“Plato makes the perfect ideal being tremble in me. But that's only a bit of me. Perfection is only a bit, in the strange make-up of man alive. The Sermon on the Mount makes the selfless spirit of me quiver. But that, too, is only a bit of me. The Ten Commandments set the old Adam shivering in me, warning me that I am a thief and a murderer, unless I watch it. But even the old Adam is only a bit of me. I very much like all these bits of me to be set trembling with life and the wisdom of life. But I do ask that the whole of me shall tremble in its wholeness, some time or other.” D. H. Lawrence
It is no secret that I am student of Ray Carney's. I just finished an essay of his entitled “Two Forms of Cinematic Modernism: Visionary and Pragmatic.” It is described on his website as “the longest and most ambitious essay he has ever written about film and philosophy.” I have not spoken to Ray about when he wrote the essay, I know that a lot of the ideas and examples came up in a course I took with him in 1997, but my concern is that the essay was first publish in a book called A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States that came out in 2000. That means that Carney waited an awfully long time to set down some tenets for an aesthetics. He had already published books about Cassavetes, Dreyer and Capra in addition to numerous essays and interviews. This suggests to me that I need to get back on track writing about films instead of always letting myself be drawn into debates about the nature of cinema. It is hard not to get side-tracked by these arguments, because I have always been on the defensive. It seems every time I say one movie is bad and another is good, I am asked, by teachers, by would-be publishers, to insert a detailed aesthetic breakdown that makes clear how I reached such a conclusion. Over the past ten years this has become practically instinctual. I have published two essays in cinema journals, one about why it is wrong to understand Tarkovsky's Nostalghia as an anti-feminist harangue and the other about why Kiarostami's Taste of Cherries is a cinematic masterpiece while a movie ostensibly interested in many of the same questions, Mendes' American Beauty is kitsch. Then there is the content of this blog! Where are the movies for people who hate movies?
So I want to thank 13 Kangs for getting us back on track even if he chose a particularly silly idiom. I would ask readers not to judge him by his appropriation of techniques invented by sports hackery, but by the content of his criticism. 13 Kangs is a great student of Bergman, and I know that he did not get that from his screen writing teacher; he learned painstakingly over time. In any event his recent post is a damn sight better than my discussions of run of the mil documentaries about great thinkers and abstract speculation about the nature of Cinema or the makeup of the canon. There has been too much abstract discussion about the nature of art and the particular potential of cinema lately, and it is distracting me from writing about works. Not that this discussion is unimportant, just that I need to make sure I am still writing about works and artists. The films are the real teachers.
I was reminded of this by a recent viewing of Ozu's masterpiece, Tokyo Story. I actually watched it before writing the second blog about Žižek! and the one about Derrida. I must admit it was extremely difficult to bear down and finish those, because Ozu will take the wind out of those intellectual sails. It made me think about how I treat people, particularly how I treat my parents and my grandparents and how disrespectful and ungrateful to them I am. It showed me what generosity looks like. It showed me selflessness and forgiveness. It made me think about how people deal with profound loss. Tokyo Story is about getting old and dying and trying your whole life to do right by people and knowing that in many instances you failed. And when I say that art is about life and not about ideas about life, that's what I mean. Tokyo Story is not ideas; it is not so much in the mind. Ozu's films are always behavior and human experience. His work is also camera angles, empty spaces, pacing and other important aspects of visual and narrative style, but I want to focus just on the matter of ideological consent for the moment. Tokyo Story is daily life; more specifically, it it the daily life you and I ignore because we are too busy thinking about big ideas. When my father looks up from his lunch and tells me, with my mother siting next to him and my wife sitting next to me, that he figures the family name will die with him because his one male cousin only had daughters and it doesn't look like I'm going to have any kids, there is no philosophy to help me make sense of that.
But there is Ozu. I could have forgotten what art was for if not for watching that movie. I came up with the name for this site thinking about a former English professor who absolutely hated movies because he thought the medium was inherently pornographic. I convinced him to take part in programming a film series with me, and I consider it one of my happiest achievements to have won him over to Mother and Son, Stalker, Late Spring and Sans Soleil. I forgot about him. I forgot about that impetus. From now on I hope to fill this page with more criticism and commentary of movies that the average web wanderer my have never heard of.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Let's Get Irrelevant!
Is this a film or filmed theater? Bergman struggled monumentally with the samefundamental problem as Ibsen: how to bring the elemental fury of the inner world
alive for a viewing audience. His answer was through dramatic precision and
sublime acting.
I've decided to go against everything that everyone holds sacred and to create a Power Ranking of Great Directors based on my current mood of magical whimsy. Hold your venom, you bagel-eating philistines! It's all in the name of unsettling your biases and inflaming your passions. Here we go!
The rules: This is a Power Rankings analagous to preseason sports rankings that project a team or player's overall value based on various categories, such as passing yards or turnovers. Most art critics have an inherent problem with the term "Greatest" but I think it's mostly due to laziness. Surely we can agree, for example, that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Gaugin and we can point to several formal categories in which Rembrandt's best paintings simply surpass or transcend the works of the latter. I am likewise attempting to formalize a discussion of "top" directors by uniformly applying a formula for greatness while remaining open to changing the terms or the relative value of these aesthetic categories.
The criteria:
a) FORM: a signature style that reveals innovation or technical/artistic mastery of the mechanical aspects of filmmaking (i.e. visual, sound, editing)
b) THEME: complex, mature development and expression of thematic material (objective weight/value of specific thematic motifs deemed to be irrelevant)
c) ACTING/DRAMA/STORYTELLING: consistency and refinement of acting performances; emotional resonance of internal narrative/characters (possibly a red herring but I propose that narrative filmmaking is superior to documentary for the reason that fiction is superior to journalism; I propose that all great directors choose narrative for this reason to formally exploit this distinction between truth and artifice as a primary vehicle for their expression; therefore, I posit that a director's handling and development of characters and the internal dramatic narrative is paramount to the success and scale of his achievement)
d) KNOWLEDGE/CONCRETENESS/REALITY: hear me out--a great director offers so much more than technical innovation, thematic richness and human drama, she brings a refined appreciation for the details of the world, concrete knowledge of things and situations that is rapidly being lost in the ironically named "information age." Surely, Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without his immense understanding of politics and the law, trade and commerce, farming, fashion, history and the military. A director certainly need not be a scholar but, like Rilke's angels, she is bound by the same mission as the returning traveler: to impress and edify us with intimate knowledge of the world.
DIRECTOR POWER RANKINGS
10. Ingmar Bergman
Formal Greatness: C+
Thematic Greatness: A-
Dramatic Greatness: A+
Greatness of Knowledge: B
Several honorable mentions neglected here in favor of Bergman (Angelopoulos, Dreyer, Fellini, Herzog, Hou, Marker, Mizoguchi, Renoir, Wong), largely due to incomplete viewing. But on the other hand, how can you argue with Bergman's inclusion? Even though I have not seen half of his films, Bergman is in my estimation, along with Ozu, the supreme master of classical dramatic narrative form. Not a bad performance in either oeuvre and many, many legendary ones. His heralded theater roots provided him with the gifts of pacing, dialogue, composition and a knack for handling actors. Nevertheless, these roots themselves had to eventually be outgrown and his work with his actors become the true focal point of his enterprise before Bergman became truly "great."
Even with Nyqvist at his side, Bergman's genius for theatrical realization always overshadows his formal/technical innovation. Deft with comedy, spectacle and the most intense drama, he has a visual tendency towards prettified symbolism a la Seventh Seal. (Strangely, I find the narrative structure of Bergman's early and middle films virtually indistinguishable from the Kurosawa's pot-boilers.) Hard to complain when a film is as satisfying as Wild Strawberries, however, Persona seems to mark a conscious shift in Bergman's priorities towards resolving his themes through other possible means, culminating somewhat in the refined lavishness of Cries and Whispers.
