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Zizek! Reviews

51 Metascore
1 hr 11 mins
Documentary
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Quirky documentary profiling the unconventional and cantankerous Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek on a globetrotting lecture-circuit tour. Directed by Astra Taylor.

Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek has been called an "academic rock star" and fans have been known to literally embrace him, hailing him as their intellectual hero. What is it, exactly, that is so appealing about Zizek's blend of thought, which mixes Marxist theory with the methods of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to expose the ways in which capitalism works upon the public psyche? It isn't exactly the easiest to digest. And don't ask Zizek, who doesn't seem to have the slightest idea, appears to resent all the attention he receives and probably doesn't want to talk to you anyway. Filmmaker Astra Taylor follows this likably cantankerous, unlikely superstar on his globetrotting, largely sold-out lecture circuit, with stops in Buenos Aires, New York City, Boston and Zizek's native Slovenia. In between lectures, he speaks directly to Taylor about the world, love, ideology, psychoanalysis, capitalism, Stalinism and all those fans, whom he often calls idiots and creeps: What exactly do they want? Zizek speaks with a manic vigor — he admits that he's afraid that if he ever stops talking, he'll be exposed as a great big nothing — and the intensity of his speech is only increased by the glare from his deep-set, sky-blue eyes and the beads of sweat that collect on his forehead as he talks extemporaneously about how — now more than ever — we need Lacan to help us understand everything from terrorism to nonalcoholic beer. But far more interesting than this gloss on his thought is Zizek's deeply conflicted attitudes towards his own public persona. He's achieved a remarkable reputation outside academia by writing extensively about pop culture (movies are a favorite subject) and admits to flirting with a somewhat clownish public persona, while remaining painfully aware that his standing among professors and philosophers, who tend to speak only to one another, is compromised by his nonacademic popularity. This split has left him with deeply ambivalent feelings about both sides: He's clearly contemptuous of the fans who flock to his readings and suspect they've come to him for some great answer or formula that he can't deliver, while taking academia — particularly deconstructionists — to task for failing to fully recognize the full importance of his four really good books (he's written 50 so far) and criticizing his strict adherence to Lacan while failing to recognize their own dogmatism. Clearly this isn't a documentary for the uninitiated, but aided by Molly Schwartz's evocative animation, Taylor presents Zizek as a larger-than-life figure who manages to engage you even when you're not entirely sure what he's going on about.

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Slavoj Žižek

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Boringly postmodern and an ideological fantasy: Slavoj Žižek reviews Matrix Resurrections

12 January 2022, 12:47pm

Slavoj Žižek

The first thing that strikes the eye in the multitude of reviews of Matrix Resurrections is how easily the movie’s plot (especially its ending) has been interpreted as a metaphor for our socio-economic situation. Leftist pessimists read it as an insight into how, to put it bluntly, there is no hope for humanity: we cannot survive outside the Matrix (the network of corporate capital that controls us), freedom is impossible. Then there are social-democratic pragmatic ‘realists’ who see in the movie a vision of some kind of progressive alliance between humans and machines, sixty years after the destructive Machine Wars. In these wars ‘scarcity among the Machines led to a civil war that saw a faction of Machines and programs defect and join human society.’ The humans also change tack: Io (a human city in reality outside the Matrix led by General Niobe) is a much better place to live than Zion, their previous city in reality (there are clear hints of destructive revolutionary fanaticism in Zion in previous Matrix movies).

The scarcity among the Machines refers not just to the devastating effects of the war but above all to the lack of energy produced by humans for the Matrix. Remember the basic premise of the Matrix series: what we experience as the reality we live in is an artificial virtual reality generated by the ‘Matrix’, the mega-computer directly attached to all our minds; it is in place so that we can be effectively reduced to a passive state of living batteries providing the Matrix with energy. However, the unique impact of the film thus resides not so much in this premise, its central thesis, but in its central image of the millions of human beings leading a claustrophobic life in water-filled cocoons, kept alive in order to generate the energy for the Matrix. So when (some of the) people ‘awaken’ from their immersion into the Matrix-controlled virtual reality, this awakening is not an opening into the wide space of the external reality, but a horrible realisation of this enclosure, where each of us is effectively just a foetus-like organism, immersed in pre-natal fluid. This utter passivity is the foreclosed fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active, self-positing subjects – it is the ultimate perverse fantasy , the notion that we are essentially instruments of the Other’s (the Matrix’s) jouissance , sucked out of our life-substance like batteries.

Therein resides the true libidinal enigma of this dispositif : why does the Matrix need human energy? That this is to solve the energy problem is, of course, meaningless: the Matrix could have easily found another, more reliable source of energy which would have not demanded the extremely complex arrangement of a virtual reality coordinated for millions of human units. The only consistent answer is: the Matrix feeds on the human’s jouissance. S o we are here back at the fundamental Lacanian thesis that the big Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs the constant influx of jouissance . This is how we should turn around the state of things presented by the film: what the film renders as the scene of our awakening into our true situation is effectively its exact opposite, the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being.

But how does the Matrix react to the fact that humans produce less energy? Here a new figure called Analyst enters : he discovers that if the Matrix manipulates fears and desires of humans, they produce more energy that can be sucked by the machines:

The Analyst is the new Architect, the manager of this new version of the Matrix. But where the Architect sought to control human minds through cold, hard math and facts, the Analyst likes to take a more personal approach, manipulating feelings to create fictions that keep the blue-pills in line. (He observes that humans will ‘believe the craziest shit,’ which really isn’t very far off from the truth if you’ve ever spent any time on Facebook.) The Analyst says that his approach has made humans produce more energy to feed the Machines than ever before, all while keeping them from wanting to escape the simulation.

Capital is not an objective fact like a mountain or a machine which will remain even if all people around it disappear, it exists only as a virtual Other of a society

With a little bit of irony we could say that the Analyst corrects the falling profit rate of using humans as energy batteries: he realizes that just stealing enjoyment from humans is not productive enough, we (the Matrix) should also manipulate the experience of humans that serve as batteries so that they will experience more enjoyment. Victims themselves have to enjoy: the more humans enjoy, the more surplus-enjoyment can be drawn from them – Lacan’s parallel between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment is again confirmed here. The problem is just that, although the new regulator of the Matrix is called ‘Analyst” (with an obvious reference to the psychoanalyst), he doesn’t act as a Freudian analyst but as a rather primitive utilitarian, following the maxim: avoid pain and fear and get pleasure. There is no pleasure-in-pain, no ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, no death drive, in contrast to the first film in which Smith, the agent of the Matrix, gives a different, much more Freudian explanation:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the programme. Entire crops of the humans serving as batteries were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was re-designed to this: the peak of your civilization.

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One could effectively claim that Smith (let us not forget: not a human being as others but a virtual embodiment of the Matrix – the big Other – itself) is the stand-in for the figure of the analyst within the universe of the film much more than the Analyst. This regression of the last film is confirmed by another archaic feature, the affirmation of the productive force of sexual relationship:

Analyst explains that after Neo and Trinity died, he resurrected them to study them, and found they overpowered the system when they worked together, but if they are kept close to each other without making contact, the other humans within the Matrix would produce more energy for the machines.

In many media Matrix Resurrections was hailed as less ‘binary’, as more open towards the ‘rainbow’ of transgender experiences – but, as we can see, the old Hollywood formula of the production of a couple-matrix is here again: ‘Neo himself has no interest in anything except rekindling his relationship with Trinity.’ This regression is grounded in what is false already in the first movie. The best known scene in the first Matrix occurs when Morpheus offers to Neo the choice between a Blue Pill and Red Pill. But this choice is a strange non-choice: when we live immersed in virtual reality we don’t take any pill, so the only choice is ‘Take the red pill or do nothing.’ The blue pill is a placebo, it changes nothing. Plus we don’t have only virtual reality regulated by the Matrix (accessible if we choose the blue pill) and external ‘real reality’ (the devastated real world full of ruins accessible if we choose the red pill); we have the Machine itself which constructs and regulates our experience (this, the flow of digital formulas and not the ruins, is what Morpheus refers to when he says Neo ‘Welcome to the desert of the real.’) This Machine is (in the film’s universe) an object present in ‘real reality’: gigantic computers constructed by humans which held us prisoners and regulate our experiences.

