Thoughts On Forging

[fae_boleyn]

OK, so, I've tackled Arthur's job as the point man (here: fae-boleyn.livejournal.com/14015.html), now I want to turn my attention to Eames' job as a forger. I don't think I have as much to say about this one, mostly because I was also trying to counter what seems to be some accepted fanon that really annoys me in the Arthur/point man meta. This one I don't really have an agenda for.

So. Forging. I actually think this has to be the riskiest dreamscape job, and I suspect that there are only a handful of forgers out there. I know some people think Eames is the only one, but I find that a bit unlikely, unless the dreamshare community is very small. Because even if Eames is self-taught, which is a possibility, someone else had to have come up with the idea of changing their physical form in dreams and managed to pull it off convincingly. I think we've all dreamed ourselves into someone else's body at least once in our lives - I had a really odd one involving myself as Joan of Arc after a very odd episode of this kids' show called Wishbone, but that's another story altogether. Also, if you can fold up a city like a tortilla, why can't you make yourself look different? I wouldn't be surprised to find a handful of "semi-forgers", which is to say people who can change individual things about their own appearance, like hair, eyes, or height. The best of these would probably be able to manage opposite-gender versions of themselves, but they wouldn't be able to forge another person, real or made up.

Which brings me to my next point. I tend to think that there are two kinds of what I'm going to call full forgery. The first we see with the Blonde, and the second we see with Eames' forge of Browning. The Blonde is, in my mind, someone Eames created. I can't remember his exact phrasing and my computer doesn't want to play DVDs today so I can't check, but he says something along the lines of having a lovely lady they can use to distract Fischer. This may be me reading too much into a turn of phrase, but it feels to me like Eames designed her, the way Ariadne or pre-Limbo Cobb would do a dreamscape. I see forgers as constantly observing the people around them, picking up a gesture here, a hairstyle there, that pair of eyes on the guy in the corner, etc., and blending them together to create original, generic characters for simple things like distracting a mark.

Then there's the more complex forgeries, those of real people. We know that Eames spent hours observing Browning, and that he actually had to practice Browning's gestures and such over and over again. I suspect he did some of this in reality as well as in the dream, for the muscle memory aspect of it. This type of forgery also requires a certain amount of psychoanalysis, because in order to be convincing as a character, you have to understand their mindset, not just mimic their behaviors. This is something that I had to do myself, for an acting class last year. Our professor had us writing papers in character about the mindset and background of our role, really getting us into the characters' heads. A forger would have to be a lot better at this than a bunch of college kids fulfilling their fine arts core requirement.

Which brings me full circle to the first thing I said in this discussion. Forgery is the riskiest job there is in dreamshare. Why? Think about it. A forger inhabits the character of another person. The biggest risk in dreaming is losing yourself; how much higher do the odds of that go when your job involves being someone other than yourself? So how does someone like Eames do what he does without going nuts? Simple. He doesn't believe it himself. I've seen the idea in some places that even the forger must be convinced that he or she is the person they're pretending to be or the forge won't hold, but I can't see how that doesn't lead to madness. (Of course, if you're writing a fic and that;s your plan...) The trick in forgery is to convince your audience, just like a good actor. But in the end, it's just a mask. A terribly elaborate one, but still a mask. A forger probably has to know himself or herself better than most people ever do, simply because they need to be secure  and anchored in their own identity to keep from losing it. I genuinely think there have been forgers who began to believe their own acts, and if someone didn't catch it, they probably lost their minds.

So that's about all I have to say on forgery, but I hope it was at least a little bit interesting.

 

Comments

[eustacia-vye28.livejournal.com]

I think it can matter depending on where he's making the mistake and what it is. Using the gun example, I recently did wiki and blog searches about guns for a fic I'm working on. I know nothing about guns, so when I saw that a gun could use either of two types of cartridges, I assumed that it meant the same gun could fire both. (I was since corrected; they're two different models, each shooting a different kind of caliber cartridge.) In a dream, someone would probably still be able to have the gun fire both kinds of rounds without it blowing up in their hands. In real life? Serious damage.

I still think they can't be utter novices. They use proper trigger discipline in the movie and look practiced. (Maybe it's just hours of training ahead of time? IDK.) They can probably enhance their natural skill because they can alter dream physics, but it would be easier to do that if they knew how it worked in real life, at least a little bit.

I take it as the characters are able to fill in some of the gaps from the information that they have. For the compounds, Yusuf's formula is most important in the real world. Within the dreams, it's probably enough just to call it "somnacin" since everyone in the dream knows what it's supposed to do. It may not be the uber grade stuff that Yusuf creates, but they all can react to what somnacin is supposed to do.

[croik.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree they can't be complete novices. They're still criminals after all, and Cobb does a decent job fighting off the Cobol thugs. In my fics I assume that Arthur's been a criminal for a long time so he's pretty familiar with most normal guns, and just applies what he knows when creating super special guns in a dream (and that's why he can use awesome shit when he's under even if he's never been military).

[eustacia-vye28.livejournal.com]

I think this is the fun part about the canon. It's vague enough that we can fill in the blanks a dozen different ways, but they can all still be valid.

In my headcanon, I tend to put Arthur in the army. To me, that would explain some of the nonsense he can pull off. It could just as easily be lots of hours with a PASIV. :)