In my mind, Scenes From a Marriage ultimately surpasses Persona as his experimental masterpiece, not through technical innovation, but through the relentless insistence on distance and performance. These two formal innovations are Bergman's greatest achievement in that by loosening the restrictions of time and delving ever deeper into his actor's souls, Bergman arrives at a cinema (albeit originally intended for television) that at last matches the ferocity of his themes (faith, suffering, the distant promise of love) with an experience for the viewer that roughly mirrors the rawness and discomfort of his characters. The title, for me, marks a radical departure from Bergman's comfort zone of formalized drama and instead evokes the kind of actorly exercises with which he would be equally familiar, but perhaps less willing to film. But instead of merely watching pretty actors suffer and torture each other, we become complicit through time and closeup in their momentary flashes of emotion and insight. (The standard here is not "rawness" of acting but the use to which that acting is put and I see no reason to draw comparisons to the acting in Cassavetes, which is equally superior.)
Knowledge of the world in Bergman is mostly limited to the internal realm of the yearning soul (can that really be called knowledge?) and the relationships between men and women. His example lets me illustrate the inverse connection between the strength of his "themes" and his "knowledge." Themes such as solitude, suffering and the existence of God hint to a form of artistic transcendence that demands not only intellectual rigor but a great degree of innovation to avoid mere signification and involve the viewer in a lived experience of transcendence. Bresson has much the same project and he tackles it through rigorous editing and dramatic minimalism. Bergman, on the other hand, tends to show people in anguish and doubt, paralyzed or inflamed by their passions. He tends, in other words, to act his themes out. Although no one can question the authenticity or rigor of Bergman's examination of faith, I am saying here that his expression of this theme tends to be less than, say Bresson's or Dreyer's who sometimes achieve a kind of epiphany for the viewer through the power of the image or editing, rather than the power of the drama. That, to me, is another order of genius. Bergman's merit, I think, comes, like a solid veteran, from his unflinching dedication to his themes.
As a result, I rate Bergman's contribution of knowledge to be only average. He shows us intimate rituals and daily, lived interiors but I can't help but feel it's all set decoration. Has he ever been genuinely interested in the work people do, for example, outside of the relationships they trap us in or the way they symbolically reflect our souls? (Thus the profusion of professors, priests and maidens.) His actors and his sets are always so handsome and impeccably dressed; in other words--artificial. On the other hand, by Fanny and Alexander, all of Bergman's dramatic, symbolic tendencies seem to culminate in a kind of Hamlet-esque reflection of itself that is singularly beguiling. The layered orchestration of family life, ritual and fantasy in this film approaches the highest achievements of Tarkovsky and Kiarostami for me. I cannot help but wish that, like Fellini, he occassionally indulged in more childish reflection instead of trying to be so grownup.
Ultimately, his actors are Bergman's shining achievement. Through his devotion to their bold and nuanced performances, Bergman lays bare the inner lives of men and women as the cinematic counterpart to D.H. Lawrence (or at least August Strindberg).
Several honorable mentions neglected here in favor of Bergman (Angelopoulos, Dreyer, Fellini, Herzog, Hou, Marker, Mizoguchi, Renoir, Wong), largely due to incomplete viewing. But on the other hand, how can you argue with Bergman's inclusion? Even though I have not seen half of his films, Bergman is in my estimation, along with Ozu, the supreme master of classical dramatic narrative form. Not a bad performance in either oeuvre and many, many legendary ones. His heralded theater roots provided him with the gifts of pacing, dialogue, composition and a knack for handling actors. Nevertheless, these roots themselves had to eventually be outgrown and his work with his actors become the true focal point of his enterprise before Bergman became truly "great."
Even with Nyqvist at his side, Bergman's genius for theatrical realization always overshadows his formal/technical innovation. Deft with comedy, spectacle and the most intense drama, he has a visual tendency towards prettified symbolism a la Seventh Seal. (Strangely, I find the narrative structure of Bergman's early and middle films virtually indistinguishable from the Kurosawa's pot-boilers.) Hard to complain when a film is as satisfying as Wild Strawberries, however, Persona seems to mark a conscious shift in Bergman's priorities towards resolving his themes through other possible means, culminating somewhat in the refined lavishness of Cries and Whispers.
In my mind, Scenes From a Marriage ultimately surpasses Persona as his experimental masterpiece, not through technical innovation, but through the relentless insistence on distance and performance. These two formal innovations are Bergman's greatest achievement in that by loosening the restrictions of time and delving ever deeper into his actor's souls, Bergman arrives at a cinema (albeit originally intended for television) that at last matches the ferocity of his themes (faith, suffering, the distant promise of love) with an experience for the viewer that roughly mirrors the rawness and discomfort of his characters. The title, for me, marks a radical departure from Bergman's comfort zone of formalized drama and instead evokes the kind of actorly exercises with which he would be equally familiar, but perhaps less willing to film. But instead of merely watching pretty actors suffer and torture each other, we become complicit through time and closeup in their momentary flashes of emotion and insight. (The standard here is not "rawness" of acting but the use to which that acting is put and I see no reason to draw comparisons to the acting in Cassavetes, which is equally superior.)
Knowledge of the world in Bergman is mostly limited to the internal realm of the yearning soul (can that really be called knowledge?) and the relationships between men and women. His example lets me illustrate the inverse connection between the strength of his "themes" and his "knowledge." Themes such as solitude, suffering and the existence of God hint to a form of artistic transcendence that demands not only intellectual rigor but a great degree of innovation to avoid mere signification and involve the viewer in a lived experience of transcendence. Bresson has much the same project and he tackles it through rigorous editing and dramatic minimalism. Bergman, on the other hand, tends to show people in anguish and doubt, paralyzed or inflamed by their passions. He tends, in other words, to act his themes out. Although no one can question the authenticity or rigor of Bergman's examination of faith, I am saying here that his expression of this theme tends to be less than, say Bresson's or Dreyer's who sometimes achieve a kind of epiphany for the viewer through the power of the image or editing, rather than the power of the drama. That, to me, is another order of genius. Bergman's merit, I think, comes, like a solid veteran, from his unflinching dedication to his themes.
As a result, I rate Bergman's contribution of knowledge to be only average. He shows us intimate rituals and daily, lived interiors but I can't help but feel it's all set decoration. Has he ever been genuinely interested in the work people do, for example, outside of the relationships they trap us in or the way they symbolically reflect our souls? (Thus the profusion of professors, priests and maidens.) His actors and his sets are always so handsome and impeccably dressed; in other words--artificial. On the other hand, by Fanny and Alexander, all of Bergman's dramatic, symbolic tendencies seem to culminate in a kind of Hamlet-esque reflection of itself that is singularly beguiling. The layered orchestration of family life, ritual and fantasy in this film approaches the highest achievements of Tarkovsky and Kiarostami for me. I cannot help but wish that, like Fellini, he occassionally indulged in more childish reflection instead of trying to be so grownup.
Ultimately, his actors are Bergman's shining achievement. Through his devotion to their bold and nuanced performances, Bergman lays bare the inner lives of men and women as the cinematic counterpart to D.H. Lawrence (or at least August Strindberg).
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Notes on Derrida
That both Žižek! and Derrida appear within a couple years of one another from Zeitgeist films makes the comparison inevitable. Since I watched Žižek! first I find Derrida functions as a counterpoint in many ways. The way Žižek embraces the filmmaking, how he is always performing, going so far as to act out his death at the end vs. the way Derrida shies away from the camera, always seems reluctant to answer questions, never seems quite confident that this film about him is going to amount to much of anything. That Žižek! is packed from end to end with words, words, words but what I remember about Derrida are the silences – I remember him thinking more than speaking. The project of Žižek! seems to be that the filmmakers want to help him achieve his goal of shedding his humanity and “becoming a monster; becoming theory,” whereas the goal of Derrida is to humanize him through focus on the banal and the mundane, interviews with his wife about their relationship, interviews with his brother. The result is that both end up at odds with their respective mythic images. Žižek, the devourer of popular culture and the champion of the everyday comes across all cerebral and discursive, flying far above the world as we know it a deal with it. Quite surprisingly, it is Derrida who emerges as a down to earth fellow. The documentary is a bit more haphazard, a bit aimless, and quite inferior to Žižek! but the central figure manages to save Derrida through his quiet, matter-of-fact persona.
