The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012) Movie Script

I'm giving you a choice:
either put on these glasses
or start eating that trashcan.
I already am eating from
the trashcan all the time.
The name of this trashcan
is ideology.
The material force
of ideology
makes me not see
what I'm effectively eating.
It's not only our reality
which enslaves us.
The tragedy of
our predicament
when we are within
ideology, is that
when we think that we
escape it into our dreams -
at that point we
are within ideology.
They Live from 1988
is definitely one of the
forgotten masterpieces
of the Hollywood left.
It tells the story of
John Nada.
'Nada' of course is Spanish
means 'nothing'.
A pure subject, deprived
of all substantial content.
A homeless worker in L.A.
who, drifting around
one day enters into
an abandoned church
and finds there a strange
box full of sunglasses.
And when he put one of them on,
walking along the L.A. streets
he discovers
something weird:
that these glasses function like
critique-of-ideology glasses.
They allow you to see
the real message beneath:
all the propaganda, publicity
glitz, posters and so on.
You see a large publicity
board telling you
have your holiday
of a lifetime
and when you
put the glasses on
you just see just on the white
background a gray inscription.
We live, so we are told,
in a post-ideological society.
We are interpolated,
that is to say
addressed by
social authority
not as subjects who should
do their duty, sacrifice themselves
but subjects of pleasures.
Realise your true potential.
Be yourself.
Lead a satisfying life.
When you put the
glasses on
you see dictatorship
in democracy.
It's the invisible order which
sustains your apparent freedom.
The explanation for the existence
of these strange ideology glasses
is the standard story of the
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Humanity is already under
the control of aliens.
Hey buddy!
You gonna pay for that or what?
Look buddy, I don't want
no hassle today.
Either pay for it
or put it back.
According to our common sense
we think that ideology is
something blurring, confusing
our straight view.
Ideology should be glasses
which distort our view,
and the critique of ideology
should be the opposite -
like, you take off the glasses
so that you can finally see
the way things really are.
This precisely, and here
the pessimism of
the film, of They Live
is well justified, this precisely
is the ultimate illusion:
ideology is not simply
imposed on ourselves.
Ideology is our spontaneous
relationship to our social world -
how we perceive each meaning
and so on and so on.
We in a way
enjoy our ideology.
All right.
To step out of ideology -
it hurts.
It's a painful experience.
You must force yourself to do it.
This is rendered in a
wonderful way with
a further scene in the film
where John Nada tries to force
his best friend, John Armitage
to also put the glasses on.
- I don't want to fight you.
- Come on!
- I don't want to fight you.
- Come on!
- Stop it!
- No!
And it's the weirdest
scene in the film.
The fight takes eight,
nine minutes.
Put on the glasses!
It may appear irrational
because why does this guy
reject so violently to
put the glasses on?
It is as if he is well aware
that spontaneously he lives
in a lie. That the glasses
will make him see the truth,
but that this truth
can be painful.
Can shatter many
of your illusions.
This is a paradox
we have to accept.
Put the glasses on!
Put 'em on!
The extreme violence
of liberation.
You must be forced
to be free.
If you trust simply your
spontaneous sense of
well-being or whatever -
you will never get free.
Freedom hurts.
The basic insight
of psychoanalysis
is to distinguish between
enjoyment and simple pleasures.
They are not the same.
Enjoyment is precisely enjoyment
in disturbed pleasure -
even enjoyment in pain.
And this excessive factor
disturbs the apparently simple
relationship between
duty and pleasures.
This is also a space
where ideology up to
and especially religious
ideology, operates.
This brings me to maybe
my favourite example -
the great classical Hollywood film
The Sound of Music.
We all know it's the story
of a nun who is too alive -
with too much energy -
ultimately sexual energy,
to be constrained
to the role of a nun.
Oh, Reverend Mother.
I'm so sorry. I just couldn't
help myself. The gates
were open and
the hills were beckoning
and before I...
Maria, I haven't summoned
you here for apologies.
Oh, please mother do let me
ask for forgiveness.
One, two three.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
Step together. Now...
So, Mother Superior sends her
to the Von Trapp family
where she takes care
of the children...
- Kurt, we'll have to practice...
- Do allow me, will you?
...and at the same time,
of course, falls in love
with the baron Von Trapp.
And Maria gets too
disturbed by it -
cannot control it,
returns to the convent...
Oh there were times when
we would look at each other...
Oh, Mother,
I could hardly breathe.
Did you let him
see how you felt?
If I did, I didn't know it.
That's what's been
torturing me, I was there
on God's errand.
No wonder that in old
communist Yugoslavia
where I saw this film
for the first time,
exactly this scene,
or more precisely
the song which follows this
strange hedonist, if you want,
advice from the mother superior:
"Go back, seduce the guy,
follow this path,
"do not betray your desire... "
Namely the song which begins
with "Climb every mountain";
the song which is an
almost embarrassing display
and affirmation of desire.
This three minutes were censored.
Climb every mountain
Search high and low
Follow every by-way
Every path you know...
I think the censor was
a very intelligent man.
He knew, as probably
an atheist communist,
where the power of attraction
of catholic religion resides.
'Till you find your dream
If you read intelligent
catholic propagandists
and if you really try to discern,
what deal are they offering you?
It's not to prohibit,
in this case sexual pleasures.
It's a much more cynical
contract, as it were,
between the church as
an institution and the believer
troubled with, in this case,
sexual desires.
It is this hidden obscene
permission that you get -
you are covered by
the divine 'Big Other' -
you can do
what ever you want.
A dream that will need...
This obscene contract
does not belong
to Christianity as such.
It belongs to catholic church
as an institution.
It is the logic of institution
at its purest.
Climb every mountain...
This is again a key
to the functioning of ideology.
Not only the explicit message:
renounce, suffer and so on,
but the true hidden message -
pretend to renounce and
you can get it all.
My psychoanalytic friends are
telling me that typically today
patients who come to the analyst
to resolve their problems
feel guilty, not because of
excessive pleasures,
not because they indulge in
pleasures which go against
their sense of duty or
morality, or what-so-ever.
On the contrary, they feel
guilty for not enjoying enough.
For not being able to enjoy.
Oh my god, one is thirsty
in the desert and
what to drink but Coke?
The perfect commodity.
It was already Marx who
long ago emphasized that
a commodity is never just a simple
object that we buy and consume.
A commodity is an object
full of theological,
even metaphysical niceties.
Its presence always reflects
an invisible transcendence.
And the classical publicity for Coke
quite openly refers to this
absent, invisible quality.
Coke is 'The Real Thing' or
'Coke - That's it'.
What is that 'it', the 'real thing'?
It's not just another positive
property of Coke -
something that can be
described or pinpointed
through chemical analysis -
it's that mysterious
'something more'.
The indescribable excess
which is the Object-Cause
of my Desire.
In our post-modern,
how ever we call them, societies -
we are obliged to enjoy.
Enjoyment becomes a kind or
a weird, perverted duty.
The paradox of Coke is that
you are thirsty -
you drink it but,
as everyone knows,
the more you drink it
the more thirsty you get.
A desire is never simply
the desire for certain thing.
It's always also a desire
for desire itself.
A desire to continue to desire.
Perhaps the ultimate
horror of a desire is
to be fully filled-in, met,
so that I desire no longer.
The ultimate melancholic
experience is the experience
of a loss of desire itself.
It's not that in some return
to a previous era
of natural consummation
where we got rid of this excess
and were only consuming
for actual needs -
like you were thirsty,
you drank water, and so on.
We cannot return to that.
The excess is with us forever.
So, let's have a drink of Coke.
It's getting warm.
It's no longer 'The Real Coke'
and that's the problem.
You know, this passage from
sublime to excremental dimension.
When it's cold, properly served,
it has a certain attraction -
all of a sudden
this can change into shit.
It's the elementary dialectics
of commodities.
We are not talking about
objective, factual properties
of a commodity. We are talking
only here about that elusive surplus.
'Kinder Surprise egg'.
A quite astonishing commodity.
The surprise of the 'Kinder
Surprise egg' is that
this excessive object,
the cause of your desire
is here materialized.
In the guise of an object -
a plastic toy which fills in
the inner void
of the chocolate egg.
The whole delicate balance
is between these two dimensions:
what you bought, the chocolate
egg, and the surplus -
probably made in some Chinese
gulag or whatever -
the surplus that
you get for free.
