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Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Zizek!
Scott McLemee reviews Zizek!, the documentary film, which he makes sound interesting and worth watching. (He says he always wanted to do Zizek! the musical. With Laibach soundtrack. That’s only natural. In the meantime, we’ll have to settle for this, which is very close to what Scott has in mind. Me? I’ve always wanted to do Endgame!)
UPDATE: Since he gets the assist (see comments), Matt wishes to remind of the sometimes-contempt in which he holds beloved revolutionary sweetheart Z.
Comments
Glad to be of service, John.
Matt is presumably referring to the fact that I visited his site this morning before posting. (Guy watches his stats, I guess.) I did not provide the usual courteous hat tip ‘via’, true. But you see, the hell of it is that I had already seen the piece last night (via Scott’s blog) and so Matt only reminded me. Thus, it is really via Scott, with an assist from Matt.
With this “assist” my stats should about double in no time; thanks!
Forgive me for vainly wishing to remind everyone of the sometimes-contempt in which I hold beloved Z.
Does Analia figure in the movie? (Analia is apparently a fairly common name in Argentina, BTW.)
’Contempt’, Matt? I’d be interested in your elaboration....
No sign of Analia in the film, unless she’s in the Buenos Aires crowd scenes. As I recall, the director indicated that filming was wrapped up sometime before the wedding took place. There is a sequence involving Zizek’s kid, though, who appears to be about five years old.
Also, I should have noted this: Zizek mentions in passing that he considers the greatest American film to be “The Fountainhead.”
Well it has to do with his persistently inhospitable take on a certain philosopher, as you know. One he superficially borrows from all the time.
That said, at his best he remains of course a brilliant and unorthodox thinker.
Zizek mentions in passing that he considers the greatest American film to be “The Fountainhead.”
The Fountainhead?!? I enjoyed a lecture on Kieslowski he delivered at UCI a few years back because of his analysis (despite the psychoanalytic flavor) of the characteristic dissonance between the words spoken by characters, the structure of the scene in which they’re articulated, and the placement of that scene within the structure of the film. He was all over Kieslowski’s ouevre. Here The Double Life of Veronique, there Heaven (which isn’t really a Kieslowski film), but his interpretations were consistently sound. It can’t be the same man who thinks that mess of a movie adapted from the novel by that tin-eared libertarian hack is “the greatest American film.” I think Matt elsewhere characterized Zizek as “a wildly inconsistent thinker” (I paraphrase), and while I was already inclined to concur with that assessment, I now can’t nod my head more vigorously without doing myself permanent damage.
(Also, given some of my previous encounters with Mr. Zizek, I doubt I could watch the film without obsessively counting the number of times he points to “deadlocks.")
While it’s an overstatement to call “The Fountainhead” the greatest American film, I do think it is incredibly enjoyable. It’s very stylized; the sex symbolism is over-the-top, in ways that are just about hysterical; and the turgid speech in the courtroom is like something out of a Stalinist propaganda film.
I’ve said it before and will say it again: Ayn Rand’s stuff is basically just Socialist Realism with every mention of “the proletariat” and “Bolshevism” scratched out and “the individual” and “the free market” written in their place. Beneath that kind of superficial difference, the aesthetic is the same.
Given that Zizek has a kind of nostalgia for Stalinist kitsch, it’s perfectly understandable that he would love this film—and maybe not just for its considerable appeal as camp. And there’s an essay of Zizek’s on Rand that makes clear that he considers her sexual ideology pretty close to that of Otto Weininger, another of his basic references. His judgment is perverse, but there are arguments to be made on its behalf.
Besides, anyone who can watch “The Fountainhead” without some degree of pleasure is too ascetic by half. I say that as someone who would rather be hit over the head with a sock full of shit than read Rand’s fiction.
Depending on the kind of sock (say one for hiking—durable, does stuff to moisture beyond my ken), that might not be so bad, really.
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