The choice between the blue pill and the red pill in the first Matrix movie is false, but this does not mean that all reality is just in our brain: we interact in a real world, but through our fantasies imposed on us by the symbolic universe in which we live. The symbolic universe is ‘transcendental’, the idea that there is an agent controlling it as an object is a paranoiac dream – the symbolic universe is no object in the world, it provides the very frame of how we approach objects. Today, however, we are getting closer and closer to manufactured machines which promise to provide a virtual universe into which we can enter (or which controls us against our will). China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences pursues what it calls the ‘intelligentization’ of warfare: ‘War has started to shift from the pursuit of destroying bodies to paralyzing and controlling the opponent.’ We can be sure that the West is doing the same – the only difference will be (maybe) that if it will go public about it, there will be a humanitarian twist (‘we are not killing humans, we are just for a brief time diverting their minds…’).

One of the names of ‘taking the blue pill’ is Zuckerberg’s project of the ‘Metaverse’: we take the blue pill by registering in the metaverse in which the limitations, tensions and frustrations of ordinary reality are magically left behind – but we have to pay a big price for it: ‘Mark Zuckerberg “has unilateral control over 3 billion people” due to his unassailable position at the top of Facebook, the whistleblower Frances Haugen told to the British MPs as she called for urgent external regulation to rein in the tech company’s management and reduce the harm being done to society.’ The big achievement of modernity, the public space, is thus disappearing. Days after the Haugen revelations, Zuckerberg announced that his company will change its name from Facebook to Meta, and outlined his vision of Metaverse in a speech that is a true neo-feudal manifesto:

Zuckerberg wants the metaverse to ultimately encompass the rest of our reality – connecting bits of real space here to real space there, while totally subsuming what we think of as the real world. In the virtual and augmented future Facebook has planned for us, it’s not that Zuckerberg’s simulations will rise to the level of reality, it’s that our behaviors and interactions will become so standardized and mechanical that it won’t even matter. Instead of making human facial expressions, our avatars can make iconic thumbs-up gestures. Instead of sharing air and space together, we can collaborate on a digital document. We learn to downgrade our experience of being together with another human being to seeing their projection overlaid into the room like an augmented reality Pokemon figure.

Metaverse will act as a virtual space beyond (meta) our fractured and hurtful reality, a virtual space in which we will smoothly interact through our avatars, with elements of augmented reality (reality overlaid with digital signs). It will thus be nothing less than metaphysics actualised: a metaphysical space fully subsuming reality which we will be allowed to enter in fragments only insofar as it will be overlaid by digital guidelines manipulating our perception and intervention. And the catch is that we will get a commons which is privately owned, with a private feudal lord overseeing and regulating our interaction.

This brings us back to the beginning of the movie where Neo visits a therapist (Analyst) in recovery from a suicide attempt. The source of his suffering is that he has no way of verifying the reality of his confused thoughts, so he is afraid of losing his mind. In the course of the film we learn that ‘the therapist is the least trustworthy source that Neo could have turned to. The therapist is not just part of a fantasy that might be a reality, and vice versa… He is just one more layer of fantasy-as-reality, and reality-as-fantasy, a mess of whims, and desires, and dreams that exists in two states at once.’ Is, then, Neo’s suspicion, which drove him to suicide, not just confirmed?

The film’s end brings hope by merely giving the opposite spin to this sad insight: yes, our world is composed just of layers of ‘fantasy-as-reality, and reality-as-fantasy, a mess of whims, and desires’, there is no Archimedean point which eludes the deceitful layers of fake realities. However, this very fact opens up a new space of freedom – the freedom to intervene and rewrite fictions that dominate us. Since our world is composed just of layers of ‘fantasy-as-reality, and reality-as-fantasy, a mess of whims, and desires’, this means that the Matrix is also a mess: the paranoiac version is wrong, there is no hidden agent (Architect or Analyst) who controls it all and secretly pulls the strings. The lesson is that ‘we should learn to fully embrace the power of the stories that we spin for ourselves, whether they be video games or complex narratives about our own pasts… – we might rewrite everything . We can make of fear and desire as we wish; we can alter and shape the people who we love, and we dream of.’ The movie thus ends with a rather boring version of the postmodern notion that there is no ultimate ‘real reality’, just an interplay of the multitude of digital fictions:

Neo and Trinity have given up on the search of epistemic foundations. They do not kill the therapist who has kept them in the bondage of The Matrix. Instead, they thank him. After all, through his work, they have discovered the great power of re-description, the freedom that comes when we stop our search for truth, whatever that nebulous concept might mean, and strive forever for new ways of understanding ourselves. And then, arm in arm, they take off, flying through a world that is theirs to make of.

The movie’s premise that machines need humans is thus correct – they need us not for our intelligence and conscious planning but at a more elementary level of libidinal economy. The idea that machines could reproduce without humans is similar to the dream of the market economy reproducing itself without humans. Some analysts recently proposed the idea that, with the explosive growth of robotisation of production and of artificial intelligence which will more and more play the managerial role of organising production, capitalism will gradually morph into a self-reproducing monster, a network of digital and production machines with less and less need for humans. Property and stocks will remain, but competition on stock exchanges will be done automatically, just to optimize profit and productivity. So for whom or what will things be produced? Will humans not remain as consumers?

Ideally, we can even imagine machines just feeding each other, producing machined parts, energy. Perversely attractive as it is, this prospect is an ideological fantasy: capital is not an objective fact like a mountain or a machine which will remain even if all people around it disappear, it exists only as a virtual Other of a society, a reified form of a social relationship, in the same way that values of stocks are the outcome of the interaction of thousands of individuals but appear to each of them as something objectively given.

Every reader has for sure noticed that, in my description of the movie, I heavily rely on a multitude of reviews which I extensively quote. The reason is now clear: in spite of its occasional brilliance, the film is ultimately not worth seeing – which is why I also wrote this review without seeing it. The editorial that appeared in Pravda on January 28, 1936, brutally dismissed Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as ‘Muddle Instead of Music’. Although Matrix Resurrections is very intelligently made and full of admirable effects, it ultimately remains a muddle instead of a movie. Resurrections is the fourth film in the Matrix series, so let’s just hope that Lana’s next movie will be what the Fifth Symphony was for Shostakovich, an American artist’s creative response to justified criticism.

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Slavoj Žižek Names His 5 Favorite Films

in Film , Philosophy | May 25th, 2017 Leave a Comment

Anyone who has read the prose of philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Žižek , a potent mixture of the academic and the psychedelic, has to wonder what material has influenced his way of thinking. Those who have seen his film-analyzing documentaries The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology might come to suspect that he’s watched even more than he’s read, and the interview clip above gives us a sense of which movies have done the most to shape his internal universe. Asked to name his five favorite films, he improvises the following list:

Melancholia (Lars von Trier), “because it’s the end of the world, and I’m a pessimist. I think it’s good if the world ends”
The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949), “ultracapitalist propaganda, but it’s so ridiculous that I cannot but love it”
A Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), “standard but I like it.” It’s free to watch online.
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), because “ Vertigo is still too romantic” and “after Psycho , everything goes down”
To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942), “madness, you cannot do a better comedy”

You can watch a part of Žižek’s breakdown of Psycho , which he describes as “the perfect film for me,” in the Pervert’s Guide to Cinema clip just above . He views the house of Norman Bates, the titular psycho, as a reproduction of “the three levels of human subjectivity. The ground floor is ego: Norman behaves there as a normal son, whatever remains of his normal ego taking over. Up there it’s the superego — maternal superego, because the dead mother is basically a figure of superego. Down in the cellar, it’s the id, the reservoir of these illicit drives.” Ultimately, “it’s as if he is transposing her in his own mind as a psychic agency from superego to id.” But given that Žižek’s interpretive powers extend to the hermenutics of toilets and well beyond, he could probably see just about anything as a Freudian nightmare.

