her, but failed, and leapt to her death alone.
Beyond this, Mal's history is unclear, and again, needs to be triangulated from what other people say. The film doesn't even state how she got into dream exploration: was she a scientist, an architect, or what? Here's what I'm going with; it seems plausible given what the other characters say, and fits in with the known facts. Elements of the "psychologist" backstory are borrowed from a piece of fanfic (I'd link it if I could remember where the heck it was); I chose this because Mal doesn't quite seem like either a military contractor or a hard-core scientist, and because there are suggestions that she probably does have a pretty good understanding of the way the mind works in a practical sense, and probably is fluent in psych-speak, given the "three psychiatrists" thing. Also, if Cobb was an architect, it seems more interesting if Mal was not one (or not strictly one), and makes them a more plausible team.
Mal's full first name is Mallorie, but she has gone by Mal almost all her life. She was highly intelligent, entering university at the Sorbonne at sixteen and taking her degree in psychology and biochemistry. Her undergraduate thesis on lucid dreaming led her to graduate work at UCLA in dream exploration via the PASIV device (a field in which her father was a known architect, possibly a pioneer in it) and its use in psychotherapy. During the course of her research, she met Dominic Cobb, who was a student of her father's, a talented architect, and also a dream-explorer, being particularly gifted in environment design. He and Mal fell in love (it was pretty much a lightning-bolt at first sight), and were soon partners in life as well as work.
After Mal completed her degree, she and Dom began private consulting with the PASIV-therapeutic exploration, subconscious security, and so forth. Occasionally the legality of their work was very, very grey (i.e. extraction), although this aspect of their work was not so pronounced for them as it later became for Dom. They also started to explore the boundaries of what they could do with the technology beyond what Mal's graduate research team had been willing to do. They took on a trainee, Arthur, who was a brilliant young student taking classes from her father. Meanwhile, Mal and Dom married and settled down in California, near LA. They had two children. Their business grew and they began working with clients all over the world. After the children were born, Mal travelled less than Dom, but her mother often came to America to help raise them. Everything seemed to be going extraordinarily well.
And then came the Limbo experiment, and everything went to hell from there. Months passed while Mal drifted into a depressive, suicidal funk, neglecting her work and her family. Dom and Arthur handled most of their work and Dom tried to help her through it, but she resisted all his efforts and began quietly setting up the circumstantial evidence that would frame him for her murder. She began modifying her behaviour, allowing Dom to think that she might actually be getting better, all the while getting statements confirming her sanity from three different psychiatrists, and filing a statement with their attorney claiming that Dom had threatened her life. Finally, on the night of their wedding anniversary, her plans complete, she went to the hotel where they always spent their anniversary and trashed the room they had reserved, and went to the window of a room across the street to wait for her husband.
She tried to talk him into jumping with her, using the words he'd spoken to her before they left Limbo; when that didn't work, she tried blackmail. And then she jumped.
Special notes: No one in the film knows that Mal was incepted except for Dom and Ariadne; Dom never even told Arthur what really led to her suicide, and Mal herself certainly doesn't know. Dom told Arthur that she'd become suicidally depressed after their sojourn in Limbo ("He told me he'd done it before!" "Oh, yeah? With Mal? That worked out great, didn't it?") but absolutely nothing of the inception-at the beginning of the film Arthur doesn't really believe inception is possible and is surprised when Dom admits he's done it. And no one had a chance to fill in Arthur before he showed up here (confirmed with Ros). So absent a Dom or Ariadne to fill in the blanks, the only way anyone on the Barge would know the true story of what happened to her is if it's included in her inmate file. It should be included, because having that full knowledge will be absolutely essential to her warden's success in helping Mal recover and move on. Of course, the warden must also be sensitive and discreet enough to NOT talk about it to anyone, least of all Mal herself, until the time is right. Mention it too early, and she'll probably shut down completely.
Sample Journal Entry: [5-10 Sentences]
I will tell you a story. Perhaps that will make sense of my situation.
Once upon a time a prince and princess lived in a magical land of Do-As-You-Please. But they grew weary of it and left, and found themselves in the land of Do-As-You-Must. The prince was happy, but the princess was not, because she knew there was another land beyond the land of Do-As-You-Must. But the prince did not understand, would not acknowledge that she had the right of it, so so she left him and-
It should have ended with them together again, in the land of Be-As-You-Are, but the princess is stranded somewhere else now, alone, and the prince. No one knows where the prince is.
