Original subtitles

(reverberating guitar music)

(ethereal synth music)

(metal clanking)

(engine rumbling)

- 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.

(distorted chime music)

(slow-paced guitar music)

- "They Live" from 1988 is definitely

one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left.

(slow-paced saxophone music)

It tells the story of John Nada.

Nada, of course, in Spanish means nothing.

A pure subject deprived of all substantial content.

A homeless worker in L.A. who, drifting around

(wood crashes)

one day, enters into an abandoned church

and finds there a strange box full of sunglasses.

(tape scratching)

And when he put one of them on,

walking along the L.A. streets,

he discovers something weird,

(car horn honks)

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 see just on the white background a gray inscription.

(car honking)

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.

Realize 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.

- Alright.

- [Voiceover] 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. - [John] Come on!

- Stop it! - [John] No!

- [Voiceover] 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.

(car banging)

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 wellbeing

or whatever you will never get free.

- Look!

- Freedom hurts.

(choir singing)

The basic insight of psychoanalysis is to distinguish

between enjoyment and simple pleasures.

They are not the same.

(choir singing)

Enjoyment is precisely enjoyment in

disturbed pleasure, even enjoyment in pain,

and this excessive factor disturbs

the apparently simple relationship

between duty and pleasures.

(choir singing)

This is also a space where ideology,

up to and especially religious ideology, operates.

(choir singing)

This brings me to maybe my favorite example,

the great classical Hollywood film "The Sound of Music."

(metal squeaking)

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, 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--

- [Voiceover] So, Mother Superior sends her to

the von Trapp family where she takes care of the children.

- Hop and under (chuckles) Kurt, we'll have to practice--

- Do allow me will you?

- Mm-hmm.

- [Voiceover] And at the same time, of course,

falls in love with the Baron von Trapp.

(lively waltz music)

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.

These three minutes were censored.

* Climb every mountain

* Search high and low

* Follow every byway

* Every path you know

- [Voiceover] I think the sensor was a very intelligent man.

He knew, as probably an atheist communist,

where the power of attraction of Catholic religion resides.

* Rainbow, 'till you find your dream.

* A dream

- [Voiceover] 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, enjoy.

* Dream

* A dream that will need

- [Voiceover] This obscene contract does not

belong to Christianity as such.

It belongs to Catholic Church as an institution.

* For as long as you live

- [Voiceover] It is the logic of institution at its purest.

* Climb every mountain

- [Voiceover] This is again a key

to the functioning of ideology.

* Follow every rainbow

- [Voiceover] Not only the explicit message,

renounce, suffer and so on, but the true hidden message.

pretend to renounce and you can get it all.

(woman singing)

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 whatsoever.

On the contrary, they feel guilty for not

enjoying enough, for not being able to enjoy.

(gravel crunching)

(exhales)

(gravel crunching)

Oh my god, one is thirsty in the

desert and what to drink but Coke.

(cat meows)

The perfect commodity, why?

(cat meows)

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.

(bursting pop music)

The indescribable excess which is

the object cause of my desire.

(lively pop music)

In our postmodern, however we call them,

societies, we are obliged to enjoy.

(lively pop music)

Enjoyment becomes a kind of a weird perverted duty.

* Enjoy, Coca-Cola, enjoy

- 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 a 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.

(liquid sloshes)

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.

(cat meowing)

We are not talking about objective,

factual properties of a commodity.

We are talking only here about that elusive surplus.

(soothing classical music)

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.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

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.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

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.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

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.

(crowd cheering and chanting)

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

At the extreme right in South Rhodesia,

before it became Zimbabwe, it proclaimed independence

to be able to postpone the abolishment of apartheid.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

Therefore, those couple of years of independence,

South Rhodesia, again the melody of the "Ode to Joy"

with changed lyrics of course,

was the anthem of the country.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

(crowd chanting)

At the opposite end, when Abimael Guzman,

Presidente 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 favorite,

he claimed, again, Beethoven's 9th symphony, "Ode to Joy."

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

When Germany was still divided,

and their team was appearing together at the Olympics,

when one of the Germans won golden medal,

(crowd cheering)

again, "Ode 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.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

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 racists is embracing Mao Zedong,

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.

(dramatic synth music)

Here, I think the perspective of Alex from

the "Clockwork Orange" enters.

- [Voiceover] 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"?