You can watch another of Žižek’s five favorite films, Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera , which we featured here on Open Culture a few years ago, just above. Whether or not you can tune into the right intellectual wavelength to enjoy Žižek’s own work, the man can certainly put together a stimulating viewing list.

For more of his recommendations — and his distinctive justifications for those recommendations — have a look at his picks from the Criterion Collection and his explanation of the greatness of Andrei Tarkovsky . If university superstardom one day stops working out for him, he may well have a bright future as a revival-theater programmer.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Philosophy › Slavoj Žižek and Film Theory

Slavoj Žižek and Film Theory

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on August 4, 2018 • ( 0 )

We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we really are. ( Slavoj Zizek , in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema [dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2005])

Would you allow this guy to take your daughter to a movie? Of course not. [Laughs] (Ibid.)

LOST HIGHWAY

One of the early sequences of Sophie Fiennes’s film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) opens with Slovenian cultural analyst and philosopher Slavoj Zizek dressed in a yellow shirt, sitting a little uncomfortably at the helm of a motorized dingy, which, he declares, is floating in the middle of Bodega Bay, the location for Alfred Hitchcock ‘s film The Birds (1963). The sequence then cuts back and forth between scenes from The Birds and Zizek ‘s animated explanations of how the Oedipal tensions between the central character Mitch (Rod Taylor) and his mother underpin an explanation of why the birds inexplicably attack; they are, he suggests, “raw incestuous energy” A little later, with the outboard engine now running, relaxing into his role, Zizek turns to the camera and declares: “You know what I am thinking now? I am thinking like Melanie, I am thinking I want to fuck Mitch” This sequence of Fiennes’s film illustrates the almost perfect conflation of “Zizek the person” with “Zizek the scholar” and now “Zizek the film star” The characteristic frenzy of his tics and spasms, the wild gesticulations of his hands and tugging at his beard, the ever-increasing circles of sweat widening under his arms, his strong Central European accent in English, and above all his outrageous and unselfconscious bad taste in jokes and examples, scatological as well as sexual, all translate directly into print and now on to screen. On screen we have a sense of the unrestrained energy of Zizek ‘s published ideas, which rush ahead of themselves and frenetically dissipate into a web of disseminated connections, of what Robert Boynton calls a “trademark synthesis of philosophical verve and rhetorical playfulness” (1998: 42-3). Zizek the film star also plays to the marketing on the back covers of his books – The Elvis of Cultural Theory and “An academic rock star”1 – and to Zizek the global academic, who is feted on the international academic conference circuit, has run for the office of President of Slovenia, written copy for the catalogue of American outfitters Abercrombie and Fitch, collaborated with experimental punk rock band Laibach and has featured in no fewer than five films.

Slavoj Zizek

However, among many film theorists Zizek ‘s status as film critic (and film star) is that of a clown: the Charlie Chaplin of film theory! This is not only the result of his distinctive personality but also the product of his prolific writing, which employs the thrust of “cut and paste”; articles, essays, chapters, bad jokes and film examples get re-used time and time again, forcing his reader to tease out a philosophical argument from among the asides and at times dubious vignettes.2 Indeed, towards the end of another documentary, Zizek! (dir. Astra Taylor , 2005), in which he also stars, Zizek himself wonders in a psychoanalytic vein whether the attempts to turn him into a figure of fun may represent in fact a deep resistance to taking him seriously.

Most film critics have been scathing of what they see as Zizek ‘s utilitarian plundering in a “machinic” fashion of, in the main, Hollywood feature films to advance and illustrate aspects of his Marxist and psychoanalytical theoretical project. His references to film, it is consistently argued, are merely incidental illustrations, which show little concern for or interest in the fundamental basics of film study.3 We might cite the only one of Zizek’s monographs dedicated to an individual film as such, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime (2000b), on David Lynch ‘s Lost Highway (1997), as a case in point since it fails to address significant aspects of the film text in favour of an extended exploration of the Lacanian position on fantasy. About one-third into Lost Highway the protagonist, Fred ( Bill Pullman ), who has been sentenced to death for the murder of his unfaithful wife, Renee ( Patricia Arquette ), inexplicably transforms into another person, Pete ( Balthazar Getty ), in his prison cell. It is a transformation from the dull, drab existence of the impotent husband with a mousy non-communicative wife to the exciting and dangerous life of the young virile Pete, who is seduced by the sexually aggressive femme fatale blond reincarnation of Renee named Alice and uncannily played by the same actress. The problem of the film is: how are we to understand this inexplicable (“unreal”) transformation? We can understand it, suggests Zizek , not through any exploration of a formal distinctiveness but by understanding the film as an illustration of the Lacanian notion of “traversing the fantasy”, the re-avowal of subjective responsibility that comes at the end of the psychoanalytic cure. Traversing the fantasy means the recognition that in the long term, Zizek argues, in order to avoid a clash of fantasies we have to acknowledge that fantasy functions merely to screen the abyss or inconsistency in the Other, and we must cease positing that the Other has stolen the “lost” object of our desire. In “traversing” or “going through” the fantasy all we have to do is experience how there is nothing “behind” it, and how fantasy masks precisely this “nothing”. In Lost Highway , Lynch achieves resolution of the contradiction by staging two solutions one after the other on the same level: Renee is destroyed, killed, punished; Alice eludes the control of the male protagonist and disappears triumphantly along the lost highway

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THE PARALLAX VIEW

One of the most sustained criticisms of Zizek ‘s (lack of) film criticism has come from veteran cognitivist and post-theorist David Bordwell (2005), who attacks Zizek with the charge of fundamentally lacking responsibility to scholarly process and serious engagement with the nuts and bolts of film studies. This attack is prompted in no small part by Zizek ‘s scathing, and far wittier, dismantling of post-theory in the opening pages of his only complete “film book”, The Fright of Real Tears (2001), before he offers, through analysis of the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski , the alternative of a later Lacanian reading of the film text’s organization of enjoyment. Of course, such oppositions, deconstructionists versus cognitivists or Lacanians versus post-theorists, are dialectical, and Zizek ‘s understanding and exploitation of dialectics underpins his entire project. However, Zizek rereads the traditional dialectical process of Hegel in a more radical fashion. In Zizek s version, the dialectic does not produce a resolution or a synthesized viewpoint; rather, it points out that contradiction is an internal condition of every identity. An idea about something is always disrupted by a discrepancy, but that discrepancy is necessary for the idea to exist in the first place. For Zizek, the truth is always found not in the compromise or middle way but in the contradiction rather than the smoothing out of differences.

