Daily Dialogue — October 1, 2011
INT. WAREHOUSE — CONTINUOUS
Yusuf and Eames PULL Fischer from the cab, HUSTLING him through a doorway. Cobb JUMPS out of the sedan, furious.
COBB Arthur! Arthur what the-
Arthur pulls the bloody Saito from the front seat.
COBB Oh, Christ. Is he dying?
ARTHUR I don’t know. What happened back there? Where were you?
COBB We were blocked by a freight train.
ARTHUR (to Ariadne) Why would you put a train crossing in a downtown intersection?
ARIADNE I didn’t.
COBB (snaps) Why were we all ambushed, Arthur?! Those weren’t regular projections they’d been trained!
ARIADNE How could they be trained?
ARTHUR Fischer’s had an extractor teach his mind to defend itself. His subconscious is militarized. It should’ve shown on the research-
COBB So why the hell didn’t it?!
ARTHUR Calm down.
COBB Don’t tell me to calm down-you were meant to check Fischer’s background thoroughly. You can’t make this kind of mistake-we’re not prepared for this kind of violence-
ARTHUR Cobb, we’ve dealt with sub-security before. We just have to be more-
COBB This wasn’t part of the plan, Arthur! (points at Saito) He’s dying!
EAMES So we put him out of his misery.
Eames steps into the room, pulls his gun and moves over Saito.
COBB No.
EAMES He’s in agony. Let’s wake him up-
Cobb GRABS Eames’s arm.
COBB No! (they lock eyes) It won’t wake him up.
EAMES What do you mean, it won’t wake him? When you die in a dream you wake up.
YUSUF Not from this. We’re too heavily sedated to wake up that way. Eames looks at Yusuf, then to Cobb.
EAMES So what happens if one of us dies?
COBB That person doesn’t wake up. Their mind drops into Limbo.
ARIADNE Limbo?
ARTHUR Unconstructed dream space.
ARIADNE What’s down there?
ARTHUR Raw, infinite subconscious. Nothing there but what was left behind by anyone on the team who’s been trapped there before. On this team… just Cobb.
ARIADNE How long would we be stuck there?
YUSUF You couldn’t even think about trying to escape until the sedation eases-
EAMES How long?
YUSUF Decades-it could be infinite-I don’t know! Ask him-he’s the one who’s been there before!
Eames moves to Cobb. Looks him in the eye.
EAMES Great. So now we’re stuck in Fischer’s mind battling it out with his private army, and if we get hit we’re stuck in Limbo ’til our brains dissolve into scrambled egg?
Cobb says nothing. Saito groans more loudly.
ARTHUR Let’s just get him upstairs.
— Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Ariadne (Ellen Page), Eames (Tom Hardy), Yusuf (Dileep Rao), Inception (2010), written by Christopher Nolan
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is terrible exposition, suggested by Teddy Pasternak, who also suggested Inception. James came up with this example and offers an analysis why this is a case of bad exposition.
The real problem with this exposition is that:
1) It occurs on page 79–81. Now, I’m not a stickler for page count. BUT — this type of exposition, setting up the rules for your world, really needs to occur at latest early in Act Two. Preferably in Act One, but as it is a twist, seems like it is the type of information that is an “Oh, by the way… Act Two is different.”
2) It violates the films own rules already established. This is compounded by how late in the script this info occurs.
The opening scene illustrates that people can’t die in dreams.
The problem with this is that there are no stakes inside a dream state. Nolan realizes this and AMMENDS HIS RULES to create stakes. The problem is it happens too late. He probably should have just axed the idea that people can’t die in dreams altogether.
Trivia: Christopher Nolan first pitched the film to Warner Bros. after the completion of his third feature, Insomnia, and was met with approval from the studio. However, it was not yet written at the time, and Nolan determined that rather than writing it as an assignment, it would be more suitable to his working style if he wrote it as a spec script and then presented it to the studio whenever it was completed. So he went off to write it, thinking it would take “a couple of months”, but it ultimately took nearly eight years.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Why would you consider this an example of terrible exposition?
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