Friday, August 06, 2010


Grounded
(or the Materialist Base)

I googled "Zizek" and "Inception" and it came up with this blog post at The Parallex by a Sarahana.
Yet we watch a movie like Inception, and giddily wonder, What would Zizek say about Inception? We don't know yet, but a learned soul on the internet, who goes by "Berlusconi Youth", has dreamed up a plausible response:
Ish not thish "limbo" Lacan’s unbearable Real?
Ish not thish dream from which the only escape ish death not, indeed, the actuality of global capitalishm?
Ish not thish "idea" that, you know, ish planted and growsh like a cansher not the revolutionary kernel?
Ish not the role of the democratic-progressive Leninisht vanguard Party to plant thish revolutionary kernal in the mindsh of the mashes?
Fredric Jameson's review of Zizek's opus The Parallax View.
What can this possibly have to do with popular culture? Let’s take a Hollywood product, say, Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944). (Maybe now Fritz Lang belongs to high culture rather than mass culture, but anyway . . .) Edward G. Robinson is a mild-mannered professor who, leaving his peaceful club one night, gets caught up in a web of love and murder. We think we are watching a thriller. At length, he takes refuge in his club again, falls asleep from exhaustion, and wakes up: it was all a dream. The movie has done the interpretation for us, by way of Lang’s capitulation to the cheap Hollywood insistence on happy endings. But in reality -- which is to say in the true appearance -- Edward G. Robinson ‘is not a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor dreaming that he is a murderer, but a murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor’. Hollywood’s censorship is therefore not some puritanical, uptight middle-class mechanism for repressing the obscene, nasty, antisocial, violent underside of life: it is, rather, the technique for revealing it.
 Berlusconi Youth is probably a reference to Zizek's piece titled "Berlusconi in Tehran."

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