I don't think that the chocolate
frame is here just to send you
on a deeper voyage towards
the inner treasure -
the, what Plato calls the 'Agalma'
which makes you a worthy person,
which makes a commodity
the desirable commodity -
I think it's the other way around.
We should aim at the higher goal,
the gold in the middle of an object -
precisely in order to
be able to enjoy the surface.
This is what is the
anti-metaphysical lesson,
which is difficult to accept.
What does this famous
'Ode to Joy' stand for?
It's usually perceived as
a kind of ode to humanity
as such, to the brotherhood
and freedom of all people.
And what strikes the eye here
is the universal adaptability
of this well-known melody.
It can be used
by political movements
which are totally opposed
to each other.
In Nazi Germany it was widely used
to celebrate great public events.
In Soviet Union
Beethoven was lionized
and the 'Ode to Joy' was
performed almost as
a kind of a communist song.
In China during the time
of the great Cultural Revolution -
when almost all western
music was prohibited -
the 9th symphony
was accepted.
It was allowed to play it as a piece
of progressive bourgeois music.
At the extreme right
in South Rhodesia -
before it became Zimbabwe -
it proclaimed independence
to be able
to postpone the
abolishment of apartheid.
Therefore those couple of
years of independence -
South Rhodesia, again
the melody of 'Ode to Joy' -
with changed lyrics of course,
was the anthem of the country.
At the opposite end -
when Abimael Guzman
President Gonzalo,
the leader of 'Sendero Luminoso',
the 'Shining Path',
the extreme leftist
guerrilla in Peru -
when he was asked by
a journalist which piece of music
is his favourite,
he claimed
again Beethoven's 9th
symphony 'Ode to Joy'.
When Germany was
still divided
and their team was appearing
together at the Olympics -
when one of the Germans
won golden medal -
again Old to Joy
was played
instead of either East or
West German national anthem.
And even now today
'Ode to Joy' is the unofficial
anthem of European union.
So it's truly that we can imagine
a kind of a perverse scene of
universal fraternity
where Osama Bin Laden is
embracing President Bush,
Saddam is embracing
Fidel Castro, white races
are embracing Mao Tse Tung
and all together they
sing 'Ode to Joy'.
It works. And this is how
every ideology has to work.
It's never just meaning.
It always has to also work
as an empty container -
open to all
possible meanings.
It's, you know, that
gut feeling that we feel
when we experience something
pathetic and we say:
"Oh my God, I am so moved,
there is something so deep. "
But you never know
what this depth is.
It's a void.
Now, of course
there is a catch here.
The catch is that of course
this neutrality of a frame
is never as neutral
as it appears.
Here, I think the
perspective of Alex from
the Clockwork Orange enters.
We were all feeling a bit
shagged and fagged and fashed.
It having been an evening of
some small energy expenditure,
oh my brothers.
So we got rid of the auto
and stopped off at The Korova
for a nightcap.
Why is Alex, this ultimate
cynical delinquent, the hero of
Clockwork Orange,
why is he so fascinated -
overwhelmed -
when he sees the lady
singing Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'?
And it was like for a moment,
oh my brothers,
some great bird had
flown into the milk bar
and I felt all the malanky
little hairs on my plott
standing endwise and
the shivers crawling up
like slow malanky lizards,
and then down again.
Because I knew
what she sang.
It was a bit from the glorious
ninth by Ludwig van.
Whenever an ideological
text says: "all humanity,
"unite in brotherhood,
joy" and so on,
you should always ask
"OK, OK, OK, but are this all,
really all
"or is someone excluded?"
I think Alex, the delinquent
from Clockwork Orange,
identifies with this
place of exclusion.
And the great genius
of Beethoven is that
he literally states
this exclusion.
All of a sudden the whole
tone changes into a kind of
a carnavalesque rhythm.
It's no longer this
sublime beauty.
Excuse me brother,
I ordered this two weeks ago -
can you see if
it's arrived yet please?
Just a minute.
We hear this vulgar music
precisely when Alex enters
a shopping arcade and
we can see from his movements
that now he feels at home.
He is like fish in the water.
Pardon me, ladies.
Beethoven is not the
cheap celebrator
of the brotherhood
of humanity and so on -
we are one big happy family
enjoying freedom,
dignity, and so on.
Enjoying that, are
you my darling?
The first part, which is falsely
celebrated today -
you hear it in
all official events -
is clearly identified
with Beethoven
as ideology, and then
the second part tells
the true story of that which
disturbs the official ideology
and of the failure
of the offical ideology
to constrain it,
to tame it.
This is why Beethoven
was doing something
which may appear
difficult to do.
He was already in
the purely musical work
practicing critique
of ideology.
If the classical ideology
functioned in the way
designated by Marx
in his nice formula
from Capital Volume One:
"Sie wissen es nicht,
aber sie tun es. "
"They don't know
what they are doing
"but they are
none the less doing it. "
Cynical ideology functions
in the mode of
"I know very well
what I am doing
"but I am still none
the less doing it. "
This paradoxical constellation
is staged in a beautiful way
in the famous song 'Officer Krupke'
in Bernstein's and Sondheim's
West Side Story.
Hey, you!
- Who me, officer Krupke?
- Yeah, you!
Give me one good
reason for not
dragging you down
to station house, you punk.
kindly Sergeant Krupke,
you gotta understand
it's just our bringin' up-ke,
that gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses,
natcherly we're punks!
Gee, Officer Krupke,
we're very upset.
We never had the...
The delinquent gang enact
a whole explanation,
as a musical number of course,
of why they are delinquents.
...there is good,
there is untapped good!
Like inside,
the worst of us is good!
Addressing the police officer Krupke,
who is not there but all is
addressed at the police officer.
That's a touchin' good story.
Lemme tell it to the world!
Just tell it to the judge.
So one of them adopts
the position of a judge:
Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
my parents treat me rough.
With all their marijuana,
they won't give me a puff.
Then the psychological
...he shouldn't be here.
This boy don't need a couch,
he needs a useful career.
Society's played him
a terrible trick -
und sociologically
he's sick!
I am sick!
We are sick, we are sick...
The paradox here is how can
you know all this and still do it?
This is the cynical
functioning of ideology.
They're never what they appear
to be cynical brutal delinquents.
They always have
a tiny private dream.
This dream can be many things.
It can even be something
quite ordinary.
Let's take the English riots
of August 2011.
The standard liberal explanation
really sounds like
a repetition of
'Officer Krupke' song.
We cannot just condemn this
riot as delinquent vandalism.
You have to see how these people
live in practically ghettos -
isolated communities -
no proper family life,
no proper education.
They don't even have a prospect
of a regular employment.
But this is not enough
because man is not simply
a product of objective
We all have this margin
of freedom in deciding
how we subjectivise these
objective circumstances
which will of course
determine us.
How we react to them by
constructing our own universe.
The conservative solution
is we need more police.
We need courts, which pass
severe judgements.
I think this solution
is too simple.
If I listen closely to some of
David Cameron's statements
it looked as if OK,
they are beating people,
burning houses, but the
truly horrible thing is
that they were taking objects
without paying for them.
The ultimate things
that we can imagine.
In a very limited way,
Cameron was right -
there was no
ideological justification.
It is the reaction of people
who are totally caught into
the predominant ideology
but have no ways to realise
what this ideology demands
of them so it's kind of
a wild acting out within this
ideological space of consumerism.
Even if we are dealing
with apparently
totally non-ideological
brutality -
I just want to burn houses,
to get objects.
It is the result of a very specific
social and ideological
constellation where big ideology,
striving for justice,
equality etc,
The only functioning ideology
is pure consumerism
and then no wonder what you
get as a form of protest.
Every violent acting out
is a sign that
there is something you are not
able to put into words.
Even the most brutal violence
is the enacting
of a certain
symbolic deadlock.
The great thing about
the Taxi Driver
is that it brings this brutal
outburst of violence
to its radical
suicidal dimension.
We are not dealing
here with something
which simply concerns
the fragile psychology
of a distorted person,
what Travis in Taxi Driver is.
It has something to do
with ideology.
Listen you fuckers,
you screw-heads.
Here is a man who would
not take it anymore.
Who would not let...
Listen you fuckers,
you screw-heads.
Here is a man who would
not take it anymore.
A man who stood up
against the scum -
the cunts, the dogs,
the filth, the shit.
Here is someone
who stood up.
In the Taxi Driver,
Travis, the hero,
is bothered by the young prostitute
played by Jody Foster.