The importance of the revised dialectic is paralleled by the Zizekian notion of “the parallax view”, which he defines as follows:

The standard definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective”, due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stances, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated”, so that an “epistemological” shift in the subjects point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. Or – to put it in Lacanese – the subjects gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its “blind spot”, that which is “in the object more than the object itself”, the point from which the object returns the gaze. (2006a: 17)

Zizek is interested in the “parallax gap” separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, a gap linked by an “impossible short circuit” of levels that can never meet. At the root of this category is the gap or split (beance) within human subjectivity identified by Jacques Lacan , where the split or barred subject (symbolized by the matheme $) denotes the impossibility of a fully present selfconsciousness. How can one read a book like The Parallax View (2006a) except with a parallax view – by reading, that is, what seems to be there but is never there? The early responses to Zizek’s book, and several bloggers’ websites, have lamented the fact there is not one mention of Alan J. Pakula ‘s film The Parallax View (1974), which is obviously the source of Zizek’s title. How might we explain the perversity of Zizek naming a monumental book that he describes as his “magnum opus” after a film and then not discussing it? And there is also the odd fact that, given that it is an optical phenomenon under discussion, the film references in The Parallax View are minimal. But it would seem that the parallax in Zizek’s sense is present in the film, and the book, in the gap between explanations that account for the immediacy of an event and explanations that account for the totality offerees behind them; or, perhaps, better, in the way that investigating a crime or matter shifts imperceptibly into becoming part of the very crime or matter. Warren Beatty s character in Pakulas film moves from being a reporter to being part of the situation, to being involved, hence suggesting the presence of the observer within the frame. Similarly, for Zizek the shift is from cognitive responses to the moving image (what the screen places in our heads) to an interest in cinema as the screen onto which we project our desires.

A similar “parallax view” marks Zizek ‘s ambivalent relationship to cultural studies. It might seem that Zizek’s interest in mass-cultural objects such as Titanic (dir. James Cameron , 1997), or the novels of Stephen King, are merely part of a recent “turn” to the study of popular culture. By locating his theorizing within popular culture Zizek would seem to share this approach and the assertion that, in Raymond Williams ‘s (1958) words, culture is “ordinary”. Indeed, the charge of Bordwell and others is that with Zizek we have an emphasis of context above text, and that the film text for Zizek is significant not for its own sake, its aesthetic greatness, but for what it might reveal to us about the cultural context from whence it came. However, cultural studies is the object of some of Zizeks most scathing criticism. Zizek approaches the popular from the opposite (parallax) angle: rather than treating high works of art as if they were popular, Zizek treats the popular work of art as if it were “high”; the popular texts in some way transcend their context and testify to some truth that the context obscures. Take his response to the liberal claim that the film Fight Club (dir. David Fincher , 1999) is pro-violence and proto-fascist. Zizek counters that the message of the film is not about “liberating violence” and that it is the reality of the appearance that “violence 311 LAURENCE SIMMONS hurts” that is its true message after all. The fights are “part of a potentially redemptive disciplinary drive … an indication that fighting brings the participants close to the excess-of-life over and above the simple run of life” (2004: 174).

THE LADY VANISHES

For Lacan there are two steps in the psychoanalytic process: interpreting symptoms and traversing fantasy. When we are confronted with the patient s symptoms, we must first interpret them, and penetrate through them to the fundamental fantasy, as the kernel of enjoyment, which is blocking the further movement of interpretation. Then we must accomplish the crucial step of going through the fantasy, of obtaining distance from it, of experiencing how the fantasy-formation is just masking, filling out a certain void, lack, an empty place in the Other. But even so there were patients who had traversed the fantasy and obtained distance from the fantasy-framework of their reality but whose key symptom still persisted. Lacan tried to answer this challenge with the concept of the sinthome . The word sinthome in French is a fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury way of writing the modern word symptome (symptom). By suggesting a word that is derived from an archaic form of writing L acan also shifts the inflection of the term to the letter rather than the signifier (as message to be deciphered). The letter as the site where meaning becomes undone is, for Lacan , a primary inscription of subjectivity. The pronunciation sinthome in French also produces the associations of saint homme (holy man) and synth-homme (synthetic [artificial] man). When it occurs, a symptom causes discomfort and displeasure; nevertheless, we embrace its interpretation with pleasure. But why, in spite of its interpretation, does the symptom not dissolve itself? Why does it persist? The answer, of course, is enjoyment. The symptom is not only a ciphered message; it is a way for the subject to organize his or her enjoyment. Treatment is not strictly speaking directed towards the symptom. The symptom is what the subject must cling to since it is what uniquely characterizes him or her. Zizek ‘s film example is from Ridley Scott ‘s Alien (1979): the figure of the alien, while it is external to the crew on board the spaceship, is also what, by virtue of its threat to them, confers unity on the spaceship crew. Indeed, the ambiguous relationship we have to our sinthomes – one in which we enjoy our suffering and suffer our enjoyments – is like the relationship of the character Ripley ( Sigourney Weaver ) to the alien, which she fears but progressively identifies with (we need only think of the famous scene at the end of the film where she “undresses” for the alien).

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Let us take Hitchcock ‘s The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Zizeks influential interpretations of Hitchcock s films in general, as further illustrations of this ambiguity. The existence of an old lady is understood, or made to pass, as a hallucination of the central character Iris. The old woman, Miss Froy ( May Whitty ), is a mother-figure to – but also a counterpart/mirror of – the young woman, Iris ( Margaret Lockwood ), who is the “ideal woman”, the ideal partner in the sexual relation. Iris is returning to London to be married to a boring father figure whom she does not love. His name, Lord Charles Fotheringale, tells us everything. Iris in fact is the woman who, according to Lacanian theory, does not exist. The attraction of the theme is that through the disappearance of her double (mOther), Miss Froy, she is “made to exist”. Zizek suggests that the woman who disappears is always “the woman with whom the sexual relationship would be possible, the elusive shadow of a Woman who would not just be another woman” (1991: 92). At the end Iris falls for Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), who throughout the film has played the role of naughty child (without a father). Hitchcock’s films are full of “the woman who knows too much” (intellectually superior but sexually unattractive, bespectacled but able see into what remains hidden from others: Ingrid Bergman as Alicia in Spellbound [1945]; Ruth Roman as Anne in Strangers on a Train [1951]; Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge in Vertigo [1958]). How can we interpret this motif? These figures are not symbols but, on the other hand, they are not insignificant details of individual films; they persist across a number of Hitchcock films. Zizek ‘s answer is that they are sinthornes . They designate the limit of interpretation, they resist interpretation; they fix or tie together a certain core of enjoyment.

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Zizek pursues the difference between the early structuralist Lacan of the 1950s and the late Lacan of the fundamental recalcitrance of the Real of the 1960s on. The Lacanian concept of the Real – the most under-represented component of the triad of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary4 – provides another way to approach that which cannot be spoken (drawn into the Symbolic), because it eludes the ability of the ontological subject to signify it. The Real is the hidden/traumatic underside of our existence or sense of reality, whose disturbing effects are felt in strange and unexpected places. For Zizek, material contained within the pre-ontological, like abject material, can and does emerge into the ontological sphere and once there, however troubling or traumatic, it is made meaning of. Zizek s examples are the Mother Superior who emerges at the close of Vertigo’, who “functions as a kind of negative deus ex rnachina, a sudden intrusion in no way properly grounded in the narrative logic, the prevents the happy ending” (2002: 208); and the swamp that Norman (Anthony Perkins) sinks Marions (Janet Leigh) car into in Psycho “is another in the series of entrance points to the preontological netherworld” (ibid). Nevertheless, despite its irruption into the film text, the Real resists every attempt to render it meaningful and those elements that inhabit it continually elude signification. As such, it is a version of the mythic creature called by Lacan the lamella. On the one hand, the lamella is a thin plate-like strata, like those of a shell or the layers found in geological formations; on the other, it can refer to flat amoeba-like organisms that reproduce asexually Zizek notes, “As Lacan puts it, the lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances that seem to enfold a central void – its status is purely phantasmatic” (2006b: 62). In its materializations the lamella marks an Otherness beyond intersubjectivity. Lacan ‘s description, Zizek declares, reminds us of the creatures in horror movies: vampires, zombies, the undead, the monsters of science fiction. Indeed, it is the alien from Scott’s film that may conjure up the lamella in its purest form. Uncannily, Lacan writes in Seminar 11 , a decade before the film appeared, “But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep” (Lacan 1979:197); “it is as if Lacan somehow saw the film before it was even made” suggests Zizek (2006b: 63). We think immediately of the scene in the womb-like cave of the unknown planet when the alien leaps from its throbbing egg-like globe and sticks to Executive Officer Kane’s ( John Hurt ) face. This amoeba-like flattened creature that envelops the face stands for irrepressible life beyond all the finite forms that are merely its representatives. In later scenes of the film the alien is able to assume a multitude of different shapes; it is immortal and indestructible. The Real of the lamella is an entity of pure surface without density, an infinitely plastic object that can change its form. It is indivisible, indestructible and immortal, like the living dead, which, after every attempt at annihilation, simply reconstitute themselves and continue on.