For me what was most interesting about Derrida was his frequent rejection of the ways in which he is appropriated by the anything-goes/everything-is-meaningful crowd that currently hold court in American intellectual culture. When asked by a British talk show host what he thinks of the idea that Seinfeld is born from Deconstructions Derrida responds: (He blinks a couple times, hands folded and arched just in front of his chin. It is clear that he disdains the question but he is polite. He shifts in his seat) “Deconstruction… the way I understand it… does not produce any… sitcom (Derrida’s French accent is ever so slight, but you hear it when he emphasizes the “com” instead of the “sit.” Somehow that end up communicating to me that he finds this question ridiculous) If people who watch [Seinfeld] think deconstruction is this, the only advice I have to give them… just read; stop watching sitcom. Do your homework.” Who would have guessed that Derrida harbored the notion that popular culture is shallow? Later there is a scene in which one of the filmmakers points to the some books at the top of his shelf and asks, “Have you read those?” Derrida pulls down two novels by Anne Rice and says “No. I Taught a course concerned with vampirism and cannibalism and someone gave me these. I have read most of these books (on the floor to ceiling shelves from which the Anne Rice came), but not all of them.” Again I want to emphasize, imagine that Derrida would think reading Anne Rice is a waste of his time!
I don’t know what it all adds up to regarding Derrida’s aesthetics, but I am glad to see some indication of standards and values, because those are the things deconstruction is always invoked to neutralize. Similarly, when he is asked what he would like to ask the great philosophers of history, Derrida says he wants to ask them about their sex lives. Not because he wants to diagnose them, but because he wants to make them talk about what they leave out. It has been suggested to me that Derrida is more of an artist than a philosopher. That would explain why he wants the great thinkers to remember their bodies. So much thinking is done at a distance from lived experience, is done even to forget and deny lived experience. The deconstructionists, the post-colonialists, the multi-culturalists, the feminists, the psychoanalyticists fail to bring lived experience back into philosophy; they merely draw their abstractions from different groups of people and champion different values. Their revolutions are often only the flipside of the coin to which they object. Derrida’s project is much bigger, much more dangerous. Not that I am an expert on Derrida. Have written a few hundred words, I am left thinking that I actually know nothing about Derrida after watching that movie. I only know a few things that he is not.
For me what was most interesting about Derrida was his frequent rejection of the ways in which he is appropriated by the anything-goes/everything-is-meaningful crowd that currently hold court in American intellectual culture. When asked by a British talk show host what he thinks of the idea that Seinfeld is born from Deconstructions Derrida responds: (He blinks a couple times, hands folded and arched just in front of his chin. It is clear that he disdains the question but he is polite. He shifts in his seat) “Deconstruction… the way I understand it… does not produce any… sitcom (Derrida’s French accent is ever so slight, but you hear it when he emphasizes the “com” instead of the “sit.” Somehow that end up communicating to me that he finds this question ridiculous) If people who watch [Seinfeld] think deconstruction is this, the only advice I have to give them… just read; stop watching sitcom. Do your homework.” Who would have guessed that Derrida harbored the notion that popular culture is shallow? Later there is a scene in which one of the filmmakers points to the some books at the top of his shelf and asks, “Have you read those?” Derrida pulls down two novels by Anne Rice and says “No. I Taught a course concerned with vampirism and cannibalism and someone gave me these. I have read most of these books (on the floor to ceiling shelves from which the Anne Rice came), but not all of them.” Again I want to emphasize, imagine that Derrida would think reading Anne Rice is a waste of his time!
I don’t know what it all adds up to regarding Derrida’s aesthetics, but I am glad to see some indication of standards and values, because those are the things deconstruction is always invoked to neutralize. Similarly, when he is asked what he would like to ask the great philosophers of history, Derrida says he wants to ask them about their sex lives. Not because he wants to diagnose them, but because he wants to make them talk about what they leave out. It has been suggested to me that Derrida is more of an artist than a philosopher. That would explain why he wants the great thinkers to remember their bodies. So much thinking is done at a distance from lived experience, is done even to forget and deny lived experience. The deconstructionists, the post-colonialists, the multi-culturalists, the feminists, the psychoanalyticists fail to bring lived experience back into philosophy; they merely draw their abstractions from different groups of people and champion different values. Their revolutions are often only the flipside of the coin to which they object. Derrida’s project is much bigger, much more dangerous. Not that I am an expert on Derrida. Have written a few hundred words, I am left thinking that I actually know nothing about Derrida after watching that movie. I only know a few things that he is not.
Remaining thoughts about Žižek.
Here is the long awaited (I am sure of this) part two of my reaction to Reality of the Virtual. I would like to cleverly set up the stream of consciousness you are about to step into, but I have no patience to construct such artifice at this late hour. (Yes, this was posted at 12:30 on a Sunday, but when I wrote that sentence it was 10:00 Saturday night and I had been writing, or at least sitting in front of the computer, since 2:00. While that may not seem like much for a lot of people who call themselves writers, it is quite exhausting for me.)
The bit about everyone agreeing to the virtual through silent, even unconscious, assumption is crucial. So many of our beliefs are not really notions in which we believe, but beliefs that we expect others at once to have and to assume we have so we go along. I would say that this flow runs over the very notion of belief itself. When I watch myself, I can see that my very behavior is almost totally made up of movements and sounds that I assume others expect of me. Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel is a brilliant illustration of this phenomenon. Fine, upstanding people will digress to savagery before taking a single step over the precipice that separates the status quo from the unknown, even as the status quo is killing them.
According to Žižek this is the very function of a society. Like the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, argues that society is flawed not by disharmony, but by its primordial shape. Historically, those at the top of the socio-economic power structure have attributed the various problems in their respective societies to minority groups that threaten harmony. Everything would be fine if we got rid of the Jews or the Gays, if we kept the Blacks and Women where they belong, if we kept out the Mexicans, if we killed off the intellectuals. Placing aside for the moment the moral objections to these plans, they do not work because they misunderstand the problem. There is no idyllic, harmonious society to which we must return; there is only the flawed shape of a society that necessarily stratifies classes. A society has to have poor and rich, worker and owner, ignorant and enlightened. What Žižek dares to suggest, if I understand correctly, is that we don’t need an alternative society so much as an alternative to society.
But we are all very attached to society, and so we try to make it work. Chief among our recent efforts to save society has been to disseminate tolerance far and wide. Rodney King’s famous “Can’t we all just get along,” has become something of a motto to large segments of our population, particularly for intellectuals and public figures. Of course nothing has changed about politics and pundits. They still don’t get along, but now they can accuse the other side of not wanting to get along. As for intellectuals, the new-found mission of tolerance opens up myriad new subjects to teach, ways to teach them and demographic groups to bring into the universities.
Žižek calls tolerance a chocolate laxative. He says the ultimate chocolate laxative is to wage wars to free people who don’t ask to be freed i.e. Iraq. I am still working on that metaphor. Does he mean that we are unable to take something we need unless it is sugar-coated, and thus we begin to conflate the two? Is it that we start feeling good about feeling bad? Or does he mean that it isn’t what we think it is. That we think tolerance is something sweet, but the sweetness conceals a motive completely at odds with what we should expect from it? Tolerance, Žižek says, means do not harass me; in fact, don’t even come close to me. Since every attempt at communication is almost always first an intrusion of some sort, then every word spoken toward or written about another human being is potentially “harassment.” It does not take long to reach the point at which this fear of harassment becomes intolerance. I am quite susceptible to this argument, because I see this going on all around me. Everyone is entitled to his opinion, and if you don’t like it, you can fuck right off! Where does conversation take place? Indeed where does thinking occur? I think this is Žižek at his best – revealing that a given ballyhooed truism that seems like a good idea, actually engenders the opposite of what it purports to do.