What bothers him are,
of course as is always the case -
precisely his fantasies.
Fantasies of her.
Victim who of her
hidden pleasures...
And fantasies are not just
a private matter of individuals.
Fantasies are the central stuff
our ideologies are made of.
Don't look at him.
Fantasy is in psychoanalytical
fundamentally a lie.
Not a lie in the sense that
it's just a fantasy
but not a reality,
but a lie in the sense that
fantasy covers up a certain
gap in consistency.
When things are blurred,
when we cannot really get
to know things, fantasy
provides an easy answer.
The usual mode of fantasy
is to construct a scene -
not a scene where
I get what I desire -
but a scene in which I imagine
myself as desired by others.
Taxi Driver is an
unacknowledged remake of
perhaps the greatest
of John Ford's westerns -
his late classic The Searchers.
- I take many...?
- Scalps.
In both films,
the hero tries to save
a young woman who is perceived
as a victim of brutal abuse.
In The Searchers the
young Nathalie Wood
was kidnapped and lived
for a couple of years
as the wife of an Indian chief.
In Taxi Driver
the young Jodie Foster
is controlled by
a ruthless pimp.
You walk out with those
fucking creeps and lowlifes
and degenerates
out on the streets,
and you sell your little pussy
for nothing, man?
For some low life pimp?
Stands in a hall?
I'm the- I'm square?
You're the one
that's square, man.
I don't go screw and
fuck with a bunch of killers
and junkies the way you do.
The task is always to save
the perceived victim.
But what really drives
this violence of the hero
is a deep suspicion that
the victim is not simply a victim.
That the victim, effectively
in a perverted way
enjoys or participates in what
appears as her victimhood.
So that, to put it very simply -
she doesn't want to be redeemed,
she resists it.
Let's go home, Debby.
And this is the big problem -
if I make an immediate jump
to the political dimension -
the big problem of American
military interventions,
especially so-called
humanitarian interventions.
From Iraq to already
Vietnam half a century ago.
We try to help them,
but what if they really
did not want our help?
The result of this
debilitating deadlock
can only be an
outburst of violence.
We do get, towards
the end of the film
Travis exploding
in a killing spree.
Killing the pimps, all the
people around the young girl.
Violence is never
just abstract violence.
It's a kind of brutal
intervention in the real -
to cover up a certain
impotence concerning
what we may call
cognitive mapping.
You lack a clear picture
of what's going on.
Where are we?
Exactly the same holds
for the terrifying outburst of
violence: Anders Behring Breivik's
murder spree in Oslo.
Exploding a bomb in front
of the government building
and then killing dozens
of young members
of the social democratic party
in an island close to Oslo.
Many commentators
tried to dismiss this as
a clear case of personal insanity.
But I think Breivik's manifesto
is well worth reading.
It is palpably clear
there how this violence -
that Breivik not only theorised
about but also enacted -
is a reaction
to the impenetrability
and confusion of global capital.
It's exactly like Travis Bickle's
killing spree
at the end of the Taxi Driver.
When he is there,
barely alive,
he symbolically with
his fingers points a gun
at his own head.
Clear sign that all this
violence was basically suicidal.
He was on the right path,
in a way -
Travis in the Taxi Driver.
You should have the
outburst of violence
and you should
direct it at yourself
but in a very specific way
at what in yourself
change you, ties you
to the ruling ideology.
Pippin? Pippin?
In Steven Spielberg's Jaws
a shark starts to attack
people on the beach.
What does this attack mean?
What does the shark stand for?
There were different,
even mutually exclusive
answers to this question.
On the one hand
some critics claimed
that obviously the shark stands
for the foreign threat
to ordinary Americans.
The shark is a metaphor
for either natural disaster -
storms or immigrants
United States citizens
and so on.
On the other hand
it's interesting to note that
Fidel Castro,
who loves the film,
once said that for him
it was obvious that
Jaws is kind of
a leftist Marxist film
and that the shark
is a metaphor for
brutal big capital
exploiting ordinary Americans.
So which is
the right answer?
I claim none of them and
at the same time all of them.
Ordinary Americans, as ordinary
people in all countries
have a multitude of fears.
We fear all kind of things.
We fear maybe,
immigrants or people
whom we perceive as lower
than ourselves attacking us,
robbing us. We fear people
raping our children.
We fear natural disasters,
tornados, earthquakes,
tsunamis; we fear
corrupted politicians.
We fear big companies
which can basically
do with us
whatever they want.
The function of the shark
is to unite all these fears
so that we can in a way
trade all these fears
for one fear alone.
Smile, you son of a...
In this way our experience
of reality gets much simpler.
Why am I mentioning this?
Because isn't it that
for example, the most extreme
case of ideology,
maybe in the history
of humanity -
the Nazi fascist anti-Semitism
work precisely in
the same way?
Imagine an ordinary
German citizen
in the late 20s/early 30s.
His situation is,
in an abstract way
the same as that
of a small child.
He's totally perplexed.
Social authority, symbolic
order is telling him
you are a German worker,
banker, whatever -
but nothing functions.
What does society
want from him?
Why is everything
going wrong?
The way he perceives
the situation
is that newspapers
lie to him.
He lost his work
because of inflation.
He lost all his
money in the bank.
He sees moral degradation
and so on...
So what's the
meaning of this all?
The original fascist
dream is to -
of course as the dream
of every ideology -
to have a cake
and to eat it.
As it was often pointed
out, fascism is,
at it's most elementary,
a conservative revolution.
Revolution: economic
modern industry, yes.
But a revolution which
would none the less
maintain or even reassert
a traditional hierarchal society.
A society which is
modern, efficient,
but at the same time
controlled by
hierarchal values with no
class or other antagonisms.
Now, they have a problem
here, the fascists,
but antagonism, class
struggle and other dangers
is something inherent
to capitalism.
industrialisation -
as we know from
the history of capitalism -
means disintegration
of old stable relations.
It means social conflicts.
Instability is the way
capitalism functions.
So how to solve
this problem? Simple.
You need to generate
an ideological narrative
which explains how
things went wrong
in a society, not
as a result of the
inherent tensions in the
development of this society
but as the result
of a foreign intruder.
Things were okay until Jews
penetrated our social body.
The way to restore the
health of our social body
is to eliminate the Jews.
It's the same operation
as with
the shark in Jaws.
You have a multitude
of fears
and this multiplicity
of fears confuses you -
like you simply
don't know
what's the meaning
of all this confusion.
And you replace this
confused multitude
with one clear figure:
the Jew. And everything
becomes clear.
The search for cuts in
the social security provision
to lone parent families
in part spurred this report.
The social security
department fears
that the accelerating budget
for single mothers
on benefits
could reach nearly
5 billion pounds
by the end of the decade.
But the issue
of the lone parent
has increasingly been
seen as the heart
of John Major's back to
basics crusade.
Remember, I think around
two, three decades ago -
when the prime minister of
the United Kingdom was
John Major -
there was a kind of
ideological campaign
to return to
morality and so on.
And all the evils of society
were embodied in the
conservative narrative
in the figure of
unemployed single mother.
Like, there is violence
in our suburbs?
Of course, because single
unemployed mothers
cannot take care
of their children -
don't properly educate
them and so on.
We have a lack in our budget,
not enough money -
of course, because we have
to support unwed
single mothers
and so on and so on.
In an ideological edifice
you need some pseudo
concrete image like this
to fixate your imagination,
and then this image
can mobilise us.
Imagine ideology
as a kind of a filter.
A frame, so that if
you look at the same
ordinary reality through
that frame -
everything changes.
In what sense?
It's not that the frame
actually adds anything;
it's just that the frame opens
the abyss of suspicion.
If we look at the anti-Semitic
image of the Jew
it's crucial to notice how
contradictory this figure
of the Jew is.
Jews are at the same time
extra intellectual -
like mathematicians,
whatever -
and vulgar.
Not washing regularly.
Seducing innocent girls all the
time and so on and so on.
This is typical for racism.
You try to imagine how
the other enjoys
all the secret orgies or
whatever, because in racism
the other is not
simply an enemy;
usually it is also
invested with
some specific
perverse enjoyment or
in an inverted way,
the other can be someone
who tries to steal from us
our enjoyment, our...
to disturb, as we usually
put it: our way of life.
We should be here
very precise
not to fall into the usual
trap of disqualifying
all elements out of which
the Nazi ideological edifice
is composed, to disqualify all
them as proto-fascist.