But the princess is all alone and someday soon she will find a way out, and they will be together again, as they were always meant to be together. They will grow old together, just as the prince promised.
Sample RP:
In those seconds as she fell-seconds that seemed to stretch on and on-she knew what would happen: the wrenching pain of death, only for a moment, and then waking with Dom at her side and then they would go to the children, the real children who waited for them-
Mal opened her eyes and reached out to where her husband ought to have been and her hand closed on empty air.
No. No, no, no; this wasn't how it was supposed to be. She staggered to her feet, frantic, and when she opened the door, she nearly pressed her entire hand into her mouth to stop herself screaming at the sight of the unfamiliar corridor.
So she did the only thing she could think of to do: she began to run, run as fast as she could through the strange space in which she now found herself; escape, run, fly, jump. She stopped at the deck railing, gripping it with both hands. The strange void below was no ocean she had ever imagined, even in the most brilliantly built dreams, but it would do. It had to. She began to climb over the side, ready to jump.
User LJ: caycep
AIM/IM: ricksonjacket
E-mail: lingeanare at gmail dot com
Other Characters: Una Persson, Lord Fanny.
Character Name: Mal
Series: Inception
Age: Early thirties.
From When?: Immediately after her suicide.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Admittedly, Mal is not so much a bad woman as one who got seriously, deeply screwed up by her husband when he performed an inception on her. But Mal has a self-destructive, self-centred streak that was only exacerbated by the idea planted in the inception. Instead of doing anything even remotely constructive with her delusions, she framed Cobb for her own murder before committing suicide. There is also the possibility that without the inception, Mal might have easily stayed in Limbo forever (or at least, one presumes, until the physical death of her body); she had deliberately chosen to forget about her life in the real world over the subjective years that they spent in Limbo.
Abilities/Powers: Mal is very experienced with the use of the PASIV device to enter and manipulate dream space. She has a degree in psychology and some clinical experience. Speaks French and English fluently. Contrary to Cobb's projections, however, the real Mal is kind of crap with a gun. Though she's not a pushover in real life, she is much more physically able and dangerous in the dream world.
Personality: Okay, this is tricky, because most of what we see of Mal in Inception isn't her-it's Cobb's projection of her, and even he admits that his own mind is not capable of replicating her as she truly was when she lived. And what I really want to play here is not Cobb's projection of Mal-it's Mal herself. So I'm having to triangulate a lot of this from what little we do see of the real Mal, from the way Cobb projects her, and the tidbits we get from Arthur. Fun times.
So that caveat out of the way, here's what I think we have. Mal is intelligent, imaginative, and strong-willed. She's a good problem-solver; Cobb credits her with having come up with the "totem" idea. Where projection!Mal delights in interfering with Cobb's plans, the original was both supportive and a strong lateral thinker, able to troubleshoot, offer constructive critiques, and devise her own creative solutions. She is kind and loving, and she's also a romantic-Cobb asking her to marry her by saying he'd dreamed they grow old together was, for her, perfectly swoon-worthy.
She's a bit of a design nerd; having grown up with an architect father made her appreciate good design, and she has the stereotypical Frenchwoman's sense of style (come by honestly through her mother). She's a good storyteller with a fine turn of phrase in both French and English. And until her madness set in, she was a good mother to her children, and had a tendency to go maternal on Arthur-frequently inviting him over for dinner ("Non, there will be no takeaway for you tonight; you're coming over to dine with us, and do not argue."), fussing gently over his well-being, etc. She likes good food, attractive clothes, modern art, and well-made things; parts of her house were a sort of "cabinet of curiosities" of small toys, artifacts, and interesting objects she acquired over the course of her life. Her totem, the metal top, was one of those things, a toy from her childhood. (On the Barge, she hasn't got it.) And it's characteristic of the things she likes: simple, elegantly crafted, with a bit of wabi-sabi wear on it.
But there's a strong melancholy/depressive streak that made her especially vulnerable to the idea planted by Cobb that eventually led to her suicide. She was attracted to dream-share in the first place by a sense that the real world could never quite contain the breadth of her own creativity and imagination (she could, in fact, exercise her artistic ideas in dreams in a way that she wasn't as good at in real life), but that sense was ultimately inverted into her dissatisfaction and despair with the real world and her willingness to embrace life in Limbo. She can be petulant and self-centred, and while she's generally slow to anger, there's a temper there like a coiled serpent, and when someone finally gets under her skin, she'll let them have it without mercy.
