The Divine Details: Enjoyment and Ideology in Cinema
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2008-08-20 · 1:57:12 · 15,393 words
ideologycinema-art-culturepsychoanalysisfascism-populismcommunism-socialismsexuality-genderliberalism-political-correctnesseveryday-lifehistorygeopolitics-war
Žižek delivers a lecture on ideology in cinema, arguing that Hollywood films consistently subordinate their overt historical or catastrophic content to a hidden narrative of restoring paternal authority or reconstructing the couple. He extends this analysis to Stalinist cinema, Ku Klux Klan ideology, ethnic fundamentalism, and hardcore pornography, arguing that ideology always operates through a supplement at a second level invisible to the first. In the Q&A he contrasts ideologically saturated commercial films with works of true cinematic art, Altman, Hitchcock, Cassavetes, Lynch, where an implicit ontology or 'world feeling' is inscribed into the film's formal apparatus itself. He closes with reflections on Stalinism vs. fascism, charity as ideological pacification, and the potential of smaller national cinemas under globalization.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “post-ideological society”
The commonplace that we no longer live in ideology, which Žižek treats as itself an ideological illusion, ideology is more pervasive than ever, precisely because it operates below explicit belief.
The Hollywood formula whereby any historical or catastrophic event is staged merely as background for the real story: the production or restoration of a romantic or familial couple.
as “restitution of paternal authority”
The underlying narrative drive Žižek identifies in Spielberg's films: father is absent or bad at the outset and the entire plot functions to restore his legitimate authority.
A marginal narrative element, the subordinated love story or paternal subplot, that is actually the key to the film's ideological function and emotional economy.
as “catastrophe prevents the true catastrophe”
The logic whereby in Titanic the iceberg disaster must occur to prevent the greater catastrophe of the couple's real life together, preserving the illusion of love.
as “two-level spectator”
The address Hollywood makes to its audience: it supplies enough signs that you can maintain plausible deniability at the clean official level while simultaneously indulging the obscene subtext at the second level.
Under Stalinism, not only was criticism of Stalin forbidden, but publicly announcing that criticism was forbidden was also forbidden, you had to maintain the fiction of freedom you never use.
as “libidinal resonance”
The depth a film achieves not through artistic merit but through the echoing between its official narrative and its hidden libidinal (incestuous, erotic) undercurrent.
Borrowed from John Carpenter's They Live, Žižek uses the sunglasses metaphor for a critical reading device that reveals the hidden message beneath the official ideological text.
as “false permissivity”
The structure of fundamentalist ideology: the explicit call to sacrifice and discipline conceals an underside message that everything, rape, killing, robbery, is permitted for the cause.
as “exchange of obscenities as social bond”
Žižek's claim that in ex-Yugoslavia, exchanging dirty ethnic jokes and insults constituted genuine solidarity, a direct person-to-person contact impossible under liberal politeness.
The 'human touch' added to superhero films or authoritarian propaganda, showing the hero's weaknesses and doubts, is precisely where ideology enters most effectively, not where it is overcome.
We live in a cynical era where we pretend not to believe in ideology but simply act as if we do, beliefs are enacted in practice regardless of inner conviction.
In Hitchcock, the camera move to an overhead omniscient perspective that then collapses into a point-of-view shot from an impossible, unlocatable subject, God subjectivized as evil presence.
as “big Other”
Used in the context of Hitchcock: the neutral anonymous overview of reality that can become subjectivized as an evil presence inhabiting the formal apparatus of the film.
as “implicit ontology”
The attitude toward reality, the world-feeling or Weltanschauung, inscribed not in a film's explicit content but in its formal apparatus, camera movement, editing, sound, which for Žižek is where true cinema begins.
The cinematic technique of detaching an element (voice, smile) from its body so the object persists without its subject, as in Mulholland Drive's singing scene, which for Žižek is where cinema becomes art.
In sound cinema, the voice can autonomize itself and haunt the image independently of its bodily source, making all speakers into ventriloquists who no longer fully control their own voices.
as “charity as ideological pacification”
Charitable giving ('save a child for five dollars a month') functions as a superstitious payment to guarantee that the suffering Other stays at a safe distance and does not actually disturb the donor's world.
as “Ur-father”
Freud's figure of the primordial father who possesses all women, which Žižek invokes as the more apt figure for contemporary authority than the symbolic father of classical patriarchy.
Stories he reaches for 17
Bohr had a horseshoe above his door. A friend asked if he believed in it. Bohr said no, he was a scientist. Friend: then why have it? Bohr: 'I was told that even if you don't believe in it, it still works.'
“Niels Bohr answered, 'I have it there because I was told that even if you don't believe it in it, it still works.'”
In John Carpenter's They Live a homeless man finds sunglasses that reveal the true subliminal messages behind advertisements: 'Obey, don't think, marry, reproduce', a paranoiac literalization of ideology's hidden second level.
“when he puts the sunglasses on, he sees the true message behind publicity... 'Don't think, obey, marry, reproduce'”
In fascism the leader simply receives applause; in Stalinism the leader joins the applause, he must present himself as servant of the people, never as leader in his own right, even while exercising total power.
“In fascism, when the leader is applauded, he just receives the applause. In Stalinism, always, the leader joins the applause.”
Even in the darkest camps, every year on Stalin's birthday all prisoners assembled to sign a congratulatory telegram to him, inconceivable under Nazism, where the Jews would never be asked to affirm Hitler, because the ideological economies are fundamentally different.
“every year on Stalin's birthday, even in the darkest Gulag, Kolyma, Magadan, all the prisoners were assembled and they all had to sign a telegram to Stalin wishing him all the best”
An Albanian soldier greeted Žižek with a sexual insult about his mother; Žižek returned one about the soldier's sister; thereafter each morning they exchanged 'mother / sister' without smiling, as a ritual affirmation of genuine friendship.
“every morning after... he told me 'mother,' I said 'sister.' Mother, sister. Without any smile. It was just, it strictly meant we are still real friends.”
Žižek quotes Radovan Karadžić's poem to demonstrate how ethnic-nationalist ideology operates as false permissivity: beneath the call to convert to a new faith is the promise that everything, loving, drinking, sunbathing, is permitted.
“I offer you inclemency and wine... nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want”
After Bergman and Bogart embrace, the film fades to the airport tower and returns, giving contradictory signals about whether they had sex: signals that they did (fade, cigarettes, phallic tower) and signals they didn't, so the viewer can maintain plausible deniability while enjoying the obscene subtext.
“the movie addresses you as a two-levels spectator and tells you, 'I will give you enough signs so that you can claim, pretend, that nothing happened.'”
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.
“when the gigantic wave is approaching, she embraces him and she says, 'Oh daddy'... I claim that this strictly as if these waves materialized their passion”
Rammstein perform fascist aesthetics in a context stripped of ideological scaffolding, producing an alienation-effect more powerful than liberal moral critique, just as Chaplin and the Austrian left's parody of Haider's slogan worked through mimicry, not condemnation.
“They bring it outside their ideological context and I think the effect of alienation in the Freudian sense of Extranation-Verfremdung is even stronger.”
In Lynch's Mulholland Drive a woman is singing in a nightclub, collapses, but the singing continues, for a moment the spectator fears the voice has survived its body, enacting the Cheshire Cat operation of spectral autonomy.
“the woman is singing, she collapses, the singing goes on. For a brief moment you're almost afraid, my god, does a voice survive on its own?”
Bergson observed that before WWI people knew it was coming but couldn't believe it; once it began, they adapted astonishingly fast. Žižek applies this to Sarajevo: the siege was unthinkable until it happened, after which the enlightened public absorbed it as normal background.
“when the catastrophe did take place, how quickly they got accustomed to it. All of a sudden, 'Okay, it's war'”
Chiaureli's 1949 Stalinist epic reproduces the Hollywood formula: the entire Second World War exists so that the lovers separated at its outbreak can be reunited through Stalin's gaze at the end; Stalin even advised the worker on how to court his girl.
“how the two lovers are united through mediation of Stalin. They look at Stalin, they look where Stalin looks, they see each other”
In Leone's film, a phone rings endlessly; a hand picks it up, but the ringing goes on, disintegrating sound from its bodily source and illustrating how cinema can decompose reality into autonomous elements.
“towards the beginning of the film, we see a phone ringing, ringing endlessly, then finally a hand picks up the phone, the ringing goes on”
Žižek argues the scene in Bob Fosse's Cabaret where a Hitler Youth sings has nothing fascist outside the swastika symbols; the same song with a red star would be perfectly acceptable, showing that fascist form is separable from fascist content.
“Imagine exactly the same song, maybe with a word or two changed. Imagine instead of swastika a red star. 'Tomorrow belongs to me, red star, communism will win.' And I would totally accept it.”
Full-feature hardcore pornography requires a minimal narrative (the plumber fixes a hole, housewife mentions another hole) that is ostentatiously stupid, signaling to the viewer that emotional identification is prohibited while visual gratification proceeds.
“the housewife is alone, the plumberer fixes the hole which was leaking in the bathroom and then the wife said, 'By I have another hole, can you also fix that hole'”
Kim Jong-il allegedly scored a hole-in-one on every hole the first time he played golf, an example of North Korean propaganda overreaching. Žižek imagines the bureaucrat who decided to add 'one' stroke to make it humanly credible.
“You know how many hits he needed to fill them all? That's the touch.”
In Wertmüller's film an Italian seducer survives Auschwitz by seducing the ugly female Kapo, then is forced to select colleagues for death, what remains after the disgusting comedy is utter despair: he is alive but deprived of the dignity of life.
“there is no redemption at the end, nice crying, it's just what remains after the laughter is utter despair. He survives but he is deprived of the dignity of life.”
Works invoked 40
They Live film
The sunglasses metaphor is adopted as a conceptual tool for ideology critique despite Žižek calling it a 'ridiculous paranoiac version.'
Casablanca film
Called 'the greatest classic'; the two-and-a-half-second fade is analyzed as the clearest example of ideology's two-level address.
The Great Dictator film
Called Chaplin's 'true masterpiece'; its method, rendering Hitler ridiculous through phonetic mimicry, is the model for effective counter-ideological art. Also analyzed for the Hynkel/barber duality of voice vs. silence.
The Birds film
The town-burning sequence is analyzed as the clearest illustration of God's-eye view being subjectivized as evil presence.
Schindler's List film
Called 'pure manipulation' of the Holocaust, a worse remake of Jurassic Park, and potentially anti-Semitic in its final scene of Schindler embracing Jews like children.
Titanic film
Žižek 'really hates' this film; argues it is not a love story but a vampiric class myth in which the rich girl uses the working-class man to restore her identity.
Short Cuts film
Called one of Hollywood's masterpieces of recent decades; its formal apparatus inscribes a neo-Spinozian pluralist ontology where meaning arises from contingent encounter.
Criticized for the false redemptive ending, five minutes of obligatory tragedy after the comedy, which undermines the film's comedic approach to the Holocaust.
Mulholland Drive film
The nightclub singing scene (voice persisting after singer collapses) is the premier example of the Cheshire Cat operation.
Marine marching chant cited to illustrate how obscenity serves military power rather than subverting it.
Underground film
Not too Balkan but too Western: stages the Western fantasy of the Balkans as eternal orgy for a Western audience rather than offering genuine Balkan perspective.
Deep Impact film
Analyzed as the catastrophe-film formula: the asteroid-induced tsunami materializes the heroine's incestuous tension with her father.
Cited as the model Holocaust comedy: survival without redemption, dignity destroyed, what remains after the disgusting laughter is utter despair.
War of the Worlds film
Alien invasion serves as backdrop for Tom Cruise's transformation from bad to good father.
Ivan the Terrible film
Cited alongside Chaplin as an example where the implicit ontology is inscribed into formal apparatus.
Captains Courageous book
Called the 'classical' version of the vampiric class myth: rich people need contact with the lower classes to restore their vitality.
Hero film
Mentioned alongside House of Flying Daggers as evidence that Chinese cinema now makes better historical spectacles than Hollywood.
Jurassic Park film
Sam Neill's character enacts the transformation from bad to good father; the dinosaurs materialize paternal fury.
The phone-ringing-after-being-answered scene illustrates the spectral autonomy of sound from its bodily source.
Reds film
The film Žižek would most like publicly burned; reduces October Revolution to a backdrop for American couple-making.
Cabaret film
The 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' scene is called 'totally false, fake', liberal ideology at its worst for leaving the aesthetic terrain to fascism.
The Fall of Berlin film
Analyzed at length as a Stalinist epic that reproduces Hollywood's love-catastrophe formula with Stalin as literal matchmaker; Žižek calls it 'the greatest Soviet Stalinist war spectacle.'
The gentle beach wave love scene is contrasted with Deep Impact's tsunami, illustrating how wave size scales with incestuous vs. ordinary erotic tension.
Pollock film
Criticized alongside Schindler's List for showing too much, the exact moment Pollock 'discovers' action painting, violating the art of leaving things unseen.
The Silence film
Called Bergman's true masterpiece, in contrast to the self-conscious Persona and later work.
Cited as an example of admirable contemporary Chinese cinema beyond Hollywood formula.
Part of the Spielberg paternal-authority pattern: fatherless boy seeking and finding a father figure.
Enigma film
Opening example of Hollywood formula: the military code-cracking plot is merely a vehicle for the claim that the real enigma is femininity.
Nostalghia film
The camera's cold stillness during the woman's hysterical outburst is described as conveying hatred toward the feminine subject, the negative formal foil to Cassavetes.
Called Kieślowski's masterpiece, made during Jaruzelski's dictatorship, used to argue that constraint sometimes enables better art than freedom.
Cited as an example of Chinese cinema surpassing Hollywood historical spectacle.
Seconds film
Called 'one of the absolute Hollywood masterpieces', a recently discovered gem about identity reinvention turning into nightmare.
The Sweet Hereafter film
Called 'my ideal', the girl's lie is a perfect example of the ethical act.
Called 'one of the few truly interesting films' by Spielberg because it doesn't reproduce the paternal-authority formula, possibly explaining its box-office failure.
Called 'one of the worst films of all times', an example of post-Soviet artistic decline.
Praised for its wonderfully shot post-industrial Prague aesthetic; used as an example of hidden cinematic art within commercial genre.
Used against Sontag: co-written by Jewish communist Béla Balázs, readable as a metaphor of Jewish exclusion, proof that formal elements are not inherently fascist.
ET (Spielberg, 1982) film
Žižek says he would squash ET with his boots; analyzes it as a fatherless-family narrative in which ET's role is to restore the family and thereby paternal authority.
The shaking close-up during Gena Rowlands' hysteria is cited as the formal technique that makes Cassavetes a great feminist director.
The European anthem sequence is called 'shit'; Žižek implies Kieślowski naively took the European project seriously when sophisticated viewers found it pompous.
People invoked 36
Mentioned as Kieślowski's friend who told Žižek about Kieślowski's affairs with his actresses.
Ingmar Bergman negative
Rated 'so-so'; his decline begins with Persona which is 'too self-conscious and pretentious'; true masterpiece is The Silence.
Josef Fritzl positive
Used as an example of the Freudian Ur-father, possessing all women in his basement, and as a reductio ad absurdum of 'humanization as ideology' (he was even more human than Karadžić).
Mikhail Chiaureli positive
The Fall of Berlin (1949) is analyzed at length as a Stalinist epic that reproduces the Hollywood formula of love-story-as-background, with Stalin as matchmaker.
Nikita Mikhalkov negative
The Barber of Siberia called 'one of the worst films of all times', an example of post-Soviet directors losing substance once freed from communist constraints.
Warren Beatty negative
Reds is described as possibly the film Žižek would most like to see burned publicly, it reduces October Revolution to a backdrop for American couple-making.
Béla Balázs positive
Cited as evidence that Riefenstahl's Das blaue Licht was co-written by a Jewish communist, undermining Sontag's claim of formal proto-Nazism.
Andrzej Wajda negative
Post-communist freedom led him to do 'Pan Tadeusz and similar big Polish national epics', a decline from his communist-era work.
John Carpenter positive
They Live is cited positively as a paranoiac literalization of ideology's hidden level, useful as a conceptual model even if 'ridiculous' in its literal execution.
Radovan Karadžić negative
Quoted from a poem to demonstrate how nationalist ideology functions as false permissivity, the poem's message is that nothing is forbidden under the new faith.
Charlie Chaplin positive
Called a genius for resisting sound cinema and for The Great Dictator's method of rendering Hitler ridiculous through mimicry and phonetic derangement; used as the model for ideal Holocaust comedy.
Susan Sontag negative
Žižek radically disagrees with Sontag's analysis of Riefenstahl, which traces proto-Nazism through her formal style, he denies that formal elements are inherently ideological.
Sergio Leone positive
Once Upon a Time in America's ringing phone scene is cited as an example of the Cheshire Cat operation, sound detached from its source.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Invoked to characterize Short Cuts' ontology as a neo-Spinozian open pluralism without teleology.
David Lynch positive
Described as 'rather stupid' as a person and ideologically into 'new age meditation madness,' yet praised as an extraordinary cinematic sensibility who knows how to perform the Cheshire Cat operation with image and sound.
Atom Egoyan positive
The Sweet Hereafter is called 'my ideal', a perfect example of the ethical act where the girl lies to ruin an unjust game.
Guillermo del Toro positive
Blade II is praised for its wonderfully shot post-industrial Prague aesthetic; Žižek says del Toro has more artistic substance than Iñárritu despite lower critical standing.
John Frankenheimer positive
Seconds with Rock Hudson is called an 'absolute Hollywood masterpiece', about identity reinvention turning into nightmare.
Bob Fosse negative
The 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' scene in Cabaret is called 'totally false, fake', liberal ideology at its worst for leaving too much to the fascist enemy.
Wolf Biermann positive
East German dissident cited for the line (attributed via Breton/surrealism): the true question is not life after death but life before death.
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as 'my friend, another Slovene Lacanian Hegelian philosopher'; shares the anecdote of the US academic dinner where sexual orientation was requested.
Henri Bergson positive
His observation about WWI, that people knew it was coming but couldn't believe it, then adapted instantly, is applied to the Sarajevo siege.
Jörg Haider negative
His 'Kärnten bleibt deutsch' campaign is the target of the Austrian left's obscene mimicry strategy, the example of effective counter-ideology through Verfremdung.
John Cassavetes positive
Called a great feminist director because his camera catches the hysteria it depicts, form and content are inseparable, contrasted favorably with Tarkovsky's cold distance.
Lina Wertmüller positive
Pasqualino Settebellezze is praised as an example of how Holocaust film must be comedy, survival with utter despair, no redemption.
Robert Altman positive
Short Cuts is cited as a masterpiece whose formal apparatus inscribes a neo-Spinozian open pluralist ontology; the film achieves optimism through form rather than content.
Krzysztof Kieślowski negative
His best films (Blind Chance) were made under Jaruzelski's dictatorship; freedom led him to new-age films about beautiful women, Blue's European anthem theme is called 'shit'; Žižek implies the late trilogy was partly a pretext to sleep with his actresses.
Alejandro González Iñárritu negative
Described as a 'good artisan' who manipulates three parallel storylines to maximize emotional effect; lacks true artistic substance despite high critical regard.
Cited in defense against Sontag: her pre-Nazi film Das blaue Licht had a script co-written by Jewish communist Béla Balázs and can be read as a Jewish allegory of exclusion.
Niels Bohr positive
The horseshoe anecdote is cited as a perfect illustration of cynical reason, the structure of belief enacted in practice despite intellectual disavowal.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Extended analysis of Hitchcock's formal procedures, the God's-eye shot collapsing into an impossible point of view, as enacting a theological dimension inscribed into cinematic form.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Ivan the Terrible cited as a case where the implicit ontology is inscribed into formal apparatus, mentioned alongside Chaplin as great examples.
Andrei Tarkovsky negative
In Nostalghia the camera's total stillness during the woman's hysterical outburst is described as conveying 'the most hatred towards a feminine subject', formal detachment as ideological position.
Steven Spielberg negative
Žižek uses Spielberg as the exemplary case of Hollywood ideology: all his films, whatever their topic, enact the restitution of paternal authority; Schindler's List is called manipulative and a worse remake of Jurassic Park.
Sigmund Freud positive
Ur-father concept invoked for contemporary authority; Verfremdung/Extranation used for the defamiliarization effect of Rammstein.
Emir Kusturica negative
Underground is criticized not for being too Balkan but for being too Western, staging the Western fantasy of the Balkans as eternal orgy for a Western audience.
What it argues
ideology operates through a hidden second level, not the explicit messageHollywood's formula: historical background as pretext for restoring the couple or paternal authorityStalinist cinema reproduces the Hollywood formula of love-and-catastropheobscenity as social bond vs. obscenity in service of powercynical reason: belief enacted in practice despite disavowaltrue cinematic art inscribes its ontology into formal apparatusfundamentalism as false permissivity — 'nothing is forbidden' beneath the call to sacrifice
Dialectical moves 11
“The true enigma is not the German coding machine—the true enigma is woman.”