We should never forget that
the large majority
of these elements which we
today associate with fascism
were taken from
the workers' movement.
This idea of large numbers of
people marching together -
this idea of strict bodily
discipline as our duty -
the Nazis directly took this over
from social democracy,
from the left.
Let me just take some other
central concepts
of the Nazi world-view:
the solidarity of the people.
My God, there is nothing bad
in this notion as such.
The problem is solidarity
to what kind of people?
If by people you mean
'Volksgemeinschaft' -
the organic community
of people -
where then the enemy
is automatically
the foreign intruder,
in this case
we are in Nazism.
The crucial thing is to locate
ideology where it belongs.
Let's take a clear example.
The well known song
'Tomorrow Belongs To Me'
from the film Cabaret.
The sun on the meadow
is summery warm
The stag in the forest
runs free...
Some of my friends after
seeing the film -
Bob Fosse's Cabaret -
thought that after
they heard this song
they finally understood
what at it's deepest,
as to its emotional impact,
what fascism is.
But I think this precisely
is the mistake to be avoided.
This song is rather ordinary
popular song.
Incidentally it was composed
while they were
shooting the movie
by a Jewish couple.
Nice irony.
If you look not only at the
music, at the way it is sung,
but even at the words
"awakening of a nation,
tomorrow belongs to me... "
one can well imagine with
a slight change of words
radically leftist,
communist song.
But soon says the whisper:
arise, arise...
The German hard rock
band Rammstein
are often accused of flirting,
playing with
the Nazi militaristic
But if one observes
closely their show -
one can see very nicely
what they are doing.
Exemplarily in one of their best
known songs 'Reise Reise'.
Reise, reise,
Seemann reise
Jeder tut's auf seine Weise
Der eine stt den
Speer zum Mann
Der andere zum Fische dann.
Reise, reise,
Seemann reise...
The minimal elements
of the Nazi ideology
enacted by Rammstein
are something like
pure elements of
libidinal investment.
Enjoyment has to be,
as it were,
condensed in some
minimal tics: gestures,
which do not have any
precise ideological meaning.
What Rammstein does is -
it liberates these elements
from their Nazi articulations.
It allows us to enjoy them in
their pre-ideological state.
The way to fight Nazism
is to enjoy these elements,
ridiculous as they
may appear,
by suspending the
Nazi horizon of meaning.
This way you undermine
Nazism from within.
So how does none the less
ideology do this?
How does it articulate
pre-ideological elements?
These elements can also be
seen as a kind of a bribe.
The way ideology pays us to
seduce us into it's edifice.
These bribes can be
purely libidinal bribes,
all those tics which are
condensed enjoyment.
Or they can be explicit
discursive elements like
notions of solidarity
of collective discipline,
struggle for one's destiny
and so on and so on.
All these in itself are
free floating elements
which open themselves to
different ideological fields.
Let's turn to the high point
of our consumerism.
Let me take a drink...
Some of it -
'Starbucks' coffee.
I am regularly drinking it,
I must admit it.
But are we aware that
when we buy a cappuccino
from 'Starbucks', we also buy
quite a lot of ideology.
Which ideology?
You know when you enter
a 'Starbucks' store
it's usually always displayed
in some posters there,
their message which is:
Yes, our cappuccino is more
expensive than others,
but - and then
comes the story -
we give one percent of
all our income to some
Guatemala children
to keep them healthy.
For the water supply
for some Sahara farmers,
or to save the forests, to enable
organic growing coffee...
whatever, whatever.
Now I admire the ingeniosity
of this solution.
In the old days of
pure simple consumerism
you bought a product
and then you felt bad.
My God, I'm just
a consumerist
while people are
starving in Africa.
So the idea was you had to
do something to counteract
your pure distractive
For example, I don't know,
you contribute
to charity and so on.
What 'Starbucks' enables you
is to be a consumerist and-
be a consumerist without
any bad conscience
because the price
for the counter measure -
for fighting consumerism -
is already included into
the price of a commodity.
Like you pay a little bit more
and you are not just
a consumerist but you do also
your duty towards environment -
the poor, starving people in
Africa and so on and so on.
It's, I think, the ultimate
form of consumerism.
We should not simply
oppose a principal life
dedicated to duty and enjoying
our small pleasures.
Let's take today's capitalism.
We have, on the one hand,
the demands of the circulation
of the capital which push us
towards profit making,
expansion, exploitation and
destruction of nature and,
on the other hand,
ecological demands:
let's think about our posterity
and about our own survival,
let's take care of
nature and so on.
In this opposition between
ruthless pursuit of
capitalist expansion and
ecological awareness -
duty, a strange perverted
duty of course -
duty is on the side
of capitalism,
as many perspicuous
analysts noted.
Capitalism has a strange
religious structure.
It is propelled by this
absolute demand:
capital has to circulate to
reproduce itself to expand -
to multiply itself and
for this goal
anything can be sacrificed,
up to our lives,
up to nature and so on.
Here we have a strange
unconditional injunction.
A true capitalist is a miser
who is ready
to sacrifice everything
for this perverted duty.
What we see here in
Mojave desert
at this resting place for
abandoned planes
is the other side of
capitalist dynamics.
Capitalism is all
the time in crisis.
This is precisely why it appears
almost indestructible.
Crisis is not its obstacle.
It is what pushes
it forwards
towards permanent
self-revolutionising -
permanent, extended
self-reproduction -
always new products.
The other invisible side
of it is waste -
tremendous amount of waste.
We shouldn't react to
these heaps of waste
by trying to somehow
get rid of it.
Maybe the first thing to do
is to accept this waste.
To accept that there
are things out there
which serve nothing.
To break out of this eternal
cycle of functioning.
The German philosopher
Walter Benjamin
said something very deep.
He said that we
experience history -
what does it mean for us to
be historical beings -
not when we are engaged in
things, when things move;
only when we see
this, again,
rest waste of culture being
half retaken by nature -
at that point we get an intuition
of what history means.
Maybe this also accounts
for the redemptive value
of post-catastrophic movies
like I Am Legend and so on.
We see the devastated
human environment,
half empty factories,
machines falling apart,
half empty stores.
What we experience
at this moment,
the psychoanalytic term
for it would have been
the 'Inertia of the Real' -
this mute presence
beyond meaning.
What moments like
confronting planes
here in Mojave Desert
bring to us is
maybe a chance
for an authentic
passive experience.
Maybe without this
properly artistic
moment of
authentic passivity
nothing new can emerge.
Maybe something new only
emerges through the failure,
the suspension of proper
functioning of the
existing network of our life -
where we are.
Maybe this is what we need
more than ever today.
What does the wreck of
the Titanic stand for?
We all know the
standard reading
of the impact of
the sinking of the Titanic.
Not only the film
but the real accident.
This sinking had such an
impact because it happened
in a society still at that point
in all its glitz and glory,
unaware of the decay that
awaited it in the near future -
the World Wars and so on.
But there is something
in excess
of this entire field
of meanings
which is the very
fascinating presence
of the ruin of the Titanic
at the bottom of the ocean.
When James Cameron
a trip to the real
wreck of Titanic
he also made a similar remark.
When the explorers
approached the wreck,
they had this almost
metaphysical experience
that they are approaching
a forbidden territory
in which the sacred and
the obscene overlap.
Yeah, Roger that.
OK, drop down
and go into the first
class gangway door.
I want you guys
working with...
Every effective political,
ideological symbol
or symptom has to rely
on this dimension of
petrified enjoyment.
Of the frozen grimace of
an excessive pleasure in pain.
What am I doing here
in the middle of the ocean -
alone in a boat surrounded
by frozen corpses?
I am in a scene from
James Cameron's Titanic...
...which is the supreme case of
ideology in recent Hollywood.
Why? Beause
of the imminent
tension to the story
of the film.
- I don't know this dance.
- Neither do I.
Just go with it.
Don't think.
We have at least three levels.
First there is what people
ironically refer to as
James Cameron's
Hollywood Marxism -
this ridiculous fake sympathy
with lower classes.
Up there, first class
passengers -
they are mostly evil,
egotistic, cowardly...
You know I don't
like that, Rose.
...embodied in Kate
Winslet's fianc
played by Billy Zane.
- She knows.
This whole narrative
is sustained
by a much more
reactionary myth.
Did you see
those guys' faces?
We should ask what role does
the iceberg hitting the ship
play in the development
of the love story?
