Gender roles

[sour_idealist]

Now, this is... a bit of a tricky topic, so let me preface it by saying that I absolutely love the movie, okay?  But it does rely on some pretty strict gender roles in a lot of ways.

For a start: Well. Let's look at a theoretical woman. You realize that in her dreams, she's being stalked by someone who appears to be her husband. Her mental

Comments

[fae_boleyn]

It's hard to look at Mal as just a projection, I guess, when she is so obviously... independent, in some ways, of Cobb. By that, I mean she's clearly part of him (his need to be punished for what he did to the real Mal, and his inability to live without her), but she's also separate in a strange way. She does things he would never want her to do, sabotaging what is, to him, his most important job ever, the one that gets him home.

I played with shades in a fic of mine, in which Arthur has a shade of his twin sister, who died when they were young, so I've thought a lot about shades. In that fic, because it wasn't guilt but simply grief, my shade, Aubrey, was an overall more benevolent presence. Well, she shot Cobb in the kneecaps once, but that was a special case. However, one thing that Arthur was always aware of was that she was part of him. He didn't know what part of him she represented for a long time, but he was aware of that much.

My point in bringing that up isn't to pimp my fic, but to make a comparison. Unlike my fic's Arthur, I don't think Cobb is that aware that Mal is just a part of his mind until the end, when he finally lets her go. She's more like a sci-fi version of the standard ghost to him, Mal's spirit or whatever term you prefer haunting him. Obviously that is not what she is, but that's how Cobb treats her, at least to me, for most of the film. (This idea may be born of too much supernatural fiction.) But what that means is that we tend to treat her the same way. We buy into Cobb's self-delusion, and it's not the only time fandom has seized on a misconception of one character created by another. (But that's another thing, and I've kind of already gone over one such instance elsewhere.)