Inception’s dream architecture mirrors the vacuousness of creative-industries ideology.

Evidence

Significantly and symptomatically, Faraci’s hyperbole here sounds as if it might belong in a marketing pitch for Cobb and his team; just as when Cobb and the others eulogise the ‘creativity’ of the dream architecture process – you can create worlds that never existed! – they sound like they are reciting advertising copy or the script from a corporate video. The scenes in which the team prepare for Fischer’s inception might have been designed to bring out the depressing vacuousness of the concept of the ‘creative industries’. They play like a marketing team’s own fantasies about what they themselves are doing: the view from inside an Apprentice contestant’s head, perhaps. In any case, Inception seems to be less a meta-meditation on the power of cinema than a reflection of the way in which cinematic techniques have become imbricated into a banal spectacle which – fusing business machismo, entertainment protocols and breathless hype – enjoys an unprecedented dominion over our working lives and our dreaming minds. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 526

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: read Inception’s ‘dream architect’ fantasy as a lens on how creative-industries consultants imagine their own labour.
• XREF: connects to: The ego’s loss of mastery now stems from corporate forces, not the unconscious. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 532; Dreams serve as creative material harvested through partner sharing. — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 114; Capital’s own logic of reification drives realism through modernism into postmodernism. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 256 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Dreams serve as creative material harvested through partner sharing. #exemplifies (0.80) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 114
• Capital’s own logic of reification drives realism through modernism into postmodernism. #qualifies (0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 256