When the ship docks
I'm getting off with you.
- This is crazy.
- I know.
My claim is here
a slightly cynical one.
This would have been
the true catastrophe.
We can imagine how maybe
after two three weeks of
of intense sex in New York
the love affair would
somehow fade away.
As a paying customer
I expect to get what I want.
Kate Winslet is
an upper class girl -
in psychological
distress, confused,
her ego is in shatters.
And the function
of Leonardo DiCaprio...
Over on the bed,
the couch. simply that he helps her
to reconstitute her ego.
Good. Lie down.
Her self image, literally
he draws her image.
Tell me when it looks right.
Put your arm back
the way it was.
It's really a new version
of one of the old -
favourite imperialist myths.
The idea being that when
the upper class people
lose their vitality
they need a contact
with lower classes.
Basically ruthlessly exploiting
them in a vampire like way -
as it were sucking
from them the life energy.
Revitalised they can join their
secluded upper class life.
My heart was pounding
the whole time.
It was the most erotic
moment of my life.
Up until then at least.
The ship hits the iceberg -
not immediately after sex but
when the couple goes up
to the open space and
decide to stay together.
Oh yes. Hey, look at this.
You know, often in history
the event which may
appear as a catastrophe
saves persons or an idea,
elevating it into a myth.
Remember the intervention
of the Soviet army -
and other Warsaw backed armies
in 1968 in Czechoslovakia -
to strangle the so
called Prague Spring.
The attempt of the Czech
democratic communists
to introduce a more
human faced socialism.
Usually we perceive this
brutal Soviet intervention
as something that destroyed
the brief dream of Prague Spring.
I think it saved the dream.
Either Czechoslovakia would
have turned into an ordinary
liberal capitalist state
or at a certain point - which
was usually the fate of
reformist communists,
the communist in power -
would be obliged
to set a certain limit.
OK, you had you fun,
your freedom -
that's enough, now we
again define the limits.
Again, the paradox is precisely
the Soviet intervention
saved the dream of
the possibility of
another communism
and so on and so on.
So, here again
through the temporal
we have a love story
which is, as it were,
redeemed in it's idea,
saved for eternity.
We can ultimately
read the catastrophe
as a desperate manoeuvre
to save the illusion
of eternal love.
We can see how ideology
works effectively here.
We have two
superficial levels.
All the fascination of
the accident, then
the love story - but all this
which is quite acceptable
for our liberal
progressive minds -
all this is just a trap.
Something to lower
our attention -
threshold, as it were,
to open us up -
to be ready to accept the
true conservative message
of rich people having tried
to revitalise themselves
by ruthlessly appropriating the
vitality of the poor people.
There's no one here, sir.
There is a wonderful detail
which tells everything.
Come back.
When Kate Winslet notices
that Leonardo DiCaprio
is dead, she, of course,
starts to shout
"I will never let go,
I will never let go"
while at the same moment...
- I will never let go.
- I promise.
... she pushes him off.
He is what we may call ironically
a vanishing mediator.
This logic of the
production of the couple
has a long history
in Hollywood.
Whatever the story is about -
it may be about the end of
the world, an asteroid
threatening the very
survival of humanity
or a great war, whatever.
As a rule we always
have a couple whose
link is threatened and
who somehow through
this ordeal at the end
happily gets together.
This logic does not hold
only for Hollywood films.
In the late forties,
in Soviet Union,
they produced arguably
one of the most expensive
film of all times:
The Fall of Berlin.
The chronicle of the
second World War
from the Soviet standpoint.
And it's incredible how
closely this film
also follows the logic of
the production of a couple.
The story begins just before
the German attack
on the Soviet Union,
when the model worker
who is in love
with a local girl but is too
shy to propose to her,
is called to Moscow to get
a medal from Comrade Stalin.
There Stalin notices his
confusion, distress,
and Stalin gives
him some advice -
which poetry
to quote and so on.
This part unfortunately
was lost
because in the background
of this scene there was Beria -
a Soviet politician who
after Stalin's death
became a 'non-person' -
was shot as a traitor.
But we know from the
screenplay what was there.
If Stalin gives you love
advice it has to succeed -
so the couple embraces.
He carries her probably
to make love.
At that very moment
there is the triumphant,
violent entrance
of the obstacle:
German planes come,
dropping bombs.
The girl is taken prisoner.
The boy of course joins
the Red Army
and we follow him through
all the great battles.
The idea being that in a
deeper logic of the film -
what these battles
were about -
was really to
recreate the couple.
The boy has to get his girl.
This is what happens
at the end,
but in a very strange
way which reconfirms
Stalin's role as the supreme
divine matchmaker.
The scene itself, Stalin
emerging himself into
a crowd of ordinary people
never happened.
Stalin was totally paranoid
about flying,
about taking planes.
But none the less when he
saw this scene he cried.
Of course he himself as you
know, wrote the lines.
When the couple
encounters each other
the girl first sees Stalin,
then she turns around
and, surprised,
sees her lover
for whom she was waiting
all the time of the war.
So it's only through
the presence of Stalin
that the couple
gets reunited.
This is how ideology works.
Not the explicit
ideology of the film -
which we hear at the
end Stalin saying:
now all the free people
will enjoy peace
and so on and so on.
But precisely ideology
at its more fundamental.
This apparently totally
subordinated motive -
unimportant in itself -
the story of a couple, this is
what is the key element,
which holds the
entire film together,
that small surplus element
which attracts us,
which maintains
our attention.
This is how ideology works.
Everything clean.
So that your action
is beautiful.
Smooth, Charlene.
We usually think that
military discipline
is just a matter of mindlessly
following orders.
Obeying the rules.
You don't think - you do
what is your duty.
It's not as simple as that.
If we do this, we just
become machines.
There has to be
something more.
This more can have
two basic forms.
The first more benign form
is an ironic distance.
Best epitomised by the
well known movie
and TV series'M.A.S.H.'...
...where the military
doctors are involved
in sexual escapades,
make jokes all the time.
Some people took Robert
Altman's movie M.A.S.H.
as a kind of antimilitaristic,
satiric product,
but it's not.
We should always bear
in mind that these
soldiers with all their
practical jokes -
making fun of their
superiors and so on -
operated perfectly
as soldiers.
They did their duty.
This one's for you, babe.
Much more ominous
is a kind of obscene
supplement to
pure military discipline.
In practically all movies
about U.S. Marines,
the best-known embodiment
of this obscenity
are marching chants.
A mixture of nonsense...
- I don't know but I've been told.
Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.
...and obscenity.
This is not undermining,
making fun of military discipline.
It is it's inner most constituent.
You take this obscene
supplement away -
and military machine
stops working.
Well, no shit.
What have we got here?
A fucking comedian?
Private Joker.
I admire your honesty.
Hell, I like you.
You can come over
to my house and
fuck my sister.
You little scumbag!
I've got your name!
I've got your ass!
You will not laugh.
You will not cry.
You will learn by the numbers.
I will teach you.
Now get up!
Get on your feet!
You had best unfuck yourself
or I will unscrew
your head and shit
down your neck.
- Sir, yes, sir!
- Private Joker,
why don't you join
my beloved corps?
I think that the
drill sergeant -
the way it is played in
an exemplary way in
Stanley Kubrick's
Full Metal Jacket -
that the drill sergeant
is rather a tragic figure.
I always like to imagine
him as the person who
after his work returns home,
is quite decent and so on.
This is my rifle,
this is my gun.
All this obscene shouting
is just a show put on
not so much to impress
ordinary soldiers
whom he is training
as to bribe them
with bits of enjoyment.
It's not just a question
of these obscenities,
which sustains the
military machinery;
it's another more general rule
which holds for
military communities,
but even more
I would say, for all
human communities.
From the largest nations,
ethnic groups,
up to small university
departments and so on.
You don't only have
explicit rules.
You always, in order to become
part of a community,
you need some implicit
unwritten rules
which are never
publicly recognised
but are absolutely crucial
as the point of
the identification
of a group.
In the U.K. everyone
knows about
the obscene
unwritten rituals,
which regulate life
in public schools.
That'll be all. Thank
you, Finchley.
I want to see all whips
in my study after break.
- Right, sir.
- Oh, how was India? Enjoy it?
- Jolly good.
- Bridges!
I'll labor night and day...
Just think about Lindsay
Anderson's classic 'If... '.