Nowhere is this more striking than in his discussion of pleasure. His examples are always vivid. “There is nothing more miserable,” Žižek says, “than those young couples or people who organize their life in order to enjoy themselves.” This is exactly why we have Blackberries. Everyone needs her life to be meticulously planned. We even plan something called free time! We plan to go out and get drunk on a particular night then the next day’s schedule says: “gym” or “jogging.” We have to plan our pleasure! Žižek distinguishes Freud’s time from our own, and it is often instructive to think of our era as “Post-Freud,” arguing that Freud developed his theories and practice in opposition to the societal injunction to deny oneself pleasure, whereas our societal injunction is to go after pleasure. Of course Žižek argues that our pleasure is pleasure neutralized – we get to drink on the decaffeinated coffee and non-alcoholic, low-carb, light beer we want! What we need now is find a space where we are allowed not to enjoy. How pregnant that suggestion is! Yet I fear that my digression into why I think we need that pleasure-less space would lead this commentary quite away from Žižek, so I should leave it alone for now.
The bit about everyone agreeing to the virtual through silent, even unconscious, assumption is crucial. So many of our beliefs are not really notions in which we believe, but beliefs that we expect others at once to have and to assume we have so we go along. I would say that this flow runs over the very notion of belief itself. When I watch myself, I can see that my very behavior is almost totally made up of movements and sounds that I assume others expect of me. Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel is a brilliant illustration of this phenomenon. Fine, upstanding people will digress to savagery before taking a single step over the precipice that separates the status quo from the unknown, even as the status quo is killing them.
According to Žižek this is the very function of a society. Like the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, argues that society is flawed not by disharmony, but by its primordial shape. Historically, those at the top of the socio-economic power structure have attributed the various problems in their respective societies to minority groups that threaten harmony. Everything would be fine if we got rid of the Jews or the Gays, if we kept the Blacks and Women where they belong, if we kept out the Mexicans, if we killed off the intellectuals. Placing aside for the moment the moral objections to these plans, they do not work because they misunderstand the problem. There is no idyllic, harmonious society to which we must return; there is only the flawed shape of a society that necessarily stratifies classes. A society has to have poor and rich, worker and owner, ignorant and enlightened. What Žižek dares to suggest, if I understand correctly, is that we don’t need an alternative society so much as an alternative to society.
But we are all very attached to society, and so we try to make it work. Chief among our recent efforts to save society has been to disseminate tolerance far and wide. Rodney King’s famous “Can’t we all just get along,” has become something of a motto to large segments of our population, particularly for intellectuals and public figures. Of course nothing has changed about politics and pundits. They still don’t get along, but now they can accuse the other side of not wanting to get along. As for intellectuals, the new-found mission of tolerance opens up myriad new subjects to teach, ways to teach them and demographic groups to bring into the universities.
Žižek calls tolerance a chocolate laxative. He says the ultimate chocolate laxative is to wage wars to free people who don’t ask to be freed i.e. Iraq. I am still working on that metaphor. Does he mean that we are unable to take something we need unless it is sugar-coated, and thus we begin to conflate the two? Is it that we start feeling good about feeling bad? Or does he mean that it isn’t what we think it is. That we think tolerance is something sweet, but the sweetness conceals a motive completely at odds with what we should expect from it? Tolerance, Žižek says, means do not harass me; in fact, don’t even come close to me. Since every attempt at communication is almost always first an intrusion of some sort, then every word spoken toward or written about another human being is potentially “harassment.” It does not take long to reach the point at which this fear of harassment becomes intolerance. I am quite susceptible to this argument, because I see this going on all around me. Everyone is entitled to his opinion, and if you don’t like it, you can fuck right off! Where does conversation take place? Indeed where does thinking occur? I think this is Žižek at his best – revealing that a given ballyhooed truism that seems like a good idea, actually engenders the opposite of what it purports to do.
Nowhere is this more striking than in his discussion of pleasure. His examples are always vivid. “There is nothing more miserable,” Žižek says, “than those young couples or people who organize their life in order to enjoy themselves.” This is exactly why we have Blackberries. Everyone needs her life to be meticulously planned. We even plan something called free time! We plan to go out and get drunk on a particular night then the next day’s schedule says: “gym” or “jogging.” We have to plan our pleasure! Žižek distinguishes Freud’s time from our own, and it is often instructive to think of our era as “Post-Freud,” arguing that Freud developed his theories and practice in opposition to the societal injunction to deny oneself pleasure, whereas our societal injunction is to go after pleasure. Of course Žižek argues that our pleasure is pleasure neutralized – we get to drink on the decaffeinated coffee and non-alcoholic, low-carb, light beer we want! What we need now is find a space where we are allowed not to enjoy. How pregnant that suggestion is! Yet I fear that my digression into why I think we need that pleasure-less space would lead this commentary quite away from Žižek, so I should leave it alone for now.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
The Reality of the Virtual Part One
As always I find Žižek’s comments about movies to be needlessly convoluted and quite over-intellectualized. Near the beginning of the “lecture” he argues that Sound of Music is popular because it purports to be about fascist resistance, but really it just re-inscribes and normalizes domestic fascism. Of course this is true. Indeed, how else could it possibly be popular? This is how kitsch works. What I find frustrating about Žižek’s conversation about movies, is that he seems to think this is a particular achievement of Sound of Music. It is for similar reasons I imagine that he named Fountainhead the greatest American film. They are both brilliant illuminations despite themselves of American Cultural ideology. I would ask: Why these films specifically? Isn’t this how Hollywood works in general? And do we really need all the verbal and conceptual gymnastics to say that Hollywood movies which purport to sell rebellion and freedom merely maintain the status quo?
Žižek is a unique, adventurous thinker on so many subjects (often vehement and confrontational), so it is surprising that his views on art line up so neatly with current academic trends.
Where does value come from? I find that philosophers will often focus on questions of ontology to demonstrate that values are unstable. Fair enough. Are we then left with no limits? I can agree that nothing should be taken for granted, that all should be scrutinized and interrogated, but at some point we must get on with it, no? At some point one must choose, yes? I would argue that in the world in which we live, that choice can easily be made for you. One who refuses to get off the path of relativity, one who endlessly deconstructs and upends everything as inherently illusory, will eventually find that his conceptual clarity makes for a quite shallow practical world. Society will not stand for relativism (and I am not sure that consciousness will either, but that is another matter). There will be values, and if one does not determine them according to morals, ethics, aesthetics or what have you, they will be determined by the market.
For all the bad philosophizing of the previous paragraph, I stand by the conclusion, and I reject the practice of indiscriminately treating everything as if it had significance. I am unsure whether this idea began when Freud started applying his technique of dream analysis to his interpretations of art and artists (see especially what he has to say about Leonardo’s Notebooks) or when Freud’s followers began using his myriad analytical practices as approaches to understanding society and culture, but Freud is a key source. I would argue that this methodology really comes to fruition in Roland Barthes Mythologies, the most important book to read for anyone who wants to understand where cultural theory as we know it today came from. Whether or not he states it outright, Barthes makes possible the absolute relativism that we know today. Professional wrestling, laundry detergents, automobile designs, toilets, Guernica, The Wings of the Dove, The Well-Tempered Clavier – all of it tells us something and we are not in the business of assigning value to what it tells us. The consequence of treating all culture as equally significant is that it is only a matter of time, within a society that mass produces and sells its culture, before the market replaces morality, ethics, aesthetics, faith even reason.