With regard to science fiction film, Zizek talks about the Lacanian notion of the Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity, a mechanism that directly materializes the impenetrability of our unacknowledged fantasies. In the film Solaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky , 1972), for example, it relates to “the deadlocks of sexual relationship” (Zizek 1999: 222). A space agency psychologist is sent to an abandoned spaceship above a newly discovered planet. Solaris is a planet with a fluid surface that imitates recognizable forms. Scientists in the film hypothesize that Solaris is a gigantic brain that somehow reads our minds. Soon after his arrival Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), the psychologist, finds his dead wife at his side in bed. In fact his wife had committed suicide years ago on Earth after Kelvin deserted her. The dead wife pops up everywhere, sticks around and finally Kevin grasps that she is a materialization of his own innermost traumatic fantasies. He discovers that she does not have human chemical composition. The dead wife, because she has no material identity of her own, thus acquires the status of the Real. However, the wife then becomes aware of the tragedy of her status, that she only exists in the Other s dream and has no innermost substance, and her only option is to commit suicide a second time by swallowing a chemical that will prevent her recomposition. The planet Solaris here, Zizek argues, is the Lacanian Thing ( das Ding ), a sort of obscene jelly, the traumatic Real where Symbolic distance collapses: “it provides – or rather imposes on us – the answer before we even raise the question, directly materialising our innermost fantasies which support our desire” (1999: 223).

WILD AT HEART

Zizek can be credited with a revival of interest in specifically Lacanian psychoanalytical film criticism, but, as we have seen, his approach also represents a decisive shift from Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the gaze of mastery (1975) and Jean-Pierre Oudart ‘s notion of suture and cinematic identification (1977-8), to focus on questions of fantasy and spectator enjoyment. Thus concepts of the gaze and identification in Zizek ‘s film commentary are linked to issues of desire and the fantasmatic support of reality as a defence against the Real.5 A case in point is Zizek s repeated analysis of the sexual assault scene from Lynch ‘s Wild at Heart (1990).6 In this scene Bobby Peru ( Willem Dafoe ) invades the motel room of Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) and after repeated verbal and physical harassment coerces her into saying to him, “Fuck me!” As soon as the exhausted Dern utters the barely audible words that would signal her consent to the sexual act, Dafoe withdraws, puts on a pleasant face and politely retorts: “No thanks, I don t have time today, I’ve got to go; but on another occasion I would do it gladly.” Our uneasiness with this scene, suggests Zizek , lies in the fact that Dafoe’s “unexpected rejection is his ultimate triumph and, in a way, humiliates her more than direct rape” but also that “just prior to her ‘Fuck me!’, the camera focuses on [Derris] right hand, which she slowly spreads out – the sign of her acquiescence, the proof that he has stirred her fantasy” (2006a: 69).

A keystone to Zizek s edifice is the Lacanian notion oi jouissance , which, characteristically, he simply translates as “enjoyment”.7 For Zizek, jouissance is both a feature of individual subjectivity, an explanation of our individual obsessions and investments, and a phenomenon that best describes the political dynamics of collective violence; for example, it is the envy of the jouissance of the Other (as neighbour) that accounts for racism and extreme forms of nationalism. What gets on our nerves about the Other is his or her enjoyment (smelly food, noisy conversation in another language), strange customs (chador) or attitudes to work (he or she is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or a bludger living off our benefits) (see Zizek 1993: 200-205). One of Zizek ‘s central concerns is the status of enjoyment within ideological discourse, where, in our so-called permissive society, there is an obscene command to enjoy that marks the return of the Freudian superego. For example, there is a paradox between the greater possibilities of sexual pleasure in more open societies such as ours and the pursuit of such pleasure, which turns into a duty. The superego stands between these two: the command to enjoy and the duty to enjoy. The law is a renunciation of enjoyment that manifests itself by telling you what you cannot do; in contrast the superego orders you to enjoy what you can do – permitted enjoyment becomes an obligation to enjoy. But of course, Zizek notes, when enjoyment becomes compulsory it is no longer enjoyment.

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A PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA

We might question whether what is at stake in Zizekian film criticism is a pervert s guide to cinema or a cinema guide for perverts. There is the fact or possibility of Zizek ‘s cinematic perversion, which, as we have seen, is a mainstay of many responses from within film studies to his texts, but what if it were possible for this perversion to be more complex than might initially appear, and, secondly, for it to serve a critical and heretical function? Here Zizek s own thoughts on the relationship between cinema and perversion prove illuminating. Zizeks use of Lacan ‘s definition of perversion hinges on the structural aspect of perversion: what is perverse in film viewing is the subjects identification with the gaze of an other, a moment that represents a shift in subjective position within the interplay of gazes articulated by the cinematic text. Utilizing an example from Michael Mann ‘s Manhunter (1986), Zizek comments that the moment Will Graham ( William Petersen ), the FBI profiler, recognizes that the victims’ home movies, which he is watching, are the same films that provided the sadistic killer with vital information, his “obsessive gaze, surveying every detail of the scenery, coincides with the gaze of the murderer” (1991: 108). This identification, Zizek continues, “is extremely unpleasant and obscene … [because] such a coincidence of gazes defines the position of the pervert” (ibid). As Will examines home movies, seeking as a profiler whatever they have in common, his gaze shifts from their content to their status as home movies, thereby coinciding with the gaze of the murderer; in so doing he identifies the form of the movies he is watching and with them. It is their very status as home movies that is the key to unravelling the mystery of Manhunter .

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if our social reality itself is sustained by a symbolic fiction or fantasy, then the ultimate achievement of film art is not to recreate reality within a narrative fiction, to seduce us into (mis)taking a fiction for reality, but, on the contrary, to make us discern the fictional aspect of reality itself, to experience reality itself as a fiction. (Ibid.: 77)