She's also very good at hiding her feelings and presenting an amiable front; she was very pleasant to everyone outside her marriage (including Arthur) right up until the day she killed herself. Plus, she was sufficiently convincing to make her own family attorney believe that Cobb had been abusing and threatening her and she was also able to convince three psychiatrists that she was sane. She can be slippery and deceptive with a smile on her face, and that may be the most dangerous thing about her.
By the time of her arrival on the Barge, she's become seriously unrooted in her perceptions and sense of what is real and what isn't, and her moral compass is spinning out of control. In the initial phases of her time here, she is going to be seriously suicidal, completely out of touch with the reality of the Barge, and convinced that she can "kick" her way out to the real world where her family waits for her. And when she does get past this stage, her despair will be profound. She'll be more than a little paranoid and very unwilling to trust anyone (least of all anyone from her native canon, or for that matter anyone who looks like anyone she knows; Costigan and the Arthur-clones are going to make her very uncomfortable, to say nothing of Arthur himself). At the same time, she will also be more than willing to tell her warden what she thinks they want to hear, and may be quite convincing. Eventually (hopefully) she'll be drawn out of her shell and something of the original warm, sane Mal will be back again.
Path to Redemption: There are two stages in Mal's redemption. Stage 1 involves curing her of her delusion that she is still existing in a dream state. That's going to be really hard on the Barge, since she's surrounded by people with strange powers and so forth, so her warden will have to be really patient (and not afraid to call in the psychological big guns). She may even convince herself that the Admiral is Cobb himself, that this is his dream and everyone else is a projection of his mind. (Arthur's appearance on the scene? Probably won't help.) Key to this stage will be revealing Cobb's actions, but not too soon (see Special Notes). Stage 2 is at once easier and more complex. She needs to acknowledge how her actions damaged her family and recognize how she lost the gifts in life that she had been given, although the complication here is that once she finds out that Cobb performed an inception on her, she'll continue to dump all responsibility on him. He is definitely responsible for messing up her head, but she was still the one who made the decision to frame him and to kill herself. She can never have her old life back (an acknowledgement that will be hard to bear), but she can move on.
History: Here's what we know of Mal from the film and the shooting script:
Her father, Stephen Miles, is British, and a professor of architecture at what is very likely the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her mother Marie is French. Marie and Stephen are divorced, possibly when Mal was in her teens (the shooting script makes reference to them having been married for twenty years). Mal married Dominic Cobb and had two children with him, Philippa and James. She was a talented dream-share explorer, and her innovations in that field included the use of totems as a method of consciousness-orientation.
In the course of their work and experiments, Mal and Cobb entered Limbo, presumably by means of dream-death while under very heavy sedation. They lived there for fifty years of subjective dream-time (perhaps a day in the waking world), and Mal deliberately chose to forget that they had any life outside of it. Desperate to return to the real world, Cobb performed an inception on her, planting the idea that their existence in Limbo was only a dream and that they had to return to the real world. On their return, the idea lingered, and Mal became increasingly depressed and disaffected, convinced that this world was itself a dream, and that she had to die to escape it. To that end, she attempted to coerce her husband into committing suicide with her, but failed, and leapt to her death alone.
Beyond this, Mal's history is unclear, and again, needs to be triangulated from what other people say. The film doesn't even state how she got into dream exploration: was she a scientist, an architect, or what? Here's what I'm going with; it seems plausible given what the other characters say, and fits in with the known facts. Elements of the "psychologist" backstory are borrowed from a piece of fanfic (I'd link it if I could remember where the heck it was); I chose this because Mal doesn't quite seem like either a military contractor or a hard-core scientist, and because there are suggestions that she probably does have a pretty good understanding of the way the mind works in a practical sense, and probably is fluent in psych-speak, given the "three psychiatrists" thing. Also, if Cobb was an architect, it seems more interesting if Mal was not one (or not strictly one), and makes them a more plausible team.
