In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek

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СКАЧАТЬ children, displaying warm affection and tenderness towards them. Significantly, the dinosaurs which approach the tree the next morning and awaken the sleeping party, turn out to be of the benevolent herbivorous kind . . . Schindler’s List is, at the most basic level, a remake of Jurassic Park (and, if anything, worse than the original), with the Nazis as the dinosaur monsters, Schindler as (at the film’s beginning) the cynical, profiteering, and opportunistic parental figure, and the ghetto Jews as threatened children (their infantilization in the film is striking). The story the film tells is about Schindler’s gradual rediscovery of his paternal duty towards the Jews, and his transformation into a caring and responsible father. And is The War of the Worlds not the latest installment of this saga? Tom Cruise plays a divorced working-class father who neglects his two children; the invasion of the aliens reawakens in him the proper paternal instincts, and he rediscovers himself as a caring father—no wonder that, in last scene, he finally gets the recognition from his son who, throughout the film, despised him. In the mode of eighteenth-century stories, the film could thus also have been subtitled “A story of how a working father is finally reconciled with his son.” . . . One can easily imagine the film without the bloodthirsty aliens so that what remains is in a way “what it is really about,” the story of a divorced working-class father who strives to regain the respect of his two children. Therein resides the film’s ideology: with regard to the two levels of the story (the Oedipal level of lost and regained paternal authority; the spectacular level of the conflict with the invading aliens), there is a clear dissymmetry, since the Oedipal level is what the story is “really about,” while the external spectacular is merely its metaphoric extension. There is a nice detail in the film’s soundtrack which makes clear the predominance of this Oedipal dimension: the aliens’ attacks are accompanied by a terrifying one-note low-trombone sound weirdly resembling the low bass and trumpet sound of the Tibetan Buddhist chant, the voice of the suffering, dying evil father (in clear contrast to the “beautiful” five-tones melodic fragment that identifies the “good” aliens in Spielberg’s Encounters of the Third Kind).

      No wonder, then, that the same key discloses the underlying motif of the greatest cinema hit of all times, James Cameron’s Titanic. Is Titanic really a film about the catastrophe of a ship hitting an iceberg? One should be attentive to the precise moment of the disaster: it takes place when the two young lovers (Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet), immediately after consummating their amorous encounter in the sexual act, return to the ship’s deck. This, however, is not all: if this were all, then the catastrophe would have been simply the punishment of Fate for the double transgression (illegitimate sexual act; transgression of the class divisions). What is more crucial is that, on the deck, Kate passionately tells her lover that, when the ship reaches New York the next morning, she will leave with him, preferring a life of poverty with her true love to a false and corrupted existence among the rich; at this moment the ship hits the iceberg, in order to prevent what would undoubtedly have been the true disaster, namely the couple’s life in New York. One can safely guess that the misery of everyday life would soon have destroyed their love. The accident thus occurs in order to save their love, in order to sustain the illusion that, had it not happened, they would have lived “happily ever after” . . .

      But this is not all. A further clue is provided by the final moments of Di Caprio. He is freezing to death in the cold water, while Winslet is safely floating on a large piece of wood; aware that she is losing him, she cries: “I’ll never let you go!”, all the while pushing him away with her hands—why? Because he has served his purpose. For, beneath the love story, Titanic tells another tale, that of a spoiled high-society girl in an identity crisis: she is confused, does not know what to do with herself, and, much more than her lover, Di Caprio is a kind of “vanishing mediator” whose function is to restore her sense of identity and purpose in life, her self-image (quite literally, also: he sketches her image); once his job is done, he can disappear. This is why his last words, before he disappears into the freezing North Atlantic, are not the words of a departing lover, but, rather, the last message of a preacher, telling her how to lead her life, to be honest and faithful to herself, and so on and so forth. What this means is that Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism (his all too obvious privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism and opportunism of the rich) should not deceive us: beneath this sympathy for the poor, there is another narrative, the profoundly reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Kipling’s Captains Courageous, of a young rich kid in crisis whose vitality is restored by a brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.

      The ridiculous climax of this Hollywood procedure of staging great historical events as the backdrop to the formation of a couple is Warren Beatty’s Reds, in which Hollywood found a way to rehabilitate the October Revolution itself, arguably the most traumatic historical event of the twentieth century. How, exactly, is the October Revolution depicted in the film? The couple of John Reed and Louise Bryant are in a deep emotional crisis; their love is reignited when Louise watches John on a platform delivering an impassioned revolutionary speech. What then follows is their love-making, intersected with archetypal scenes from the revolution, some of which reverberate in an all too patent manner with the love-making; say, when John penetrates Louise, there is a cut to a street where a dark crowd of demonstrating people envelops and stops a penetrating “phallic” tramway . . . all this against the background of the singing of “The Internationale.” When, at the orgasmic climax, Lenin himself appears, addressing a packed hall of delegates, he is more a wise teacher overseeing the couple’s love initiation than a cold revolutionary leader. Even the October Revolution is acceptable, if it serves the reconstitution of a couple . . .

      To what extent, one might ask, is this Hollywood formula of the creation of the couple as the foreground of a great historical epic present also in other cultures? Let us take a look at the successors of the October Revolution itself—there are surprises awaiting us here.⁷

      Take Chiaureli’s infamous The Fall of Berlin (1948), the supreme case of the Stalinist war epic, the story of the Soviet victory over Hitler’s Germany. The film begins in 1941, just prior to the German assault on the USSR; the hero, a Stakhanovite steelworker in love with a local teacher, but too shy to directly approach her, is awarded the Stalin Prize and received by Stalin in his dacha. In a scene which was cut after 1953 and then lost, after the official congratulations, Stalin notices a nervous uneasiness in the hero and asks him what is wrong. The hero tells Stalin about his love problems, and Stalin gives him advice: recite poetry to her, that’s the way to win a girl’s heart, and so on. Back home, the hero succeeds in seducing the girl, but at the very moment when he is carrying her in his arms into the grass (to make love, in all probability), the bombs from German planes start to fall—this is June 22, 1941. In the ensuing confusion, the girl is taken prisoner by the Germans and taken to a work camp near Berlin, while the hero joins the Red Army, fighting on the front lines to get his love back. At the film’s end, when the jubilant crowd of camp prisoners liberated by the Red Army mingles with the Russian soldiers, a plane lands on a field nearby; Stalin himself steps out and walks towards the crowd which greets him joyfully. At that very point, as if again mediated by Stalin’s help, the couple are reunited: the girl notes the hero in the crowd; before embracing him, she approaches Stalin and asks him if she can give him a kiss . . . Truly, they don’t make them like that any more! The Fall of Berlin is effectively the story of a couple reunited: World War II serves as the obstacle to be overcome so that the hero can reach his beloved, like the dragon the knight has to kill to win the princess imprisoned in the castle. The role of Stalin is that of a magician and matchmaker who wisely leads the couple to its reunion . . .

      The same interpretive key fits science-fiction catastrophe films. In a recent example of the series of cosmic catastrophe films, Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (1998), a gigantic comet threatens to hit the Earth and to extinguish all life for millennia; at the end of the film, the Earth is saved due to the heroic and suicidal action of a group of astronauts with atomic weapons; only a small fragment of the comet falls into the ocean east of New York and causes a colossal wave, hundreds of yards high, that flushes СКАЧАТЬ