See, for example, the back cover of his recent Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2008).
For example, it is with characteristic perversity that Zizek cites The Fountainhead (dir. King Vidor 1949) as the best American movie of all time.
Stephen Heath expresses concern that Zizek “has, in fact, little to say about ‘institution,’ apparatus,’ and so on, all the concerns of the immediately preceding attempts to think cinema and psychoanalysis” (“Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories”, in Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, J. Bergstrom [ed.], 25-56 [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999], 44). Vicky Lebeau argues that “it is the specificity of cinema that seems to go missing in Zizek’s account” (Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows [London: Wallflower, 2001], 59). These points have been made and summarized by Todd McGowan, “Introduction: Enjoying the Cinema” International Journal of Zizek Studies 1(3) (2007) http://www.zizekstudies.org/index.php/ ijzs/article/view/57/119.
Zizek explains these three levels as follows: This triad can be nicely illustrated by the game of chess. The rules one has to follow in order to play it are its symbolic dimension: from the purely formal symbolic standpoint, “knight” is defined only by the moves this figure can make. This level is clearly different from the imaginary one, namely the way in which different pieces are shaped and characterized by their names (king, queen, knight), and it is easy to envision a game with the same rules, but with a different imaginary, in which this figure would be called “messenger” or “runner” or whatever. Finally, real is the entire complex set of contingent circumstances that affect the course of the game. (How to ReadLacan [London: Granta, 2006], 8-9)
Todd McGowan maintains that Zizek “elaborates an entirely new concept of suture” (“Introduction: Enjoying the Cinema”, 4).
Analysis of this scene occurs in Zizek’s The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 186-7, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle, WA: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000), 11, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzystof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-theory (London: BFI, 2001), 131, and The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 69-70, as well as The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (dir. S. Fiennes, 2006).
Dylan Evans notes: “The French word jouissance means basically enjoyment’, but it has a sexual connotation (i.e. ‘orgasm’) lacking in the English word enjoyment’, and is therefore left untranslated in most English editions of Lacan” (An Introductory Dictionary ofLacanian Psychoanalysis [London & New York: Routledge, 1996], 91).
Jouis-sens relates to the demand of the superego to enjoy, a demand that the subject will never be able to satisfy. According to Lacan, jouis-sens, the jouissance of meaning, is located at the intersection of the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

Source: Colman, F. (2014). Film, theory and philosophy . London: Routledge.

The Courage of Hopelessness by Slavoj Žižek review – how the big hairy Marxist would change the world

The leftwing intellectual with rock-star popularity argues that Trump vs Clinton, and Brexit vs Remain are mere sideshows

L ife is, despite all the advances of medical science, still way too short to spend any time reading theoretical gibberish concocted by superannuated Marxists – theory that purports to still further stretch this ideological corpse like Procrustes on the rack of contemporary events. Fortunate Guardian-reading bourgeois liberals that we are, however, God – or the Self-Moving Absolute – has sent us Slavoj Žižek instead. Žižek demands to be taken seriously: he produces thousands of wildly and densely written pages that bear all the hallmarks of a scholar who has ingurgitated the western canon with the sole intent of firing it at the very bastions of power.

A political gadfly, who ran for office in his native Slovenia, Žižek has at least leant on the barricades – if not, so far as we know, while actually mixing a Molotov cocktail – and believes in the idea of himself as a revolutionary activist sufficiently to subtitle his latest book Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously , while quoting in its pages Gandhi ’s famous maxim: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”

But The Courage of Hopelessness is also a pratfall staged at the end of Barack Obama ’s underwhelming multicultural road show; for, inasmuch as he demands to be taken seriously, Žižek does so with his trousers down, and in the guise of a farceur. Yes! Life’s too short to read superannuated Marxists, especially those whose theoretical toolkit deploys the left-handed dialectical spanner and the right-handed Freudian screwdriver (with some “Lacanian” modifications) at one and the same time. At least it would be, if it weren’t for the jokes – and the comic timing.

It’s surely as much for his Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema , and his wide and eclectic cultural references – in this new book he ranges from obscure Chinese science-fiction novels to Schubert ’s Winterreise and back again – that Žižek has become the darling of what’s left of the left in British academia; because what he actually has to say, once the hurly-burly of theorising (and witticising) is done, is both remarkably simple and delightfully impractical – if, that is, you follow Papa Karl, and take seriously the idea that the whole point of philosophy is to change the world. Indeed, reading The Courage of Hopelessness , I was all too often reminded of the old joke about economics: “That’s all very well in practice – but will it work in theory?”

Following his 2013 work Less Than Nothing , a 1,000-page-plus summation of the Žižekian worldview in the guise of a Hegelian excursus, The Courage of Hopelessness sets out to apply his contorted perspective in real time: this is indeed philosophising à pied : and Žižek certainly makes like he really wants us to abandon the last vestiges of our discredited value system, and march with him (and Bernie Sanders) towards some yet-to-be-constructed barricades. Surveying the left’s annus horribilis of 2016, Žižek recalls the aftermath of the October revolution, and Lenin’s gathering conviction – once it became clear a Europe-wide revolution wouldn’t take place – that, while the idea of building socialism in one country was “nonsense”, nevertheless: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilisation in a different way from that of the west European countries?”

Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

That silly old sausage Stalin ’s problem was that he hoped for too much – hence the Terror, the Gulag, and all the rest of the murderousness; while, according to Žižek, the lesson of 20th-century communism “is that we have to gather the strength to fully assume the hopelessness”. I confess, I’m not sure I understand what Žižek means by this in relation to practical contemporary politics – but my suspicion is that his message is directed to a very small audience indeed: namely the sort of self-hating liberal humanists who buy his books and attend his lectures. It’s these folk, presumably, who can be expected to form the vanguard of the knowledge-working proletariat that will enact the Žižekian revolution – it’s these peons who find themselves trapped in the tunnel of history, and who must be adjured by their master to accept that “the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice”, while “the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of another train approaching”.

In this minatory respect, at least, Žižek has strong affinities with a contemporary philosopher to whom he’s otherwise diametrically opposed: John Gray. In a review of Less Than Nothing for the New York Times Book Review, Gray lambasted Žižek for his obfuscation and his sophomoric appeals to violence. According to Gray, Žižek “insists that revolutionary violence has intrinsic value as a symbolic expression of rebellion – a position that has no parallel in either Marx or Lenin”. Gray sees Žižek’s intellectual forefather as being, rather, Georges Sorel, who “argued that communism was a utopian myth – but a myth that had value in inspiring a morally regenerative revolt against the corruption of bourgeois society”.

It’s this revolt Žižek seems always to be urging on his – undoubtedly for the most part corrupt and bourgeois – readership: it’s us who feel hopeless in the face of what Žižek identifies as the four principal “faces” of the immanent contradiction in global capitalism: fundamentalist jihad; geopolitical tensions; the “new radical emancipatory movements” in Greece and Spain; and the refugee crisis. But our sense of hopelessness is purely a function of our own false consciousness: once we accept the specious nature of the great “choices” we were faced with in 2016 – Trump vs Clinton; Remain vs Brexit; Grexit vs the EU bailout – we will accept Stalin’s position (in respect of “deviations” from Bolshevism), that “they’re both worse”.

It’s because of our “misperception of radical politics” that we get caught on the horns of dilemmas – burkini or bared breasts? Assad or Isis? – that are really pseudo-conflicts. Presumably, once we’ve finished The Courage of Hopelessness this misperception will be dispelled, and we will join in fully radicalising the as yet “gentle” Syriza, Bernie Sanders’s disappointed followers and, who knows, possibly the rump of the Labour Party remaining under Jeremy Corbyn, although Žižek has little to say about Britain as a distinct political culture.

Which surprises me. I said above that it was probably his humour (he can be a very witty writer indeed) that had gained Žižek such a following in the English-speaking world, this, together with his obvious erudition, and application of various Marxian and Freudian heuristics, which, let’s face it, are always good for a laugh. But in truth, for all his huffing and puffing here and elsewhere about the US, Žižek’s ideas have far less traction there than they do in Britain, while his media presence is marginal at best. It’s the same in continental Europe – an International Journal of Žižek Studies exists, but its luminaries seem to be principally British. Indeed, it’s only in British academia, so far as I’m aware, that scholars still range themselves beneath standards bearing the names of the generation of French theorists whose ideas form the obfuscatory seedbed of Žižek’s lively imagination; thus we have Althusserians, Derrideans, Deleuzians and, gulp, Lacanians – while to the French themselves such affiliations are at best ridiculous.

