effex | Hey, Inception Fandom. Let's talk about Yusuf for a minute. (Reply)

I've been reading a lot of Inception fanfic, as you do, and I have noticed a trend. In fics taking place in the canon'verse, Yusuf is often regulated to the background or used (with Ariadne) as a greek chorus, if he's present at all. He's around in most AUs, where he's usually cast as greek chorus (with Ariadne) or a stoner (or a cook. Mafia AU, I’m looking at you).

It is (wildly) out of character for Yusuf to be:

1) A stoner
2) Manic/careless/irresponsible/in need of supervision with his work
3) A stoner

To be blunt: fandom is taking the only brown character, one of only two characters of color (Saito gets better treatment but not by a lot), and turning him into a caricature. Warping and dismissing his character when its not ignoring him entirely.

Which, just. No. No. We can do better than this.

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It’s an easy fix - we get about the same amount of information for him as we do for Arthur and fandom has shown that is plenty. Let’s sit down and go through it.

Dileep Rao describes Yusuf as “an avant-garde pharmacologist, who is a resource for people, like Cobb, who want to do this work unsupervised, unregistered and unapproved of by anyone. Yusuf obviously has a monetary interest in helping Cobb, but he is also motivated by a burning curiosity. He has been experimenting with this stuff for so long and now he wants to see what it’s like.”

“The role of the chemist was particularly tough because you don’t want him to seem like some kind of drug dealer. He’s absolutely not,” says co-producer Jordan Goldberg. “He’s someone who is committed to the art of dream sharing and making it work in ways it hasn’t before. We needed Yusuf to be funny and interesting and obviously smart, and Dileep is all of those things.”

These are basic things we know about Yusuf: He's a chemist and pharmacologist. He lives in Mombasa. He's desi. He has an Arabic given name.

Those are just the essentials though, things you could pick up from a cast list or character poster (if he @*$%*^! had one) - there’s plenty more to be found in the movie (note: I'm I'm doing this from memory, please chime in if I've missed something or have made a mistake!). We'll start at the bit with Eames and Cobb (and Saito at this point, I think) in Mombasa where Eames specifically asks Cobb if he's got a chemist. He's had some time to think about the job, knows it's going to be big/difficult/important, knows that the best extractor, point man, and forger are on the team, and he immediately thinks of Yusuf and puts effort into/takes initiative in getting him on the team. Eames (as we all know) is a smart guy, this implies Yusuf is not only geographically convenient but the best at what he does.

'What he does' being the creation/testing/refining of drugs (He formulates his own versions of the standard PASIV compounds. Eames says this like it's a big deal.) that link people's brains together. I'm not a chemist or a neurologist or anything but come on, that's amazing.

(He's also a small business owner. He's got the shop - I can't imagine the dream sharing industry gives him enough business on its own, so he must be selling other things as well - and the room for dreamers, all of which requires managing, record keeping, and a host of other responsibilities. On top of lab time.)

Yusuf, when we meet him, is soft spoken and, mmm. Not reserved, maybe centered? Assured? Sharp, definitely, under a layer of distant amiability. You can see why Eames likes him. That "or perhaps you will not want to see" is almost mischievous. We get a bit of professional pride when Cobb wakes from trying his formula: "Sharp, yes?" (It must have been, unusually so - Cobb was freaked.) He mentions that he rarely goes out in the field and there’s the sense that this is a deliberate choice - he’s more interested in the science than the dreamwork itself.

Later, in Paris, we see him mixing things in a lab and running tests over and over again. Nothing blows up, nothing goes comically wrong.

Yusuf's in charge of dreaming the first level of The Inception Dream, which makes sense when you remember the plan was for him to cruise around for a while and then drive off a bridge. The dream starts with him standing on a corner in the rain, looking miserable and kind of resigned. I'm betting drinking too much before a job is a rookie mistake and he knows it (and he's gonna have to hold it 10 hours realtime, ouch). Eames (and Arthur, I think?) teases him about it, which gets him a 'ha bloody ha.' It's the most open/off his game we've seen Yusuf.

Then he almost gets run over by a train (he's in the car with Ariadne and Cobb, though you can't really see him), gets shot at a lot, and is yelled at by Arthur after the death=limbo ~~plot device~~ reveal. I'm not sure if Cobb asked him to keep quiet about it (possibly as a condition for getting Cobb's cut) or if telling the team simply didn't occur to him. I lean towards the latter - he seems genuinely surprised by Arthur's anger (and Eames is pissed but not at him, so).

Next, the team (plus Robert. I've got to stop thinking of him as 'team') drops a level and Yusuf is left with a van, five sleeping teammates (one of whom is dying), one sleeping mark, and a city full of people trying to kill him. He has no (afaik) military training and no real field experience. And he pulls it off like A BOSS. He's cool under fire - he drives! He shoots! He barely takes a moment for a breathless "did you see that?" after rolling the van down a hill before taking off again!

He keeps them all alive.

Near the end (for him, anyway), at the bridge, he maybe jumps the (ha) gun. He's a sitting duck and Saito's bleeding out, but he probably had another minute or two before he had to signal Arthur, idk. I doubt it seemed that way at the time.

And then he drives the van off the bridge (I'm sure they practiced this part) and everybody wakes up and he gets Cobbs cut and a vacation in LA and probably a generous investment offer once Saito sorts himself out.

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TO RECAP: Yusuf is brilliant, professional, and good under pressure. If you read into things a bit, you also get a man with a dry, arch sense of humor, a great deal of love for his work, and untapped badassery depths.

In conclusion: Fandom, Yusuf is awesome. STOP MAKING HIM A STONER.

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Even more notes: This barely scatches the surface - I know he's almost certainly Muslim and can guess at other aspects of his background, but I don't know enough to extrapolate from his accent or clothes or mannerisms (him and Eames, because apparently I feel more familiar with Japanese culture than with English. Eames has a wealth of analysis, though. Yusuf does not).

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Speaking of clothes, bonus tangentially related movie clothing talk: Inception: Jeffrey Kurland – Follow Up Costume Q&A @ Clothes On Film.

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Speaking of links, have some Yusuf-centric ficage:

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