(woman singing in foreign language)

- [Voiceover] And it was like for a moment,

oh my brothers, some great bird had

flown into the milk bar and I felt all the malenky

little hairs on my plott standing endwise,

and the shivers crawling up like slow, malenky lizards,

and then down again because I knew what she sang.

It was a bit from the glorious 9th by Ludwig van.

(mimics fart)

(man screams)

- [Voiceover] Whenever an ideological text says,

all humanity unite in brotherhood,

joy, and so on, you should always ask,

okay, okay, okay, but are these all,

really all, or is someone excluded?

I think Alex, the delinquent from "Clockwork Orange,"

identifies with this place of exclusion.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

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 carnivalesque rhythm.

It's no longer this sublime beauty.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

- [Man with Cane] Excuse me, brother,

I ordered this two weeks ago.

Can you see if it's arrived yet, please?

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

- Just a minute.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

- [Voiceover] 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.

("Ode to Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

- Pardon me, ladies.

- [Voiceover] Beethoven is not a 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 official

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.

("Symphony No. 9 in D minor" by Ludwig van Beethoven)

If the classical ideology functioned in the way

designated by Marx in his nice

formula from, "Capital Volume I,"

(speaking in foreign language)

"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."

(lively orchestral music)

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 the station house, you punk.

* Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, ya 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

- [Voiceover] The delinquent gang enact

a whole explanation as a musical number,

of course, of why they are delinquents.

* There is good, there is good, there is untapped good

* Like inside, the worst of us is good *

- [Voiceover] 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.

- [Voiceover] So one of them adopts the position of a judge.

(men arguing)

(speaking gibberish)

* Dear kindly Judge, your Honor, my parents treat me rough

* With all their marijuana, they won't give me a puff *

- [Voiceover] Then, the psychological explanation.

* Krupke, he shouldn't be here

* This boy don't need a couch, he needs a useful career

* Society's played him a terrible trick

* And 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.

(slow-paced orchestral music)

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 circumstances.

(operatic singing)

We all have this margin of freedom

in deciding how we

subjectivize these objective circumstances

which, of course, determine us,

how we react to them by

constructing our own universe.

(operatic singing)

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 okay, they are beating people,

burning houses, but the truly horrible thing is

that they were taking objects without paying for them,

(chuckles) 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 realize what this ideology demands of them,

so it's a kind of a wild acting out within this

ideological space of consumerism.

(fast-paced strings music)

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, etcetera, disintegrates.

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.

(gun clicks)

The great thing about the "Taxi Driver"

is that it brings this brutal outburst of

violence to it's radical, suicidal dimension.

(holster scratches)

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.

- [Voiceover] 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.

- [Voiceover] 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,

victimhood of her hidden pleasures.

(man shouting)

And fantasies are not just a private matter of individuals.

Fantasies are the central stuff

our ideologies are made of.

- [Prostitute] Don't look at him.

- Fantasy is, in psychoanalytic perspective,

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.

(tires squealing)

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.

(yelping)

(gun fires)

"Taxi Driver" is an unacknowledged remake of

perhaps the greatest of John Ford's Westerns,

his late classic,"'The Searchers."

- I take many...

- Scalps.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Voiceover] In both films, the hero tries to save a young

woman who is perceived as a victim of brutal abuse.

(dramatic orchestral music)

In "The Searchers," the young Natalie 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 street,

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.

- [Voiceover] 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.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- 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.

(guns fire)

(glass shatters)

Violence is never just abstract violence.

It's a kind of brutal intervention in the real

(gun fires)

to cover up a certain impotence concerning

(gun fires)

what we may call cognitive mapping.

You lack a clear picture of what's going on, where are we.

(men screaming)

Exactly the same holds for the

terrifying outburst of violence,

Anders Behring Breivik's murderous 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.

(speaking in foreign language)

(screaming)

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

theorized 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.

(drumroll)

* Oh, do you know the muffin man

* The muffin man, the muffin man *

- Pippin, Pippin, Pippin?

- [Voiceover] 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?

(suspenseful orchestral music)

There were different, even mutually

exclusive, answers to this question.

(suspenseful orchestral music)

(kids screaming and splashing)

- [Man Getting Up] Did you see that?

- [Woman Getting Up] Yes.

- [Voiceover] 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 threatening

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.

(water splashing)

- Alice?

- 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.

(suspenseful orchestral music)

The function of the shark is to unite all these fears

so that we can in away trade all

these fears for one fear alone.