For my own part, while having a vague sense of him looming on the cultural margins, it wasn’t until Žižek came to speak at the university where I teach that I fully appreciated what an intellectual rock star he is: there was no lecture room big enough to contain those who wanted to hear him, so the event was held in the sports hall, with the seats arranged horizontally along the 10 lanes of the 100-metre running track. They were all filled – that’s a kilometre of Lacanians! All of whom remained rapt while Žižek spoke – a word stream at once turbulent and turgid, from which I managed to extract the following key points: 1. I’m a big hairy Marxist-Leninist; 2. I believe in the emancipatory force of revolutionary violence; and 3. I really do.

At the time (five years ago) I was a little flummoxed as to what the audience was getting out of this, beyond the slightly dirty thrill of being in the presence of a real, live communist revolutionary. My colleagues are just as hamstrung by the privatisation of higher education as the rest of British academia, busily cutting their ragged cloth to fit the neoliberal paradigm, and looking for the most part about as revolutionary as the Net-a-Porter shoppers we undoubtedly are.

Still, now as much as then, we must be set to rights: and once the neurofibrillary tangle of Žižek’s dialectics is cleared away there is a viable critique of the left-liberal response to our current situation discernible in The Courage of Hopelessness . Žižek paints a portrait of pampered, self-indulgent bleeding-hearts, who dither over what is to be done while indulging in febrile clicktivism and agonising over the provision of gender-neutral toilets. His discussion of LGBT+ and the spell cast by identitarian politics on the left generally amounts to this coarse – yet amusing – summation: we’re fiddling with ourselves while Rome burns. And Žižek cares about Rome, cares about the western logos in all its self-moving absolutism: he’s dismissive of postcolonial perspectives, and semi-develops arguments about the emergent “creative commons” and the internet of things that suggest he sees in the web-world itself the emergence of new – hence revolutionary – means of production.

In his essay, Gray is roundly dismissive of Žižek’s philosophic credentials – both as a Marxist, and as an epistemologist. But I do discern the lineaments of a viable theory connecting what we may know to what we can do in Žižek’s thought. The only problem is that the “revolution” remains a completely void category: a mere repository for many millions of individual actes gratuits . Gray further suggests that the entire Žižek phenomenon is a function of a late capitalism that thrives on novelty – in theory as much as consumer goods; and that therefore Žižek’s high profile is entirely down to the system he himself excoriates. Gray also implicitly tasks Žižek with a sort of criminal irresponsibility: inciting his jaded readers and listeners to a senseless violence they’ve only ever witnessed in HBO miniseries. For Gray, Žižek – because of, not despite, all his frenzied attempts to distance himself from us Guardian-reading bourgeois liberals – represents just another iteration of the post-Enlightenment delusion of “scientifically” political “progress”. Yet what these two representative thinkers of our era really share is a deep and abiding pessimism – some might say nihilism.

I said above that Žižek can be a very witty writer indeed – but, as a good Freudian (or Lacanian), he knows well there really are no such things as jokes. I’m meant to be in conversation with Žižek at a suitably large venue in London soon , and the nice man who is organising the gig, when he learned I would be reviewing The Courage of Hopelessness, emailed me rather timorously hoping I wouldn’t be too negative about the book.

Many of Žižek’s jokes aren’t really his own, but rather those told by the victims of various nasty regimes – in The Courage of Hopelessness he retells one that was current during the Soviet era, concerning a Russian peasant under the Mongol occupation, who’s forced to hold his overlord’s testicles aloft while the warrior rapes the peasant’s wife, but seditiously allows them to drag in the dust. The peasant then accords this a great victory – while his violated wife sobs. The joke is meant to illustrate the impotence of Soviet dissidents, who merely “dusted Stalin’s balls” – and by extension the impotence of late night TV satirists who are merely dusting Trump’s balls; and by further extension impotent Guardian-reading liberals such as ourselves. Well, I wonder if Žižek is humorous enough to come and debate the revolutionary potency of hopelessness with me – or if he’s only seriously interested in having his testicles held aloft by the hands that otherwise feed him.

To order The Courage of Hopelessness for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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Laurence Fishburne’s solo show somehow needs more Laurence Fishburne

In ‘like they do in the movies,’ the actor shares anecdotes of his upbringing and rise to stardom but mixes it with too many side characters.

NEW YORK — In his new solo show “Like They Do in the Movies,” acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne promises a vulnerable evening of storytelling about his family, his purpose and the people who influenced his career. In actuality, he spends it blurring anecdotes about those creative origins with vignettes starring memorable strangers. Some stories are true, some are fiction, some dwell in the murky middle.

He performs all with the precision you’d expect of such an impeccable talent, but the double act — of pulling us into his autobiographical story and then keeping us at arm’s length — is puzzling. Most of us have already spent a lifetime watching him embody others. “Like They Do” is precious time with just him. Why waste it?

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There is nothing fantastical about the physical presentation. Scenic designer Neil Patel never adorns the blunt, oblong Perelman Performing Arts Center stage with more than a simple desk and a chair or two. Behind Fishburne, an illuminated frame — which chummily mirrors a movie theater screen — floats just above the stage floor. Aside from images of Fishburne’s ancestors, which are sometimes projected, the rigidness of it all does nothing to warm us to his story. The theatrics are reserved solely for the thespian.

Fishburne powers through the dense volume of speech like the charmster he is. He opens the show by detailing his childhood years, toggling between his mentally unstable force of a mother, Hattie, and boisterous Casanova of father, Big Fish. Their eccentricities, and perhaps a pinch of Hattie’s projected fantasies of being a performer, drive Fishburne’s involvement in the dramatic arts.

Fishburne remains spirited and tactile; we see him touching, stroking, lifting objects that aren’t actually present. He is generous with his affability, always asking the audience how we’re doing and softening any TED Talk didacticism with “Reading Rainbow” coziness. We are his friends, his family, even his “baby” for these two hours and 20 minutes. Fishburne keeps up this para-familiarity even when dipping into harder truths, most notably that he was sexually abused by Hattie as a child. Never one to keep audiences perturbed for too long, he repeatedly stopgaps staggering revelations like this with a pacifier: “More on that later.”

“More” is truly the operative word. Because these are not short spews of text Fishburne has penned for us; they are run on sentences and legato soliloquies. Mercifully, director Leonard Foglia (Fishburne’s longtime collaborator) keeps everything moving at a brisk pace, but the challenge is evident. Case in point, at the performance I attended Fishburne called out to a stage manager in the shadows for his next line more than once.

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He becomes different races and ages, adopting novel dialects and cadences like the great monologists before him: Whoopi Goldberg, John Leguizamo, Anna Deavere Smith, all of whom Fishburne thank in the show’s program. During a scene involving one of those side characters, he becomes Joseph, a man who withstands unthinkable hardship while trying to escape New Orleans for Baton Rouge during Hurricane Katrina. In real life, Fishburne was a French Quarter resident in 2005, and has fundraised for post-hurricane relief. In another scene, Fishburne becomes Marcus, an American expat in Australia who proudly owns a brothel, traffics in pleasure and marries a beautiful sex worker. In real life, one of Fishburne’s daughters, Montana, worked as a sex worker and adopted the name Chippy D for her adult films. These are lush, thoughtful portrayals, but talent is no longer something he has to prove. And presumably he has some connection to these tales, but Fishburne never makes it clear.

As the play reaches its conclusion, the real Laurence Fishburne returns to us, asking permission to delve back into the story of his parents (as if we haven’t been telepathically begging him to). As he breaks down Hattie’s mental disorder, he descends into a deep squat, and then even lower, sitting cross-legged on the stage floor. He brings us closer to eye level, no longer a Hollywood star or theater titan, but a son enraptured by memories of his complicated, impossible, formidable mother.

That initial pledge of nonstop vulnerability is not completely fulfilled, but Fishburne has poured out a bit of his heart and channeled the stories of others, exactly like he’s always done in the movies.