Mal's full first name is Mallorie, but she has gone by Mal almost all her life. She was highly intelligent, entering university at the Sorbonne at sixteen and taking her degree in psychology and biochemistry. Her undergraduate thesis on lucid dreaming led her to graduate work at UCLA in dream exploration via the PASIV device (a field in which her father was a known architect, possibly a pioneer in it) and its use in psychotherapy. During the course of her research, she met Dominic Cobb, who was a student of her father's, a talented architect, and also a dream-explorer, being particularly gifted in environment design. He and Mal fell in love (it was pretty much a lightning-bolt at first sight), and were soon partners in life as well as work.
After Mal completed her degree, she and Dom began private consulting with the PASIV-therapeutic exploration, subconscious security, and so forth. Occasionally the legality of their work was very, very grey (i.e. extraction), although this aspect of their work was not so pronounced for them as it later became for Dom. They also started to explore the boundaries of what they could do with the technology beyond what Mal's graduate research team had been willing to do. They took on a trainee, Arthur, who was a brilliant young student taking classes from her father. Meanwhile, Mal and Dom married and settled down in California, near LA. They had two children. Their business grew and they began working with clients all over the world. After the children were born, Mal travelled less than Dom, but her mother often came to America to help raise them. Everything seemed to be going extraordinarily well.
And then came the Limbo experiment, and everything went to hell from there. Months passed while Mal drifted into a depressive, suicidal funk, neglecting her work and her family. Dom and Arthur handled most of their work and Dom tried to help her through it, but she resisted all his efforts and began quietly setting up the circumstantial evidence that would frame him for her murder. She began modifying her behaviour, allowing Dom to think that she might actually be getting better, all the while getting statements confirming her sanity from three different psychiatrists, and filing a statement with their attorney claiming that Dom had threatened her life. Finally, on the night of their wedding anniversary, her plans complete, she went to the hotel where they always spent their anniversary and trashed the room they had reserved, and went to the window of a room across the street to wait for her husband.
She tried to talk him into jumping with her, using the words he'd spoken to her before they left Limbo; when that didn't work, she tried blackmail. And then she jumped.
Special notes: No one in the film knows that Mal was incepted except for Dom and Ariadne; Dom never even told Arthur what really led to her suicide, and Mal herself certainly doesn't know. Dom told Arthur that she'd become suicidally depressed after their sojourn in Limbo ("He told me he'd done it before!" "Oh, yeah? With Mal? That worked out great, didn't it?") but absolutely nothing of the inception-at the beginning of the film Arthur doesn't really believe inception is possible and is surprised when Dom admits he's done it. And no one had a chance to fill in Arthur before he showed up here (confirmed with Ros). So absent a Dom or Ariadne to fill in the blanks, the only way anyone on the Barge would know the true story of what happened to her is if it's included in her inmate file. It should be included, because having that full knowledge will be absolutely essential to her warden's success in helping Mal recover and move on. Of course, the warden must also be sensitive and discreet enough to NOT talk about it to anyone, least of all Mal herself, until the time is right. Mention it too early, and she'll probably shut down completely.
Sample Journal Entry: [5-10 Sentences]
I will tell you a story. Perhaps that will make sense of my situation.
Once upon a time a prince and princess lived in a magical land of Do-As-You-Please. But they grew weary of it and left, and found themselves in the land of Do-As-You-Must. The prince was happy, but the princess was not, because she knew there was another land beyond the land of Do-As-You-Must. But the prince did not understand, would not acknowledge that she had the right of it, so so she left him and-
It should have ended with them together again, in the land of Be-As-You-Are, but the princess is stranded somewhere else now, alone, and the prince. No one knows where the prince is.
But the princess is all alone and someday soon she will find a way out, and they will be together again, as they were always meant to be together. They will grow old together, just as the prince promised.
Sample RP:
In those seconds as she fell-seconds that seemed to stretch on and on-she knew what would happen: the wrenching pain of death, only for a moment, and then waking with Dom at her side and then they would go to the children, the real children who waited for them-
Mal opened her eyes and reached out to where her husband ought to have been and her hand closed on empty air.
No. No, no, no; this wasn't how it was supposed to be. She staggered to her feet, frantic, and when she opened the door, she nearly pressed her entire hand into her mouth to stop herself screaming at the sight of the unfamiliar corridor.
So she did the only thing she could think of to do: she began to run, run as fast as she could through the strange space in which she now found herself; escape, run, fly, jump. She stopped at the deck railing, gripping it with both hands. The strange void below was no ocean she had ever imagined, even in the most brilliantly built dreams, but it would do. It had to. She began to climb over the side, ready to jump.