The public life
is democratic -
we have professors who
interact with their pupils,
nice atmosphere,
teaching, friendship,
spirit of cooperation -
but then we all know
what happens
beneath the surface.
Older pupils torturing, sexually
abusing the younger.
This same mixture of obscenity
and sadistic violence.
And again what is
crucial here is
we should not simply
put all the blame
or all the enjoyment
on the older pupils.
The victims even are
part of this infernal
cycle of obscenity.
It's as if in order to really be
a member of a community
you have to render
you hands dirty.
And I think even the
Abu Ghraib scandal -
of American soldiers
torturing or
especially humiliating
Iraqi prisoners -
is to be read in this way.
It's not simply, we the
arrogant Americans
are humiliating others.
What Iraqi soldiers
experienced there
was the staging of
the obscene underside
of the American
military culture.
In Full Metal Jacket it's
the character of Joker -
played by
Matthew Modine -
who is close to what we
would call a normal soldier.
A M.A.S.H. type of soldier.
He has proper
ironic distance.
He proves, at
the end, militarily,
the most efficient soldier.
Returning back to me.
Why then will I soon
shoot myself?
Something went wrong
there. But what?
Lock and load!
I did not just run amok.
This is my rifle.
There are many like it,
but this one is mine.
But I got too
directly identified
with these obscene rituals.
I lost the distance.
I took them seriously.
What in the name
of Jesus H. Christ
are you animals doing
in my head?
If you get too close to it,
if you over
identify with it,
if you really immediately
become the voice
of this super ego,
it's self destructive.
You kill people around you -
you end up
killing yourself.
Oh, shh, shh, shh.
So you think Batman's made
Gotham a better place? Hm?
Look at me.
Look at me!
You see, this is how crazy
Batman's made Gotham.
You want order in Gotham -
Batman must take off his
mask and turn himself in.
Oh, and every day he
doesn't, people will die.
Starting tonight.
I'm a man of my word.
So who is Joker?
- If we're gonna play games...
Which is the lie he is opposing?
...I'm gonna need
a cup of coffee.
Ah, the 'good cop,
bad cop' routine?
Not exactly.
The truly disturbing thing
about The Dark Knight
is that it elevates lie into
a general social principal -
into the principal
of organisation
of our social political life.
As if our societies
can remain stable,
can function, only
if based on a lie.
As if telling the truth,
and this telling the truth
embodies in Joker
means distraction.
Disintegration of
the social order.
Never start with the head.
The victim gets all fuzzy.
He can't feel the next...
Toward the end it is
as if lie functions
as a hot potato passing from
one person's hand to
another person's hand.
First there is Harvey Dent.
So be it. Take the Batman
into custody...
The public prosecutor
who lies.
- I am the Batman.
Claiming that he is the real
person behind Batman's mask.
That he is Batman.
Then we have Gordon -
honest policeman,
Batman's friend, who
fakes, stages his
own death.
Five dead.
Two of them cops.
You can't sweep that off.
At the end, Batman himself
takes upon himself...
- But the Joker cannot win.
... the crimes, murders committed
by Harvey Dent, the public
prosecutor turned criminal...
Gotham needs
its true hero. order to maintain
the trust of the public
into the legal system.
The idea is if the ordinary
public were to learn
how corrupt was or
is the very core of our
legal system then everything
would have collapsed -
so we need a lie
to maintain order.
A hero.
Not the hero we deserved,
but the hero we needed.
Nothing less than
a knight, shining.
There's nothing new in this.
This is an old
conservative wisdom
asserted long ago by
philosophers from Plato
especially, and then
Immanuel Kant,
Edmond Burke and
so on and so on.
This idea that the truth
is too strong.
That a politician should
be a cynicist who,
although he
knows what is true,
tells to ordinary people what
Plato called 'a noble fable' -
a lie.
Um, the United States
knows that Iraq
has weapons of
mass destruction.
The U.K. knows
that they have
weapons of mass destruction.
Any country on
the face of the earth
with an active
intelligence program
knows that Iraq has weapons
of mass destruction.
Which could be activated
within forty five minutes
including against his
own Shia population.
The choice is his and
if he does not disarm,
the United States of America
will lead a coalition
and disarm him
in the name of peace.
Let's be frank.
We can have a state -
public system of power -
as legitimate as you want
submitted to critical press,
democratic elections and
so on and so on,
apparently just
serves us.
But nonetheless, if you
look closely into
how even the most democratic
state power functions
in order for it to display
true authority,
and power needs authority,
there has to be, as it were,
between the lines all the
time this message of:
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are
legalised through elections
"but basically we can do with
you whatever we want. "
Because that's what
needs to happen.
Because sometimes,
truth isn't good enough.
Sometimes people
deserve more.
Sometimes people
to have their
faith rewarded.
One of the
great platitudes -
which are popular today
when we are confronted
with acts of violence -
is to refer to Fyodor
famous statement from
'The Brothers Karamazov':
"If there is no God then
everything is permitted. "
Well, the first problem with
this statement is that
Dostoyevsky, of course,
never made it.
The first one who used
this phrase as
allegedly made by
Dostoyevsky was
Jean-Paul Sartre in '43,
but the main
point is that this
statement is simply wrong.
Even a brief look at our
predicament today
clearly tells us this.
It is precisely:
if there is God, that
everything is permitted
to those who not
only believe in God
but who perceive
themselves as instruments,
direct instruments
of the divine will.
If you posit or perceive
or legitimise yourself
as a direct instrument
of the divine will,
then of course all narrow
petty moral considerations
How can you even think
in such narrow terms
when you are a direct
instrument of God?
This is how so-called religious
fundamentalists work,
but not only them.
Every form of so called
works like that even
if it is presented
or if it presents
itself as atheist.
Let's take Stalinism.
Officially Stalinism was based
on atheist Marxist theory,
but if we look closely at
the subjective experience
of a Stalinist
political agent,
leader, we see that
it's not a position of
an arrogant master,
who can do
whatever he wants.
It's, on the contrary, the
position of a perfect servant.
In a Stalinist universe
there definitely is
what in psychoanalytic theory
we call the 'Big Other'.
This 'Big Other' in the
Stalinist universe
has many names.
The best known of them
are the necessity of
historical progress
towards communism
or simply history.
History itself is the 'Big Other'.
History as the necessary
succession of historical stages.
A communist experiences
himself as simply
an instrument whose
function is to actualise
a historical necessity.
The people, the
mythic people -
whose instrument the
totalitarian leader is -
are never simply the actually
existing individuals,
groups of people and so on.
It's some kind of imagined
idealised point of reference
which works even when,
for example in
rebellions against
the communist rule
like in Hungary '56,
when the large majority
of actually resisting people
raises up, is opposed
to the regime.
They can still say: "No,
these are just individuals,
"they are not
the true people. "
When you are accused
of: "My God,
"how could you have been doing
all of these horrible things?"
You could have said,
and this is the
standard Stalinist excuse:
"Of course my heart bleeds
for all the poor victims,
"I am not fully
responsible for it.
"I was only acting on
behalf of the 'Big Other'".
"As for myself, I like cats,
"small children",
whatever -
this is always part
of the iconography of
a Stalinist leader.
Lenin in Stalinism is
always presented as
someone who likes small
children and cats.
The implication being -
Lenin had to order many
killings and so on, but
his heart
was not there -
this was his duty
as instrument of
historical progress and
so on and so on.
The way to undermine
Stalinism is not simply
to make fun of the
leader which can be,
up to a point
even tolerated.
It is to undermine
this very reference,
mythic reference which
legitimises the Stalinist leader:
the people.
This is how I read
the by far best work
of Milo Forman -
his early Czech films.
Black Peter,
The Loves of a Blond,
and Firemen's Ball
where he mocks
precisely the
ordinary people.
In their daily
stupidity, egotistic lust
and so on and so on.
It may appear that this is
something very arrogant -
but no, I think that
this is the way to
undermine the entire structure
of the Stalinist universe.
To demonstrate not that
leaders are not leaders,
they are always ready to say:
"Oh, but we are just
"ordinary people like you. "
No! That there is no
mythic people
which serves as the
ultimate legitimisation.
So what is the 'Big Other'?
This basic element of
every ideological edifice?
It has two quite
contradictory aspects.
On the one hand,
of course,
the 'Big Other' is the secret
order of things like
divine reason, fate
or whatever,
which is controlling
our destiny.
But it is maybe the least
interesting aspect
of the 'Big Other'
as the agents, which
guarantees meaning
of what we are doing.
