Cobb’s generic heroism positions the audience as interpellated subjects of commercial fiction.

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

• XREF: Althusserian interpellation applied to cinema; connects with the ch23 note on users becoming unpaid workers for platforms. — connects to: Globalised capital has colonised the depths that Freud called the unconscious. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 531; Commercial news now narrates events through hero-villain-victim dramatic arcs like fiction does. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 525

Broader Connections

• Commercial news now narrates events through hero-villain-victim dramatic arcs like fiction does. #expands (0.78) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 525