I heard Robert Rauschenberg say once that he feels sorry for anyone who cannot see the beauty in a coke can. Indeed his whole project was to transform the ugly, discarded trash and byproducts of mass production and mass consumption into works of art by reconfiguring and recontextualizing them. What Rauschenberg fails to acknowledge, in my view, is his agency in that perception. I believe underlying his statement is the view, held by many westerners, that seeing the beauty in all things is the equivalent of understanding that everything has Buddha nature. I will just say that I think westerners who use this as excuse for their relativism do not understand the eastern idea. Not that I claim to know what it means, just that I don’t think it is meant to be a defense for relativism. I would be inclined to argue that such a statement is not intended to be taken a conceptual at all, and to make reason out of it is a mistake.
Reason may be the root of my conflict with Žižek’s ideas about art. He seems to think that he can submit the world to the power of his mind. Everything is significant because he can make it so, and what’s more, it would be insulting to his great mind to suggest that he does not see right through the market that I submit shapes his values. Such are the limitations of my own mind and my own rhetorical style. I can only evaluate Žižek’s conclusions and speculate about where I think they come from. I do not find his discussion of cinema particularly interesting. For my own part, I do not believe that the sheer force of my will can make meaning. The time I spend browsing the internet, playing video games, watching television and thinking about sports is time unquestionably wasted on insignificant diversions. The less I do those things the better off I am, not just in the sense that all those things make me dumber, or atrophy my intellect, but that they cloud my awareness, they deaden my sensitivities and make my perceptions less acute.
Let me conclude (or rather draw to a close by blowing the whole thing up instead of concluding) by addressing the quote at the top of the page, from the Symbolist poet and philosopher, Viacheslav Ivanov. I anticipate that the notion of “new forms” can be misleading because it carries a lot of baggage about “formalism,” especially to anyone who has studied Modernist Art History. I think what he is getting at is the difference between what the conceptual idea and experience as idea. In other words, it is a lesser art work of art that seeks to embody a particular concept. It is a lesser artist that would have specific conceptual goals that he would use art instead of philosophy or science to address. It is a lesser spectator or critic that would expect to find concepts in a work; that would judge a work of art based on what he or she can glean from it. To experience a great work of art is to be plunged into states of perception and awareness that are ahead (maybe just ahead, but ahead nonetheless) of the categories one keep around to help make sense of the world. Part of making sense of this experience will be the spectator’s effort to revise those conceptual tools, but something happens to perception first. One does not come away from a masterpiece with new knowledge as such, but with sharper perception, enhanced sensitivity and the like. It is more akin to the professed benefits of psychotropic drugs or a profound religious conversion, than to a lesson learned.
Does this sound mystical? It is actually the most pragmatic thing in the world. At the root of it is the simple principle of constant change. As one grows, he or she gives up past interests and amusements. One stops listening to a particular band or a host of bands, one gives up on an author at a certain point, one finds that he or she cannot eat McDonald’s hamburgers anymore. Why? -- Ostensibly because new experiences have put past experiences into perspective. This part of life, this part of consciousness, is often neglected, because it is difficult to use conceptual language to talk about it. Yet it is just as much a part of our perception as reason, except in individuals where it has been ruthlessly subjected to the supposed superiority of reason.
Žižek is a unique, adventurous thinker on so many subjects (often vehement and confrontational), so it is surprising that his views on art line up so neatly with current academic trends.
Where does value come from? I find that philosophers will often focus on questions of ontology to demonstrate that values are unstable. Fair enough. Are we then left with no limits? I can agree that nothing should be taken for granted, that all should be scrutinized and interrogated, but at some point we must get on with it, no? At some point one must choose, yes? I would argue that in the world in which we live, that choice can easily be made for you. One who refuses to get off the path of relativity, one who endlessly deconstructs and upends everything as inherently illusory, will eventually find that his conceptual clarity makes for a quite shallow practical world. Society will not stand for relativism (and I am not sure that consciousness will either, but that is another matter). There will be values, and if one does not determine them according to morals, ethics, aesthetics or what have you, they will be determined by the market.
For all the bad philosophizing of the previous paragraph, I stand by the conclusion, and I reject the practice of indiscriminately treating everything as if it had significance. I am unsure whether this idea began when Freud started applying his technique of dream analysis to his interpretations of art and artists (see especially what he has to say about Leonardo’s Notebooks) or when Freud’s followers began using his myriad analytical practices as approaches to understanding society and culture, but Freud is a key source. I would argue that this methodology really comes to fruition in Roland Barthes Mythologies, the most important book to read for anyone who wants to understand where cultural theory as we know it today came from. Whether or not he states it outright, Barthes makes possible the absolute relativism that we know today. Professional wrestling, laundry detergents, automobile designs, toilets, Guernica, The Wings of the Dove, The Well-Tempered Clavier – all of it tells us something and we are not in the business of assigning value to what it tells us. The consequence of treating all culture as equally significant is that it is only a matter of time, within a society that mass produces and sells its culture, before the market replaces morality, ethics, aesthetics, faith even reason.
I heard Robert Rauschenberg say once that he feels sorry for anyone who cannot see the beauty in a coke can. Indeed his whole project was to transform the ugly, discarded trash and byproducts of mass production and mass consumption into works of art by reconfiguring and recontextualizing them. What Rauschenberg fails to acknowledge, in my view, is his agency in that perception. I believe underlying his statement is the view, held by many westerners, that seeing the beauty in all things is the equivalent of understanding that everything has Buddha nature. I will just say that I think westerners who use this as excuse for their relativism do not understand the eastern idea. Not that I claim to know what it means, just that I don’t think it is meant to be a defense for relativism. I would be inclined to argue that such a statement is not intended to be taken a conceptual at all, and to make reason out of it is a mistake.
Reason may be the root of my conflict with Žižek’s ideas about art. He seems to think that he can submit the world to the power of his mind. Everything is significant because he can make it so, and what’s more, it would be insulting to his great mind to suggest that he does not see right through the market that I submit shapes his values. Such are the limitations of my own mind and my own rhetorical style. I can only evaluate Žižek’s conclusions and speculate about where I think they come from. I do not find his discussion of cinema particularly interesting. For my own part, I do not believe that the sheer force of my will can make meaning. The time I spend browsing the internet, playing video games, watching television and thinking about sports is time unquestionably wasted on insignificant diversions. The less I do those things the better off I am, not just in the sense that all those things make me dumber, or atrophy my intellect, but that they cloud my awareness, they deaden my sensitivities and make my perceptions less acute.
Let me conclude (or rather draw to a close by blowing the whole thing up instead of concluding) by addressing the quote at the top of the page, from the Symbolist poet and philosopher, Viacheslav Ivanov. I anticipate that the notion of “new forms” can be misleading because it carries a lot of baggage about “formalism,” especially to anyone who has studied Modernist Art History. I think what he is getting at is the difference between what the conceptual idea and experience as idea. In other words, it is a lesser art work of art that seeks to embody a particular concept. It is a lesser artist that would have specific conceptual goals that he would use art instead of philosophy or science to address. It is a lesser spectator or critic that would expect to find concepts in a work; that would judge a work of art based on what he or she can glean from it. To experience a great work of art is to be plunged into states of perception and awareness that are ahead (maybe just ahead, but ahead nonetheless) of the categories one keep around to help make sense of the world. Part of making sense of this experience will be the spectator’s effort to revise those conceptual tools, but something happens to perception first. One does not come away from a masterpiece with new knowledge as such, but with sharper perception, enhanced sensitivity and the like. It is more akin to the professed benefits of psychotropic drugs or a profound religious conversion, than to a lesson learned.