Hollywood displaces the stated problem (military/historical) onto an eternal, unresolvable one (femininity), revealing the ideological subordination of history to romantic myth.
“The catastrophe has to occur to prevent the true catastrophe—which would have been the two of them in New York.”
The Titanic disaster is not the obstacle to love but its condition of possibility; without it the love would simply have faded, so the disaster must happen to sustain the illusion.
“The Russian intervention into Prague in '68 saved the utopia of democratic socialism—it didn't crush it.”
By preventing the experiment, the Soviets preserved the dream that democratic socialism would have worked, whereas its realization would have destroyed the illusion.
“She is shouting 'I will never let you go' while pushing him away with her hands.”
Kate Winslet's gesture in Titanic is contradictory: the official declaration of love is accompanied by the bodily act of releasing him, revealing the film's true logic beneath the romantic surface.
“It was not only forbidden to criticize Stalin—it was also forbidden to publicly announce this criticism as such.”
The meta-prohibition: articulating the prohibition is itself prohibited, so you must maintain the fiction of voluntary restraint rather than obeying an imposed rule.
“Far from fundamentalists being afraid of too much freedom, they are offered false permissivity—nothing is forbidden when you fight for your nation.”
The apparent call to sacrifice and renunciation conceals its opposite: an obscene license to enjoy violence and transgression, which is the real libidinal motor of fundamentalism.
“Rammstein do not criticize fascist enjoyment from the outside—they extract the obscene foundation and show it without its ideological context, which is far more effective.”
The Verfremdung-effect works better by presenting enjoyment bare than by morally condemning it, because condemnation leaves the enjoyment intact as a forbidden pleasure.
“The humanization of the hero—showing his weaknesses—is precisely where ideology enters, not where it is overcome.”
The 'human touch' that appears to personalize and demystify authority actually makes ideology more effective by giving it emotional adhesion.
“Stalinism was more horrible precisely because it was ironically closer to Enlightenment—even the lowest enemy retains access to reason and must confess.”
The show-trial system, which seems humanizing, is actually more totalizing than Nazi externalization of guilt because it penetrates the subject's interiority and requires self-condemnation.
“In Hitchcock the neutral God's-eye frame of reality itself gets subjectivized as an evil presence.”
Objectivity is not a neutral guarantee of truth but is itself haunted by a malevolent agency, the formal apparatus of the film enacts a theological claim about the nature of reality.
“The truly horrifying thing about Pasqualino Settebellezze is not that he dies but that he survives—yet is deprived of the dignity of life.”
Survival by betraying one's principles costs life itself in a deeper sense, making survival indistinguishable from living death.
Claims 20
asserts
Hollywood films, whatever their overt topic, subordinate history, catastrophe, or politics to an underlying narrative of restoring the couple or paternal authority.Hollywood ideology
asserts
Stalinist cinema reproduced the Hollywood formula of love-and-catastrophe: the entire war epic exists to reunite lovers through the mediation of Stalin.Stalinist cinema (Chiaureli's The Fall of Berlin)
asserts
Ideology is not in the explicit message but in the supplement—the second level that sustains the first.theory of ideology
asserts
Ethnic fundamentalism and nationalism do not appeal to people as a retreat from freedom into security but as false permissivity—a license to rape, kill, and rob under cover of sacrificing for the nation.fundamentalism and nationalism
rejects
Political correctness misreads fundamentalists as afraid of postmodern freedoms; in reality fundamentalism offers its own obscene enjoyment.liberal explanation of fundamentalism
asserts
Rammstein is more effective against fascism than liberal critique because it extracts the obscene enjoyment from its ideological context rather than criticizing it from outside.cultural resistance to fascism
rejects
Susan Sontag's reading of Leni Riefenstahl—finding her proto-Nazism already in early mountain films—is wrong: the formal elements she identifies are not inherently fascist.Sontag on Riefenstahl
asserts
The 'humanization' of superhero and action heroes—showing their trauma and weakness—is where ideology enters most effectively, not where it is resisted.humanization as ideological mechanism
asserts
Today we live in a cynical era: we pretend not to believe, yet we simply act as if we believe—belief operates in practice without inner conviction.cynical ideology
asserts
True cinematic art inscribes its implicit ontology—its attitude to reality—into the very formal apparatus of the film, not just into narrative content.aesthetics of cinema
asserts
In Hitchcock the neutral God's-eye shot collapses into a point of view from an impossible subject, enacting a theological dimension where objective reality is subjectivized as evil.Hitchcock's formal procedures
rejects
Stalinism and fascism are fundamentally different in their economy of subjectivity: fascism does not require confessions or show trials, while Stalinism paradoxically preserves Enlightenment universalism.totalitarianism as monolithic
asserts
Charity is ideologically a superstitious payment to keep the suffering Other at a distance rather than genuine solidarity.charity and liberal ideology
asserts
A proper Holocaust film must be a comedy, not a tragedy, because tragedy requires a minimum of dignity that was precisely what the camps destroyed.Holocaust representation in cinema
asserts
Schindler's List manipulates the Holocaust theme and is essentially a remake of Jurassic Park—a story of a bad father who becomes a good one.Schindler's List
rejects
Titanic is not a love story but a vampiric myth in which the rich upper-class girl uses the working-class man to restore her identity and then discards him.Titanic as love story
asserts
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 saved the utopia of democratic socialism by preventing its inevitable failure in practice.Prague Spring / Soviet intervention
asserts
Kusturica's Underground gives the West its fantasy of the Balkans rather than a genuine Balkan perspective—it is too Western, not too Balkan.Kusturica / Underground
asserts
We no longer live in a patriarchal universe in any straightforward sense; contemporary authority more closely resembles Freud's Ur-father—brutal, possessive—than the symbolic father.patriarchy and contemporary power
asserts
Even hardcore pornography is governed by ideological rules—the ridiculous framing story signals necessary distance so the viewer cannot fully emotionally identify with sex.pornography and ideology
Quotes 20
“The true enigma is not the German coding machine, the true enigma is woman which we will never resolve.”Slavoj Žižek · Hollywood displaces history onto the enigma of femininity
“While she is shouting, 'I will never let you go.' She is pushing him away.”Slavoj Žižek · Titanic's contradictory bodily truth beneath the romantic declaration
“The catastrophe has to occur to prevent the true catastrophe, which would have been the two of them in New York.”Slavoj Žižek · catastrophe as condition of possibility for the love illusion
“It was not only that it was forbidden to criticize Stalin. It was also forbidden to publicly announce this criticism as such.”Slavoj Žižek · the meta-prohibition: prohibition of the prohibition
“You become a nationalist and everything you do you do it for your nation, so it's freedom: rape, kill, rob, and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · fundamentalism as false permissivity
“The movie addresses you as a two-levels spectator: I will give you enough signs so that you can claim that nothing happened, but at the same time give you hints as to what might have happened.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology's two-level address to the spectator
“Ideology is not where it appears to be. Ideology is not in the explicit message.”Slavoj Žižek · structural theory of ideology
“This humanization, this 'I'm also a human being,' is exactly where ideology enters. Ideology is effective, it needs this human touch.”Slavoj Žižek · humanization as the entry-point of ideology
“I have it there because I was told that even if you don't believe in it, it still works.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical reason: belief enacted in practice without inner conviction
“In fascism, when the leader is applauded, he just receives the applause. In Stalinism, always, the leader joins the applause.”Slavoj Žižek · the structural difference between fascist and Stalinist subjectivity
“Stalinism was in some respects more horrible precisely because it was ironically closer to Enlightenment.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinist paradox: universalism as more total domination
“Charity is at its most fundamental a kind of a superstitious activity to guarantee that they don't bother you.”Slavoj Žižek · charity as ideological distance-management
“The true question is not is there life after death—the true question is is there life before death.”Slavoj Žižek · surviving without the dignity of life
“What remains after the laughter is utter despair. He survives but he is deprived of the dignity of life.”Slavoj Žižek · Holocaust comedy exposes what tragedy conceals: survival without redemption
“Appearances have an autonomy of their own. You can be cynical or whatever, but things function.”Slavoj Žižek · the performative autonomy of ideology beyond belief
“If there is a scene which should be publicly burned, it's this one—Warren Beatty's Reds.”Slavoj Žižek · October Revolution reduced to romantic backdrop
“I claim it's much more—okay, not so much complex as complicated.”Slavoj Žižek · signature self-correcting rhetorical move distinguishing complexity from complication
“This was racism at its purest. I am only allowed—you know, I hated this kind of Balkan victim tourism.”Slavoj Žižek · the West assigns Balkans the role of victim as a form of racism
“Don't leave to the enemy too much. We should act like this, we should have songs like this, better songs.”Slavoj Žižek · the left must not cede aesthetic and affective terrain to fascism
“For me where cinema as an art truly begins is at this level of some attitude to reality, implicit ontology, which is inscribed into the very form.”Slavoj Žižek · formal apparatus as the site of cinematic truth
Transcript 31 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Now we will speak the common language of the enemy. Why not? Why not? Okay. Uh, let me. My topic will be effectively ideology in cinema today. This may sound strange because the commonplace today is that we live in a post-ideological society. Who cares about big ideological issues today? At least in the hedonist Western countries, the motto, the injunction, commandment that society is addressing to us is not sacrifice yourself for some higher goal, it’s rather a vague injunction to enjoy. Something like enjoy, realize your true self, reach spiritual fulfillment. Where is ideology here? I will precisely try to use some Hollywood and other films to show how perhaps more than ever we are in ideology. Let me begin just to first go quickly through some popular films. Let me begin by a film which I think makes my case, articulates my case in a pure way. Very simple commercial film, British, Michael Apted’s Enigma. You know about a group of scientists who in '43 in that Bletchley Park, the famous, uh, in the suburbs of London, old house, or further from London, where they tried to crack the German secret code, Enigma. It’s again a group of scientists, mathematicians and so on trying to crack the code. At the same time, it’s a love story between the main scientist vaguely based on Alan Turing, although in a Hollywood style, they just made some small unimportant changes like from homosexual they changed him into heterosexual and so on, but it’s an, and towards the end of the film, they openly almost articulate the lesson, which is: We can crack even the most complex enigmas—I mean military enigmas, coding machines and so on—but we will never be able to crack the enigma of femininity, of a woman. So this is typical, I claim, Hollywood. And this is first what I will try to demonstrate to you through some examples. Hollywood’s formula, one of the formulas of the production of the couple, that whatever topic the film is about, it can be Titanic, it can be the world catastrophe, asteroid hitting earth, it can be October Revolution, it can be Second World War and so on. The war itself, this vast historical reality is staged, shown as a kind of a background for, as it were, the true story which is the story for the creation of the couple. So let me go back to this film briefly, Enigma. This is what makes it a Hollywood film, that this precisely this double meaning of enigma, that the true enigma is not the German coding machine, the true enigma is woman which we will never resolve and so on and so on. So now you will say am I, am I not exaggerating here? I will try to give you some examples from maybe even cinematographers where you would not expect it. Let’s take first another one, the top of commercial cinema, Steven Spielberg. I’ve chosen him first because he is the exemplary of Hollywood today and point two because it can be, because you know the films, and because it can be so clearly shown, I claim, how all his films, no matter what is the topic—Schindler's List, ET, Jurassic Park—the topic can be dinosaurs, can be the Nazis and Holocaust, whatever you want, I claim that the underlying story is not so much creation of the couple as the assertion of paternal authority, the restitution of paternal authority. Father is either absent or a failure and through, through the narrative, father asserts his authority. You don’t believe me, let me give you some proofs. Molim, hoćemo, let’s start with ET. I hope the sound will work. Ako može zvuk malo niže tako da ja mogu da pričam da ne gubimo vreme. Okay. This is from the beginning—does it go on?—yes, from the beginning of ET, the conversation before even the monster, the small one, appears. I mean, I don’t know what is your sensibility, but every time I see this film with my son, I’m tempted to say if I were to encounter such a monster as ET I would squash him with my boots, with pleasure. I claim it’s really, it’s absolutely crucial that the family, this is the first crisis they have, is a family abandoned by father. As we learn father is in Mexico, and I think that the true role of ET, it’s the same as Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, he is a matchmaker, the one who reconstructs the couple. Because precisely as it—this is already the end, oh sorry, the final scene where—this is absolutely crucial. You see? Namely, what happened? The father is absent and then the scientists help who investigate this, one of the scientists, you’ve just seen him, is the good guy, as it were, and in the very last scene he is already standing by the mother, you even see all of them, the family is reconstructed so ET can go home. Hoću reći, the role of ET is absolutely just to re-restore to the family the paternal authority. Now let’s go on, Empire of the Sun, John Malkovich, the bad father, fatherless son, the problem is how to find a father. Jurassic Park, please go on. It’s the crucial—here this is at the very beginning of the film, you will see the crucial role of Sam Neill. Možeš malo zvuka da daš? A little bit of sound wouldn’t hurt here. As the evil father trying to scare the boy. At the end, you will see he will try to scare him by a long dinosaur teeth. And I claim that the problem is again Sam Neill figure, bad father, how will he develop into a good father. You will have here this brutal attack, then in the next scene you will see is that they are, after being attacked by dinosaurs, they go up to a large tree, this paternal figure with two small children, and they are reconciled, at that point he throws away the tooth and the dinosaurs who come are herbivores, not carnivores, the good ones. So it’s clear that the entire fury, rage of attacking bad dinosaurs is basically, as it were, the materialization, metaphorical realization of paternal fury. Father is furious, father turns into a good boy. Just watch carefully, he will, they will fall asleep, he will throw down as if he no longer needs the bad object. Then, please leave it on, I will just go on. Schindler's List. I shock my friends by telling them that Schindler's List is for me a remake of Jurassic Park, only a worse film. I think it purely manipulates all this Holocaust topic. It’s really a story of Schindler, a bad father at the beginning, a bad father in the sense of exploiting Jews, business opportunity, how he gradually turns into a good father figure. And you know at the end that absolutely, I claim, potentially anti-Semitic disgusting scene where, where the Jews are basically reduced to children and he is embracing them and so on. Again, paternal authority restored. Although what I really think is beneath, yes, beneath the paternal—sorry, that beneath this story there is another problem with Schindler's List, if you noticed it, is that Spielberg couldn’t resist a minimum of discretion, he had to show openly the moment when Schindler turns from bad guy to good guy. Maybe you remember the well-known scene when he is on a morning horse ride above the ghetto on a hill and sees how Germans are penetrating the ghetto, a girl, the only color detail in the film, in red dress, and oh, at that moment he becomes a good boy. I think this is vulgarity. The art of cinema is precisely not to show everything, not to show too much, which is why there is even another—okay, whatever this means, I don’t know—pretty good film which I hate for this reason, Pollock with Ed Harris, where they couldn’t resist showing the very moment where Pollock discovered action painting. The drunken Pollock over kicks over, kicks over a bottle with colors and the colors spill and he looks, ‘Ah, that’s it, now, now I discovered action painting.’ Okay. Let’s go on, even the War of the Worlds, apparently a totally different film, but it’s the same. It’s really a story about Tom Cruise, you remember at the beginning, distrust, bad father, and through all these aliens attacking, he takes care of the children, the paternal authority is restructured. So this would be what I refer in the title of my talk, the divine detail. How the movies, you cannot imagine more different movies, like for example Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun, ET, but I claim the underlying story, this apparently marginal detail, paternal authority restored, is the key to it. A similar thing we find in, haha, the greatest, please go on to, it should be if I didn’t misplan it, Titanic now. Please go on. Titanic is a special case which I really hate. There will be three scenes. The one where Leonardo DiCaprio paints her, the second one, the moment when the boat hits the iceberg, and the third one, the death of Leonardo DiCaprio. The one key to Titanic, so that you will see it’s the same formula, is the exact moment when—you should be very attentive to this, in the Hollywood melodramatic universe such details have meaning—when exactly does the boat hit the iceberg? You remember? Precisely after the couple makes love beneath. Of course, if it were only this, it would have been a standard upper-class melodrama where it’s punishment for a double transgression. Sexual relations which was, they were not married, and they are from different, more important, social classes. But it’s more complex because if you watch it closely, the boat hits the iceberg at the precise moment when, after making love, they go up onto the deck and she, Kate Winslet, tells Leonardo DiCaprio, ‘You know, the rich girl, I’ve decided, I have enough of my rich corrupted life, now I want to go with you when we arrive to New York and even if we will live a poor destitute life, we will be happy and so on.’ At that point, accident. Here I think the logic is much more cynical. It is that the catastrophe has to occur to prevent the true catastrophe, which would have been the two of them in New York. It’s clear that probably their love would be over in one, two weeks, rich spoiled girl and so on. So it’s like, you know, the true catastrophe would have been the love fiasco. So there has to be a catastrophe to sustain the illusion of love. It’s the same as, let me give you a very problematic political example that I like. When I was young, '68, Soviet invasion to prevent the Prague Spring. People usually say the hope, the utopia of democratic socialism was crushed. I think it’s exactly the opposite. They saved it. In what sense? Imagine Soviets not intervening into Prague in '68 August. I claim only one of the two things would have happened: a) either Czech Republic would simply probably turn to the West, we would get an ordinary Western democracy, or b) communists would at a certain point they would have to, well, to take control again. Maybe a more liberal communist regime, but still one. So I claim it was the Russian intervention which kept alive the illusion that only if, if only the Russians were not to intervene we would have a new truly democratic socialism, socialism whatever, whatever. But there is—ah, please more sound now, sound. Be careful, this is the key. When she will notice that he is dead, she will start to shout, ‘I will never let you go.’ Be—but watch what she is doing with her hands while she is shouting, ‘I will never let you go.’ She is pushing him away. If you don’t believe me, look at it. So I claim that this provides the true key to the film. It’s not, you know many people were seduced with this what some people ironically call James Cameron Hollywood Marxism, you know, like rich guys are ridiculously evil, poor guys are always good. But I think that here we learn that it’s—the Titanic, I claim basically it’s not even a love story. It’s a story about a rich upper-class girl who has what we call identity crisis, and Leonardo DiCaprio is just some kind of a mediator. He literally restores her image, you remember the first clip that you saw, Leonardo DiCaprio drawing her. He restores her image, he, as it were, makes her functional again, and when the job is done, of course, he can go because it’s also—I didn’t want to bore you too much, but it’s so interesting to listen to what he is telling her while he is freezing to death. This is not how a lover talks. This is how a priest talks. He gives her this kind of a worldly advice, ‘Be good, be faithful to yourself,’ and so on and so on. So I claim that that’s why Titanic works, gives you such a satisfaction. Beneath the appearance of a love story, or at the same level, there is a different story, a very reactionary myth whose first version is, you know that Rudyard Kipling’s classical child novel Captains Courageous. The myth is that the rich people’s lives are sterile, aseptic, so from time to time they need a little bit of contact with lower classes who are more instinctual, passionate, and it’s a kind of a vampire-like relationship. She restores her ego sucking all the energy out of him, when the job is done, he can disappear down there. It’s a totally different myth. And I’m so sorry we don’t have time to go further into it because what is crucial is that this multi-level approach, that it’s the story is not about what it appears to be. For example, Titanic is not simply love story, beneath the love story is a much more ominous upper-class vampiric story. The most beautiful example, but I didn’t spend too much, didn’t want to spend too much time, the most beautiful example maybe would have been if you saw it the biggest classic Casablanca. You remember that brief scene just in the middle, two-thirds into the film, where Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart for that visa, passport, whatever, to Portugal, and they talk then they embrace, fade out for two seconds and a half, you see the tower of the, of the Casablanca airport and then cut back to them going on talking. Of course, there is a crucial question here. What does those two seconds and a half stand for? Did they do it or not? Sex. What is so interesting, many nice analyses were done of this scene, is that it’s not so much ambiguous as simply contradictory. You get three, four unambiguous signs that they did do it. For example, in the standard Hollywood where explicit sex was prohibited, whenever you have a couple passionately embracing and then a fade out, it meant sex. Point two: after we return to them, they smoke. This was also in Hollywood a standard codified way—no, you know that nice proverb, what is the second and the third nicest thing in the world: the drink before and the cigarette after. So, and then also the kind of a phallic tower of the—so and then on the other hand, we get a whole series of signals that they didn’t do it. And I think that’s how ideology works in Hollywood. You are not directly told what may be it happened at this obscene level of sexuality, but it is as if the movie addresses you as a two-levels spectator and tells you, ‘I will give you enough signs so that you can claim, pretend, that nothing happened.’ So, no, you know, they just talk there, nothing happened, I’m clean. ‘But at the same time, I will give you a whole series of hints as to what might have happened, and since you are covered by the first level, you can indulge, enjoy, in all these dirty obscenities and so on and so on.’ So let me go on here with how this production of the couple happens. This is really what shocked me, which is why I think if some film has to be burned publicly, it’s this one, Warren Beatty’s Reds. Even October Revolution is here basically reduced—listen, let’s go on, please, so that we don’t lose time. This is the lovemaking scene. They before this scene, the two of them, the couple, Diane Keaton, Warren Beatty, had a love crisis. Now, he gives, you see her fascinated gaze, he gives a big revolutionary speech, she is again erotically attracted to him, and then you will have the absolute obscenity, the two of them making love against the background literally of the October Revolution. Notice even all the details. For example, how metaphorically she lying later on the top of him echoes with the scene on the street where a crowd, a crowd encircles streetcar, then at the end you will even see the two of them on some big square after the revolution because it’s Christmas with a Christmas tree. So basically you see that’s what I’m telling you about. Officially the movie is about this John Reed, the American participant in the October Revolution and so on, problems of communism effectively, but the effective function within the emotional economy of the film is—the function is to interpret October Revolution as a means to recreate an American couple. It’s at the end you will get, you will see, happy couples created, a little bit of Lenin now and so on and so on. Okay, I don’t want—yeah, let’s go on please to fill in—it just goes on, okay—to fill in this time I want to quickly improvise on something which, for which unfortunately we do not have time. Maybe how this duality which is finds its clearest expression in, for example, Casablanca, between the—are we already—ah stop, stop. My god, this is sacred territory, stop. Okay, no. Let’s go on. Okay. Now, you will say but this holds only for Hollywood. No. It’s a little bit more ambiguous. Now what I will show you is where my heart is beating faster, is the greatest Soviet Stalinist war spectacle. You don’t even—it’s very difficult to get on DVD—Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin from '49. I warn you that these scenes, especially those you see now, were written, co-written by Stalin himself. The actor who plays Stalin was prohibited to play any other roles, because he cannot—be Stalin, he cannot... Okay. What shocked me so much is how this film perfectly reproduces the Hollywood formula of creation of the couple. Let me briefly introduce it to you, the scene. At the beginning we see, just in the summer of '41, an model worker who is in love with a local teacher or librarian girl but is afraid to approach her, doesn’t know how. As a model worker he gets a call to visit Stalin because he got that Lenin’s medal whatever. And then this scene was cut out in the Khrushchev era because it was considered too much. In the scene which is unfortunately cut out, Stalin notices that the guy is nervous and tells him, asks him, this ordinary worker, ‘Tell me, comrade, what is wrong?’ And the guy confesses to him, ‘Listen, Comrade Stalin, I’m in love, don’t know how to do.’ And then here’s the top of Stalinist pornography. Stalin gives him precise advices, like ‘Grab her hand like this, recite to her this poem by Pushkin’ and so on. They cut this out, but you can check it, you can get the full scenario on, on internet. Then we will cut here directly to the scene where he returns back to the girl, the hero, and of course, my god, if Stalin gives you his advice, it’s okay, so they are officially lovers. He takes her to a field, probably to do certain things with her, but as you will see, at the very moment when they are embraced, something happens. Planes, bombing. It’s again this wonderful melodramatic coincidence, at the very moment when the love was to be consummated, you get World War II starts. And then the whole film is the guy of course, she is taken prisoner by the Germans, the guy becomes a model soldier, and it’s as if again the whole point of the war is to reunite the lovers. In a wonderful, terrifyingly wonderful final scene, you will see Stalin arrives among the crowd and how—be attentive to the looks, exchange of gazes—how the two lovers are united through mediation of Stalin. They look at Stalin, they look where Stalin looks, they see each other, and then in the final scene the woman before kissing—they just embrace—her lover walks to Stalin and says, ‘Comrade Stalin, can I give you a kiss, please?’ Stalin himself wrote this scene, remember as a scenario, and according to some sources in a history of Soviet cinema when he saw the film, he was crying, of course he—okay. Please let’s go on. Put more sound please. Sound. Look the sacred music. Represent to him the worker if you don’t understand fastly Russian. Prostite radi boga. It’s really shocking, especially if you hear this Orthodox religious chorus in the background, to what extent—he says ‘Ras-st-retel-Ivanovich,’ ‘Prostite, radiboga.’ ‘This is my paternal blessing.’ ‘A ya, Iosif Vissarionovich.’ ‘I know everything.’ Okay. Here comes, unfortunately here they censored it. You know why they cut that scene out, now I remember, because in the background you see Beria. And Beria was a non-person in Khrushchev's times. Now they are—together watch how wonderfully this scene will be shot with all the ridiculous theatricals. You know why I found this so interesting? Because it gives you a proper approach to the Stalinist universe in the sense that do you know that the most popular model films in Soviet Union under Stalin were not as we would have thought war ethics or whatever, but so-called Stalinist musicals? In the same way that for example in Nazi Germany in the harshest time, early '40s, it was melodramas and musicals also. We don’t have time, but this scene now has, would have to be analyzed in detail, the movements. How it is as if the unification shouldn’t be direct, she will look now—basically the message is let me go away from you so that I can then directly run towards you. You will see. It’s the charm of the movies where there are no coincidences, you know, things happen, for example now. Exactly now when the love would have been consummated. Okay. Now you will see the a little bit of a speech by Stalin. So that we don’t lose time, I will go on drawing another attention—sorry, attention to another detail which is crucial. Usually we—put on voice please. Music is of course by Shostakovich. So let me go on. You know what makes Stalinism so enigmatic? Usually they say in the West we are manipulated, it’s freedom but which is just an appearance, while Stalinism was a brutal dictatorship. No, Stalinism in—of course it was a brutal dictatorship. But what makes it so mysterious is that it was all the more, how should I put it, sensible to appearances. Appearances had to be kept at all price. What does this mean? One could make a detailed analysis propos Stalinism of a certain feature which always fascinated me in the functioning of ideology. How, for example, when you are member of a certain closed community, it’s not enough to know the rules of that community. You have to know also how to violate the rules. You know what I mean? Like rules are never simply rules. I mean, I remember from my unfortunate experience in '75, '76 in the infamous Yugoslav army, my military service there. What shocked me was that there were rules, but if you did stick to the rules, you were an idiot. The point was to know which rules are meant to be taken just not literally so that you can really violate them, or on the contrary, even more interesting, which rules allow you something but you were not expected to take the opportunity seriously. Like in our lives even, many of the sexual rules are of the first type. Something is prohibited but between the lines the message is do it by discreet—but discreetly. No, you are an idiot if you follow prohibition. But in politics, did you notice how—again, yeah, yeah—so you see basically this is the continuation of the scene four years ago, that scene. So my point is that much more mysterious are those rules and meta-rules, higher level—well, something is offered to you—sorry, that’s too nice, it’s obscene to talk while we have such sublime scenes. I don’t know if you noticed in the back, only Stalin images, just one very small Lenin, so it was—She asked him if she can kiss him. Don’t be afraid, it’s a very decent kiss. No, it’s again, it’s really like almost unbelievable how Soviet cinema in at its most Stalinist again followed this idea of great history as a background only for the, for the creation of the couple. Okay. Back to Stalinism. Even in our everyday life we have many rules like this. For example, I don’t know how is it with you in, in Bosnia, but in Slovenia maybe we have the same rules. Let’s say I am in a competition with my best friend for a job. He gets it. It’s considered polite that he asks, tells me, ‘I know you deserved it more, why don’t I step down?’ But if I say yes, I
Now we will speak the common language of the enemy. Why not? Why not? Okay. Uh, let me. My topic will be effectively ideology in cinema today. This may sound strange because the commonplace today is that we live in a post-ideological society. Who cares about big ideological issues today? At least in the hedonist Western countries, the motto, the injunction, commandment that society is addressing to us is not sacrifice yourself for some higher goal, it’s rather a vague injunction to enjoy. Something like enjoy, realize your true self, reach spiritual fulfillment. Where is ideology here? I will precisely try to use some Hollywood and other films to show how perhaps more than ever we are in ideology. Let me begin just to first go quickly through some popular films. Let me begin by a film which I think makes my case, articulates my case in a pure way. Very simple commercial film, British, Michael Apted’s Enigma. You know about a group of scientists who in '43 in that Bletchley Park, the famous, uh, in the suburbs of London, old house, or further from London, where they tried to crack the German secret code, Enigma. It’s again a group of scientists, mathematicians and so on trying to crack the code. At the same time, it’s a love story between the main scientist vaguely based on Alan Turing, although in a Hollywood style, they just made some small unimportant changes like from homosexual they changed him into heterosexual and so on, but it’s an, and towards the end of the film, they openly almost articulate the lesson, which is: We can crack even the most complex enigmas—I mean military enigmas, coding machines and so on—but we will never be able to crack the enigma of femininity, of a woman. So this is typical, I claim, Hollywood. And this is first what I will try to demonstrate to you through some examples. Hollywood’s formula, one of the formulas of the production of the couple, that whatever topic the film is about, it can be Titanic, it can be the world catastrophe, asteroid hitting earth, it can be October Revolution, it can be Second World War and so on. The war itself, this vast historical reality is staged, shown as a kind of a background for, as it were, the true story which is the story for the creation of the couple. So let me go back to this film briefly, Enigma. This is what makes it a Hollywood film, that this precisely this double meaning of enigma, that the true enigma is not the German coding machine, the true enigma is woman which we will never resolve and so on and so on. So now you will say am I, am I not exaggerating here? I will try to give you some examples from maybe even cinematographers where you would not expect it. Let’s take first another one, the top of commercial cinema, Steven Spielberg. I’ve chosen him first because he is the exemplary of Hollywood today and point two because it can be, because you know the films, and because it can be so clearly shown, I claim, how all his films, no matter what is the topic—Schindler's List, ET, Jurassic Park—the topic can be dinosaurs, can be the Nazis and Holocaust, whatever you want, I claim that the underlying story is not so much creation of the couple as the assertion of paternal authority, the restitution of paternal authority. Father is either absent or a failure and through, through the narrative, father asserts his authority. You don’t believe me, let me give you some proofs. Molim, hoćemo, let’s start with ET. I hope the sound will work. Ako može zvuk malo niže tako da ja mogu da pričam da ne gubimo vreme. Okay. This is from the beginning—does it go on?—yes, from the beginning of ET, the conversation before even the monster, the small one, appears. I mean, I don’t know what is your sensibility, but every time I see this film with my son, I’m tempted to say if I were to encounter such a monster as ET I would squash him with my boots, with pleasure. I claim it’s really, it’s absolutely crucial that the family, this is the first crisis they have, is a family abandoned by father. As we learn father is in Mexico, and I think that the true role of ET, it’s the same as Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, he is a matchmaker, the one who reconstructs the couple. Because precisely as it—this is already the end, oh sorry, the final scene where—this is absolutely crucial. You see? Namely, what happened? The father is absent and then the scientists help who investigate this, one of the scientists, you’ve just seen him, is the good guy, as it were, and in the very last scene he is already standing by the mother, you even see all of them, the family is reconstructed so ET can go home. Hoću reći, the role of ET is absolutely just to re-restore to the family the paternal authority. Now let’s go on, Empire of the Sun, John Malkovich, the bad father, fatherless son, the problem is how to find a father. Jurassic Park, please go on. It’s the crucial—here this is at the very beginning of the film, you will see the crucial role of Sam Neill. Možeš malo zvuka da daš? A little bit of sound wouldn’t hurt here. As the evil father trying to scare the boy. At the end, you will see he will try to scare him by a long dinosaur teeth. And I claim that the problem is again Sam Neill figure, bad father, how will he develop into a good father. You will have here this brutal attack, then in the next scene you will see is that they are, after being attacked by dinosaurs, they go up to a large tree, this paternal figure with two small children, and they are reconciled, at that point he throws away the tooth and the dinosaurs who come are herbivores, not carnivores, the good ones. So it’s clear that the entire fury, rage of attacking bad dinosaurs is basically, as it were, the materialization, metaphorical realization of paternal fury. Father is furious, father turns into a good boy. Just watch carefully, he will, they will fall asleep, he will throw down as if he no longer needs the bad object. Then, please leave it on, I will just go on. Schindler's List. I shock my friends by telling them that Schindler's List is for me a remake of Jurassic Park, only a worse film. I think it purely manipulates all this Holocaust topic. It’s really a story of Schindler, a bad father at the beginning, a bad father in the sense of exploiting Jews, business opportunity, how he gradually turns into a good father figure. And you know at the end that absolutely, I claim, potentially anti-Semitic disgusting scene where, where the Jews are basically reduced to children and he is embracing them and so on. Again, paternal authority restored. Although what I really think is beneath, yes, beneath the paternal—sorry, that beneath this story there is another problem with Schindler's List, if you noticed it, is that Spielberg couldn’t resist a minimum of discretion, he had to show openly the moment when Schindler turns from bad guy to good guy. Maybe you remember the well-known scene when he is on a morning horse ride above the ghetto on a hill and sees how Germans are penetrating the ghetto, a girl, the only color detail in the film, in red dress, and oh, at that moment he becomes a good boy. I think this is vulgarity. The art of cinema is precisely not to show everything, not to show too much, which is why there is even another—okay, whatever this means, I don’t know—pretty good film which I hate for this reason, Pollock with Ed Harris, where they couldn’t resist showing the very moment where Pollock discovered action painting. The drunken Pollock over kicks over, kicks over a bottle with colors and the colors spill and he looks, ‘Ah, that’s it, now, now I discovered action painting.’ Okay. Let’s go on, even the War of the Worlds, apparently a totally different film, but it’s the same. It’s really a story about Tom Cruise, you remember at the beginning, distrust, bad father, and through all these aliens attacking, he takes care of the children, the paternal authority is restructured. So this would be what I refer in the title of my talk, the divine detail. How the movies, you cannot imagine more different movies, like for example Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun, ET, but I claim the underlying story, this apparently marginal detail, paternal authority restored, is the key to it. A similar thing we find in, haha, the greatest, please go on to, it should be if I didn’t misplan it, Titanic now. Please go on. Titanic is a special case which I really hate. There will be three scenes. The one where Leonardo DiCaprio paints her, the second one, the moment when the boat hits the iceberg, and the third one, the death of Leonardo DiCaprio. The one key to Titanic, so that you will see it’s the same formula, is the exact moment when—you should be very attentive to this, in the Hollywood melodramatic universe such details have meaning—when exactly does the boat hit the iceberg? You remember? Precisely after the couple makes love beneath. Of course, if it were only this, it would have been a standard upper-class melodrama where it’s punishment for a double transgression. Sexual relations which was, they were not married, and they are from different, more important, social classes. But it’s more complex because if you watch it closely, the boat hits the iceberg at the precise moment when, after making love, they go up onto the deck and she, Kate Winslet, tells Leonardo DiCaprio, ‘You know, the rich girl, I’ve decided, I have enough of my rich corrupted life, now I want to go with you when we arrive to New York and even if we will live a poor destitute life, we will be happy and so on.’ At that point, accident. Here I think the logic is much more cynical. It is that the catastrophe has to occur to prevent the true catastrophe, which would have been the two of them in New York. It’s clear that probably their love would be over in one, two weeks, rich spoiled girl and so on. So it’s like, you know, the true catastrophe would have been the love fiasco. So there has to be a catastrophe to sustain the illusion of love. It’s the same as, let me give you a very problematic political example that I like. When I was young, '68, Soviet invasion to prevent the Prague Spring. People usually say the hope, the utopia of democratic socialism was crushed. I think it’s exactly the opposite. They saved it. In what sense? Imagine Soviets not intervening into Prague in '68 August. I claim only one of the two things would have happened: a) either Czech Republic would simply probably turn to the West, we would get an ordinary Western democracy, or b) communists would at a certain point they would have to, well, to take control again. Maybe a more liberal communist regime, but still one. So I claim it was the Russian intervention which kept alive the illusion that only if, if only the Russians were not to intervene we would have a new truly democratic socialism, socialism whatever, whatever. But there is—ah, please more sound now, sound. Be careful, this is the key. When she will notice that he is dead, she will start to shout, ‘I will never let you go.’ Be—but watch what she is doing with her hands while she is shouting, ‘I will never let you go.’ She is pushing him away. If you don’t believe me, look at it. So I claim that this provides the true key to the film. It’s not, you know many people were seduced with this what some people ironically call James Cameron Hollywood Marxism, you know, like rich guys are ridiculously evil, poor guys are always good. But I think that here we learn that it’s—the Titanic, I claim basically it’s not even a love story. It’s a story about a rich upper-class girl who has what we call identity crisis, and Leonardo DiCaprio is just some kind of a mediator. He literally restores her image, you remember the first clip that you saw, Leonardo DiCaprio drawing her. He restores her image, he, as it were, makes her functional again, and when the job is done, of course, he can go because it’s also—I didn’t want to bore you too much, but it’s so interesting to listen to what he is telling her while he is freezing to death. This is not how a lover talks. This is how a priest talks. He gives her this kind of a worldly advice, ‘Be good, be faithful to yourself,’ and so on and so on. So I claim that that’s why Titanic works, gives you such a satisfaction. Beneath the appearance of a love story, or at the same level, there is a different story, a very reactionary myth whose first version is, you know that Rudyard Kipling’s classical child novel Captains Courageous. The myth is that the rich people’s lives are sterile, aseptic, so from time to time they need a little bit of contact with lower classes who are more instinctual, passionate, and it’s a kind of a vampire-like relationship. She restores her ego sucking all the energy out of him, when the job is done, he can disappear down there. It’s a totally different myth. And I’m so sorry we don’t have time to go further into it because what is crucial is that this multi-level approach, that it’s the story is not about what it appears to be. For example, Titanic is not simply love story, beneath the love story is a much more ominous upper-class vampiric story. The most beautiful example, but I didn’t spend too much, didn’t want to spend too much time, the most beautiful example maybe would have been if you saw it the biggest classic Casablanca. You remember that brief scene just in the middle, two-thirds into the film, where Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart for that visa, passport, whatever, to Portugal, and they talk then they embrace, fade out for two seconds and a half, you see the tower of the, of the Casablanca airport and then cut back to them going on talking. Of course, there is a crucial question here. What does those two seconds and a half stand for? Did they do it or not? Sex. What is so interesting, many nice analyses were done of this scene, is that it’s not so much ambiguous as simply contradictory. You get three, four unambiguous signs that they did do it. For example, in the standard Hollywood where explicit sex was prohibited, whenever you have a couple passionately embracing and then a fade out, it meant sex. Point two: after we return to them, they smoke. This was also in Hollywood a standard codified way—no, you know that nice proverb, what is the second and the third nicest thing in the world: the drink before and the cigarette after. So, and then also the kind of a phallic tower of the—so and then on the other hand, we get a whole series of signals that they didn’t do it. And I think that’s how ideology works in Hollywood. You are not directly told what may be it happened at this obscene level of sexuality, but it is as if the movie addresses you as a two-levels spectator and tells you, ‘I will give you enough signs so that you can claim, pretend, that nothing happened.’ So, no, you know, they just talk there, nothing happened, I’m clean. ‘But at the same time, I will give you a whole series of hints as to what might have happened, and since you are covered by the first level, you can indulge, enjoy, in all these dirty obscenities and so on and so on.’ So let me go on here with how this production of the couple happens. This is really what shocked me, which is why I think if some film has to be burned publicly, it’s this one, Warren Beatty’s Reds. Even October Revolution is here basically reduced—listen, let’s go on, please, so that we don’t lose time. This is the lovemaking scene. They before this scene, the two of them, the couple, Diane Keaton, Warren Beatty, had a love crisis. Now, he gives, you see her fascinated gaze, he gives a big revolutionary speech, she is again erotically attracted to him, and then you will have the absolute obscenity, the two of them making love against the background literally of the October Revolution. Notice even all the details. For example, how metaphorically she lying later on the top of him echoes with the scene on the street where a crowd, a crowd encircles streetcar, then at the end you will even see the two of them on some big square after the revolution because it’s Christmas with a Christmas tree. So basically you see that’s what I’m telling you about. Officially the movie is about this John Reed, the American participant in the October Revolution and so on, problems of communism effectively, but the effective function within the emotional economy of the film is—the function is to interpret October Revolution as a means to recreate an American couple. It’s at the end you will get, you will see, happy couples created, a little bit of Lenin now and so on and so on. Okay, I don’t want—yeah, let’s go on please to fill in—it just goes on, okay—to fill in this time I want to quickly improvise on something which, for which unfortunately we do not have time. Maybe how this duality which is finds its clearest expression in, for example, Casablanca, between the—are we already—ah stop, stop. My god, this is sacred territory, stop. Okay, no. Let’s go on. Okay. Now, you will say but this holds only for Hollywood. No. It’s a little bit more ambiguous. Now what I will show you is where my heart is beating faster, is the greatest Soviet Stalinist war spectacle. You don’t even—it’s very difficult to get on DVD—Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin from '49. I warn you that these scenes, especially those you see now, were written, co-written by Stalin himself. The actor who plays Stalin was prohibited to play any other roles, because he cannot—be Stalin, he cannot... Okay. What shocked me so much is how this film perfectly reproduces the Hollywood formula of creation of the couple. Let me briefly introduce it to you, the scene. At the beginning we see, just in the summer of '41, an model worker who is in love with a local teacher or librarian girl but is afraid to approach her, doesn’t know how. As a model worker he gets a call to visit Stalin because he got that Lenin’s medal whatever. And then this scene was cut out in the Khrushchev era because it was considered too much. In the scene which is unfortunately cut out, Stalin notices that the guy is nervous and tells him, asks him, this ordinary worker, ‘Tell me, comrade, what is wrong?’ And the guy confesses to him, ‘Listen, Comrade Stalin, I’m in love, don’t know how to do.’ And then here’s the top of Stalinist pornography. Stalin gives him precise advices, like ‘Grab her hand like this, recite to her this poem by Pushkin’ and so on. They cut this out, but you can check it, you can get the full scenario on, on internet. Then we will cut here directly to the scene where he returns back to the girl, the hero, and of course, my god, if Stalin gives you his advice, it’s okay, so they are officially lovers. He takes her to a field, probably to do certain things with her, but as you will see, at the very moment when they are embraced, something happens. Planes, bombing. It’s again this wonderful melodramatic coincidence, at the very moment when the love was to be consummated, you get World War II starts. And then the whole film is the guy of course, she is taken prisoner by the Germans, the guy becomes a model soldier, and it’s as if again the whole point of the war is to reunite the lovers. In a wonderful, terrifyingly wonderful final scene, you will see Stalin arrives among the crowd and how—be attentive to the looks, exchange of gazes—how the two lovers are united through mediation of Stalin. They look at Stalin, they look where Stalin looks, they see each other, and then in the final scene the woman before kissing—they just embrace—her lover walks to Stalin and says, ‘Comrade Stalin, can I give you a kiss, please?’ Stalin himself wrote this scene, remember as a scenario, and according to some sources in a history of Soviet cinema when he saw the film, he was crying, of course he—okay. Please let’s go on. Put more sound please. Sound. Look the sacred music. Represent to him the worker if you don’t understand fastly Russian. Prostite radi boga. It’s really shocking, especially if you hear this Orthodox religious chorus in the background, to what extent—he says ‘Ras-st-retel-Ivanovich,’ ‘Prostite, radiboga.’ ‘This is my paternal blessing.’ ‘A ya, Iosif Vissarionovich.’ ‘I know everything.’ Okay. Here comes, unfortunately here they censored it. You know why they cut that scene out, now I remember, because in the background you see Beria. And Beria was a non-person in Khrushchev's times. Now they are—together watch how wonderfully this scene will be shot with all the ridiculous theatricals. You know why I found this so interesting? Because it gives you a proper approach to the Stalinist universe in the sense that do you know that the most popular model films in Soviet Union under Stalin were not as we would have thought war ethics or whatever, but so-called Stalinist musicals? In the same way that for example in Nazi Germany in the harshest time, early '40s, it was melodramas and musicals also. We don’t have time, but this scene now has, would have to be analyzed in detail, the movements. How it is as if the unification shouldn’t be direct, she will look now—basically the message is let me go away from you so that I can then directly run towards you. You will see. It’s the charm of the movies where there are no coincidences, you know, things happen, for example now. Exactly now when the love would have been consummated. Okay. Now you will see the a little bit of a speech by Stalin. So that we don’t lose time, I will go on drawing another attention—sorry, attention to another detail which is crucial. Usually we—put on voice please. Music is of course by Shostakovich. So let me go on. You know what makes Stalinism so enigmatic? Usually they say in the West we are manipulated, it’s freedom but which is just an appearance, while Stalinism was a brutal dictatorship. No, Stalinism in—of course it was a brutal dictatorship. But what makes it so mysterious is that it was all the more, how should I put it, sensible to appearances. Appearances had to be kept at all price. What does this mean? One could make a detailed analysis propos Stalinism of a certain feature which always fascinated me in the functioning of ideology. How, for example, when you are member of a certain closed community, it’s not enough to know the rules of that community. You have to know also how to violate the rules. You know what I mean? Like rules are never simply rules. I mean, I remember from my unfortunate experience in '75, '76 in the infamous Yugoslav army, my military service there. What shocked me was that there were rules, but if you did stick to the rules, you were an idiot. The point was to know which rules are meant to be taken just not literally so that you can really violate them, or on the contrary, even more interesting, which rules allow you something but you were not expected to take the opportunity seriously. Like in our lives even, many of the sexual rules are of the first type. Something is prohibited but between the lines the message is do it by discreet—but discreetly. No, you are an idiot if you follow prohibition. But in politics, did you notice how—again, yeah, yeah—so you see basically this is the continuation of the scene four years ago, that scene. So my point is that much more mysterious are those rules and meta-rules, higher level—well, something is offered to you—sorry, that’s too nice, it’s obscene to talk while we have such sublime scenes. I don’t know if you noticed in the back, only Stalin images, just one very small Lenin, so it was—She asked him if she can kiss him. Don’t be afraid, it’s a very decent kiss. No, it’s again, it’s really like almost unbelievable how Soviet cinema in at its most Stalinist again followed this idea of great history as a background only for the, for the creation of the couple. Okay. Back to Stalinism. Even in our everyday life we have many rules like this. For example, I don’t know how is it with you in, in Bosnia, but in Slovenia maybe we have the same rules. Let’s say I am in a competition with my best friend for a job. He gets it. It’s considered polite that he asks, tells me, ‘I know you deserved it more, why don’t I step down?’ But if I say yes, I
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break—you know what I mean? He makes an offer but it’s clear that I—or
break—you know what I mean? He makes an offer but it’s clear that I—or
Slavoj Žižek
if somebody who is more rich than you, stop here yes please, invites you to a restaurant. It’s clear that he will pay. But
if somebody who is more rich than you, stop here yes please, invites you to a restaurant. It’s clear that he will pay. But
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isn’t it that
isn’t it that
Slavoj Žižek
at the beginning you have to insist a little bit that you will pay? I think that this is for me a kind of a zero level not only of ideology as of social link as such. Okay, let me—so what makes this situation so mysterious and here Stalinism is an exemplary case of ideology is that not only are there things which are prohibited, but the prohibition itself is prohibited, in the sense that what is the sense? Okay, let’s just imagine that we are now in Moscow in '37. I am Stalin, I deliver the speech, then there is debate. Let’s say that one of you stands up and attacks me. This will not end good. The next day people will ask who saw you the last time. But let’s say that something else happens, that another one of you stands up then
at the beginning you have to insist a little bit that you will pay? I think that this is for me a kind of a zero level not only of ideology as of social link as such. Okay, let me—so what makes this situation so mysterious and here Stalinism is an exemplary case of ideology is that not only are there things which are prohibited, but the prohibition itself is prohibited, in the sense that what is the sense? Okay, let’s just imagine that we are now in Moscow in '37. I am Stalin, I deliver the speech, then there is debate. Let’s say that one of you stands up and attacks me. This will not end good. The next day people will ask who saw you the last time. But let’s say that something else happens, that another one of you stands up then
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and
and
Slavoj Žižek
attacks the first guy like, ‘Are you crazy? Don’t you know that we don’t criticize Comrade Stalin here? How dare you talk like
attacks the first guy like, ‘Are you crazy? Don’t you know that we don’t criticize Comrade Stalin here? How dare you talk like
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that?’ I
that?’ I
Slavoj Žižek
claim the second guy will be arrested even faster. That is to say it wasn’t only that it was criticized, forbidden to criticize Stalin. It was also forbidden
claim the second guy will be arrested even faster. That is to say it wasn’t only that it was criticized, forbidden to criticize Stalin. It was also forbidden
unknown
to publicly announce
to publicly announce
Slavoj Žižek
this criticism as such. You know, you had to pretend that I could have but I don’t. It has to be this structure of you can, just that, you know, to be given a freedom which you never really use. Okay. Nonetheless, let’s go to my main topic. The last example of this love, love catastrophe and so on are deep impact, catastrophe movies. Maybe you saw Deep Impact, which is again a story
this criticism as such. You know, you had to pretend that I could have but I don’t. It has to be this structure of you can, just that, you know, to be given a freedom which you never really use. Okay. Nonetheless, let’s go to my main topic. The last example of this love, love catastrophe and so on are deep impact, catastrophe movies. Maybe you saw Deep Impact, which is again a story
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about asteroid threatening the whole
about asteroid threatening the whole
Slavoj Žižek
earth. Following my formula, it’s really a story about incestuous tension. Téa Leoni plays a young journalist who is furious at her father because her father divorced her mother and married a young girl who is the same age as herself. So it’s clear that this fury of threatening the whole earth is a kind of materialization of her disappointment and so on. How can we analyze this? The final scene, towards the end, not quite final, of the film is a gigantic, a gigantic asteroid hits the ocean and then a gigantic wave comes to the coast where the girl is united with her father, it’s truly a love scene, and when the gigantic wave is approaching, she embraces him and she says, ‘Oh daddy,’ and so on, hop, they are dead. My idea is to read this scene together with this well-known sexually explicit scene, relatively okay, from—yes, this is from Here to Eternity. You know, illicit love, you get a little bit of gentle wave. This is normal promiscuity. My god is when you have incestuous tension, the love is—sorry, the wave is slightly bigger, how should I put it, no. I claim that this strictly as if these waves materialized their passion, just an ordinary—here you will see the other scene. Ah, yeah, put a little bit of sound please. Okay, this is now the easiest part. Now we move to slightly higher theory. But what I wanted to show you here is how obviously again we are dealing with again two levels. We have the official narrative focused on the big catastrophe and so on. But I claim that this incestuous or whatever love tension, love story, it’s apparently marginal, but it’s the echoing between the official story, natural catastrophe or whatever, war, and this incestuous or whatever libidinal tension which gives to the film its true depth. Not depth in the sense of deep art, but depth in the sense of libidinal resonance. So let me now more directly approach how this tension function between the two levels. There is a film, one of the half-forgotten masterpieces of Hollywood which does this, yes, much more directly. It’s a wonderful film by half-forgotten again, from '90—sorry, from '89, by John Carpenter, They Live. Let me just explain the situation. It’s a kind of a paranoiac science fiction, ordinary guy, the hero, homeless, walks into an abandoned church in the shanty town suburbs of Los Angeles and finds there a box with strange sunglasses. And when he puts the sunglasses on, he, as it were, sees directly the truth. Okay, the truth is that we are already controlled by aliens and so on. But what makes it more interesting is that he sees the true message behind publicity. Or for example, as you will see, he sees a big poster publicity for I don’t know some product or some trip tourism, and then when he puts glasses on, he sees what it really says: ‘Don’t think, obey, marry, reproduce,’ and so on. Please, let me. Okay, let’s go on to the end of this clip. Nonetheless, I don’t want to lose time, it’s just now the repetition of the same. What I want to tell you is that of course this is a ridiculous paranoiac version. But isn’t it something like this is effectively going on without any paranoiac—without any paranoiac scenarios of aliens who control us and so on? Isn’t it that when you see a publicity, there is an underlying clear message: obey or whatever? It’s inscribed into its very form. But what is more interesting is that the way we have it here, it’s I would say today’s consumerist hedonist ideology where apparently you are just called to enjoy, to have a good time and so on, and the true message of social control—obey, don’t think, remain asleep and so on—is, as it were, hidden at the other level. We should not forget that we also have the opposite procedure, which is that—and this is more how traditional ideology functions—which is that you get the explicit ideological message, but if you were, as it were, to put these ideological glasses on, you would have seen the obscene pleasure that ideology is giving you. For example, let’s imagine we are in the United States in the early 1920s, a small town with Ku Klux Klan. The explicit message there of ideology would have been, I don’t know, ‘Be a good Christian, fight for Western culture,’ and so on and so on. You put the glasses on and you would have read, ‘And if you do this every weekend, we can go and rape some black girls and lynch some black guys,’ and so on and so on. Or with Nazism again. Why—for example, officially, ‘Sacrifice yourself for Germany, for your country, enough exploitation.’ You put the glasses on: ‘We can rob, we can kill some Jews,’ and so on and so on. Why am I saying this? I don’t have again time to go into it in detail. Because precisely with regard to the tragic experience that we, or rather you much more than I, being from Slovenia I was more lucky, had here, namely with regard to the horrors of the war here, the horrors of ethnic cleansing and so on. What people usually miss when we are dealing with so-called fundamentalist, nationalistic religious ideologies is—sorry—they all too much follow the ideological cliché of reading fundamentalists as people who are afraid, as it were, of postmodern freedoms and escape into the coordinates of old fixed universe. Like the idea being that people are terrified: today you can do whatever you want, homosexuality whatever, and this is horrible, where are the old values, so too many freedoms, we want security, firm values. But I claim effectively it doesn’t work at all like this. This is the surface. Like too much enjoyment, we need old values, we need to drop hedonism, you need to sacrifice yourself for your nation, religion, whatever. But I claim that what—the way effectively fundamentalisms function is that again, if you put the glasses on, you get the opposite message. Like to be very brutal, in this case: forget about Western liberal hedonism, become a fighter for your nation. And then you put glasses on: and you can then rape, kill, burn and so on and so on. It’s a, as it were, promise of false liberation. And every fundamentalism, I claim, functions like this. Let me now do something to see how the guy was aware of it. Sorry to do this obscenity, but let me just quote a couple just of lines from—again I’m sorry but they are crucial—from a poem by Radovan Karadžić. Poem: 'Convert to my new faith, crowd. I offer you what no one has had before. I offer you inclemency and wine. The one who won’t have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. Now people, nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want and this Godhead forbids you nothing. Oh obey my call, brethren people, crowd,' and so on and so on. I mean, this is how totalitarianism functions, you know. Officially, or let’s say Hitler again, officially it is enough of Weimar decadence, order, sacrifice, the country needs you. But the message when you put the glasses on is nothing is forbidden. Which is why again this is so crucial to grasp against this stupid Western patronizing attitude that the so-called ethnic fundamentalists are some kind of stupid people who are afraid of insecurity. Once in Milošević's era, I had illegally visited, so-called, Belgrade and was unfortunate to speak with one of these hardliners, ethnic. And he gave me the lesson of my lifetime. He told me, ‘No,’ he told me, ‘For me,’ he told me, ‘your Western developed society is too regulated.’ He told me, ‘You cannot drink, you have to take care of political correctness, you cannot beat the woman, you cannot drink, you cannot this, you cannot that.’ He told me, ‘My god, you become a nationalist and everything you do you do it for your nation, so it’s freedom: rape, kill, rob, and so on and so on.’ So it’s absolutely crucial again to be aware of this, how should I call it, false permissivity, of how the message beneath the surface of so-called fundamentalisms is exactly the opposite one of what it may appear. What does this mean? Now let’s go a step further. Does this mean that that we should be, how should I call it, distrustful towards enjoyment as such? That, you know, enjoyment is the way ideology manipulates with us? No. The situation is here much more—okay, not so much complex as complicated. It moves at two levels. That is to say, let me be now very open. Let—I remember from the old ex-Yugoslavia whenever I met people from other republics, the first thing we did were we started to tell dirty obscene ethnic jokes to each other. I don’t think this was racism. I think this was first because usually these jokes were not jokes against each other but more like, I don’t know, I told them the joke about us Slovenes. You know how it was. No, you don’t know, some of you are young. In ex-Yugoslavia each ethnic—each nation was identified with certain clichés. We Slovenes were, how do you call it, misers, we don’t want to spend money. Montenegro were lazy. You Bosnians I think were a kind of a cunning sexually obsessed. Like, okay, I will not bore you with stories about yourselves which I love, like you know the one of the boy at Beethoven class who said 'Für Elise' and then and so on. I mean I just—so what I’m saying is that, you know, this is the problem of political correctness for me, that it may appear racist, but this was more a kind of a true solidarity in the sense of when I visit you, what does a proper liberal, liberal racist do? He tells you something like, ‘Oh, you have interesting folkloric dances, show me your customs’ and so on. That’s boring, no? I mean when you tell me a dirty joke—you know, there must be an exchange of obscenities, as it were, which makes it a contact. I remember from the, for example, I remember—it happened to me, my god, probably my stay was '75, '76 in Yugoslav army. There was an Albanian soldier there, very dignified nice man, and we were friendly but we wanted to become like real friends and there was only one way through obscenity. And I remember how
earth. Following my formula, it’s really a story about incestuous tension. Téa Leoni plays a young journalist who is furious at her father because her father divorced her mother and married a young girl who is the same age as herself. So it’s clear that this fury of threatening the whole earth is a kind of materialization of her disappointment and so on. How can we analyze this? The final scene, towards the end, not quite final, of the film is a gigantic, a gigantic asteroid hits the ocean and then a gigantic wave comes to the coast where the girl is united with her father, it’s truly a love scene, and when the gigantic wave is approaching, she embraces him and she says, ‘Oh daddy,’ and so on, hop, they are dead. My idea is to read this scene together with this well-known sexually explicit scene, relatively okay, from—yes, this is from Here to Eternity. You know, illicit love, you get a little bit of gentle wave. This is normal promiscuity. My god is when you have incestuous tension, the love is—sorry, the wave is slightly bigger, how should I put it, no. I claim that this strictly as if these waves materialized their passion, just an ordinary—here you will see the other scene. Ah, yeah, put a little bit of sound please. Okay, this is now the easiest part. Now we move to slightly higher theory. But what I wanted to show you here is how obviously again we are dealing with again two levels. We have the official narrative focused on the big catastrophe and so on. But I claim that this incestuous or whatever love tension, love story, it’s apparently marginal, but it’s the echoing between the official story, natural catastrophe or whatever, war, and this incestuous or whatever libidinal tension which gives to the film its true depth. Not depth in the sense of deep art, but depth in the sense of libidinal resonance. So let me now more directly approach how this tension function between the two levels. There is a film, one of the half-forgotten masterpieces of Hollywood which does this, yes, much more directly. It’s a wonderful film by half-forgotten again, from '90—sorry, from '89, by John Carpenter, They Live. Let me just explain the situation. It’s a kind of a paranoiac science fiction, ordinary guy, the hero, homeless, walks into an abandoned church in the shanty town suburbs of Los Angeles and finds there a box with strange sunglasses. And when he puts the sunglasses on, he, as it were, sees directly the truth. Okay, the truth is that we are already controlled by aliens and so on. But what makes it more interesting is that he sees the true message behind publicity. Or for example, as you will see, he sees a big poster publicity for I don’t know some product or some trip tourism, and then when he puts glasses on, he sees what it really says: ‘Don’t think, obey, marry, reproduce,’ and so on. Please, let me. Okay, let’s go on to the end of this clip. Nonetheless, I don’t want to lose time, it’s just now the repetition of the same. What I want to tell you is that of course this is a ridiculous paranoiac version. But isn’t it something like this is effectively going on without any paranoiac—without any paranoiac scenarios of aliens who control us and so on? Isn’t it that when you see a publicity, there is an underlying clear message: obey or whatever? It’s inscribed into its very form. But what is more interesting is that the way we have it here, it’s I would say today’s consumerist hedonist ideology where apparently you are just called to enjoy, to have a good time and so on, and the true message of social control—obey, don’t think, remain asleep and so on—is, as it were, hidden at the other level. We should not forget that we also have the opposite procedure, which is that—and this is more how traditional ideology functions—which is that you get the explicit ideological message, but if you were, as it were, to put these ideological glasses on, you would have seen the obscene pleasure that ideology is giving you. For example, let’s imagine we are in the United States in the early 1920s, a small town with Ku Klux Klan. The explicit message there of ideology would have been, I don’t know, ‘Be a good Christian, fight for Western culture,’ and so on and so on. You put the glasses on and you would have read, ‘And if you do this every weekend, we can go and rape some black girls and lynch some black guys,’ and so on and so on. Or with Nazism again. Why—for example, officially, ‘Sacrifice yourself for Germany, for your country, enough exploitation.’ You put the glasses on: ‘We can rob, we can kill some Jews,’ and so on and so on. Why am I saying this? I don’t have again time to go into it in detail. Because precisely with regard to the tragic experience that we, or rather you much more than I, being from Slovenia I was more lucky, had here, namely with regard to the horrors of the war here, the horrors of ethnic cleansing and so on. What people usually miss when we are dealing with so-called fundamentalist, nationalistic religious ideologies is—sorry—they all too much follow the ideological cliché of reading fundamentalists as people who are afraid, as it were, of postmodern freedoms and escape into the coordinates of old fixed universe. Like the idea being that people are terrified: today you can do whatever you want, homosexuality whatever, and this is horrible, where are the old values, so too many freedoms, we want security, firm values. But I claim effectively it doesn’t work at all like this. This is the surface. Like too much enjoyment, we need old values, we need to drop hedonism, you need to sacrifice yourself for your nation, religion, whatever. But I claim that what—the way effectively fundamentalisms function is that again, if you put the glasses on, you get the opposite message. Like to be very brutal, in this case: forget about Western liberal hedonism, become a fighter for your nation. And then you put glasses on: and you can then rape, kill, burn and so on and so on. It’s a, as it were, promise of false liberation. And every fundamentalism, I claim, functions like this. Let me now do something to see how the guy was aware of it. Sorry to do this obscenity, but let me just quote a couple just of lines from—again I’m sorry but they are crucial—from a poem by Radovan Karadžić. Poem: 'Convert to my new faith, crowd. I offer you what no one has had before. I offer you inclemency and wine. The one who won’t have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. Now people, nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want and this Godhead forbids you nothing. Oh obey my call, brethren people, crowd,' and so on and so on. I mean, this is how totalitarianism functions, you know. Officially, or let’s say Hitler again, officially it is enough of Weimar decadence, order, sacrifice, the country needs you. But the message when you put the glasses on is nothing is forbidden. Which is why again this is so crucial to grasp against this stupid Western patronizing attitude that the so-called ethnic fundamentalists are some kind of stupid people who are afraid of insecurity. Once in Milošević's era, I had illegally visited, so-called, Belgrade and was unfortunate to speak with one of these hardliners, ethnic. And he gave me the lesson of my lifetime. He told me, ‘No,’ he told me, ‘For me,’ he told me, ‘your Western developed society is too regulated.’ He told me, ‘You cannot drink, you have to take care of political correctness, you cannot beat the woman, you cannot drink, you cannot this, you cannot that.’ He told me, ‘My god, you become a nationalist and everything you do you do it for your nation, so it’s freedom: rape, kill, rob, and so on and so on.’ So it’s absolutely crucial again to be aware of this, how should I call it, false permissivity, of how the message beneath the surface of so-called fundamentalisms is exactly the opposite one of what it may appear. What does this mean? Now let’s go a step further. Does this mean that that we should be, how should I call it, distrustful towards enjoyment as such? That, you know, enjoyment is the way ideology manipulates with us? No. The situation is here much more—okay, not so much complex as complicated. It moves at two levels. That is to say, let me be now very open. Let—I remember from the old ex-Yugoslavia whenever I met people from other republics, the first thing we did were we started to tell dirty obscene ethnic jokes to each other. I don’t think this was racism. I think this was first because usually these jokes were not jokes against each other but more like, I don’t know, I told them the joke about us Slovenes. You know how it was. No, you don’t know, some of you are young. In ex-Yugoslavia each ethnic—each nation was identified with certain clichés. We Slovenes were, how do you call it, misers, we don’t want to spend money. Montenegro were lazy. You Bosnians I think were a kind of a cunning sexually obsessed. Like, okay, I will not bore you with stories about yourselves which I love, like you know the one of the boy at Beethoven class who said 'Für Elise' and then and so on. I mean I just—so what I’m saying is that, you know, this is the problem of political correctness for me, that it may appear racist, but this was more a kind of a true solidarity in the sense of when I visit you, what does a proper liberal, liberal racist do? He tells you something like, ‘Oh, you have interesting folkloric dances, show me your customs’ and so on. That’s boring, no? I mean when you tell me a dirty joke—you know, there must be an exchange of obscenities, as it were, which makes it a contact. I remember from the, for example, I remember—it happened to me, my god, probably my stay was '75, '76 in Yugoslav army. There was an Albanian soldier there, very dignified nice man, and we were friendly but we wanted to become like real friends and there was only one way through obscenity. And I remember how
unknown
this happened, it was unbelievable. One morning instead of when we met, instead of saying me ‘Good morning,’ he told me, ‘Jebem ti majku,’ ‘I screw your mother.’ I knew what this was. This was just a call for me to return a kind of symmetrical insult. Believe me, I didn’t have any problem. I immediately answered, ‘Izvoli tvoja je, kad ja završim sa tvojom sestrom,’
this happened, it was unbelievable. One morning instead of when we met, instead of saying me ‘Good morning,’ he told me, ‘Jebem ti majku,’ ‘I screw your mother.’ I knew what this was. This was just a call for me to return a kind of symmetrical insult. Believe me, I didn’t have any problem. I immediately answered, ‘Izvoli tvoja je, kad ja završim sa tvojom sestrom,’
Slavoj Žižek
like ‘Go on after I finish with your sister.’ Then we embrace, we were friends. And that’s now the beauty. We never again mentioned this. All that happened is that every morning after, instead of saying goodbye—but we didn’t laugh, it wasn’t even a joke, it was just a reminder that we were really friends—instead of saying good morning, he told me ‘mother,’ I said ‘sister.’ Mother, sister. Without any smile. It was just, it strictly meant we are still real friends. You cannot do this, this is what the politically correct Westerners who come here and teach you all those rules—I mean, wait a minute, political correctness does have its point. That is to say there are of course two limitations of this example. First, it’s obviously a male chauvinist one. That is to say, let’s not forget it’s about men exchanging, offering to each other women, no? So as a good feminist, I would like to live in a society where the same would have gone for women. Two women met, no? One, one says ‘I screw your son,’ the other said ‘Go on after I finish with your, your husband’ or whatever, no? Like at least to have symmetry. Second one, it only worked because we were both ordinary soldiers. Like if I were to be an officer, no? I don’t think any soldier would come to me and tell me ‘I screw your mother’ or what, no? But what I’m just saying is the—this is one aspect of obscenity, that it’s only through this exchange of obscenities that you have what one may naively call a true contact to a person as a person. On the other hand, we all know unfortunately to what extent obscenities also function in racism, in brutal violence, and so on and so on. For example, I don’t know, just do you know American, so-called, so-called marching chants? Songs marines sing when they are on maneuvers and so on, and they are also full of this kind of nonsense rhymes and obscenities. For example, I don’t know if you’ve saw the Richard Gere film An Officer and a Gentleman where the song is something like, ‘I don’t know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold,’ and so on. This pure—and you see what’s my point here, it’s that it’s not any kind of resistance, protest against military discipline. Military discipline itself needs this kind of obscenity to sustain itself. This is what fascinated me in, when I was serving the army. How I learned that all these obscenities were part of the game, part of military community, there was nothing subversive about them. For example, my unit is probably all of the army was extremely homophobic. If somebody was suspected to be gay, he was beaten every night, you know, this standard soldiers' punishment, one holds a cover over his head and the others beat him with their ropes or whatever, with whatever ropes or whatever. But at the same time, our daily life was absolutely penetrated by homosexual innuendos. For example, in my unit we didn’t say in the morning if I greet another, another soldier, usually it was not to say good morning, it was to say ‘Popuši mi, popuši mi,’ which means ‘smoke my prick,’ which means a kind of a invitation. It was totally neutral, all, all—you see this paradox, how it wasn’t simply homophobic. The true enigma is why the explicit homophobia have to be supplemented by all this explosive obscenity. So again, we should here bear in mind the upper—the utmost ambiguity of the role of obscenity. At the same time it serves power, at the same time it can play a positive role. Which is why one shouldn’t make here mistakes. What kind of mistakes? Ah, let me go on and show you a movie which I almost hate more than Reds, the famous—yes, this one from Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. You know when the two hero, please go on and put the sound on. Okay. Again, if there is a scene which is totally false, fake—so is this one, I think. Why? Many of my friends even told me how deeply they were impressed, like, ‘Now I understood how fascism grasped the people, why was Hitler such a success,’ and so on and so on. But I think that, well, I will be very provocative here. I think that there is absolutely nothing fascist outside the system—sorry, outside the swastika, the signs in all of this scene. Imagine something. Imagine exactly the same song, maybe with a word or two changed. Imagine instead of swastika a red star. ‘Tomorrow belongs to me, red star, communism will win,’ and so on. And I would totally accept it. What is wrong, and this is liberal ideology at its worst. You remember when the two guys then leave in the car, one says to the other, to the rich decadent German, ‘And you think you can still dominate them,’ and so on and so on. Let’s—there is of course the fascist danger, but let’s not leave to the enemy the terrain. Are we aware that all practically all the features which liberals identify as proto-fascist were taken, taken by the fascists from the left, from the communist meetings and so on and so on? All this, this—I think we should radically stop this false identification as if if you say discipline, sacrifice or whatever, you are automatically proto-fascist. No. All, everything here can be recuperated. And the falsity of this scene is precisely that it leaves too much to the enemy. No. I mean we should act like this, we should have songs like this, better songs and so on. It’s totally false to pro-project into this. So again, ideology is not in elements as such. Which is why I will go to the end if we are with cinema. I radically disagree with famous Susan Sontag’s analysis of Leni Riefenstahl, where her thesis is to look for the traces of her proto-Nazism already in her earlier Bergfilme, mountain films, and later in her films about Africa and so on and so on. I think this is totally not the case. Let’s look at her last pre-Nazi film, ‘Das blaue Licht,’ the mountain light whatever, which my god, do you know that the scenario for that film was co-written by her lover at that time Béla Balázs, who was a Jew and a communist? And the film which tells a story about an isolated girl who is kind of a cursed exile in a small closed village can almost be read—many of my Jewish friends read it as a kind of a metaphor of the Jews excluded by the community and so on and so on. So again, don’t be afraid, don’t leave to the enemy too much. So how, what can we do here? Okay, I will try to give you an example of how critique can take from the enemy or undermine these pleasures. A rock, hard rock, punk, however you call it band. I don’t want to take Slovene Laibach, I’ve written enough of them, rather I took—I will take the German one, Rammstein. I, you know where you can—I immediately identify the liberal temptation. They like to say, ‘Okay, all this playing with totalitarian symbols is ironic, but are we sure that some young people will not be too naive and instead of seeing the irony they will really identify by it and like take it as a neo-Nazi spectacle?’ I think this is a totally false fear. Why? Because it misses what Rammstein are doing. What are they doing? Let me give you an example of similar thing. I remember way back when Jörg Haider, the Austrian populist, was beginning his famous career. He organized in Carinthia, Kärnten, the Southern Austrian province, north of Slovenia, a big campaign against the alleged Slovene threat. The formula was ‘Kärnten bleibt deutsch,’ Carinthia should, will remain, remains German. What did Austrian leftists do? They bought space in big newspapers and instead of—instead of, how should I put it, instead of any critique, detailed, of this formula, they did something very simple. Sorry, they reproduced the official motto, ‘Kärnten bleibt deutsch,’ and then what they did is simply to add to it obscene variations, like ‘Kärnten deibt bloitsch, Kärnten laibt boytsch, Kärnten waibt bloitsch,’ and so on. The effect was so obscene, why? Because it’s as if the official motto was extracted from its ideological context and shown in its dirty obscenity. You know who did the same already in '39 or when, Chaplin in his true masterpiece, I claim, The Great Dictator. You remember the famous scene where Hynkel, Hitler, gives a speech in some totally obscene language where all we recognize is from time to time a vulgar German words like Wienerschnitzel, Apfelstrudel or what and—and I think that this exactly is what Rammstein are doing. They are not—they are doing exactly the opposite of the official liberal critique which would see, ‘No, this obscene enjoyment, you must resist it, totalitarian.’ No, they give us this obscene foundation, these all big gestures at its purest. They bring it outside their ideological context and I think the effect of alienation in the Freudian sense of Extranation-Verfremdung is even stronger. So please now just that short clip from Rammstein. Again, I think you have nothing to fear to fully identify with it. You will not be a neo-Nazi. You will definitely not be. You know when people say, ‘Oh, but he’s doing such a Nazi meeting, Hitler.’ No, the point is that it’s well worth looking at Hitler’s speeches. He was of course playing with all this hysteria, but like not directly. You just have to push it a little bit further and Hitler becomes ridiculous. And that’s what they are doing here. It’s much more effective than criti—than, how should I put it, than criticizing it from the outside. Okay, you can stop this one. Now let me go on. So what’s my point here? My point is that where is ideology? I just tried as you saw it to complicate the issues. Ideology is not where it appears to be. Ideology is not in the explicit message. Ideology is explicit message, but the explicit message itself would have been ridiculous propaganda counter-productive. You have to supplement like ideology Soviet propaganda—yeah, but you need a love story, a couple, you need something, some background, the second level to sustain it. This can even be, and this is the worst ideology today, at its most disgusting for me, the so-called humanization. What do I mean by this? Did you notice how—it makes me very depressed—how these big hero films, Spiderman, Batman and so on, more and more—and some people even think that for this maybe they are more artistic, you know—more and more they show us the hero with, as they put it, the last movie shows Batman also with his weaknesses, with his traumas, he’s not just a flat hero and so on. But this, this humanization, this ‘I’m also a human being,’ is exactly, it’s there that ideology enters. Ideology is effective, it needs this human touch. Which is why when an American publisher who wants to reprint a book of mine, I resisted this how—they wanted me to add, you know on the last page of the book you have the official representation of the writer and then they like you to add two, three human touch details like, you know, ‘In his free time Professor bla bla also likes to grow tulips and play with dogs,’ or whatever. And I wanted to shock them. I said, ‘Okay, do it by telling them in his free time Professor Žižek surfs, surfs internet for child pornography and teaches his son how to pull legs out of living spiders or what,’ no? I mean, of course I’m not doing that. The point is just to show the falsity. This, this human touch is ideology. And I found a wonderful totally ridiculous example from the greatest country living, North Korea. I read there that now they opened a new golf course for South Korean tourists, no? And of course the first one to play was, was Kim Jong-il. And there is—this is an holes golf course. You know how many hits he needed to fill them all? That’s the touch. Not
like ‘Go on after I finish with your sister.’ Then we embrace, we were friends. And that’s now the beauty. We never again mentioned this. All that happened is that every morning after, instead of saying goodbye—but we didn’t laugh, it wasn’t even a joke, it was just a reminder that we were really friends—instead of saying good morning, he told me ‘mother,’ I said ‘sister.’ Mother, sister. Without any smile. It was just, it strictly meant we are still real friends. You cannot do this, this is what the politically correct Westerners who come here and teach you all those rules—I mean, wait a minute, political correctness does have its point. That is to say there are of course two limitations of this example. First, it’s obviously a male chauvinist one. That is to say, let’s not forget it’s about men exchanging, offering to each other women, no? So as a good feminist, I would like to live in a society where the same would have gone for women. Two women met, no? One, one says ‘I screw your son,’ the other said ‘Go on after I finish with your, your husband’ or whatever, no? Like at least to have symmetry. Second one, it only worked because we were both ordinary soldiers. Like if I were to be an officer, no? I don’t think any soldier would come to me and tell me ‘I screw your mother’ or what, no? But what I’m just saying is the—this is one aspect of obscenity, that it’s only through this exchange of obscenities that you have what one may naively call a true contact to a person as a person. On the other hand, we all know unfortunately to what extent obscenities also function in racism, in brutal violence, and so on and so on. For example, I don’t know, just do you know American, so-called, so-called marching chants? Songs marines sing when they are on maneuvers and so on, and they are also full of this kind of nonsense rhymes and obscenities. For example, I don’t know if you’ve saw the Richard Gere film An Officer and a Gentleman where the song is something like, ‘I don’t know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold,’ and so on. This pure—and you see what’s my point here, it’s that it’s not any kind of resistance, protest against military discipline. Military discipline itself needs this kind of obscenity to sustain itself. This is what fascinated me in, when I was serving the army. How I learned that all these obscenities were part of the game, part of military community, there was nothing subversive about them. For example, my unit is probably all of the army was extremely homophobic. If somebody was suspected to be gay, he was beaten every night, you know, this standard soldiers' punishment, one holds a cover over his head and the others beat him with their ropes or whatever, with whatever ropes or whatever. But at the same time, our daily life was absolutely penetrated by homosexual innuendos. For example, in my unit we didn’t say in the morning if I greet another, another soldier, usually it was not to say good morning, it was to say ‘Popuši mi, popuši mi,’ which means ‘smoke my prick,’ which means a kind of a invitation. It was totally neutral, all, all—you see this paradox, how it wasn’t simply homophobic. The true enigma is why the explicit homophobia have to be supplemented by all this explosive obscenity. So again, we should here bear in mind the upper—the utmost ambiguity of the role of obscenity. At the same time it serves power, at the same time it can play a positive role. Which is why one shouldn’t make here mistakes. What kind of mistakes? Ah, let me go on and show you a movie which I almost hate more than Reds, the famous—yes, this one from Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. You know when the two hero, please go on and put the sound on. Okay. Again, if there is a scene which is totally false, fake—so is this one, I think. Why? Many of my friends even told me how deeply they were impressed, like, ‘Now I understood how fascism grasped the people, why was Hitler such a success,’ and so on and so on. But I think that, well, I will be very provocative here. I think that there is absolutely nothing fascist outside the system—sorry, outside the swastika, the signs in all of this scene. Imagine something. Imagine exactly the same song, maybe with a word or two changed. Imagine instead of swastika a red star. ‘Tomorrow belongs to me, red star, communism will win,’ and so on. And I would totally accept it. What is wrong, and this is liberal ideology at its worst. You remember when the two guys then leave in the car, one says to the other, to the rich decadent German, ‘And you think you can still dominate them,’ and so on and so on. Let’s—there is of course the fascist danger, but let’s not leave to the enemy the terrain. Are we aware that all practically all the features which liberals identify as proto-fascist were taken, taken by the fascists from the left, from the communist meetings and so on and so on? All this, this—I think we should radically stop this false identification as if if you say discipline, sacrifice or whatever, you are automatically proto-fascist. No. All, everything here can be recuperated. And the falsity of this scene is precisely that it leaves too much to the enemy. No. I mean we should act like this, we should have songs like this, better songs and so on. It’s totally false to pro-project into this. So again, ideology is not in elements as such. Which is why I will go to the end if we are with cinema. I radically disagree with famous Susan Sontag’s analysis of Leni Riefenstahl, where her thesis is to look for the traces of her proto-Nazism already in her earlier Bergfilme, mountain films, and later in her films about Africa and so on and so on. I think this is totally not the case. Let’s look at her last pre-Nazi film, ‘Das blaue Licht,’ the mountain light whatever, which my god, do you know that the scenario for that film was co-written by her lover at that time Béla Balázs, who was a Jew and a communist? And the film which tells a story about an isolated girl who is kind of a cursed exile in a small closed village can almost be read—many of my Jewish friends read it as a kind of a metaphor of the Jews excluded by the community and so on and so on. So again, don’t be afraid, don’t leave to the enemy too much. So how, what can we do here? Okay, I will try to give you an example of how critique can take from the enemy or undermine these pleasures. A rock, hard rock, punk, however you call it band. I don’t want to take Slovene Laibach, I’ve written enough of them, rather I took—I will take the German one, Rammstein. I, you know where you can—I immediately identify the liberal temptation. They like to say, ‘Okay, all this playing with totalitarian symbols is ironic, but are we sure that some young people will not be too naive and instead of seeing the irony they will really identify by it and like take it as a neo-Nazi spectacle?’ I think this is a totally false fear. Why? Because it misses what Rammstein are doing. What are they doing? Let me give you an example of similar thing. I remember way back when Jörg Haider, the Austrian populist, was beginning his famous career. He organized in Carinthia, Kärnten, the Southern Austrian province, north of Slovenia, a big campaign against the alleged Slovene threat. The formula was ‘Kärnten bleibt deutsch,’ Carinthia should, will remain, remains German. What did Austrian leftists do? They bought space in big newspapers and instead of—instead of, how should I put it, instead of any critique, detailed, of this formula, they did something very simple. Sorry, they reproduced the official motto, ‘Kärnten bleibt deutsch,’ and then what they did is simply to add to it obscene variations, like ‘Kärnten deibt bloitsch, Kärnten laibt boytsch, Kärnten waibt bloitsch,’ and so on. The effect was so obscene, why? Because it’s as if the official motto was extracted from its ideological context and shown in its dirty obscenity. You know who did the same already in '39 or when, Chaplin in his true masterpiece, I claim, The Great Dictator. You remember the famous scene where Hynkel, Hitler, gives a speech in some totally obscene language where all we recognize is from time to time a vulgar German words like Wienerschnitzel, Apfelstrudel or what and—and I think that this exactly is what Rammstein are doing. They are not—they are doing exactly the opposite of the official liberal critique which would see, ‘No, this obscene enjoyment, you must resist it, totalitarian.’ No, they give us this obscene foundation, these all big gestures at its purest. They bring it outside their ideological context and I think the effect of alienation in the Freudian sense of Extranation-Verfremdung is even stronger. So please now just that short clip from Rammstein. Again, I think you have nothing to fear to fully identify with it. You will not be a neo-Nazi. You will definitely not be. You know when people say, ‘Oh, but he’s doing such a Nazi meeting, Hitler.’ No, the point is that it’s well worth looking at Hitler’s speeches. He was of course playing with all this hysteria, but like not directly. You just have to push it a little bit further and Hitler becomes ridiculous. And that’s what they are doing here. It’s much more effective than criti—than, how should I put it, than criticizing it from the outside. Okay, you can stop this one. Now let me go on. So what’s my point here? My point is that where is ideology? I just tried as you saw it to complicate the issues. Ideology is not where it appears to be. Ideology is not in the explicit message. Ideology is explicit message, but the explicit message itself would have been ridiculous propaganda counter-productive. You have to supplement like ideology Soviet propaganda—yeah, but you need a love story, a couple, you need something, some background, the second level to sustain it. This can even be, and this is the worst ideology today, at its most disgusting for me, the so-called humanization. What do I mean by this? Did you notice how—it makes me very depressed—how these big hero films, Spiderman, Batman and so on, more and more—and some people even think that for this maybe they are more artistic, you know—more and more they show us the hero with, as they put it, the last movie shows Batman also with his weaknesses, with his traumas, he’s not just a flat hero and so on. But this, this humanization, this ‘I’m also a human being,’ is exactly, it’s there that ideology enters. Ideology is effective, it needs this human touch. Which is why when an American publisher who wants to reprint a book of mine, I resisted this how—they wanted me to add, you know on the last page of the book you have the official representation of the writer and then they like you to add two, three human touch details like, you know, ‘In his free time Professor bla bla also likes to grow tulips and play with dogs,’ or whatever. And I wanted to shock them. I said, ‘Okay, do it by telling them in his free time Professor Žižek surfs, surfs internet for child pornography and teaches his son how to pull legs out of living spiders or what,’ no? I mean, of course I’m not doing that. The point is just to show the falsity. This, this human touch is ideology. And I found a wonderful totally ridiculous example from the greatest country living, North Korea. I read there that now they opened a new golf course for South Korean tourists, no? And of course the first one to play was, was Kim Jong-il. And there is—this is an holes golf course. You know how many hits he needed to fill them all? That’s the touch. Not