Much more interesting
is the 'Big Other'
as the order of appearances.
Many things which
are prohibited
are not simply
prohibited but
they should not happen
for the 'Big Other'.
A supreme
example of this
agency of the 'Big Other'
as the agency of
appearance is the
prattling busybody
in David Lean's masterpiece,
Brief Encounter.
At the very beginning
of the film,
the two lovers, Celia Johnson
and Trevor Howard,
arrange for their last
meeting in a cafeteria
of a small train station.
Laura, what a lovely surprise.
Oh, Dolly.
My dear, I've been shopping
till I'm dropping.
My feet are nearly off,
and my throat's parched.
I thought of having
tea in Spindle's
but I was terrified
of losing the train.
- Oh, dear.
- This is Dr. Harvey.
- How do you do?
- Would you be a perfect dear
and get me my cup of tea?
I really don't think I could
drag my poor old bones
over to the counter.
Why is this situation
so interesting?
Because on the one hand we
cannot but experience
this annoying lady as
a brutal intruder.
- There's your train.
- Yes, I know.
Oh, aren't you coming
with us?
No, I go in the opposite
- My practice is in Churley.
- Oh, I see.
I'm a general practitioner
at the moment.
Dr. Harvey's going out
to Africa next week.
Oh, how thrilling.
Instead of the two lovers
being allowed at least their
final moments alone,
they have to maintain
the appearances
that nothing is happening
between them,
that they are just acquaintances
and so on and so on.
He'll have to run,
or he'll miss it.
He's got to get right over
to the other platform.
This precisely is the function
of the 'Big Other'.
We need for our stability,
a figure of 'Big Other'
for whom we maintain
And I arrived at the station
with exactly half
a minute to spare.
My dear, I flew.
But are things really
as simple as that?
The next scene, the
scene of Celia Johnson
totally desperate, she knows
she will never again
see her lover.
Yes, he's a nice creature.
- You known him long?
- No, not very long.
I hardly know him
at all, really.
Well, my dear, I've always
had a passion for doctors.
Then we hear the line of
Celia Johnson's thought.
I wish I could trust you.
I wish you were
a wise, kind friend
instead of a gossiping
acquaintance I've known
casually for years and never
particularly cared for.
What is the nature of this
deadlock of Celia Johnson?
She is split between
the two figures
in the film
of the 'Big Other'.
On the one hand
it's her husband -
the ideal listener, but
it's out of question
to confess to him.
Dear Fred.
There's so much that
I want to say to you.
You're the only one in the
world with enough wisdom
and gentleness
to understand.
Wild horses wouldn't drag
me away from England
and home and all the
things I'm used to.
I mean, one has one's roots
after all, hasn't one?
Oh, yes, one has
one's roots.
On the other hand, you
have here this stupid
person who is available
as a confessor,
but there is not even
an elementary trust.
I wish you'd stop talking.
I wish you'd stop prying and
trying to find things out.
I wish you were dead.
No, I don't mean that.
That was silly and unkind,
but I wish you'd stop talking.
- My dear, all her hair
came out, and she said the
social life was quite,
quite horrid. Provincial, you know,
and very nouveau riche.
- Oh, Dolly.
- What's the matter, dear?
Are you feeling ill again?
So that's the tragedy
of our predicament.
In order to fully
exist as individuals
we need the fiction
of a 'Big Other'.
There must be an agency
which, as it were,
registers our predicament.
An agency where the truth of
ourselves will be inscribed,
accepted. An agency
to which to confess.
But what if there is
no such agency?
This was the utmost despair
of many women raped -
in the post Yugoslav war -
in Bosnia in
the early nineties.
They survived their
terrible predicament
and what kept them alive was
the idea I must survive
to tell the truth.
If/when - if they survived they
made a terrible discovery:
there is no one to
really listen to them.
Either some ignorant
bored social worker
or some relative
who usually made
obscene insinuations like
are you sure you were not
enjoying a little bit -
the rape and so on
and so on.
They discovered
the truth of what
Jacques Lacan claims:
there is no 'Big Other'.
There may be
a virtual 'Big Other'
to whom you
cannot confess.
There may be a 'Real Other'
but it's never
the virtual one.
We are alone.
I think Kafka was right
when he said that
for a modern secular
non-religious man
bureaucracy, state bureaucracy
is the only remaining
contact with the
dimension of the divine.
It is in this scene
from Brazil
that we see
the intimate link
between bureaucracy
and enjoyment.
What the impenetrable
omnipotence of
bureaucracy harbours
is divine enjoyment.
My name's Lowry,
Mr. Warren, Sam Lowry.
The intense rush of
bureaucratic engagement
serves nothing.
Glad to have you on board.
It is the performance of
its very purposelessness
that generates
an intense enjoyment
ready to reproduce
itself forever.
Between you and
me, Lowry, this... no, no!
...departement... tell Records
to get stuffed! about to be
upgraded and the...
Here we are.
Your very own number
on your very own door.
And behind that door,
your very own office.
Congratulations, DZ-015.
Welcome to the team.
Yes. No. Cancel that.
Send two copies to Finance.
The adverse of that is
a wonderful scene
more towards the
beginning of the film.
Harry Tuttle, heating
engineer, at your service.
The hero who has a problem
in his apartment
with plumbing tries to get
the State agency to fix it.
Are you from
Central Services?
Of course, two guys come,
they just want forms
to fill in, they do nothing.
I called
Central Services.
And then the ultimate
subversive figure comes:
a kind of clandestine plumber,
played by Robert De Niro...
Just a minute. What was that
business with the gun?
Just a precaution, sir.
Just a precaution.
...who tells him: "Just tell me
what is the problem"
and promises quickly
to fix it.
This of course is the ultimate
offense to bureaucracy.
Are you telling me
this is illegal?
Listen kid, we're all in
it together.
Go on.
In the ordinary
theological universe
your duty is imposed
onto you by God
or society or another
higher authority, and
your responsibility
is to do it.
But in a radically
atheist universe
you are not only responsible
for doing your duty,
you are also responsible
for deciding
what is your duty.
There is always
in our subjectivity,
in the way we
experience ourselves -
a minimum of hysteria.
Hysteria is what? Hysteria
is the way
we question our social,
symbolic identity.
You're sure it's God? You're
sure it's not the devil?
I'm not sure. I'm not
sure of anything.
If it's the devil, the devil
can be cast out.
But what if it's God?
You can't cast out
God, can you?
What is hysteria at
it's most elementary?
It's a question addressed
at the authority which
defines my identity.
It's: "Why am I what you are
telling me that I am?"
In psychoanalytic theory,
hysteria is much more
subversive than perversion.
A pervert has no
uncertainties while again
the hysterical position
is that of a doubt,
which is an extremely
productive position.
All new inventions come
from hysterical questioning,
and the unique character
of Christianity is that
it transposes this
hysterical questioning
onto God himself
as a subject.
Who's that? Who's following
me? Is that you?
This is the ingenious
idea of
The Last Temptation of Christ -
as Kazantzakis' novel and
Scorsese's film -
namely the idea that
when Jesus Christ
in his youth is told
that he is
not only the Son of God,
but basically God himself,
he doesn't simply accept it.
This is for Jesus Christ, boy,
traumatic news like, my God,
why am I dead?
Am I really dead?
How did we come to
that unique point,
which I think, makes
Christianity an exception?
It all began with
the Book of Job -
as we all know things
turn out bad for Job.
He loses everything.
His house, his family, his
possessions and so on.
Three friends visit him
and each of them
tries to justify
Job's misfortunes.
The greatness of Job is that
he does not accept this
deeper meaning.
When, towards the end of the Book
of Job, God himself appears,
God gives right to Job.
He says everything that the
theological friends
were telling Job is false;
everything that Job
was saying is true.
No meaning in catastrophes.
Here we have the first step
in the direction of
delegitimizing suffering.
Father stay with me,
don't leave me.
The contrast between
Judaism and Christianity
is the contrast between
anxiety and love.
The idea is that the Jewish
God is the God of the
abyss of the other's desire.
Terrible things happen,
God is in charge
but we do not
know what the 'Big Other',
God, wants from us.
What is the divine desire?
To designate this
traumatic experience
Lacan used the Italian
phrase 'che voglio'?
"What do you want?"
This terrifying question:
but what do you
want from me?
The idea is that Judaism
persists in this
anxiety, like God remains
this enigmatic
terrifying other.