(gun fires)

- Smile you son of a--

(gun fires)

(shark explodes)

- 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,

all his money in the bank.

He sees moral degradation and so on,

so what's the meaning of this all?

(tranquil orchestral music)

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 development, modern industry, yes,

but a revolution which would nonetheless maintain or even

reassert a traditional hierarchal society.

(tranquil orchestral music)

A society which is modern, efficient,

but at the same time controlled by

hierarchic values with no class or other antagonisms.

(tranquil orchestral music)

Now, they have a problem here, the fascists, but

antagonism, class struggle and other tangents

is something inherent to capitalism.

Modernization, industrialization,

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 the result of the inherent tensions

in the development of this society,

but as the result of a foreign intruder.

(people cheering)

Things were okay 'til Jews penetrated our social body.

(people cheering)

The way to restore the health of our

social body is to eliminate the Jews.

(inspirational orchestral music)

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.

- [Voiceover] 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 United Kingdom was John Major,

there was a kind of ideological campaign

to return the 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 mobilize us.

(metal clanking)

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.

- [Voiceover] If we look at the anti-Semitic image

of the Jew, it's crucial to notice how

contradictory this figure of the Jew is.

- [Voiceover] Jews are at the same time extra intellectual,

like mathematicians, whatever, and vulgar.

- [Voiceover] Not washing regularly.

- [Voiceover] 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.

(inspirational orchestral music)

We should never forget that the large majority

of these elements which we today associate with fascism

were taken from the workers' movement.

(speaking in foreign language)

This idea of large numbers of people marching together,

This idea of strict bodily discipline as our duty,

(drums banging)

the Nazis directly took this over

from social democracy, from the left.

Let me just take some other central

concepts of the Nazi worldview.

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.

(lively accordion music)

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 *

- [Voiceover] 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.

(man singing)

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.

* Embraces the bee

* But soon says the whisper

* Arise, arise

(crowd cheering)

- [Voiceover] The German hard rock band Rammstein

are often accused of flirting, playing with

the Nazi militaristic iconography.

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" by Rammstein)

- [Voiceover] The minimal elements of the Nazi ideology

enacted by Rammstein are something like

pure elements of libidinal investment.

("Reise Reise" by Rammstein)

- [Voiceover] 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.

("Reise Reise" by Rammstein)

- [Voiceover] 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.

("Reise Reise" by Rammstein)

(engine humming)

- So how does, nonetheless, 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 its 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 1% 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 ingeniousity 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 consumerism.

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 countermeasure,

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.

And 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-revolutionizing, 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 lifework, 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, at that point,

still 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.

(mechanical whirring)

When James Cameron organized 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, okay, drop down

and go into the first class gangway door.

I want you guys working the D deck.

- 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.

(mechanical whirring)

(distant screaming)

What am I doing here in the middle of the ocean,

alone in a boat surrounded by frozen corpses?

- Jack?

- [Voiceover] I am in a scene from

James Cameron's "Titanic."

- Jack?

- Which is the supreme case

of ideology in recent Hollywood.

(men shouting)

Why?

Because 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.

- [Voiceover] We have at least three levels.

First, there is what people ironically refer to as

James Cameron's Hollywood Marxism,

(fast-paced folk music)

this ridiculous fake sympathy with lower classes.

(fast-paced folk music)

Up there, first class passengers,

they are mostly evil, egotistic, cowardly.

- You know I don't like that, Rose.

- [Voiceover] Embodied in Kate

Winslet's fiancé played by Billy Zane.

- She knows.

- [Voiceover] This whole narrative is sustained

by a much more reactionary myth.

(laughing)

- Did you see those guys' faces?

- [Voiceover] 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.

- (chuckles) 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 intense sex in New York, the love

affair would somehow fade away.

- As a paying customer, I expect to get what I want.

- [Voiceover] Kate Winslet is an

upperclass girl in psychological distress.

Confused, her ego is in shatters.

And the function of Leonardo DiCaprio--

- Over on the bed, the couch.

- [Voiceover] Is simply that he

helps her to reconstitute her ego.

- Good, lie down.

- [Voiceover] 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, favorite, 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.

Revitalized, they can join their secluded upperclass 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.

- [Sailor] 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.

Okay, you had your fun, your freedom, that's enough.

Now, we again define the limits.

Again, the paradox is that precisely the Soviet intervention

saved the dream of, the possibility of

another communism and so on and so on.