Does this sound mystical? It is actually the most pragmatic thing in the world. At the root of it is the simple principle of constant change. As one grows, he or she gives up past interests and amusements. One stops listening to a particular band or a host of bands, one gives up on an author at a certain point, one finds that he or she cannot eat McDonald’s hamburgers anymore. Why? -- Ostensibly because new experiences have put past experiences into perspective. This part of life, this part of consciousness, is often neglected, because it is difficult to use conceptual language to talk about it. Yet it is just as much a part of our perception as reason, except in individuals where it has been ruthlessly subjected to the supposed superiority of reason.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Is there a place for violence in the cinema?
I have been arguing a bit with a friend about various movies, many of which feature graphic scenes of violence and murder (Among the directors we have touched on are the Coen brothers, P.T. Anderson and David) We have argued plenty, and in my estimation have yet to get anywhere. Then he boiled it down to a succinct, fundamental question: Is there a place for violence in the cinema? Here are some of my thoughts.
The short answer is no. Sex and violence are such easy button pushers that to show them at all is almost always to invite cliché. This is one of the primary reasons that the Frankfurt school and Benjamin in particular thought cinema was inherently pornographic. I would say that it has to do with the indexical reality (a term I first came across reading Bill Nichols book about the documentary) of the cinematic image. It is not inherently pornographic, but the psychological predisposition of most people makes it so. It is difficult to turn away from violent images. Since most directors know this their use of violence is intentionally exploitative. It is mere button pushing and not aesthetic experience. For whatever reason the intellectual inclinations of many thoughtful viewers is precisely to equate violence with substance and weight as if the director would not show us something so horrific unless what he was saying was very important and very deep. This too is exploitation. The Spielbergs, Coens, Aranovskys and P. T. Andersons of the world certainly know that when they make a violent movie it will be taken very seriously by the critical establishment.
When I watched Burn After Reading I was horrified by image of Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) hacking away at the head of Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins) at the end of the film. It is easily one of the worst things I have seen recently. It is the kind of thing one cannot unsee. I would describe it as poison to the imagination. I can recall the image right now when I close my eyes. My question is: What did I learn from this movie that warranted such an image? Tarkovsky, Kiarostami, Ozu, Cassavetes, Akerman – they show me the world inside and out, and he does it without hatchets to the face, without feet sticking out of the wood chipper and without pools of blood creeping across hardwood floors.
That is the short answer, the somewhat shallow answer. The real answer is that I reject the question. I am not interested in defining the limits of cinema, as if there were abstract rules to which all works of art were subject. I am not interested in the rules. If I see a good movie that has violence in it, my interest is in the movie’s goodness, not in its violence. If I see a bad movie with violence, my problem is with its badness. One of the most crucial aspects of movie-making is how the director resolves the problem of indexical reality. Part of art is artifice, but filmmakers of both the kitsch variety and the Salon variety seem to want to dissolve the artifice.
Consider Los Muertos. It is about a man who has been in prison an undetermined/unrevealed amount of time for committing a double murder. The film begins with what turns out to be a dream sequence. The camera dollies through the jungle, lifting, falling and tilting through the trees, branches, grasses and undergrowth. All you hear are birds and bugs chirping and buzzing. The two murder victims are revealed in turn. They are presented not graphically, but abstractly, almost as a matter of narrative course. They lie face down, motionless, a bit of red liquid on their backs, but no severed limbs (though we are led to believe the protagonist has killed them with a machete) and no gore.
The remainder of the film follows a man from his prison release to a home in the jungle where he thinks he will find his daughter. The pace is languid and there is very little talking. I should mention that I watched this movie because I read that the director was influenced by Tarkovsky. Let me say that his pace is quite beyond anything Tarkovsky ever imagined. Most of the film is like the handcart ride in Stalker but with only one person. I am exaggerating just a little to indicate that one gets caught up in the pace of this movie. One forgets the character because one is so immersed in the rhythm.
Half of the film is the protagonists paddling a small boat down a river. At a certain point he drifts past a small goat standing on the shore. He paddles over to the animal, and, as matter-of-factly as you please, proceeds to slit its throat, drain it of its blood and gut it, all of which is shown in graphic detail. Let me impress upon you that this is utterly real. Real goat, really killed, really butchered by the main character. It is astonishing.
I want to say a couple things about this. First, this image does not haunt me. It was surprising, but t did not upset me like Malkovich did. Of course I am still thinking about it, but I am thinking about what it means. Film is probably inherently pornographic, but some images stick with you because they are evocative and pregnant, while other stick with you more like shit that you can’t get off your shoe. Malkovich with the hatchet in Burn After Reading is the shit on my shoe.
Anyway, the important thing to understand about the meaning of slaughter of the goat is that it is created narratively. Granted the slaughter of the goat is a dense image, in itself. It is real death and as such it explodes the artifice of the form, and the whole suspension of disbelief thing because here is an actor playing a character in a made up scenario, but he really just killed a living creature. But this movie is not The Slaughter of a Goat. It has a narrative trajectory, and that image is contextualized within that narrative to have a different meaning than it would have if it were a simple piece of raw footage. On a very basic level, this is how cinema functions as a narrative art. The slaughter of the goat means one thing. Put a different image before it, and it means something else. Put another image after it and it means a third thing, and so forth. The narrative is the meaning, not the shocking image. I am not talking about story-telling, or plot or Aristotelian dramatic structure. Narrative is like laying bricks, and these bricks are like levels or modes of perception.
The short answer is no. Sex and violence are such easy button pushers that to show them at all is almost always to invite cliché. This is one of the primary reasons that the Frankfurt school and Benjamin in particular thought cinema was inherently pornographic. I would say that it has to do with the indexical reality (a term I first came across reading Bill Nichols book about the documentary) of the cinematic image. It is not inherently pornographic, but the psychological predisposition of most people makes it so. It is difficult to turn away from violent images. Since most directors know this their use of violence is intentionally exploitative. It is mere button pushing and not aesthetic experience. For whatever reason the intellectual inclinations of many thoughtful viewers is precisely to equate violence with substance and weight as if the director would not show us something so horrific unless what he was saying was very important and very deep. This too is exploitation. The Spielbergs, Coens, Aranovskys and P. T. Andersons of the world certainly know that when they make a violent movie it will be taken very seriously by the critical establishment.
When I watched Burn After Reading I was horrified by image of Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) hacking away at the head of Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins) at the end of the film. It is easily one of the worst things I have seen recently. It is the kind of thing one cannot unsee. I would describe it as poison to the imagination. I can recall the image right now when I close my eyes. My question is: What did I learn from this movie that warranted such an image? Tarkovsky, Kiarostami, Ozu, Cassavetes, Akerman – they show me the world inside and out, and he does it without hatchets to the face, without feet sticking out of the wood chipper and without pools of blood creeping across hardwood floors.
That is the short answer, the somewhat shallow answer. The real answer is that I reject the question. I am not interested in defining the limits of cinema, as if there were abstract rules to which all works of art were subject. I am not interested in the rules. If I see a good movie that has violence in it, my interest is in the movie’s goodness, not in its violence. If I see a bad movie with violence, my problem is with its badness. One of the most crucial aspects of movie-making is how the director resolves the problem of indexical reality. Part of art is artifice, but filmmakers of both the kitsch variety and the Salon variety seem to want to dissolve the artifice.
Consider Los Muertos. It is about a man who has been in prison an undetermined/unrevealed amount of time for committing a double murder. The film begins with what turns out to be a dream sequence. The camera dollies through the jungle, lifting, falling and tilting through the trees, branches, grasses and undergrowth. All you hear are birds and bugs chirping and buzzing. The two murder victims are revealed in turn. They are presented not graphically, but abstractly, almost as a matter of narrative course. They lie face down, motionless, a bit of red liquid on their backs, but no severed limbs (though we are led to believe the protagonist has killed them with a machete) and no gore.
