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FI L M Q UARTERLY
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Chthonic castles
Inception. Photo: Melissa Moseley. 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
sprin g 2011
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FI L M Q UARTERLY
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sprin g 2011
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Inception. 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc./Legendary Pictures. DVD: Warner Home Video.
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sprin g 2011
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A HieRARCHY . . .
Inception. 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc./Legendary Pictures. DVD: Warner Home Video.
This content downloaded from 200.3.144.114 on Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:19:52 UTC
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Inception. 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc./Legendary Pictures. DVD: Warner Home Video.
This content downloaded from 200.3.144.114 on Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:19:52 UTC
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those with a psychoanalytic bent, the scripts repeated references to the subconsciousas opposed to unconscious
no doubt grate, but this might have been a Freudian slip of a
particularly revealing kind. The terrain that Inception lays out
is no longer that of the classical unconscious, that impersonal
factory which, Jean-Franois Lyotard points out in Libidinal
Economy (Athlone, 1993), psychoanalysis describes with the
help of images of foreign towns or countries such as Rome
or Egypt, just like Piranesis Prisons or Eschers Other Worlds
(164). Inceptions arcades and hotel corridors are on the contrary those of a globalized capital whose reach easily extends
into the former depths of what was once the unconscious.
Theres nothing alien, no other place here, only a mass-
marketed subconscious recirculating deeply familiar images mined from an ersatz psychoanalysis. So in place of the
eerie enigmas of the unconscious, were instead offered an
Oedipus-lite scene played out between Fischer and a projection of his dead father. The off-the-shelf, premasticated quality of this encounter is entirely lacking in any of the weird
idiosyncrasies which give Freuds case histories their power to
haunt. Cod-Freudianism has long been metabolized by an
advertisingentertainment culture which is now ubiquitous,
as psychoanalysis gives way to a psychotherapeutic self-help
thats diffused through mass media. Its possible to read
Inception as a staging of this superseding of psychoanalysis,
with Cobbs apparent victory over the Mal projection, his
talking himself around to accepting that she is just a fantasmatic substitute for his dead wife, almost a parody of psychotherapys blunt pragmatism.
The question of whether Cobb is still dreaming or not at
the films end is ultimately too simple. For theres also the
problem of whose dream Cobb might be in, if not his own.
The old Freudian paradigm made this a problem too, of
coursebut there the issue was the fact that the ego was not
master in its own house because the subject was constitutively
split by the unconscious. In Inception, the ego is still not a master of the house, but thats because the forces of predatory business are everywhere. Dreams have ceased to be the spaces
where private psychopathologies are worked through and have
become the scenes where competing corporate interests play
out their banal struggles. Inceptions militarized subconscious converts the infernal, mythical urgencies of the old unconscious into panicked persecution and a consolatory
familialism: pursued at work by videogame gunmen, you later
unwind with the kids building sandcastles on a beach. This is
another reason that the dreams in Inception appear so undreamlike. For, after all, these arent dreams in any conventional sense. The designed virtual spaces of Inceptions
quasi-dreams, with their nested levels, evidently resemble a
videogame more than they recall dreams as psychoanalysis
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FI L M Q UARTERLY
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