So, here again--

(ship crunching)

through the temporal catastrophe,

we have a love story, which is at it were,

redeemed in its idea, saved for eternity.

(ship crashing)

We can ultimately read the catastrophe as a

desperate maneuver to save the illusion of eternal love.

(ship crashing)

(water roaring)

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 the right to revitalize

themselves by ruthlessly appropriating

the vitality of the poor people.

- [Voiceover] There's nothing there, sir.

- [Voiceover] There is a wonderful

detail which tells everything.

- Come back!

- [Voiceover] 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'll never let go, I promise.

- She pushes him off.

(mournful flute music)

He is what we may call, ironically, a vanishing mediator.

(weeping)

This logic of the production of a 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.

(explosive blasts)

This logic does not hold only for Hollywood films.

(speaking in foreign language)

- In the late 40s, in Soviet Union,

they produced arguably one of the most expensive

film of all times, "The Fall of Berlin,"

(explosions booming)

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.

(piano music)

The story begins just before the German attack

on the Soviet Union, when a 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.

(speaking in foreign language)

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.

(speaking in foreign language)

He tells her probably to make love.

(laughing)

At that very moment, there is the triumphant,

violent entrance of the obstacle.

German planes come, dropping bombs.

(explosive blasts)

- [Voiceover] 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.

(soldiers cheering)

This is what happens at the end

but in a very strange way which reconfirms

Stalin's role as the supreme divine matchmaker.

(singing in foreign language)

The scene itself, Stalin emerging himself into

a crowd of ordinary people, never happened.

Stalin was totally paranoid about flying,

about taking planes, but nonetheless,

when he saw this scene, he cried.

(crowd cheering)

- Of course, he, himself, as you know, wrote the lines.

(crowd cheering)

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.

(dramatic orchestral music)

So it's only through the presence of Stalin

that the couple gets reunited.

(speaking in foreign language)

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.

(singing in a foreign language)

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.

(metal clicking)

- Nice.

Everything clean, oiled

so that your action is beautiful.

(metal clacking)

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 epitomized by the well-known

movie and TV series, "M.A.S.H."

(knocks)

- Hawkeye?

- [Voiceover] 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."

even as a kind of an anti-militaristic,

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.

- [Voiceover] Trapper, this one's for you, babe.

- [Voiceover] Nice.

- Much more ominous is a kind of obscene

supplement to pure military discipline.

- The Marine Corps, one, two, three--

In practically all movies about the U.S. Marines,

the best-known embodiment of this obscenity are

marching chants, a mixture of nonsense--

* But I've been told

* Eskimo pussy is mighty cold

- [Voiceover] And obscenity.

* Is mighty cold, mmm good

- [Voiceover] This is not undermining,

making fun of military discipline.

* Tastes good, tastes good

- [Voiceover] It is its inner most constituent.

* Good for you, good for me

- 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.

(groans)

You little scum bag, 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 did 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.

* Here's my rifle, this is my gun *

- [Voiceover] 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.

* This is for fun, this is my rifle, this is my gun *

- 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 recognized

but are absolutely crucial as the point of

the identification of a group.

(frantic organ music)

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,

(footsteps echoing)

(wood booms and creaks)

older pupils torturing, sexually abusing the younger.

This same mixture of obscenity and sadistic violence.

(wood booms)

And again, what is crucial here is

we should not simply put all the blame

or all the enjoyment on the older pupils.

- No, no! (screaming)

- The victims even are part of

this infernal cycle of obscenity.

It is as if in order to really be a member of a community

you have to render your hands dirty.

And I think that even the Abu Ghraib scandal

of American soldiers torturing

and 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 a 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?

- [Voiceover] Lock and load!

- [Voiceover] I did not just run amok.

(gun clicks)

- Order, huh!

This is my rifle!

There are many like it, but this one is mine!

- [Voiceover] 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.

(dramatic strings music)

- No!

(gun fires)

(dramatic strings music)

- Oh, shh, shh, shh, so you think

Batman's made Gotham a better place, hmm?

Look at me, look at me!

(camera crackling)

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.

- [Voiceover] So who is Joker?

(maniacal laughing)

- If we're gonna play games--

- [Voiceover] Which is the lie he is opposing?

(handcuffs clatter)

- I'm gonna need a cup of coffee.

- Ah, the good cop, bad cop routine? (clicks teeth)

- Not exactly.