The remainder of the film follows a man from his prison release to a home in the jungle where he thinks he will find his daughter. The pace is languid and there is very little talking. I should mention that I watched this movie because I read that the director was influenced by Tarkovsky. Let me say that his pace is quite beyond anything Tarkovsky ever imagined. Most of the film is like the handcart ride in Stalker but with only one person. I am exaggerating just a little to indicate that one gets caught up in the pace of this movie. One forgets the character because one is so immersed in the rhythm.
Half of the film is the protagonists paddling a small boat down a river. At a certain point he drifts past a small goat standing on the shore. He paddles over to the animal, and, as matter-of-factly as you please, proceeds to slit its throat, drain it of its blood and gut it, all of which is shown in graphic detail. Let me impress upon you that this is utterly real. Real goat, really killed, really butchered by the main character. It is astonishing.
I want to say a couple things about this. First, this image does not haunt me. It was surprising, but t did not upset me like Malkovich did. Of course I am still thinking about it, but I am thinking about what it means. Film is probably inherently pornographic, but some images stick with you because they are evocative and pregnant, while other stick with you more like shit that you can’t get off your shoe. Malkovich with the hatchet in Burn After Reading is the shit on my shoe.
Anyway, the important thing to understand about the meaning of slaughter of the goat is that it is created narratively. Granted the slaughter of the goat is a dense image, in itself. It is real death and as such it explodes the artifice of the form, and the whole suspension of disbelief thing because here is an actor playing a character in a made up scenario, but he really just killed a living creature. But this movie is not The Slaughter of a Goat. It has a narrative trajectory, and that image is contextualized within that narrative to have a different meaning than it would have if it were a simple piece of raw footage. On a very basic level, this is how cinema functions as a narrative art. The slaughter of the goat means one thing. Put a different image before it, and it means something else. Put another image after it and it means a third thing, and so forth. The narrative is the meaning, not the shocking image. I am not talking about story-telling, or plot or Aristotelian dramatic structure. Narrative is like laying bricks, and these bricks are like levels or modes of perception.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Žižek!
It is strange to write a short commentary about such a film, because my comments do not really address filmmaking or the ideas of the filmmaker; only what I think about Žižek’s ideas after watching him talk for an hour and a half.
Here are a few observations and points of contention:
The film begins with Žižek explaining that nothing is real and insisting that he means that in a “literal” sense. My short response to that is: Bollocks. (Sometimes a British idiom seems more appropriate than the American version.) I do not understand this kind of thinking. Ontology never made sense to me. One may suppose that the world was created by a Judeo-Christian God who gave humanity a set of rules to live by or one may suppose that all of existence is the dream of a mad man. One may speculate a thousand other hypotheses. I cannot see that it matters. It is quite likely that this is my problem and that I should not judge Žižek for espousing ontology that seems futile to me. Yet I cannot shake the feeling that it is a serpent eating its tail. Is it a useful idea? Does it help one to reach tenable conclusions about the world around him or her? Does it help one to negotiate society, to move closer to what Plato called communion with the One and what today is called more commonly living authentically? For me it has the opposite effect, and I find in Žižek! numerous assertions and arguments that are contradictory, and instead of arriving at a Hegelian synthesis, they end up being self-defeating.
For several months I have been arguing with a friend and colleague about the fundamental mistake of post-modernism, at least when it address artworks. The contemporary critical theorist is always more interested in his own ideas than in the ideas of the work of art or the artist(s) that created it. It is a pet theory of mine that this began when Freud took his observation that a patient reveals more in the latent content of his or her dreams than in the manifest content, and applied it to art works, as if the point of art was to diagnose the artist. Roland Barthes develops this into a full-fledged theoretical approach to art and the rest of cultural production in a book that I believe has secretly had the most influence on critical thought in the past fifty years, Mythologies. The most important thing Barthes does in his work is dissolve the boundary between art and the rest of cultural production. A discipline was born in that book, and despite the fact that Žižek calls himself a Lacanian and Marxist, his discipline is Cultural Theory and it is Roland Barthes who brought it into being.
It is of course unfair to characterize Žižek in this one-dimensional way. He does make a distinction between his serious books and light cultural theory. From memory I believe his serious books are The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, The Fragile Absolute and The Plague of Fantasies. Whether I got the list right is not as important as the idea that he acknowledges a difference between his meaningful work (which I will talk about momentarily) and the cultural theory stuff which frankly seems silly to me. There is a point in the documentary at which he says the best American film ever made is King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. Bollocks. This is either arch irony or over thinking. He is either trying to be clever, trying to shake up people like me who cling to their sacred cows like Tarkovsky, Bresson and Ozu, or he is making the typical culture theory move that makes what he can do with the movie more important than what the movie really is.
I know that he calls into question the notion of “what it really is.” I think I throw off one or two of my more classically trained philosopher colleagues when I use the possessive to describe the ideas that are in a film. For instance, in another documentary Žižek says he is not interested in any of the subjects that Tarkovsky addresses in his narratives, but in the pre-narrative density of Tarkovsky’s films. I don’t want to say “bollocks” again I just want to point out that all this really means is that Žižek is more interested in Žižek’s ideas than he is in Tarkovsky’s. This is a fine approach to take to King Vidor’s films, because he is not very interesting. One has to be very clever to watch Fountainhead and find anything profound in it. Tarkovsky requires different skills. His meanings require sensitivity rather than cleverness. They require attention to detail instead of free association. And when I talk about Tarkovsky’s ideas I mean the ideas that are in the film. I use the possessive as shorthand so that I don’t have to redefine where truth in art comes from every time I write about the meaning of a film. Tarkovsky often described himself as a medium (he had a fairly Platonic view of how art comes into being). Ultimately I find it prohibitive to get into such ontological discussion when I merely want to address meaning in a film. In Umberto Eco’s great Interpretation and Overinterpretation he uses the following analogy: When you receive a letter from a friend you are supposed to read it to find out what he or she is trying to communicate to you. You could no doubt spin endless meanings from it, even deconstruct it into meaninglessness, but your friend ostensibly wrote it to communicate something to you and you owe it to him or her to suss that out.
The other half of this problem is that Žižek and the like do not approach philosophers the same way. Žižek is not interested in Marx and Lacan for what he can do with them; he is interested in what they mean. Some of his critics will say that he changes the meaning of Marx by superimposing Lacan upon him, but Žižek insists, quite accurately in my view (though I cannot claim to be an expert in either Marx or Lacan), that his Lacanian Marxism is not a game but a clear understanding of Marx. He is not making the connection out of whole cloth, in other words, he is elucidating it. Žižek is most interesting when he diverges with his contemporaries, and his failure to treat artists as thinkers places him among the bulk of contemporary critical theory. Perhaps this treatment of the artist as a second-class thinker goes back even further. Maybe it is a fundamental problem for philosophy. Off the top of my head it seems that only the American Pragmatists (I have in mind Emerson, James, Santayana, Dewey and Pirsig, but probably not Rorty and certainly neither Quine nor Fish) and possibly Nietzsche have had the balls to admit that anyone who does not study and write philosophy for a living would be capable of addressing the mysteries of existence. According to the philosopher only another trained philosopher, and never an artists, is capable of complex philosophical expression.
The philosopher tends to treat art as a cultural expression rather than an individual expression. Žižek has a wonderful bit about what he can learn about various cultures from their toilets. He looks at toilets in, if I recall correctly, France, Germany and… is it England or the US? In any event he sees in these toilets Catholicism and Protestantism, Romanticism and Pragmatism and it is all there. It is a tour de force of Barthesian mythology. But it ceases to be true once you take it out of the abstract. I mean that the toilet, Keats, Mozart and Delacroix are all romantic, but the toilet is only interesting for what it reveals about Romanticism while the artists are interesting for all the unique ways they reach beyond their category.