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So I can imagine a bureaucrat who says, ‘No, nobody would believe us, no? To make it human, let’s,
So I can imagine a bureaucrat who says, ‘No, nobody would believe us, no? To make it human, let’s,
Slavoj Žižek
let’s add
let’s add
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one,’ no, so that—this
one,’ no, so that—this
Slavoj Žižek
is—and if you want an example
is—and if you want an example
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much closer to us, for example, when I visited Israel, they are intelligent here, I met some officers and they showed me how the Israeli army got this. Their entire propaganda is not,
much closer to us, for example, when I visited Israel, they are intelligent here, I met some officers and they showed me how the Israeli army got this. Their entire propaganda is not,
Slavoj Žižek
‘We Israeli are
‘We Israeli are
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perfect soldiers’ and so on. It’s total humanization. They again and again emphasize our soldiers are weak, they have doubts, they are afraid. You know like to
perfect soldiers’ and so on. It’s total humanization. They again and again emphasize our soldiers are weak, they have doubts, they are afraid. You know like to
Slavoj Žižek
make them human. But I think this is the greatest mystification in
make them human. But I think this is the greatest mystification in
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a way. And then, you know, ‘I’m human’ can be an excuse for everything you want. Like in this sense the greatest human being was Josef Fritzl, you know. I think he was even more human than Karadžić probably, no? Why? Because it’s precisely this, how should I put it, this apparent distance towards ideology which makes, which makes ideology—which makes ideology effective. So slowly, another minutes if you allow me to conclude, how does then ideology function? Forget about big ideology. What interests me is ideology, ideological attitudes, whole system of racism and so on, embedded in everyday practices: how we dress, how we react, the code of discretion, what can be said, what cannot be said. For example, recently I was with my friend Mladen Dolar, another Slovene Lacanian Hegelian philosopher in United States, and a strange thing happened to us. We were at a dinner and with some professors we didn’t know each other well, so a big professor who presided over dinner told us, ‘You know what, let’s present each, each should present him or herself,’ and the professor said, ‘Please state your post, where you are employed, the field of your work, and your sexual orientation.’ I mean, it kind of slightly like what’s business of this of you, no? So I was tempted to do as a Marxist but didn’t, I wanted just to add, ‘Okay, and your, your salary after taxes and your private property if
a way. And then, you know, ‘I’m human’ can be an excuse for everything you want. Like in this sense the greatest human being was Josef Fritzl, you know. I think he was even more human than Karadžić probably, no? Why? Because it’s precisely this, how should I put it, this apparent distance towards ideology which makes, which makes ideology—which makes ideology effective. So slowly, another minutes if you allow me to conclude, how does then ideology function? Forget about big ideology. What interests me is ideology, ideological attitudes, whole system of racism and so on, embedded in everyday practices: how we dress, how we react, the code of discretion, what can be said, what cannot be said. For example, recently I was with my friend Mladen Dolar, another Slovene Lacanian Hegelian philosopher in United States, and a strange thing happened to us. We were at a dinner and with some professors we didn’t know each other well, so a big professor who presided over dinner told us, ‘You know what, let’s present each, each should present him or herself,’ and the professor said, ‘Please state your post, where you are employed, the field of your work, and your sexual orientation.’ I mean, it kind of slightly like what’s business of this of you, no? So I was tempted to do as a Marxist but didn’t, I wanted just to add, ‘Okay, and your, your salary after taxes and your private property if
Slavoj Žižek
you have any fortune,’ no? Because that would have been much more, no? But it’s not simply that Americans are more indiscreet. At the same time it happened to me and Mladen Dolar, an American was visiting us friend, and we went to the Adriatic coast, it was summer, and this American was totally shocked when he saw there topless, with breasts displayed, women. This was for them too—too obscene. So you see how different codes we have? At this level, at this level ideology interests me. At this level you can find ideology, ideological prohibitions, even in what appears to be the most super—the most vulgar or permissive films. For example, hardcore porn. It may appear, ‘My god, what can be more open? You can do whatever, you can do everything.’ Yes, but you pay a price. Which is the price? In old classical when I was young, hardcore porn, one feature always did strike me and today I claim it’s even worse. It was, you know if it’s a full feature hardcore porn, you cannot have just sex all the time. There has to be a minimal story that introduces you. And how utterly stupid, ridiculous this story always is. It tries to be funny in a painful way and I claim that they cannot be so stupid. There is a message in it. For example, even I now I’m traumatized. I remember when I was young seeing one where the story was the plumberer comes, the housewife is alone, the plumberer fixes the hole which was leaking in the bathroom and then the wife said, ‘By I have another hole, can you also fix that hole,’ or you are so embarrassed. I think the message is what? It’s: if you show everything sex, then it must—must not be, how should I call it, naively emotionally identifying. It must be that you—it’s signaled all the time that there is a distance of the ridicule. You cannot have it both. Which is why today the most popular hardcore porn I was told is are so-called 'gonzo.' Gonzo means you even don’t have a story, but actors directly interact with cameraman and so on, you know, make remarks, ‘Do I look good now, does this look good,’ to destroy even at its minimum the illusion. I think this is a very nice example of how even in a genre where apparently everything is prohibited you have rules. So what are the lessons of what I was saying today? There are two. The first lesson is: forget about all those stories how we don’t believe today, we live in a permissive society and so on. Of course we don’t believe directly. But we practice beliefs. Today I claim we live in a cynical era which means we pretend not to believe, but we simply act as if we believe. Maybe you know the story the great guy from Copenhagen quantum physics Niels Bohr. There is a wonderful anecdote about Niels Bohr who went to—he was once visitated in a countryside where he had a small farmer’s dacha-like house by a friend, and the friend saw above the entrance to the house horseshoe. You know that superstitious—superstitious item, the idea being it prevents evil spirits entering the house. And the surprised friend asked Niels Bohr, ‘My god, listen, you are a scientist, do you believe in this? That this works as a magic object?’ Niels Bohr said, ‘Of course I don’t believe it, I’m a scientist.’ Then the friend asking him, ‘But why do you have it there if you don’t believe in it?’ Niels Bohr answered, ‘I have it there because I was told that even if you don’t believe it in it, it still works.’ That’s how we function today. You don’t have to believe in democracy and so on, but you act as if—you act as if it still works. And you know that’s the—that’s the problem we are learning today that, how should I put it, appearances—appearances have an autonomy of their own. You—you can be cynical or whatever, but things function. You don’t have to believe you as a person for a belief to directly—to directly function. Second thing I want to say is that—now all I was doing till now was more or less simple films, ah, just to give you some ideas about ideology. How then, what would be then, let me hint in the last five minutes, just give you a brief hint on what would be then something like real art be? Because I still think that cinema is an authentic great art. I think that we also have some kind of duality, two levels, but in the sense that in a true film, truly—true work of art, the—it’s—I wouldn’t say philosophy, it’s too bombastic word, it’s basic, how should I call it, relation to world, how we relate to world, should be inscribed into its very form. And there should be an implicit tension between content and form. What do I mean by this? Let me give you two examples with which I will conclude. The first one, unfortunately I don’t have a clip, one of for me at least masterpieces of Hollywood in the last decades, it’s of course Robert Altman, I hope you saw it, Shortcuts. At the level of content you can say, and many leftists interpreted the film in this way, this is a kind of a leftist critique of the alienation of American suburbia, middle classes, their alienated desperate lives, whatever. It’s true, you can read it in this way. But I claim the beauty of the film is that its, how should I call it, the ontology, the view of reality inscribed into the very form of the film is a different one. You remember how it is done, a combination of Raymond Carver stories, you have eight, nine narrative lines intersecting in a totally contingent way, and then the results are totally open. It can be a catastrophe, a boy is dying. It can be a new friendship or whatever. So I claim that this basic life texture given by the film, it’s a different one, it’s a kind of a ontology which
you have any fortune,’ no? Because that would have been much more, no? But it’s not simply that Americans are more indiscreet. At the same time it happened to me and Mladen Dolar, an American was visiting us friend, and we went to the Adriatic coast, it was summer, and this American was totally shocked when he saw there topless, with breasts displayed, women. This was for them too—too obscene. So you see how different codes we have? At this level, at this level ideology interests me. At this level you can find ideology, ideological prohibitions, even in what appears to be the most super—the most vulgar or permissive films. For example, hardcore porn. It may appear, ‘My god, what can be more open? You can do whatever, you can do everything.’ Yes, but you pay a price. Which is the price? In old classical when I was young, hardcore porn, one feature always did strike me and today I claim it’s even worse. It was, you know if it’s a full feature hardcore porn, you cannot have just sex all the time. There has to be a minimal story that introduces you. And how utterly stupid, ridiculous this story always is. It tries to be funny in a painful way and I claim that they cannot be so stupid. There is a message in it. For example, even I now I’m traumatized. I remember when I was young seeing one where the story was the plumberer comes, the housewife is alone, the plumberer fixes the hole which was leaking in the bathroom and then the wife said, ‘By I have another hole, can you also fix that hole,’ or you are so embarrassed. I think the message is what? It’s: if you show everything sex, then it must—must not be, how should I call it, naively emotionally identifying. It must be that you—it’s signaled all the time that there is a distance of the ridicule. You cannot have it both. Which is why today the most popular hardcore porn I was told is are so-called 'gonzo.' Gonzo means you even don’t have a story, but actors directly interact with cameraman and so on, you know, make remarks, ‘Do I look good now, does this look good,’ to destroy even at its minimum the illusion. I think this is a very nice example of how even in a genre where apparently everything is prohibited you have rules. So what are the lessons of what I was saying today? There are two. The first lesson is: forget about all those stories how we don’t believe today, we live in a permissive society and so on. Of course we don’t believe directly. But we practice beliefs. Today I claim we live in a cynical era which means we pretend not to believe, but we simply act as if we believe. Maybe you know the story the great guy from Copenhagen quantum physics Niels Bohr. There is a wonderful anecdote about Niels Bohr who went to—he was once visitated in a countryside where he had a small farmer’s dacha-like house by a friend, and the friend saw above the entrance to the house horseshoe. You know that superstitious—superstitious item, the idea being it prevents evil spirits entering the house. And the surprised friend asked Niels Bohr, ‘My god, listen, you are a scientist, do you believe in this? That this works as a magic object?’ Niels Bohr said, ‘Of course I don’t believe it, I’m a scientist.’ Then the friend asking him, ‘But why do you have it there if you don’t believe in it?’ Niels Bohr answered, ‘I have it there because I was told that even if you don’t believe it in it, it still works.’ That’s how we function today. You don’t have to believe in democracy and so on, but you act as if—you act as if it still works. And you know that’s the—that’s the problem we are learning today that, how should I put it, appearances—appearances have an autonomy of their own. You—you can be cynical or whatever, but things function. You don’t have to believe you as a person for a belief to directly—to directly function. Second thing I want to say is that—now all I was doing till now was more or less simple films, ah, just to give you some ideas about ideology. How then, what would be then, let me hint in the last five minutes, just give you a brief hint on what would be then something like real art be? Because I still think that cinema is an authentic great art. I think that we also have some kind of duality, two levels, but in the sense that in a true film, truly—true work of art, the—it’s—I wouldn’t say philosophy, it’s too bombastic word, it’s basic, how should I call it, relation to world, how we relate to world, should be inscribed into its very form. And there should be an implicit tension between content and form. What do I mean by this? Let me give you two examples with which I will conclude. The first one, unfortunately I don’t have a clip, one of for me at least masterpieces of Hollywood in the last decades, it’s of course Robert Altman, I hope you saw it, Shortcuts. At the level of content you can say, and many leftists interpreted the film in this way, this is a kind of a leftist critique of the alienation of American suburbia, middle classes, their alienated desperate lives, whatever. It’s true, you can read it in this way. But I claim the beauty of the film is that its, how should I call it, the ontology, the view of reality inscribed into the very form of the film is a different one. You remember how it is done, a combination of Raymond Carver stories, you have eight, nine narrative lines intersecting in a totally contingent way, and then the results are totally open. It can be a catastrophe, a boy is dying. It can be a new friendship or whatever. So I claim that this basic life texture given by the film, it’s a different one, it’s a kind of a ontology which
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reminds one of, you know, the French
reminds one of, you know, the French
Slavoj Žižek
guy Gilles Deleuze, a kind of a open, kind of a neo-Spinozian open pluralist ontology where without any teleology, pre-ordained control, it’s you kind—you have a multitude which contingent interactions, it’s basically a film about how sense or rather, to be more precise, meaning, meaning arises out of nonsense, out of nonsensical encounters. So it’s—you see my point, which is why it’s this without this—you got now my point—without this, how should I call it, world feeling, world atmosphere, however you got—attitude towards reality, however you call it, inscribed into the very form of the film, if you take this away it would—it would have been just a boring socio-critical film when you say ‘Okay, so what’ and so on. It’s precisely the beauty is that it is a critical film, but the optimism is not—you don’t need at the end a hero to tell you, ‘Yes, but things are not so bad, there is hope’ or what. Hope is inscribed into the very form of how the pessimistic diagnostic about reality is rendered there. That would be for me the, the crucial point. Or to give you my another final example, please don’t yet show it because I want—Alfred Hitchcock. There I claim you have an entire theological dimension inscribed into the very form. What is one of Hitchcock’s typical standard procedures? That when the subject is approaching a potentially threatening object, house, whatever. First it’s shot in a standard way, exchange of subjective point of view shot and objective shot. Then at a certain point regularly in Hitchcock something happens. The camera moves up so that you get the so-called God’s point of view shot, where you see from above the whole scene, and then from here you jump into something very mysterious which is specifically Hitchcockian: a point of view shot, but the point of view of an impossible subject. You don’t know who he is, he’s unthinkable. It is as if God, that anonymous neutral God, gets subjectivized as a kind of evil presence. And it’s, okay, let’s see this one, this is the second murder, please, from—please play it now. This is—you see, this is still normal, as it were. Any guy can do this. I mean, would have done it. Objective shot. No, it’s objective we are already from down there before, okay. Here subjective—I mean, point of view shot, although it’s not here. Now. This—(The Birds clip plays). Now, point of God’s view, impossible subject. It’s—I didn’t want to take too much of your time, but just if you don’t believe me that this is a formula, check for example in Hitchcock’s The Birds, the scene where you see the town on fire. First you have Melanie, Tippi Hedren, observing a gas station burning, the same exchange subjective-objective. Then God’s view shot of the whole city burning, and then all of a sudden birds from behind enter the frame, objective shot is subjectivized. Again, so this idea, you know that—you don’t have to call it God—Big Other as a neutrality, neutral overview, that this very neutral frame, frame of reality can get subjectivized in an evil way. How the very objectivity is sustained by a evil god, evil divinity, however you want it. This, this is what makes Hitchcock, Hitchcock. This, how should I put it, sensitivity or however you call it rendered—rendered by the—rendered by the formal apparatus itself. Which is why, for example, who is for me a great feminist author? John Cassavetes. Because in his masterpieces, Faces and so on, where it’s usually his wife Gena Rowlands—okay, she is dead now, so his ex-wife—what does he do? Usually she is shot when she has hysterical outbursts so that camera gets too close to her face and it’s shaking. So what is basically a beautiful woman’s face, when you get too close you see all the distortions. As if—you get my point—as if hysteria is not only a hysteria of the woman whom you see there, but as if the camera itself is infected by the hysteria which is depicted there. The absolute contrast to this would have been for me, and I have great problems with him, for example Tarkovsky. If you saw his Nostalghia, there also the woman, the Italian friend of that Russian whatever poet who is roaming around Italy looking for some traces of another Russian poet, has an outburst. But I think it’s the most, the most—the most—I haven’t seen a shot with so much hatred towards a feminine subject, because while she is exploding, showing her breast, shouting, the camera just remains totally firm at a distance. You see, as it were, hatred in the camera itself. So here, where cinema as an art truly begins, at least for me, at this level of—how should I call it—some, I don’t want to call it, it’s a wrong metaphysical term, worldview, but let’s say attitude to reality, implicit ontology, implicit—which is inscribed into the very form and then how this interacts with the story, how they supplement each other and so on and so on. This is for me where one has to look for true art today. Which is why, for example, I am ready to say about another of my directors whom—as persons he is, I think, rather stupid, David Lynch, but he has an incredible—and ideologically, well, I don’t appreciate him very much, he’s into this new age meditation madness, but as a cinema maker as to sensitivity of the form, he is incredible. I think that movie also, let me make another note, movie as an art begins, I think, when you do with images also what—what—what is done with the cat, you remember the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, how the smile, cat disappears, only an object, the smile remains. This is what, for example, Lynch knows how to play wonderfully. You remember in Mulholland Drive that famous scene where—okay, we learn later it was playback, but the effect is shocking—in a nightclub a woman is singing, she collapses, the singing goes on. For a brief moment you’re almost afraid, my god, does a voice survive on its own? There is also a wonderful scene even in such an easy film, easy in the sense of apparently formally easy, the last Sergio Leone, you saw it Once Upon a Time in America. Where, towards the beginning of the film, we see a phone ringing, ringing endlessly, then finally a hand picks up the phone, the ringing goes on. I mean, you know, this, how should I put it, disintegration of reality into its different components. It’s not simply that—it’s not simply that words, that sound belongs to bodies. This, how in the very texture of the film you can get another message. Which is why, I’m sorry I couldn’t show you more from—you’ve just seen the beginning from—for example, this is why Eisenstein is great in Ivan the Terrible. This is why Chaplin is great in The Great Dictator where—you know what’s the idea of Great Dictator—twin, two of them parallel destinies: Hynkel, Hitler, dictator, played both by Chaplin and the poor Jewish barber. But it’s crucial how—it’s not only that one is good, the other is bad, but they directly relate to physical reality of the film. Hynkel—sorry, the Jewish barber is basically the continuation of the tramp. He is mostly silent, just dances around, etc., while Hynkel Hitler is in a way the primacy of the voice. We first hear his voice, then we see his distorted space and so on, but he is always overshadowed by the voice. Here I think Chaplin was a genius because he was right to resist sound. Not because of some conservative stupidity like, ‘No, I want silent movie,’ but he saw in the sound a threatening dimension where the usual realists saw only new possibilities: ‘Oh my god, we have now sound, we can show people talking like in real life.’ But Chaplin, and not only Chaplin, Fritz Lang and others, sensed how the moment you have sound film, cinema, sound becomes a spectral entity which can somehow autonomize itself, you no longer control your own voice. We, in a way, all become like ventriloquists and so on and so on. So unfortunately at this point where we would have approached a serious analysis, I have to stop. That’s life. Thank you very much for your patience. No, no. As an old communist I will tell you, don’t applaud too much, when we will take over again, you will be obliged to do it. Spare your energy for that moment when... No, but seriously, I will repeat an old joke here which you probably know, but it always fascinates me when I hear this. Did you notice this wonderful small detail—if you, I’ve written about this, oh—if you watch all documentaries, the difference between fascism and Stalinism, no? In fascism, when the leader is applauded, he just receives the applause. In Stalinism, always, the leader joins the applause. That’s, I think, in minimum the difference, because the subjectivity is totally different. In fascism, you are a leader. Stalinist leader always legitimizes himself as a servant of the people. ‘I’m anonymous, I’m nobody, I’m just—’ which is why I can join you in the applause and so on. And this, that’s the tragedy of Stalinism, which this brings us to the second point. For example, no, I am saying this as a reaction to those simplists who claim, ‘Oh, Stalinism, fascism, the same.’ No, unfortunately they are not the same. I’m not saying Stalinism is better, just that the whole economy is different. For example, do you know that under Stalin, I read in a book on Gulag, every year on Stalin’s birthday, even in the darkest Gulag, Kolyma, Magadan, all the prisoners were assembled and they all had to sign a telegram to Stalin wishing him all the best and success and so on. You cannot even imagine this like in Nazi Germany. What, to collect all the Jews to sign a telegram to Hitler? Why? Precisely because the subjectivity is totally different. In Stalinism, you have show trials, confessions. In Nazism, you don’t have them. I mean, because in Nazism, how should I put it, you are guilty just for being what you are, a Jew. They don’t have to demonstrate any Jewish plot or what. So it’s very paradoxical. The paradox is that Stalinism was in some respects more horrible precisely because it was ironically closer to Enlightenment. You know the Stalinist idea is that even the lowest Trotskyite shit is still has the access to universal reason. You can confess, you can see where you went wrong. In Nazism you don’t have this. So, okay, all I’m trying to say is that, um, I think that we are far from understanding 20th century still. I don’t believe those who think this was an aberration, now we have happy liberalism and so on and so on. No, we don’t, and it would be especially crucial to understand the 20th century to understand where we are going now because I’m a, how should I call it, moderate pessimist. I—and you saw it, now I will refer to your city, Sarajevo. You know what made me horrifiedly—horrifiedly, even already at that unfortunate epoch, '92. How, you know, Henri Bergson, the French guy, you know, had some wonderful observation about time that he made propos First World War. When it started with, uh—how before World War I basically people knew it is coming, you know, from the then. But nonetheless somehow they didn’t believe it can really happen. They secretly thought it’s not possible. But then what shocked him is that when the catastrophe did take place, how quickly they got accustomed to it. All of a sudden, ‘Okay, it’s war,’ you know, you—and what shocked me so much that something similar happened with you here. You know, nobody really believed. Everybody knew the war is in the air. Nobody really believed something like the siege of Sarajevo can happen. But the shock is how, when it happened, how—not you, you were here like being screwed, that’s more difficult, but the enlightened public—how they got, how quickly—okay, they were outraged. But they were outraged in a normal way. You know, it became part of the background. It’s just something that was unthinkable all of a sudden becomes acceptable. And here we can use again this spectacles from, uh, They Live. This is what I find so false in today’s charity, you know, when they call you like, ‘You know, give five dollars a month and you will save a child in Africa,’ or whatever. I ask myself what would you see if you were to put on the same glasses? I think you would have seen something like, ‘Pay a little bit and then you can forget about it, and we guarantee you that,’ you know, basically I claim we pay charity so that they remain there, no? Like not come too close, how should I put it, no? Charity is I think that at its most fundamental, charity is a kind of a superstitious activity to guarantee that they don’t bother you, no? Like pay a little bit and they remain there, no? And we all like to—they like to sympathize with Sarajevo and so on, no? But the moment I noticed you started to move too much, it was, ‘Eee, what if Osama bin Laden is here, what if—’ no? The West, the West likes suffering victims. Likes to help them and so on. If victims organize themselves too much, you are at least suspected of being a fundamentalist or something like that, no? So you know how this goes, no? How should I put it, better than me maybe. Sorry for this again interruption. Now we have a little bit of time to pretend that we live in democracy, no? So that you can ask questions if somebody wants. Okay, let’s have the lady with the glasses, please. Yes. No, this was just the case of that specific—this is Spielberg’s ideology. What I’m only saying is that ideology is never the explicit ideology. That you have to look for this supplement which appears just a marginal element, that without this official ideology, which can be patriotism or whatever, wouldn’t have worked. That’s, that was only my thesis that, you know, it doesn’t stand on its own. Even for example the Stalinist epic has to have this love, last story or whatever. That—that was only—no, it’s not necessarily patriarchy. On the contrary, many people criticize me today for claiming that today, I claim, patriarchy is effectively, and Spielberg is here rather old-fashioned. I don’t think we still live in patriarchal universe. I mean, I’m not saying we have some new freedom, but who says that after patriarchalism there should be, there should be, there should be freedom? And you know, even already Adorno knew this when he emphasized in late '30s that totalitarian fascist leader is not a patriarchal figure. So I’m—I think that when some feminists today still behave as if the enemy is still patriarchal authority, no? I think where it is, it is more a reaction. But I think in the very way patriarchal authority reasserts itself, it undermines itself. In the sense that even when you pretend to be patriarchal authority today, in the mode you do it, you already undermine it. If there is a patriarchal authority today, it’s rather something much more ominous. It’s a return of the figure called by Freud Ur-father, primordial father. You know this brutal, not the symbolic father who upholds the symbolic law, but the brutal father violent who wants to possess all the women. This is why what I find—okay, it’s obscene with all the suffering to say interesting—but okay, interesting in the figure Josef Fritzl. Josef Fritzl is Freudian Ur-father, possessing all the women in the basement down there and so on. And if you look a link with Hollywood, it would have been Sound of Music, I claim. I think the Sound of Music is a very dangerous myth of this kind of enclosed patriarchal—okay, but that’s another story. Let me not go too far, okay. But let’s also be democratic... Okay, in principle I would say it doesn’t matter, but I think it’s—okay, now I will be talking like the Chinese diplomats, you know, they always like to quantify, you know, like they tell you—ask them how is Mao, they say Mao was good, bad, no? And then when it’s getting a little bit worse they say now Mao is only no. Good. So I would say no. It must be somehow already in the machine. What just did strike me is how systematically this goes through, not all, but those were a failure. For example, one of the few truly interesting films of him for me was the big—the relatively big flop Artificial Intelligence. Which I think it’s a different fantasy. There you don’t have that, and it’s much more interesting, but maybe precisely because there was not this background, people were lost in a way, they—how should I put it, they didn’t know what to do with the film, no? But I don’t—how should I put it, it’s not—I don’t think Spielberg is a fake because it’s so successful, how should I put it, no? I don’t have anything against him at this level. I just think that, um, even at the level of commercial films, if you want, there are simply much better films. For example, I met the guy by chance, I like him. Let’s go to lower commercial films. Did you see Guillermo del Toro, Blade, Blade number two? That black guy, you know, the half-vampire and so on, it’s wonderfully shot in Prague, post-socialist, with all wonderful use to provide density of this literally post-industrial societies. Not in the sense of postmodern, but in the sense of still industrial but empty factories in decay and so on. For example, that’s art for me. That’s much more art than many art films. Like for example, we should be here very ruthless with history. For example, if you ask me, Bergman is so-so. I claim that his decline begins with Persona. It’s too self-conscious and pretentious. Even Bergman knows it when in one of his films he says, ‘I’m afraid I did a Bergman film,’ which means already imitating his own formula. I think Bergman’s true masterpiece is Silence. You know the dark two women coming to some kind of a Balkan-like city—it is because it says Slivovica there, you know Slivovica, it’s all—and so—what I’m saying, I’m not saying everything is equally good, commercial or not. I’m also saying that there are many films made with artistic pretentious or whatever which are don’t do the job and there are hidden pearls also in what appears to be so-called commercial films. For example, another one which pretends to be but it’s not artistic is, how’s the guy called—not Alfonso Cuarón, the other guy who did Grams and... Iñárritu. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I spoke with—and he openly confessed to me that, you know, he has his formula, these three parallel stories and how they interact, and he totally manipulates in the sense of he wants to squeeze all possible—he is for me just a good artisan. How should I put it, no? He lacks something. I think paradoxically, although he is regarded more highly than Guillermo del Toro, I think Guillermo del Toro has more of a substance of an artist. We were just—I call this first rows 'nomenklatura' seats but you did—probably you know people usually put white papers to signal they are busy, but then usually of course those people never come and then you have this stupid scene, no? So let’s move towards the working class, no? But also, there was here a gentleman here and there, no? Please. You were first and then... Okay the lady. Okay. I hope not the Hitchcockian lady with the glasses because you know that in Hitchcock’s films the lady with glasses is one permanent motive and it’s usually pointedly a kind of a nasty non-attractive lady, to add further insult to injuries usually played by his daughter, Patricia Hitchcock. So, okay, let’s have the lady with the glasses please. Okay, yeah. That’s a good simple question. Again, what I was trying to say is that first I think they are, but they are hidden. For example, for me I—okay, I will give you an example which will be maybe very problematic, I also had a clip but we didn’t have time. Let’s take Holocaust. Spielberg... no. The first condition for me to have a good Holocaust movie is that it has to be a comedy. No, no, I’m not kidding. To avoid any misunderstanding, I told this argument in Jerusalem and they accepted it. Because you know what’s the problem of a tragedy? A tragedy still, how should I put it, presupposes a certain dignity. To be a tragic hero, you have to have a minimum of dignity to then, you know, like I don’t admit this judgment, I resist and so on. But I think that when things go really hard, horrific, it’s—you cannot have a tragedy in Gulag, you cannot have a tragedy in Auschwitz where you were reduced to what they call Muselmänner, these living dead and so on. It’s so precisely when thing go really bad, you only can do it as a comedy. Because again, you concede to the Nazis too much if you do a tragedy. So it’s not that. Now, which type of comedy? I am as you can expect opposed to La vita bella. Why? Because what I don’t like is that at the end you have the five minutes which are where you should cry not laugh, you know, where—you know the story, La vita bella, not bla bla—so at the end, you know, the guy learns how father sacrificed himself. Now let me tell you what I would have thought about it, what I would have done with La vita bella to make it a little bit like Chaplin today questioning. The story should have been changed in two ways. And it would be even much more, I wouldn’t say tragic, but terrifying. First, what if the story is exactly the same, just at the end not the father but the son gets shot? And the father learns that all his stage—or even better: what if we had exactly the same story we
guy Gilles Deleuze, a kind of a open, kind of a neo-Spinozian open pluralist ontology where without any teleology, pre-ordained control, it’s you kind—you have a multitude which contingent interactions, it’s basically a film about how sense or rather, to be more precise, meaning, meaning arises out of nonsense, out of nonsensical encounters. So it’s—you see my point, which is why it’s this without this—you got now my point—without this, how should I call it, world feeling, world atmosphere, however you got—attitude towards reality, however you call it, inscribed into the very form of the film, if you take this away it would—it would have been just a boring socio-critical film when you say ‘Okay, so what’ and so on. It’s precisely the beauty is that it is a critical film, but the optimism is not—you don’t need at the end a hero to tell you, ‘Yes, but things are not so bad, there is hope’ or what. Hope is inscribed into the very form of how the pessimistic diagnostic about reality is rendered there. That would be for me the, the crucial point. Or to give you my another final example, please don’t yet show it because I want—Alfred Hitchcock. There I claim you have an entire theological dimension inscribed into the very form. What is one of Hitchcock’s typical standard procedures? That when the subject is approaching a potentially threatening object, house, whatever. First it’s shot in a standard way, exchange of subjective point of view shot and objective shot. Then at a certain point regularly in Hitchcock something happens. The camera moves up so that you get the so-called God’s point of view shot, where you see from above the whole scene, and then from here you jump into something very mysterious which is specifically Hitchcockian: a point of view shot, but the point of view of an impossible subject. You don’t know who he is, he’s unthinkable. It is as if God, that anonymous neutral God, gets subjectivized as a kind of evil presence. And it’s, okay, let’s see this one, this is the second murder, please, from—please play it now. This is—you see, this is still normal, as it were. Any guy can do this. I mean, would have done it. Objective shot. No, it’s objective we are already from down there before, okay. Here subjective—I mean, point of view shot, although it’s not here. Now. This—(The Birds clip plays). Now, point of God’s view, impossible subject. It’s—I didn’t want to take too much of your time, but just if you don’t believe me that this is a formula, check for example in Hitchcock’s The Birds, the scene where you see the town on fire. First you have Melanie, Tippi Hedren, observing a gas station burning, the same exchange subjective-objective. Then God’s view shot of the whole city burning, and then all of a sudden birds from behind enter the frame, objective shot is subjectivized. Again, so this idea, you know that—you don’t have to call it God—Big Other as a neutrality, neutral overview, that this very neutral frame, frame of reality can get subjectivized in an evil way. How the very objectivity is sustained by a evil god, evil divinity, however you want it. This, this is what makes Hitchcock, Hitchcock. This, how should I put it, sensitivity or however you call it rendered—rendered by the—rendered by the formal apparatus itself. Which is why, for example, who is for me a great feminist author? John Cassavetes. Because in his masterpieces, Faces and so on, where it’s usually his wife Gena Rowlands—okay, she is dead now, so his ex-wife—what does he do? Usually she is shot when she has hysterical outbursts so that camera gets too close to her face and it’s shaking. So what is basically a beautiful woman’s face, when you get too close you see all the distortions. As if—you get my point—as if hysteria is not only a hysteria of the woman whom you see there, but as if the camera itself is infected by the hysteria which is depicted there. The absolute contrast to this would have been for me, and I have great problems with him, for example Tarkovsky. If you saw his Nostalghia, there also the woman, the Italian friend of that Russian whatever poet who is roaming around Italy looking for some traces of another Russian poet, has an outburst. But I think it’s the most, the most—the most—I haven’t seen a shot with so much hatred towards a feminine subject, because while she is exploding, showing her breast, shouting, the camera just remains totally firm at a distance. You see, as it were, hatred in the camera itself. So here, where cinema as an art truly begins, at least for me, at this level of—how should I call it—some, I don’t want to call it, it’s a wrong metaphysical term, worldview, but let’s say attitude to reality, implicit ontology, implicit—which is inscribed into the very form and then how this interacts with the story, how they supplement each other and so on and so on. This is for me where one has to look for true art today. Which is why, for example, I am ready to say about another of my directors whom—as persons he is, I think, rather stupid, David Lynch, but he has an incredible—and ideologically, well, I don’t appreciate him very much, he’s into this new age meditation madness, but as a cinema maker as to sensitivity of the form, he is incredible. I think that movie also, let me make another note, movie as an art begins, I think, when you do with images also what—what—what is done with the cat, you remember the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, how the smile, cat disappears, only an object, the smile remains. This is what, for example, Lynch knows how to play wonderfully. You remember in Mulholland Drive that famous scene where—okay, we learn later it was playback, but the effect is shocking—in a nightclub a woman is singing, she collapses, the singing goes on. For a brief moment you’re almost afraid, my god, does a voice survive on its own? There is also a wonderful scene even in such an easy film, easy in the sense of apparently formally easy, the last Sergio Leone, you saw it Once Upon a Time in America. Where, towards the beginning of the film, we see a phone ringing, ringing endlessly, then finally a hand picks up the phone, the ringing goes on. I mean, you know, this, how should I put it, disintegration of reality into its different components. It’s not simply that—it’s not simply that words, that sound belongs to bodies. This, how in the very texture of the film you can get another message. Which is why, I’m sorry I couldn’t show you more from—you’ve just seen the beginning from—for example, this is why Eisenstein is great in Ivan the Terrible. This is why Chaplin is great in The Great Dictator where—you know what’s the idea of Great Dictator—twin, two of them parallel destinies: Hynkel, Hitler, dictator, played both by Chaplin and the poor Jewish barber. But it’s crucial how—it’s not only that one is good, the other is bad, but they directly relate to physical reality of the film. Hynkel—sorry, the Jewish barber is basically the continuation of the tramp. He is mostly silent, just dances around, etc., while Hynkel Hitler is in a way the primacy of the voice. We first hear his voice, then we see his distorted space and so on, but he is always overshadowed by the voice. Here I think Chaplin was a genius because he was right to resist sound. Not because of some conservative stupidity like, ‘No, I want silent movie,’ but he saw in the sound a threatening dimension where the usual realists saw only new possibilities: ‘Oh my god, we have now sound, we can show people talking like in real life.’ But Chaplin, and not only Chaplin, Fritz Lang and others, sensed how the moment you have sound film, cinema, sound becomes a spectral entity which can somehow autonomize itself, you no longer control your own voice. We, in a way, all become like ventriloquists and so on and so on. So unfortunately at this point where we would have approached a serious analysis, I have to stop. That’s life. Thank you very much for your patience. No, no. As an old communist I will tell you, don’t applaud too much, when we will take over again, you will be obliged to do it. Spare your energy for that moment when... No, but seriously, I will repeat an old joke here which you probably know, but it always fascinates me when I hear this. Did you notice this wonderful small detail—if you, I’ve written about this, oh—if you watch all documentaries, the difference between fascism and Stalinism, no? In fascism, when the leader is applauded, he just receives the applause. In Stalinism, always, the leader joins the applause. That’s, I think, in minimum the difference, because the subjectivity is totally different. In fascism, you are a leader. Stalinist leader always legitimizes himself as a servant of the people. ‘I’m anonymous, I’m nobody, I’m just—’ which is why I can join you in the applause and so on. And this, that’s the tragedy of Stalinism, which this brings us to the second point. For example, no, I am saying this as a reaction to those simplists who claim, ‘Oh, Stalinism, fascism, the same.’ No, unfortunately they are not the same. I’m not saying Stalinism is better, just that the whole economy is different. For example, do you know that under Stalin, I read in a book on Gulag, every year on Stalin’s birthday, even in the darkest Gulag, Kolyma, Magadan, all the prisoners were assembled and they all had to sign a telegram to Stalin wishing him all the best and success and so on. You cannot even imagine this like in Nazi Germany. What, to collect all the Jews to sign a telegram to Hitler? Why? Precisely because the subjectivity is totally different. In Stalinism, you have show trials, confessions. In Nazism, you don’t have them. I mean, because in Nazism, how should I put it, you are guilty just for being what you are, a Jew. They don’t have to demonstrate any Jewish plot or what. So it’s very paradoxical. The paradox is that Stalinism was in some respects more horrible precisely because it was ironically closer to Enlightenment. You know the Stalinist idea is that even the lowest Trotskyite shit is still has the access to universal reason. You can confess, you can see where you went wrong. In Nazism you don’t have this. So, okay, all I’m trying to say is that, um, I think that we are far from understanding 20th century still. I don’t believe those who think this was an aberration, now we have happy liberalism and so on and so on. No, we don’t, and it would be especially crucial to understand the 20th century to understand where we are going now because I’m a, how should I call it, moderate pessimist. I—and you saw it, now I will refer to your city, Sarajevo. You know what made me horrifiedly—horrifiedly, even already at that unfortunate epoch, '92. How, you know, Henri Bergson, the French guy, you know, had some wonderful observation about time that he made propos First World War. When it started with, uh—how before World War I basically people knew it is coming, you know, from the then. But nonetheless somehow they didn’t believe it can really happen. They secretly thought it’s not possible. But then what shocked him is that when the catastrophe did take place, how quickly they got accustomed to it. All of a sudden, ‘Okay, it’s war,’ you know, you—and what shocked me so much that something similar happened with you here. You know, nobody really believed. Everybody knew the war is in the air. Nobody really believed something like the siege of Sarajevo can happen. But the shock is how, when it happened, how—not you, you were here like being screwed, that’s more difficult, but the enlightened public—how they got, how quickly—okay, they were outraged. But they were outraged in a normal way. You know, it became part of the background. It’s just something that was unthinkable all of a sudden becomes acceptable. And here we can use again this spectacles from, uh, They Live. This is what I find so false in today’s charity, you know, when they call you like, ‘You know, give five dollars a month and you will save a child in Africa,’ or whatever. I ask myself what would you see if you were to put on the same glasses? I think you would have seen something like, ‘Pay a little bit and then you can forget about it, and we guarantee you that,’ you know, basically I claim we pay charity so that they remain there, no? Like not come too close, how should I put it, no? Charity is I think that at its most fundamental, charity is a kind of a superstitious activity to guarantee that they don’t bother you, no? Like pay a little bit and they remain there, no? And we all like to—they like to sympathize with Sarajevo and so on, no? But the moment I noticed you started to move too much, it was, ‘Eee, what if Osama bin Laden is here, what if—’ no? The West, the West likes suffering victims. Likes to help them and so on. If victims organize themselves too much, you are at least suspected of being a fundamentalist or something like that, no? So you know how this goes, no? How should I put it, better than me maybe. Sorry for this again interruption. Now we have a little bit of time to pretend that we live in democracy, no? So that you can ask questions if somebody wants. Okay, let’s have the lady with the glasses, please. Yes. No, this was just the case of that specific—this is Spielberg’s ideology. What I’m only saying is that ideology is never the explicit ideology. That you have to look for this supplement which appears just a marginal element, that without this official ideology, which can be patriotism or whatever, wouldn’t have worked. That’s, that was only my thesis that, you know, it doesn’t stand on its own. Even for example the Stalinist epic has to have this love, last story or whatever. That—that was only—no, it’s not necessarily patriarchy. On the contrary, many people criticize me today for claiming that today, I claim, patriarchy is effectively, and Spielberg is here rather old-fashioned. I don’t think we still live in patriarchal universe. I mean, I’m not saying we have some new freedom, but who says that after patriarchalism there should be, there should be, there should be freedom? And you know, even already Adorno knew this when he emphasized in late '30s that totalitarian fascist leader is not a patriarchal figure. So I’m—I think that when some feminists today still behave as if the enemy is still patriarchal authority, no? I think where it is, it is more a reaction. But I think in the very way patriarchal authority reasserts itself, it undermines itself. In the sense that even when you pretend to be patriarchal authority today, in the mode you do it, you already undermine it. If there is a patriarchal authority today, it’s rather something much more ominous. It’s a return of the figure called by Freud Ur-father, primordial father. You know this brutal, not the symbolic father who upholds the symbolic law, but the brutal father violent who wants to possess all the women. This is why what I find—okay, it’s obscene with all the suffering to say interesting—but okay, interesting in the figure Josef Fritzl. Josef Fritzl is Freudian Ur-father, possessing all the women in the basement down there and so on. And if you look a link with Hollywood, it would have been Sound of Music, I claim. I think the Sound of Music is a very dangerous myth of this kind of enclosed patriarchal—okay, but that’s another story. Let me not go too far, okay. But let’s also be democratic... Okay, in principle I would say it doesn’t matter, but I think it’s—okay, now I will be talking like the Chinese diplomats, you know, they always like to quantify, you know, like they tell you—ask them how is Mao, they say Mao was good, bad, no? And then when it’s getting a little bit worse they say now Mao is only no. Good. So I would say no. It must be somehow already in the machine. What just did strike me is how systematically this goes through, not all, but those were a failure. For example, one of the few truly interesting films of him for me was the big—the relatively big flop Artificial Intelligence. Which I think it’s a different fantasy. There you don’t have that, and it’s much more interesting, but maybe precisely because there was not this background, people were lost in a way, they—how should I put it, they didn’t know what to do with the film, no? But I don’t—how should I put it, it’s not—I don’t think Spielberg is a fake because it’s so successful, how should I put it, no? I don’t have anything against him at this level. I just think that, um, even at the level of commercial films, if you want, there are simply much better films. For example, I met the guy by chance, I like him. Let’s go to lower commercial films. Did you see Guillermo del Toro, Blade, Blade number two? That black guy, you know, the half-vampire and so on, it’s wonderfully shot in Prague, post-socialist, with all wonderful use to provide density of this literally post-industrial societies. Not in the sense of postmodern, but in the sense of still industrial but empty factories in decay and so on. For example, that’s art for me. That’s much more art than many art films. Like for example, we should be here very ruthless with history. For example, if you ask me, Bergman is so-so. I claim that his decline begins with Persona. It’s too self-conscious and pretentious. Even Bergman knows it when in one of his films he says, ‘I’m afraid I did a Bergman film,’ which means already imitating his own formula. I think Bergman’s true masterpiece is Silence. You know the dark two women coming to some kind of a Balkan-like city—it is because it says Slivovica there, you know Slivovica, it’s all—and so—what I’m saying, I’m not saying everything is equally good, commercial or not. I’m also saying that there are many films made with artistic pretentious or whatever which are don’t do the job and there are hidden pearls also in what appears to be so-called commercial films. For example, another one which pretends to be but it’s not artistic is, how’s the guy called—not Alfonso Cuarón, the other guy who did Grams and... Iñárritu. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I spoke with—and he openly confessed to me that, you know, he has his formula, these three parallel stories and how they interact, and he totally manipulates in the sense of he wants to squeeze all possible—he is for me just a good artisan. How should I put it, no? He lacks something. I think paradoxically, although he is regarded more highly than Guillermo del Toro, I think Guillermo del Toro has more of a substance of an artist. We were just—I call this first rows 'nomenklatura' seats but you did—probably you know people usually put white papers to signal they are busy, but then usually of course those people never come and then you have this stupid scene, no? So let’s move towards the working class, no? But also, there was here a gentleman here and there, no? Please. You were first and then... Okay the lady. Okay. I hope not the Hitchcockian lady with the glasses because you know that in Hitchcock’s films the lady with glasses is one permanent motive and it’s usually pointedly a kind of a nasty non-attractive lady, to add further insult to injuries usually played by his daughter, Patricia Hitchcock. So, okay, let’s have the lady with the glasses please. Okay, yeah. That’s a good simple question. Again, what I was trying to say is that first I think they are, but they are hidden. For example, for me I—okay, I will give you an example which will be maybe very problematic, I also had a clip but we didn’t have time. Let’s take Holocaust. Spielberg... no. The first condition for me to have a good Holocaust movie is that it has to be a comedy. No, no, I’m not kidding. To avoid any misunderstanding, I told this argument in Jerusalem and they accepted it. Because you know what’s the problem of a tragedy? A tragedy still, how should I put it, presupposes a certain dignity. To be a tragic hero, you have to have a minimum of dignity to then, you know, like I don’t admit this judgment, I resist and so on. But I think that when things go really hard, horrific, it’s—you cannot have a tragedy in Gulag, you cannot have a tragedy in Auschwitz where you were reduced to what they call Muselmänner, these living dead and so on. It’s so precisely when thing go really bad, you only can do it as a comedy. Because again, you concede to the Nazis too much if you do a tragedy. So it’s not that. Now, which type of comedy? I am as you can expect opposed to La vita bella. Why? Because what I don’t like is that at the end you have the five minutes which are where you should cry not laugh, you know, where—you know the story, La vita bella, not bla bla—so at the end, you know, the guy learns how father sacrificed himself. Now let me tell you what I would have thought about it, what I would have done with La vita bella to make it a little bit like Chaplin today questioning. The story should have been changed in two ways. And it would be even much more, I wouldn’t say tragic, but terrifying. First, what if the story is exactly the same, just at the end not the father but the son gets shot? And the father learns that all his stage—or even better: what if we had exactly the same story we
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have, just that at the end
have, just that at the end
Slavoj Žižek
father learns that the son knew all the time that father is just telling him a lie, telling him this is just a big competition, but just the son pretended to believe his father not to hurt his father? You know, this is always this wonderful terrifying moment where you think you are keeping the other innocent for his own good, but then when you learn that the other basically knows all but just pretends to believe you not to—this would have made it better. My Chaplin-like, the truly horrifying is did you see, is it Lina Wertmüller or who, Pasqualino Settebellezze? It’s a guy also about—an Italian seducer is put into, I don’t know which Auschwitz whatever, and there he finds out that the only way to survive is to seduce the Kapo who is a big fat ugly German woman. And then you have this extremely painful disgustingly funny scenes where he does it, and then the woman says, ‘Okay, now you will survive, but you have to do this and this, like select which or your colleagues will be shot.’ So that there is no redemption at the end, nice crying, it’s just what remains after the laughter is utter despair. He survives but he—is deprived of the dignity of life. Because you know I more and more like this line of German, you know once dissident Wolf Biermann, who allegedly took this from some I think Breton, old surrealist, where they said that the true question is not the religious one, is there life after death? The true question is is there life before death? Like, are we really alive? So it’s very nicely formulated that at the end after laughter he survives but it’s not really alive. Already one Austrian Jewish writer said this nicely, he said that when we betray our principle, no? For survival, the—the price we usually pay is our life itself, like you think you are alive, you are not really. So for example, that is an unsettling one. Then for example of classical Hollywood, do you know one—okay, Altman’s are my—no, no there are many excellent, for example, my ideal: Atom Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter. It’s perfect example of what I call the ethical act where the girl there tells the—tells a lie. Tells a lie just to ruin a certain game and so on ethically. So in other words, we don’t have necessarily to go to some poor third world countries or whatever. Although I do admire them. For example, I don’t know, in China today Still Life, that type of films, or the new Romanian wave wave, I admire it and so on. No, things are around and I think things can be done inside outside Hollywood if you want and so on and so on. Just with patience. For example, I recently I mentioned I discovered incredible masterpiece I claim, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds with Rock Hudson. About this—a guy who you pay to be reinvented, they change your face, so that you officially die but adopt a new life and then becomes a total nightmare where he wants to return to old life and so on. It’s I think one of the absolute—one of the absolute Hollywood masterpieces. So there is hope, one shouldn't be too much of a pessimist here. One more maybe... I think it’s still both. No, what—let me give you just a general reaction. One thing which makes me sad often is how—and I don’t want to draw this stupid conclusion that you need a little bit of repression—but look how many directors were doing pretty good movies when there was still communist terror, no? And look Kieślowski, no? I mean, I think his best films are still the one shot in the dark age of Jaruzelski dictatorship like for me the masterpiece of Kieślowski is usually Przypadek, it’s translated as Blind Chance. Then what happened when he got freedom? He started to do new age films about beautiful women, how should I put it, no? And the whole pleasure is—I could probably, I learned from his friend Agnieszka Holland that of course as an old East European he had affairs with all of them, no? So basically it’s ‘let’s do a deep new age film and the new age depth is a pretext so that I can sleep with, with Juliette Binoche, with, with, with, what’s the other one, Julie Delpy and so on,’ no? So—and it’s the same with Andrzej Wajda, no? He ended now with doing Pan Tadeusz and similar big Polish national epics and so on. Go to Mikhalkov, he did that one of the worst films of all times—how is it called, that one, The Barber of Siberia or whatever, no? So—the—the—so I think that what can—and here one should be very brutal—what happens is first that now we are confronting the truth in the sense of was there any substance or not. Like in ex-Yugoslavia, and they hate me because I already said this in Slovenia, I think it’s the only you Bosnians and Serbs who had a minimal true substance, like you know that it’s a real cinematography. In Slovenia maybe now is happening with these younger guys, Cvitkovič and so on, probably. But before the last ten years, we were just shooting theater, doing ridiculous things, it’s ontologically it was not cinema. So there is a chance here and there. For example, I admire this last wave of wonderfully ironic, wonderfully done Romanian films and so on, no? So I think that the problem is maybe at this level not so much East West but how to invent a specific color, not in any folkloric sense or whatever, they are the worst. And this is my problem, not any racism or what, with Kusturica, Underground. I asked myself a simple question. That image of Balkan that you get in Underground, this kind of eternal orgy as he put it, prolonged suicide, people fornicate, kill and drink all the time. My reproach is not that he is too Balkan, but that he is too Western. That image of Balkan is the Western fantasy of Balkan. He is staging, giving to the West what they—what they want. So—and—so again, I see chances here. What interests me even more is how rules are changed. For example, did you notice how in the last year or two the Chinese are practically doing better Hollywood than Hollywood? In the sense that this Hero, House of Flying Daggers, my god these are better—better historical spectacles than Hollywood. So I always like to imagine, and also with these good relatively marginal American films, from this post-Altman films, no? I would like to live in a world—maybe we will, when like years from now, we lone intellectuals who like serious films will start a petition: enough of multiplexes with Chinese superproductions, we want a small art cinema to show American films there and so on, no? Maybe, maybe that’s the good thing about globalization. Not—let’s not just condemn it. Far from those who think globalization means we will all eat hamburgers and so on. No, we—means you Bosnians, us Slovenes whatsoever—Ireland, Iceland—globalization is a big chance for smaller nations to have their moment, how should I put it, no? So it’s I think it’s a chance for all of us here. So again, I don’t think things are so bad—so bad at this level. But I totally hate, disagree with you, this, how should I put it, European spirit, you know, when they do it in the style of Brussels bureaucracy. Like this is what I hate and even now I don’t know did they take it seriously or not. Did you see the first of the Color Trilogy, Blue, by Kieślowski? You know all that shit of the anthem of Europe song and so on. From what I
father learns that the son knew all the time that father is just telling him a lie, telling him this is just a big competition, but just the son pretended to believe his father not to hurt his father? You know, this is always this wonderful terrifying moment where you think you are keeping the other innocent for his own good, but then when you learn that the other basically knows all but just pretends to believe you not to—this would have made it better. My Chaplin-like, the truly horrifying is did you see, is it Lina Wertmüller or who, Pasqualino Settebellezze? It’s a guy also about—an Italian seducer is put into, I don’t know which Auschwitz whatever, and there he finds out that the only way to survive is to seduce the Kapo who is a big fat ugly German woman. And then you have this extremely painful disgustingly funny scenes where he does it, and then the woman says, ‘Okay, now you will survive, but you have to do this and this, like select which or your colleagues will be shot.’ So that there is no redemption at the end, nice crying, it’s just what remains after the laughter is utter despair. He survives but he—is deprived of the dignity of life. Because you know I more and more like this line of German, you know once dissident Wolf Biermann, who allegedly took this from some I think Breton, old surrealist, where they said that the true question is not the religious one, is there life after death? The true question is is there life before death? Like, are we really alive? So it’s very nicely formulated that at the end after laughter he survives but it’s not really alive. Already one Austrian Jewish writer said this nicely, he said that when we betray our principle, no? For survival, the—the price we usually pay is our life itself, like you think you are alive, you are not really. So for example, that is an unsettling one. Then for example of classical Hollywood, do you know one—okay, Altman’s are my—no, no there are many excellent, for example, my ideal: Atom Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter. It’s perfect example of what I call the ethical act where the girl there tells the—tells a lie. Tells a lie just to ruin a certain game and so on ethically. So in other words, we don’t have necessarily to go to some poor third world countries or whatever. Although I do admire them. For example, I don’t know, in China today Still Life, that type of films, or the new Romanian wave wave, I admire it and so on. No, things are around and I think things can be done inside outside Hollywood if you want and so on and so on. Just with patience. For example, I recently I mentioned I discovered incredible masterpiece I claim, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds with Rock Hudson. About this—a guy who you pay to be reinvented, they change your face, so that you officially die but adopt a new life and then becomes a total nightmare where he wants to return to old life and so on. It’s I think one of the absolute—one of the absolute Hollywood masterpieces. So there is hope, one shouldn't be too much of a pessimist here. One more maybe... I think it’s still both. No, what—let me give you just a general reaction. One thing which makes me sad often is how—and I don’t want to draw this stupid conclusion that you need a little bit of repression—but look how many directors were doing pretty good movies when there was still communist terror, no? And look Kieślowski, no? I mean, I think his best films are still the one shot in the dark age of Jaruzelski dictatorship like for me the masterpiece of Kieślowski is usually Przypadek, it’s translated as Blind Chance. Then what happened when he got freedom? He started to do new age films about beautiful women, how should I put it, no? And the whole pleasure is—I could probably, I learned from his friend Agnieszka Holland that of course as an old East European he had affairs with all of them, no? So basically it’s ‘let’s do a deep new age film and the new age depth is a pretext so that I can sleep with, with Juliette Binoche, with, with, with, what’s the other one, Julie Delpy and so on,’ no? So—and it’s the same with Andrzej Wajda, no? He ended now with doing Pan Tadeusz and similar big Polish national epics and so on. Go to Mikhalkov, he did that one of the worst films of all times—how is it called, that one, The Barber of Siberia or whatever, no? So—the—the—so I think that what can—and here one should be very brutal—what happens is first that now we are confronting the truth in the sense of was there any substance or not. Like in ex-Yugoslavia, and they hate me because I already said this in Slovenia, I think it’s the only you Bosnians and Serbs who had a minimal true substance, like you know that it’s a real cinematography. In Slovenia maybe now is happening with these younger guys, Cvitkovič and so on, probably. But before the last ten years, we were just shooting theater, doing ridiculous things, it’s ontologically it was not cinema. So there is a chance here and there. For example, I admire this last wave of wonderfully ironic, wonderfully done Romanian films and so on, no? So I think that the problem is maybe at this level not so much East West but how to invent a specific color, not in any folkloric sense or whatever, they are the worst. And this is my problem, not any racism or what, with Kusturica, Underground. I asked myself a simple question. That image of Balkan that you get in Underground, this kind of eternal orgy as he put it, prolonged suicide, people fornicate, kill and drink all the time. My reproach is not that he is too Balkan, but that he is too Western. That image of Balkan is the Western fantasy of Balkan. He is staging, giving to the West what they—what they want. So—and—so again, I see chances here. What interests me even more is how rules are changed. For example, did you notice how in the last year or two the Chinese are practically doing better Hollywood than Hollywood? In the sense that this Hero, House of Flying Daggers, my god these are better—better historical spectacles than Hollywood. So I always like to imagine, and also with these good relatively marginal American films, from this post-Altman films, no? I would like to live in a world—maybe we will, when like years from now, we lone intellectuals who like serious films will start a petition: enough of multiplexes with Chinese superproductions, we want a small art cinema to show American films there and so on, no? Maybe, maybe that’s the good thing about globalization. Not—let’s not just condemn it. Far from those who think globalization means we will all eat hamburgers and so on. No, we—means you Bosnians, us Slovenes whatsoever—Ireland, Iceland—globalization is a big chance for smaller nations to have their moment, how should I put it, no? So it’s I think it’s a chance for all of us here. So again, I don’t think things are so bad—so bad at this level. But I totally hate, disagree with you, this, how should I put it, European spirit, you know, when they do it in the style of Brussels bureaucracy. Like this is what I hate and even now I don’t know did they take it seriously or not. Did you see the first of the Color Trilogy, Blue, by Kieślowski? You know all that shit of the anthem of Europe song and so on. From what I
unknown
unfortunately
unfortunately
Slavoj Žižek
heard from some of his friends, he was so stupid that he took that seriously, how should I put it, no? Because for for us it’s so—I mean, we really need more of your spirit. Your meaning Bosnians. For example, this was, you know where I had a true racist experience? When I was at some Hitchcock conference in United States in '92 or '3 when the war—and I gave a just an analysis of a Hitchcock film. And people there started to attack me, ‘Your country is in flames, how dare you to talk about such a frivolous thing like Hitchcock?’ Then I exploded, I told them first, ‘Ah, and you can?’ No, this was racism at its purest. I am only allowed, you know, I hated this kind of a—Balkan victim tourism. You are supposed to go there and do ‘Ooh, horrible nightmare’ and basically asking them for help and so on, no? So—and this is one thing and the other thing I told them, look at Top Lista Nadrealista and so on. I mean, without this almost obscenity of Top Lista Nadrealista, you wouldn’t survive here. That’s what you need. How should I put it, here you were in real trouble so you didn’t have time to play victims in the Western way, no? You probably played victims when some stupid Western journalists came, no? No, you were victims, but you got my point. Precisely because of that, you didn’t have time to play victims, no? It’s incredible. This is the most dangerous racism I claim today. No—no longer this sympathetic racism but this ‘Ra—be a good victim, no? Be a good victim and we will help you,’ no?
heard from some of his friends, he was so stupid that he took that seriously, how should I put it, no? Because for for us it’s so—I mean, we really need more of your spirit. Your meaning Bosnians. For example, this was, you know where I had a true racist experience? When I was at some Hitchcock conference in United States in '92 or '3 when the war—and I gave a just an analysis of a Hitchcock film. And people there started to attack me, ‘Your country is in flames, how dare you to talk about such a frivolous thing like Hitchcock?’ Then I exploded, I told them first, ‘Ah, and you can?’ No, this was racism at its purest. I am only allowed, you know, I hated this kind of a—Balkan victim tourism. You are supposed to go there and do ‘Ooh, horrible nightmare’ and basically asking them for help and so on, no? So—and this is one thing and the other thing I told them, look at Top Lista Nadrealista and so on. I mean, without this almost obscenity of Top Lista Nadrealista, you wouldn’t survive here. That’s what you need. How should I put it, here you were in real trouble so you didn’t have time to play victims in the Western way, no? You probably played victims when some stupid Western journalists came, no? No, you were victims, but you got my point. Precisely because of that, you didn’t have time to play victims, no? It’s incredible. This is the most dangerous racism I claim today. No—no longer this sympathetic racism but this ‘Ra—be a good victim, no? Be a good victim and we will help you,’ no?