(buzzing)

- The truly disturbing thing about "The Dark Knight"

is that it elevates lie

into a general social principal, into the principal

of organization 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

is embodied 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--

(fist bangs)

- Towards 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.

(crowd arguing)

- So be it, take the Batman into custody.

- [Voiceover] 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.

(distant guns fire)

- [Harvey] I'll see you later! - Wait, are you going back?

(people shouting)

- Five dead, two of them cops, you can't sweep that off.

- [Voiceover] At the end, Batman,

himself, takes upon himself--

- But the Joker cannot win.

- [Voiceover] The crimes, murders committed by Harvey Dent,

the public prosecutor turned criminal.

- [Batman] Gotham needs its true hero.

- In order to maintain the trust of

the public into the legal system,

the idea is if the ordinary public were to learn

how corrupt it 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 is nothing new in this.

This is an old, conservative wisdom

asserted long ago by philosophers from Plato,

but 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.

- 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 45 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.

(crowd cheering)

- 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 it 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 legalized through elections,

but basically, we can do with you whatever we want.

(glass shatters)

- [Voiceover] Because that's what needs to happen.

Because sometimes, truth isn't good enough.

Sometimes people deserve more.

Sometimes people deserve 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 Dostoyevsky's

famous statement from "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.

(speaking in foreign language)

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 legitimize yourself

as a direct instrument of the divine will,

then of course all narrow, petty,

moral considerations disappear.

(people screaming)

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 totalitarianism

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 the Stalinist universe, there definitely is

what in psychoanalytic theory we call the Big Other.

("Farewell Of Slavianka" by Victor Fedorov)

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.

("Farewell Of Slavianka" by Victor Fedorov)

A communist experiences himself as simply

an instrument whose function is to

actualize a historical necessity.

("Farewell Of Slavianka" by Victor Fedorov)

The people, the mythic people whose

instrument that the totalitarian leader is,

are never simply the actually existing

individuals, groups of people and so on.

It's some kind of imagined, idealized 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 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.

(man singing in foreign language)

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 legitimizes

the Stalinist leader, the people.

(choir singing)

This is how I read the by far best work

of Milos Forman, his early Czech films,

(lively saxophone music)

"Black Peter," the "Loves of a Blond,"

and "Firemen's Ball," where he mocks

precisely the ordinary people...

in their daily conformission, stupidity,

egotistic lust, and so on and so on.

- [Voiceover] 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 legitimization.

(train clacking)

- 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.

- [Voiceover] 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, the "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.

- [Laura] 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 at Spindle's,

but I was terrified of losing the train, oh, dear.

- Oh, 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.

- [Laura] There's your train. - Yes, I know.

- [Dolly] Oh, aren't you coming with us?

No, I go in the opposite direction.

- My practice is in Churley.

- [Dolly] Oh, I see.

- I'm a general practitioner at the moment.

- Dr. Harvey's going out to Africa next week.

- [Dolly] Oh, how thrilling.

- [Voiceover] 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--

- [Voiceover] This precisely is

the function of the Big Other.

We need, for our stability, a figure of Big Other

for whom we maintain appearances.

- 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 that

she will never again see her lover.

- Yes, he's a nice creature.

- [Dolly] You known him long?

- No, not very long.

I hardly know him at all, really.

- [Dolly] Well, my dear, I've always

had a passion for doctors.

- [Voiceover] Then, we hear the

line of Celia Johnson's thought.

- [Voiceover] 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.

(gloomy piano music)

- [Voiceover] Fred, Fred,

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.

- (chuckles) 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.

- [Voiceover] On the other hand, you have here this stupid

person who is available as a confessor,

but there is not even an elementary trust.

- [Dolly] For months and months.

- [Voiceover] 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.

- [Dolly] 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 90s.

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 to listen to them,

either some totally ignorant bored social worker

or some relative who usually made obscene insinuations like,

are you sure you were not even 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.

(brakes squealing)

(mysterious oboe music)

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.

(mysterious orchestral music)

It is in this scene from "Brazil" that we see the intimate

link between bureaucracy and enjoyment.

What the impenetrable omnipotence of

bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment.

(businessmen blabbering)

- My name's Lowry, Mr. Warren, Sam Lowry.

- [Voiceover] The intense rush of

bureaucratic engagement serves nothing.

- Glad to have you on board.

(businessmen blabbering)

- [Voiceover] It is the performance

of its very purposelessness--

- You like it up here?

- [Voiceover] That generates an intense enjoyment,

ready to reproduce itself forever.

