Running Point
OK, so, I keep seeing meta posts for various fandoms, but I have never done one. So here's my first try, for Inception - specifically on Arthur, everyone's favorite point man.
I'm not going to talk about his clothes or personality - both of those have been done, and by people with much more skill than I have. This one is about Arthur's job and what, exactly, it is that a point man does. Fandom seems to focus primarily on the research component of his job, probably because that's what we see mentioned explicitly in the film. After all, when Cobb tears into him on the first dream level, that's the thing he's so ticked off about, Arthur missing something in his research. I'm not going to say that's not a huge part of his job; it is, and I'm not about to argue that. I think that two parts of his function as a team member - especially the second of the two I'm going to bring up - are overlooked, though.
OK, so, we know that Arthur is a BAMF. Anti-gravity scene, anyone? However, it begs the question, why didn't Arthur go all the way down with them? Why not train Ariadne or even Saito to know when to drop the team so that they could have all the heavy hitters in the final level? Yes, I know that both Ariadne and Saito proved themselves, but no one could have known this during the planning stages. The answer for this lies in Arthur's job title. He's the point man. This is not a function invented by Mr. Nolan - at least not to the the degree of, say, an extractor. It's a military term. "In modern military parlance, to take point, walk point, be on point, or be a point man means to assume the first and most exposed position in a combat military formation, that is, the lead soldier/unit advancing through hostile or unsecured territory." The quote is from Wikipedia, but it makes my, er, point.
In the military, a point man's job is to be the guy most likely to get killed. He goes first, and presumably is the last one out of there if there's a retreat. With the way dreaming works, it's sort of the opposite. Arthur is the one left behind alone in the unsecured territory of the dream, to keep security back and get everyone out again. I think this is also what he was doing when he was captured in Saito's dream at the very beginning of the movie. It explains why they have him as a hostage - at a guess, he was outnumbered, because as good as he is, numbers overwhelm even the best.
I think other people have seen this one, I mostly discussed it because I find it interesting and also this is about Arthur's entire job. But the one that surprised me, that I didn't see until I'd watched the film a few times, is one I don't think I've seen brought up. During the planning of the inception, I was a bit bothered by the fact that, except for suggesting the musical trigger, Arthur basically has no ideas during the entire plan. You would think that even if it's not his primary job, his experience in dreamshare would give him ideas that he could suggest. Cobb's lack of ideas as compared to Eames' - and it is Eames who comes up with the whole plan, with some tweaking by Cobb (the positive angle) - makes sense because even though Cobb is the extractor, Eames is the one who tried a professional inception before. Cobb's inception of Mal was very much an amateur job in the sense that it was him grasping at straws to get the both of them out of limbo and not a carefully structured scenario like the Fischer job was meant to be and Eames' botched try probably was.
At first I thought Arthur's lack of ideas was for a reason similar to Cobb's; he knows extraction, but inception is something different. However, when I watched the pre-job planning yet again (it's my favorite sequence, I've watched it more often than the rest of the film) I noticed what it is Arthur does during the planning. He tends to poke holes in everything. I imagine this is part of where fanon!Arthur's asshole behavior comes from, but I don't think it's a personality trait. I think it's part of his job. Note that none of the things he criticizes are just for the hell of it. Even the "Might? We're gonna have to do a little better than might" line isn't really about slamming Eames' idea.
What Arthur is doing is what he does during the entire planning session. "How do you translate a business strategy into an idea?" and "How do we get out? I'm hoping you have something a little more elegant in mind than shooting me in the head." Snark aside on the second, both of these have something in common with the first line I quoted. Arthur is troubleshooting, for lack of a better term. He's finding all the flaws in the plan, and rather than trying to solve them all - which even though I believe he does have imagination, would not be a fair task - he points them out to the group at large. Yes, he's usually addressing Cobb or Eames, because it's usually one of them outlining things. But it's discussed in the group, where everyone can put their two cents in, which is the idea. He's kind of like an editor, I guess, in that he looks at the 'draft' of the plan and points out flaws and errors for the creator to change. (No, not all editing involves the editor rewriting things; trust me, I was a copy editor and I know this. Sometimes you just point stuff out and possibly suggest a change, but leave it up to the writer.)
So basically, Arthur does research, handles security while his teammates get the information - or plant it - and seeks out potential issues with the plans for each job. The first everyone knows about, the second is probably obvious, but the third can be easily misinterpreted as him just being a jerk. "Thank you for your contribution, Arthur." Technically, Eames, Arthur is contributing. He just has a different role to play.
