I'm so confused!

No, I didn't watch the movie again. These are just delayed reactions, possibly skewed from my mind twisting and turning the thing over in my head for a couple weeks.

- Is it just me or is Cobb's social skills atrocious? Talking about intestinal worms while making an important pitch to a potential client who's eating?

- I can't help but wonder...did Mal's death make Cobb the way he was in the movie or was he like that before? Was the inception he performed on her perhaps indicative of a much wider dark streak? Because it's not just his subconscious that's a freight train, his personality seems like that the whole movie: brusque, temperamental, rude, manipulative and completely self-centered, he doesn't care who he has to sacrifice as long as he gets what he wants. But since what he wants is so compelling, we root for him anyway.

- The Arthur/Eames ship doesn't really need more wind in its sails, but was Arthur the carrot Cobb used to drag Eames into the whole mess? From what I remember of the Mombasa scene, it seems to me that Eames' interest in the affair was pretty lukewarm until:

Cobb: "Arthur says it can't be done."
(cue Tom Hardy's body language saying I AM MORE AFFECTED BY THAT NAME THAN I WOULD LIKE TO ADMIT)
Eames: "Arthur. You still working with that stick-in-the-mud?"
Cobb: "He's good at what he does, right?"
Eames: "Oh, he's the best. But he's got no imagination"
Cobb: "Not like you."

Cobb is such a manipulative bastard. "Come prove you're better than Arthur!" or "Come prove yourself to Arthur!" or both?

- I found an old interview with Dileep Rao (whom I loved, btw) and his comment on the "let's slap Arthur" scene:

---- BE: Okay, so about the film. You knew this question was coming, I realize, but as soon as I saw you do this in the movie, I knew I had to ask you about it: how much did you enjoy pushing Joseph Gordon Levitt backwards in his chair?

DR: (Laughs) You know, I’ve got to say that the funniest part of that is that me and Tom Hardy were cracking up, because Joseph had to keep a straight face and do the stunt, and he’s impeccably good at it, but we were just having so much fun. I’m knocking him over, and Tom’s sitting there watching me doing it, and the fact that he couldn’t participate in the fun of knocking him over somehow made it even funnier to both of us. We had a real blast doing that. And I got to slap his face! And I was, like, “Okay, this is a movie, not a play, so I’m going to have to actually slap him.” So we just kind of went back and forth, and Chris showed me what he wanted, so I got to slap Joseph a couple of times. I’m, like, “Dude, are you okay?” “Yeah, of course I am.” “All right, just wanted to make sure.” (Laughs) ---

Poor abused Joseph!

It's 4:45 and it might be time to go to bed.