And then Christianity
the tension through love.
By sacrificing his son,
God demonstrates
that he loves us.
So it's a kind
of a imaginary,
sentimental even,
resolution of a situation
of radical anxiety.
Father, forgive them.
If this were to be the
case, then Christianity
would have been a kind of
ideological, reversal
or pacification of the
deep, much more
shattering Jewish insight.
But I think one can read
the Christian gesture
in a much more radical way.
This is what the sequence
of crucifixion
in Scorsese's film shows us.
What dies on the
cross is precisely
this guarantee
of the 'Big Other'.
The message of Christianity
is here radically atheist.
It's the death of Christ
is not any kind of
redemption of commercial
affair in the sense of
Christ suffers to
pay for our sins.
Pay to whom?
For what? And so on.
It's simply the disintegration
of the God which
guarantees the meaning
of our lives.
And that's the meaning
of that famous phrase:
"Eli Eli lama sabachthani?"
"Father, why have you
forsaken me?"
Father, why have you
forsaken me?
Just before Christ's
death, we get
what in psychoanalytic
terms we call
subjective destitution.
Stepping out totally of
the domain of
symbolic identification,
cancelling or suspending
the entire field
of symbolic authority,
the entire field
of the 'Big Other'.
Of course, we cannot know
what God wants from us
because there is no God.
This is the Jesus Christ
who says,
among other things,
"I bring to earth not peace. "
"If you don't hate your
father, your mother,
"you are not my follower. "
Of course this does not mean
that you should actively
hate or kill your parents.
I think that family relations
stand here for
hierarchic social relations.
The message of Christ is:
I'm dying but my death
itself is good news.
It means you are alone,
left to your freedom,
be in the Holy Ghost,
Holy Spirit, which is just
the community of believers.
It's wrong to think that
the second coming will be
that Christ as a figure will
return somehow.
Christ is already here when
believers form an
emancipatory collective.
This is why I claim that
that the only way really
to be an atheist
is to go through Christianity.
Christianity is much
more atheist than
the usual atheism which
can claim there is no
God and so on -
but none the less
retains a certain trust
into the 'Big Other', this
'Big Other' can be called
natural necessity,
evolution or whatever.
We humans are none
the less reduced to a
position within a harmonious
whole of evolution or whatever,
but the difficult thing
to accept is again -
that there is no 'Big Other'.
No point of reference which
guarantees meaning.
We are in John
Frankenheimer's Seconds,
a neglected Hollywood
masterpiece from 1966-
from the very heart
of the hippy era
which preached
unrestrained hedonism.
Realise your dreams,
enjoy life fully.
The film is the story of a late
middle age businessman
leading a gray, totally
alienated life,
and then he decides
at some point
that he has enough of it.
Through one of his
friends he contacts
a mysterious agency,
which offers him a deal.
They will reorganise
his life so that
he will be reborn.
The cost runs in the
neighborhood of
thirty thousand dollars.
I know this seems
rather high but in
addition to the rather
extensive cosmetic
renovation by way of
plastic surgery for you,
CPS has to provide
a fresh corpse that
perfectly matches your
physical dimensions and
medical specifications.
Oh, Cadaver
Procurement Section.
They use some corpse; they
change it to look like
his own body. They plant this
corpse, stage a pseudo accident
so that police think he is dead.
Now, mister Wilson, you
represent something
of a milestone around here.
And then, the agency
organises an ultimate life
in a nice villa somewhere
around L.A. -
they even organise a nice
lady who conveniently
stumbles upon him when
he is taking a walk
along the beach.
He is thus reborn...
no longer as a boring
businessman but as a
modernist painter...
Tony Wilson.
...called Tony Wilson,
played by none other
than Rock Hudson.
So, the woman, Nora,
his new love,
tries to engage him in life,
even takes him to some
wine orgy where
people get drunk,
dance naked and so on.
Everything seems OK,
but Tony Wilson starts
to miss his old life.
More and more he is
haunted by his past.
Finally he breaks down,
approaches again
the agency,
telling them that
he wants to return
to his old life.
The boss of this
mysterious company,
a kind of kindly cruel...
- Hello, son.
...superego paternal figure
tells him the truth.
He disappointed them
by not being able to
adapt himself to
his new life.
You know, I sure hoped
you'd make it,
find your dream come true.
I said, I sure hoped
you'd make it,
find your dream come true.
You can call it wishful
thinking, son,
but life is built on wishing.
You've got to just keep
plugging away at them.
You can't give up...
and you can't let the mistakes
jeopardize the dream.
So what went wrong here?
The problem was
that his past
in it's material
existence was erased.
Well, here's your
- What?
- Surgery, sir.
He lived in a totally new
environment, new job,
new friends and so on.
What remained the same
were his dreams -
because when the company
organised his rebirth,
when the company
provided a new existence
for him, they simply
followed his dreams.
His dreams were
wrong dreams -
and this is quite a deep lesson
for the theory of ideology.
Just remember, son. We've
got to keep plugging away
at the dream. The mistakes teach
us how. It wasn't wasted.
Remember that.
On the way to the operation
hall, he discovers
the horrible truth.
He will not be reborn
but he will be used as a
cadaver for another person
who wants to be reborn.
We should draw a line
of distinction
within the very field
of our dreams.
Between those who
are the right dreams
pointing towards a dimension
effectively beyond
our existing society
and the wrong dreams:
the dreams which
are just an idealised
consumerist reflection,
mirror image of our society.
We are not simply
submitted to our dreams -
they just come from
some unfathomable
depths and we can't
do anything about it.
This is the basic lesson
of psychoanalysis
and fiction cinema.
We are responsible
for our dreams.
Our dreams stage
our desires,
and our desires are
not objective facts.
We created them,
we sustained them,
we are responsible for them.
This is an area of ancient
lakebeds deposited
five to ten million years ago.
The scene of mass orgy
in Zabriskie Point
is a nice metaphor
of what went wrong
with the 1960s
hippy revolution.
It's crucial that Zabriskie Point
was made in 1970
when the authentic
revolutionary energy
of the sixties was already
losing its strength.
This orgy is somewhere
between subversion
of the existing
social order
and already the
full estheticised
of this allegedly
transgressive activities into
the hegemonic ideology.
Although Antonioni
meant this
as a kind of transcendence
of the existing constraints,
we can easily
imagine this shot
in some publicity campaign.
The first step to freedom
is not just to
change reality to
fit your dreams -
it's to change
the way you dream.
And again, this hurts
because all satisfactions
we have come from
our dreams.
The great supreme
commander chairman Mao
issued a world shaking
call to us:
you should pay attention
to state affairs
and carry the great proletarian
Cultural Revolution
through to the end.
One of the big problems
of all great
revolutionary movements
of the 20th century -
such as Russia,
Cuba or China -
is that they did change
the social body,
but the egalitarian communist
society was never realised.
The dreams remained
the old dreams
and they turned into
the ultimate nightmare.
Now what remains of
the radical left
waits for a magical event
when the true revolutionary
agent will finally awaken.
While the depressing lesson of
the last decades is that
capitalism has been the true
revolutionising force.
Even as it serves only itself.
How come it is easier for us to
imagine the end of all life on earth -
an asteroid hitting the planet -
than a modest change
in our economic order?
Perhaps the time has come
to set our possibilities straight
and to become realists
by way of demanding
what appears as impossible
in the economic domain.
The surprising explosion of
Occupy Wall Street protests,
the mass mobilisation in Greece,
the crowds on Tahrir square -
they all bear witness for the hidden
potential for a different future.
There is no guarantee that
this future will arrive.
No train of history on which
we simply have to take a ride.
It depends on us,
on our will.
In revolutionary
upheavals some energy
or rather some utopian dreams
take place, they explode -
and even if the actual result
of a social upheaval is just a
commercialised everyday life,
this excess of energy,
what gets lost in the result,
persists not in reality, but
as a dream haunting us
waiting to be redeemed.
In this sense,
whenever we are engaged
in radical
emancipatory politics
we should never forget
as Walter Benjamin put it
almost a century ago -
that every revolution, if it is an
authentic revolution,
is not only directed
towards the future
but it redeems also
the past failed revolutions.
All the ghosts, as it were; the living
dead of the past revolution
which are roaming around,
unsatisfied, will finally
find their home
in the new freedom.
I may be freezing to death
but you'll never get rid of me.
All the ice in the world
cannot kill a true idea.