Like They Do in the Movies , through March 31 at Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York. Two hours and 20 minutes, with an intermission. pacnyc.org .

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, we have to go deeper: the 10th anniversary of inception.

“She became obsessed with the idea that our world wasn’t real, that she had to wake up to get back to reality.”

We’ve all felt a bit of displacement in 2020, the sense that the world around us isn’t real, that we’re in a dream from which we need to wake up. The timing of a newly-printed 70MM run of Christopher Nolan ’s “ Inception ” at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago is due to the film’s tenth anniversary and as a prelude to the release of the acclaimed director’s “Tenet,” but the film carries a different energy in our dreamlike state of Summer 2020. Everything does, really. However, watching “Inception” a decade after its release, one is struck by how remarkably timeless the film feels. It could easily come out today and make just as much money, maybe even more, which is not something that can often be said ten years after the release of a blockbuster, especially one as effects heavy as this one. What is it about “Inception” that makes it feel so current?

First, a confession: I turned down a chance to see the new print. I couldn’t do it. While I’m not going to judge someone who is ready to run back into movie theaters as the pandemic continues to thrive, I’m just not there. After much discussion with family, it actually came down to a simple argument. While my logical brain knows the chance that anything could happen is statistically insignificant—Music Box is doing an amazing amount to alleviate risk, including configuring their ventilation so it doesn’t recycle air and only pushes in fresh from outside—my emotional brain would have been too distracted to concentrate, not only during the screening but for days after, when every cough and sniffle would incite panic. I feel like I’ll be ready soon (although only for Music Box's extreme precautions). I wasn’t yet.

And there’s a certain irony in not being physically or emotionally ready for “Inception” specifically. After all, it’s about a man, Leonardo DiCaprio ’s Cobb, who is running from reality, digging deeper into levels beyond normal existence in an effort to flee his own grief, trauma, and blame. Nolan brilliantly spaces out revelations about Cobb’s purpose in his existential heist film. On one level, it’s a story about corporate intrigue, but that’s really a cover for the emotional arc of Cobb, who is dealing with his perceived failure to protect his wife, and belief that his action led to her suicide. Cobb is somehow both fleeing reality and trying to fix it at the same time. Who can’t relate to a sense of immobilized anxiety in 2020, in which we feel like we should be doing something but are stuck in our own forced routine? Or the idea that we have to push through something that feels like a bad dream to come out the other side?

Leaving aside my apprehension about seeing the film in theaters, a repeat viewing of “Inception” at home clarifies how many levels Nolan is working at the same time, much like the layered dream state of the narrative. On one level, it’s a whiz-bang action movie complete with set pieces that feel inspired by 007, especially in the final act. It’s an undeniably complex film narratively, even if that has been overblown—one that always feels like it’s a step ahead in terms of unpacking exactly what is happening—and yet it’s also a remarkably easy film to just let unfold, experiencing it beat by beat instead of trying to piece it altogether, much like, well, a dream. We don’t ask ourselves what dreams mean while we’re experiencing them—we simply ride them out. "Inception" works best when you're not trying to parse exactly what's happening and when, and you allow the emotion and action to carry the experience.

The reason it’s easy to get carried away by “Inception” is simple: it’s one of the most propulsive major blockbusters in history. It never stops. The stunning trick of “Inception” is how Nolan made such a talky film that never drags. It’s constantly explaining what it is and what it’s doing in a way that should grind it to a halt—over-exposition is the death of the action blockbuster—and yet Nolan balances that with such robust, passionate filmmaking. Whether it’s Wally Pfister ’s rich cinematography, one of Hans Zimmer ’s best scores, or Lee Smith's sharp-but-never-hyperactive editing, there’s confidence in every frame.

It’s also a film that, for better or worse, served as a tentpole for our puzzle box culture, one that loves to analyze and interpret art to extremes never imagined before the internet (go Google "Inception Ending Interpretations" and come back in about 12 hours). By the time he made “Inception,” Nolan had already fed this beast with films like “ Memento ” and “ The Prestige ,” but this takes it to another level by also serving as a commentary on puzzle box creation. “Inception” can very easily be read as a commentary on filmmaking. As Cobb and Ariadne ( Ellen Page ) work through the concept of dream construction, it echoes the way Nolan views his art, embedding each layer of the film with different ideas, maybe even working his own way into the viewer’s imagination. The dreamer, or viewer, can't know they're in a dream, much like the illusion of the film experience is best left unbroken.

As Roger said, “The film's hero tests a young architect by challenging her to create a maze, and Nolan tests us with his own dazzling maze. We have to trust him that he can lead us through, because much of the time we're lost and disoriented.” Nolan loves to play with perception, and so a film about how what one sees and feels may be a construction is arguably the most perfect fit of creator and creation in his career to date.

One thing that really struck me watching “Inception” in 2020 was how certain I am that the movie would land with the same impact as it did ten years ago. This is rarely the case. CGI starts to look dated, a celebrity falls from grace, ideas grow stale—none of that happened to “Inception.” Part of it is how much Nolan has stayed current as a filmmaker with follow-ups like “ Interstellar ” and “ Dunkirk .” A blockbuster can often feel dated when it’s the last good thing that anyone involved made, but DiCaprio and Nolan are arguably more popular a decade later. It’s still breathtaking that a movie this complex made over $800 million worldwide and was nominated for Best Picture, but I am certain that both of those things would happen again if it was released in 2020. Well, maybe not in Summer 2020, but you get the idea.

So this is not a typical anniversary. Most of the time, these occasions feel like an opportunity for critical hindsight. They often come with words like “underrated” or, lately, “problematic.” What did people miss then? How does it play differently now? “Inception” defies this analysis, at least on its tenth anniversary. It’s still working its way through our imagination, something that feels even more important than it did when the film came out. Part of its brilliance is how much we’re all still kind of staring at that spinning top, waiting for it to fall.

For more information about the Music Box Theatre's special 70mm presentation of "Inception," click here

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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‘Free Time’ Review: Take This Job and Shove It. (Now What?)

Colin Burgess carries this comedy by Ryan Martin Brown about a 20-something who quits his job and finds that life without work isn’t all that thrilling.

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A man in a pink dress shirt, holding a box with a plant, reaches toward another man in a tight sweater outside of an office building.

By Glenn Kenny

In “Free Time,” a movie written and directed by Ryan Martin Brown, it quickly becomes clear that Drew (Colin Burgess), a New Yorker in his late 20s with a steady job in data analysis, doesn’t like how his work is defining him. So one day, after querying his boss, Luke (James Webb), on his options, Drew just up and quits.

“I think I’m going to go out and live life. Live life to the fullest,” Drew proclaims to his roommate Rajat (Rajat Suresh), who works from home “writing clickbait,” Rajat says, which Drew briefly considers as a new employment option.

Drew spends an afternoon biking, downs four edibles before going solo bar hopping and annoys his roommate’s hostile girlfriend, Kim (the comedian known as Holmes, who’s very funny throughout) with his loud television. He is soon desperately bored and in need of another job.

This may be because Drew, played with dry, middle-class-Everyman goofiness by Burgess, appears to have no interests — a cursory involvement in an unpromising music project notwithstanding — and a barely discernible inner life. He unexpectedly finds himself a guru to the unemployed before the movie winds down.

Burgess carries this succinct (and arguably slight, narratively disjointed) comedy without making you want to strangle his often willfully naïve character. Which is no mean feat, especially in the scene in which he obliviously squanders an erotic opportunity that almost literally drops into his lap.

Free Time Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters.

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Episode #198 ... The truth is in the process. - Zizek pt. 3 (ideology, dialectics)

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The Courage of Hopelessness by Slavoj Žižek review – how the big hairy Marxist would change the world

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