If you got this far, thanks for reading this ramble, and I hope I wasn't too obvious about things.
I'm not going to talk about his clothes or personality - both of those have been done, and by people with much more skill than I have. This one is about Arthur's job and what, exactly, it is that a point man does. Fandom seems to focus primarily on the research component of his job, probably because that's what we see mentioned explicitly in the film. After all, when Cobb tears into him on the first dream level, that's the thing he's so ticked off about, Arthur missing something in his research. I'm not going to say that's not a huge part of his job; it is, and I'm not about to argue that. I think that two parts of his function as a team member - especially the second of the two I'm going to bring up - are overlooked, though.
OK, so, we know that Arthur is a BAMF. Anti-gravity scene, anyone? However, it begs the question, why didn't Arthur go all the way down with them? Why not train Ariadne or even Saito to know when to drop the team so that they could have all the heavy hitters in the final level? Yes, I know that both Ariadne and Saito proved themselves, but no one could have known this during the planning stages. The answer for this lies in Arthur's job title. He's the point man. This is not a function invented by Mr. Nolan - at least not to the the degree of, say, an extractor. It's a military term. "In modern military parlance, to take point, walk point, be on point, or be a point man means to assume the first and most exposed position in a combat military formation, that is, the lead soldier/unit advancing through hostile or unsecured territory." The quote is from Wikipedia, but it makes my, er, point.
In the military, a point man's job is to be the guy most likely to get killed. He goes first, and presumably is the last one out of there if there's a retreat. With the way dreaming works, it's sort of the opposite. Arthur is the one left behind alone in the unsecured territory of the dream, to keep security back and get everyone out again. I think this is also what he was doing when he was captured in Saito's dream at the very beginning of the movie. It explains why they have him as a hostage - at a guess, he was outnumbered, because as good as he is, numbers overwhelm even the best.
I think other people have seen this one, I mostly discussed it because I find it interesting and also this is about Arthur's entire job. But the one that surprised me, that I didn't see until I'd watched the film a few times, is one I don't think I've seen brought up. During the planning of the inception, I was a bit bothered by the fact that, except for suggesting the musical trigger, Arthur basically has no ideas during the entire plan. You would think that even if it's not his primary job, his experience in dreamshare would give him ideas that he could suggest. Cobb's lack of ideas as compared to Eames' - and it is Eames who comes up with the whole plan, with some tweaking by Cobb (the positive angle) - makes sense because even though Cobb is the extractor, Eames is the one who tried a professional inception before. Cobb's inception of Mal was very much an amateur job in the sense that it was him grasping at straws to get the both of them out of limbo and not a carefully structured scenario like the Fischer job was meant to be and Eames' botched try probably was.
At first I thought Arthur's lack of ideas was for a reason similar to Cobb's; he knows extraction, but inception is something different. However, when I watched the pre-job planning yet again (it's my favorite sequence, I've watched it more often than the rest of the film) I noticed what it is Arthur does during the planning. He tends to poke holes in everything. I imagine this is part of where fanon!Arthur's asshole behavior comes from, but I don't think it's a personality trait. I think it's part of his job. Note that none of the things he criticizes are just for the hell of it. Even the "Might? We're gonna have to do a little better than might" line isn't really about slamming Eames' idea.
What Arthur is doing is what he does during the entire planning session. "How do you translate a business strategy into an idea?" and "How do we get out? I'm hoping you have something a little more elegant in mind than shooting me in the head." Snark aside on the second, both of these have something in common with the first line I quoted. Arthur is troubleshooting, for lack of a better term. He's finding all the flaws in the plan, and rather than trying to solve them all - which even though I believe he does have imagination, would not be a fair task - he points them out to the group at large. Yes, he's usually addressing Cobb or Eames, because it's usually one of them outlining things. But it's discussed in the group, where everyone can put their two cents in, which is the idea. He's kind of like an editor, I guess, in that he looks at the 'draft' of the plan and points out flaws and errors for the creator to change. (No, not all editing involves the editor rewriting things; trust me, I was a copy editor and I know this. Sometimes you just point stuff out and possibly suggest a change, but leave it up to the writer.)
So basically, Arthur does research, handles security while his teammates get the information - or plant it - and seeks out potential issues with the plans for each job. The first everyone knows about, the second is probably obvious, but the third can be easily misinterpreted as him just being a jerk. "Thank you for your contribution, Arthur." Technically, Eames, Arthur is contributing. He just has a different role to play.
If you got this far, thanks for reading this ramble, and I hope I wasn't too obvious about things.