Writing about art requires a degree of humility that is unusual in a philosopher, especially a continental philosopher. Žižek readily admits to being narcissistic. There is a brief section in which he discusses his fear that if he stops talking he will disappear. However, the documentary stops well short of showing him trying to resolve this problem. Clearly it is a tension that persists. In one of the many prefaces to the latest edition of Enjoy Your Symptom! that I have just begun reading, Žižek says that the best thing to do right would be to stop talking and writing; to go somewhere and (he quotes Lenin) “just learn, learn, learn.”
Finally I would mention the question that proved the most interesting for me, that of freedom. I should say that I reject Žižek’s linking of freedom to pleasure as he seems to mean pleasure in the Freudian sense. Still the discussion of freedom as an impossibility (though I would be less pessimistic and say that it is very nearly impossible) in our culture penetrates far deeper than anything Chomsky has written (and Chomsky is very good!) His discussion of pleasure as a wholly manufactured emotion is equally important, and he ties them together. In fact, this is the proof of that Lacanian psychoanalysis logically extends Marxian theory into the emotional sphere. It is a shattering analysis, and if I have dwelled too much on the points at which I disagree with Žižek it is only because his passion is infectious. It makes one want to argue.
Here are a few observations and points of contention:
The film begins with Žižek explaining that nothing is real and insisting that he means that in a “literal” sense. My short response to that is: Bollocks. (Sometimes a British idiom seems more appropriate than the American version.) I do not understand this kind of thinking. Ontology never made sense to me. One may suppose that the world was created by a Judeo-Christian God who gave humanity a set of rules to live by or one may suppose that all of existence is the dream of a mad man. One may speculate a thousand other hypotheses. I cannot see that it matters. It is quite likely that this is my problem and that I should not judge Žižek for espousing ontology that seems futile to me. Yet I cannot shake the feeling that it is a serpent eating its tail. Is it a useful idea? Does it help one to reach tenable conclusions about the world around him or her? Does it help one to negotiate society, to move closer to what Plato called communion with the One and what today is called more commonly living authentically? For me it has the opposite effect, and I find in Žižek! numerous assertions and arguments that are contradictory, and instead of arriving at a Hegelian synthesis, they end up being self-defeating.
For several months I have been arguing with a friend and colleague about the fundamental mistake of post-modernism, at least when it address artworks. The contemporary critical theorist is always more interested in his own ideas than in the ideas of the work of art or the artist(s) that created it. It is a pet theory of mine that this began when Freud took his observation that a patient reveals more in the latent content of his or her dreams than in the manifest content, and applied it to art works, as if the point of art was to diagnose the artist. Roland Barthes develops this into a full-fledged theoretical approach to art and the rest of cultural production in a book that I believe has secretly had the most influence on critical thought in the past fifty years, Mythologies. The most important thing Barthes does in his work is dissolve the boundary between art and the rest of cultural production. A discipline was born in that book, and despite the fact that Žižek calls himself a Lacanian and Marxist, his discipline is Cultural Theory and it is Roland Barthes who brought it into being.
It is of course unfair to characterize Žižek in this one-dimensional way. He does make a distinction between his serious books and light cultural theory. From memory I believe his serious books are The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, The Fragile Absolute and The Plague of Fantasies. Whether I got the list right is not as important as the idea that he acknowledges a difference between his meaningful work (which I will talk about momentarily) and the cultural theory stuff which frankly seems silly to me. There is a point in the documentary at which he says the best American film ever made is King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. Bollocks. This is either arch irony or over thinking. He is either trying to be clever, trying to shake up people like me who cling to their sacred cows like Tarkovsky, Bresson and Ozu, or he is making the typical culture theory move that makes what he can do with the movie more important than what the movie really is.
I know that he calls into question the notion of “what it really is.” I think I throw off one or two of my more classically trained philosopher colleagues when I use the possessive to describe the ideas that are in a film. For instance, in another documentary Žižek says he is not interested in any of the subjects that Tarkovsky addresses in his narratives, but in the pre-narrative density of Tarkovsky’s films. I don’t want to say “bollocks” again I just want to point out that all this really means is that Žižek is more interested in Žižek’s ideas than he is in Tarkovsky’s. This is a fine approach to take to King Vidor’s films, because he is not very interesting. One has to be very clever to watch Fountainhead and find anything profound in it. Tarkovsky requires different skills. His meanings require sensitivity rather than cleverness. They require attention to detail instead of free association. And when I talk about Tarkovsky’s ideas I mean the ideas that are in the film. I use the possessive as shorthand so that I don’t have to redefine where truth in art comes from every time I write about the meaning of a film. Tarkovsky often described himself as a medium (he had a fairly Platonic view of how art comes into being). Ultimately I find it prohibitive to get into such ontological discussion when I merely want to address meaning in a film. In Umberto Eco’s great Interpretation and Overinterpretation he uses the following analogy: When you receive a letter from a friend you are supposed to read it to find out what he or she is trying to communicate to you. You could no doubt spin endless meanings from it, even deconstruct it into meaninglessness, but your friend ostensibly wrote it to communicate something to you and you owe it to him or her to suss that out.
The other half of this problem is that Žižek and the like do not approach philosophers the same way. Žižek is not interested in Marx and Lacan for what he can do with them; he is interested in what they mean. Some of his critics will say that he changes the meaning of Marx by superimposing Lacan upon him, but Žižek insists, quite accurately in my view (though I cannot claim to be an expert in either Marx or Lacan), that his Lacanian Marxism is not a game but a clear understanding of Marx. He is not making the connection out of whole cloth, in other words, he is elucidating it. Žižek is most interesting when he diverges with his contemporaries, and his failure to treat artists as thinkers places him among the bulk of contemporary critical theory. Perhaps this treatment of the artist as a second-class thinker goes back even further. Maybe it is a fundamental problem for philosophy. Off the top of my head it seems that only the American Pragmatists (I have in mind Emerson, James, Santayana, Dewey and Pirsig, but probably not Rorty and certainly neither Quine nor Fish) and possibly Nietzsche have had the balls to admit that anyone who does not study and write philosophy for a living would be capable of addressing the mysteries of existence. According to the philosopher only another trained philosopher, and never an artists, is capable of complex philosophical expression.
The philosopher tends to treat art as a cultural expression rather than an individual expression. Žižek has a wonderful bit about what he can learn about various cultures from their toilets. He looks at toilets in, if I recall correctly, France, Germany and… is it England or the US? In any event he sees in these toilets Catholicism and Protestantism, Romanticism and Pragmatism and it is all there. It is a tour de force of Barthesian mythology. But it ceases to be true once you take it out of the abstract. I mean that the toilet, Keats, Mozart and Delacroix are all romantic, but the toilet is only interesting for what it reveals about Romanticism while the artists are interesting for all the unique ways they reach beyond their category.
Writing about art requires a degree of humility that is unusual in a philosopher, especially a continental philosopher. Žižek readily admits to being narcissistic. There is a brief section in which he discusses his fear that if he stops talking he will disappear. However, the documentary stops well short of showing him trying to resolve this problem. Clearly it is a tension that persists. In one of the many prefaces to the latest edition of Enjoy Your Symptom! that I have just begun reading, Žižek says that the best thing to do right would be to stop talking and writing; to go somewhere and (he quotes Lenin) “just learn, learn, learn.”
Finally I would mention the question that proved the most interesting for me, that of freedom. I should say that I reject Žižek’s linking of freedom to pleasure as he seems to mean pleasure in the Freudian sense. Still the discussion of freedom as an impossibility (though I would be less pessimistic and say that it is very nearly impossible) in our culture penetrates far deeper than anything Chomsky has written (and Chomsky is very good!) His discussion of pleasure as a wholly manufactured emotion is equally important, and he ties them together. In fact, this is the proof of that Lacanian psychoanalysis logically extends Marxian theory into the emotional sphere. It is a shattering analysis, and if I have dwelled too much on the points at which I disagree with Žižek it is only because his passion is infectious. It makes one want to argue.
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