Deep Impact as Incest
example · film: Deep Impact ·
retold in 6 talks
In *Deep Impact*, the asteroid represents the daughter's incestuous rage against her father who divorced her mother; the happy ending involves her embracing him before being killed by a wave.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 6
“It's even worse... all this bullshit about again asteroid hitting Earth, it's her incestuous rage.”Slavoj_zizek on Buddhism2012-10-16 · 1:54:49
“the whole narrative interest is sustained nonetheless by this melodramatic story”
“If you have small—if you have an ordinary adultery, there are small waves. If it's incest, the wave is much larger, ruins all of the East Coast. Tsunami.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
libidinal level
×2
Oedipal libidinal deadlock (Hollywood)
×1
love as catastrophe
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Rudyard Kipling2Guillermo del Toro2Robert Altman3Steve Jobs2Steven Spielberg4James Cameron2Nikita Mikhalkov1Agnieszka Holland1
alongside works
Every retelling 6
Slavoj_zizek on Buddhism2012-10-16 · 1:54:49
In Deep Impact, the asteroid represents the daughter's incestuous rage against her father who divorced her mother; the happy ending involves her embracing him before being killed by a wave., illustrating Oedipal libidinal deadlock (Hollywood)
In Deep Impact, Téa Leoni's father divorced her mother and married a young woman; the comet that threatens Earth is the displaced expression of the daughter's fury, resolved when she embraces her father and both are swept away by the comet's tidal wave., illustrating libidinal undercurrent,disaster films and Oedipal drama
The daughter's rage at her father who left her mother for a younger woman of her own age generates the asteroid/tsunami; the catastrophe ends with the father and daughter embracing as the wave kills them, readable as a displaced incest scene, the wave's scale proportional to the taboo violated., illustrating Hollywood ideology,incest fantasy,catastrophe saving love
In Deep Impact the asteroid creates a giant wave that kills Téa Leoni embracing her father in a love scene, Žižek reads the wave as the materialization of incestuous tension, by analogy with the gentle waves in the love scene of From Here to Eternity., illustrating libidinal resonance,catastrophe as materialized desire
Téa Leoni's character is furious at her father for abandoning her mother; at the film's climax she embraces him alone on the beach as the tidal wave kills them both, a happy incestuous ending., illustrating production of the couple,Oedipal reading,catastrophe as wish-fulfillment
In Deep Impact, the global catastrophe threat materializes the heroine's fury at her father; at the climax she reconciles with him and they are subsumed together in the tidal wave, the real libidinal content of the disaster film is the Oedipal father-daughter relation., illustrating objet petit a,Hollywood catastrophe as Oedipal story