A hero without a distinct civilian identity is an empty interpellation point

Evidence

The moment when Mal confronts Cobb with all this is reminiscent of the scene in Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) when a psychiatrist attempts to persuade Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Quaid that he is having a psychotic breakdown. But while Total Recall presents us with a strong distinction between Quaid’s quotidian identity as a construction worker and his life as a secret agent at the centre of an interplanetary struggle – a distinction that the film very quickly unsettles – Inception gives us only Cobb the generic hero: handsome, dapper, yet troubled. If, as Faraci claims, Cobb isn’t an extractor and he isn’t on the run from faceless corporate goons, then who is he? The ‘real’ Cobb would then be an unrepresented X, outside the film’s reality labyrinth – the empty figure who identifies with (and as) Cobb the commercially-constructed fiction; ourselves, in other words, insofar as we are successfully interpellated by the film. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 527

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that ‘we ourselves’ become Cobb because his hollow construction leaves no rival identity to anchor us is a genuinely paradigm-shifting note on how blockbuster interpellation works.
• STORYSTEM: Seed for fiction about a person discovering their entire adventure-life was packaged with no ‘real’ counterpart beneath it — the horror of being purely a commercially-constructed self.
• XREF: connects to: The abstract human being stripped of political status loses fellow-recognition

Broader Connections

• The abstract human being stripped of political status loses fellow-recognition #expands (0.75)