- Expecting big things, too complex to finance.

(frantic classical music)

Ah, don't let progress see those.

Between you and me, Lowry, this, no no,

department, tell records to get stuffed,

is about to be upgraded and the, ah!

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.

(knocking)

Yes, no, cancel that, send two copies to finance.

- [Voiceover] The adverse of this is a wonderful scene

more towards the beginning of the film.

- Harry Tuttle, heating engineer, at your service.

- [Voiceover] 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?

- [Voiceover] Of course, two guys come, they just want

forms to fill in, they do nothing.

- I called Central Services.

- [Voiceover] 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.

- [Voiceover] 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 that this is illegal?

(electrical booming and whirring)

Thanks.

- 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, another higher authority,

and your responsibility is to do it.

(inspirational orchestral music)

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.

(inspirational orchestral music)

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?

- [Voiceover] 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.

(suspenseful percussion music)

- [Voiceover] Who's that, who's following me, is that you?

(suspenseful percussion music)

- This is the ingenious idea of

"The Last Temptation of Christ,"

(eagle screeches)

(yelps in pain)

as in 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?

(singing in foreign language)

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 job was saying is true,

no meaning in catastrophes.

(slow-paced flute music)

Here, we have the first step in

the direction of delegitimizing suffering.

(slow-paced flute music)

- [Voiceover] Father, stay with me, don't leave me.

(metal clangs)

(yelping)

- [Voiceover] The contrast between Judaism and Christianity

is the contrast between anxiety and love.

(crowd arguing)

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?

(crowd arguing)

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?

(crowd arguing)

The idea is that Judaism persists in this anxiety,

like God remains this enigmatic, terrifying other.

And then Christianity resolves 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.

(crowd arguing)

- Father, forgive them.

- [Voiceover] 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.

(wind whistling)

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 or 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,

(speaking in foreign language)

Father, why have you forsaken me?

(storm brewing)

- Father, why have you forsaken me?

(thunder rumbles)

- 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 doesn't 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 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 nonetheless,

it retains a certain trust into the Big Other.

This Big Other can be called natural

necessity, evolution, or whatever.

We humans are, nonetheless, reduced to a

position within a harmonious whole of evolution, whatever,

but the difficult thing to accept is,

again, that there is no Big Other,

no point of reference which guarantees meaning.

(slow-paced strings music)

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.

Realize 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 reorganize his life so that he will be reborn.

(dramatic strings music)

- The cost runs in the neighborhood of $30,000.

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.

- CPS?

- Oh, Cadaver Procurement Section.

- [Voiceover] They use some corpse.

They change it to look like his own body.

They plant this corpse, stage a pseudo-accident

so that police thinks he is dead.

- [Voiceover] You know, Mister Wilson,

you represent something of a milestone around here.

- [Voiceover] And then, the agency

organizes an ultimate life

(slow-paced strings music)

in a nice villa somewhere around L.A.

They even organize a nice lady who conveniently

stumbles upon him when he is taking a walk along the beach.

(slow-paced strings music)

He is thus reborn no longer as a boring

businessman but as a modernist painter.

- Tony Wilson.

- [Voiceover] Called Tony Wilson,

played by none other than Rock Hudson.

- [Tony] Sure.

(waves crashing)

(lively salsa music)

- [Voiceover] 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 okay.

- [Tony] Yes, yes, yes!

- [Voiceover] But Tony Wilson starts to miss his old life.

(somber piano music)

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.

(somber piano music)

(light clicks)

The boss of this mysterious company,

a kind of kindly cruel--

- Hello, son.

- [Voiceover] 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.

- What?

- I said, I sure hoped that you'd

make it, find your dream come true.

Oh, you can call it wishful thinking,

son, but life is built on wishing,

and you gotta just keep plugging away at 'em.

You can't give up, and we can't

let the mistakes jeopardize the dream.

- [Voiceover] So what went wrong here?

The problem was that his past, in its

material existence, was erased.

- Well, here's your transportation.

- What? - [Voiceover] 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 organized his rebirth,

when the company provided 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 gotta

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.

(muffled screaming)

We should draw a line of distinction

within the very field of our dreams,

(muffled screaming)

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 idealized 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 lake beds

deposited five to 10 million years ago.

(lighthearted guitar music)

- The scene of mass orgy in "Zabriskie Point"

is a nice metaphor of what went wrong

with the 1960s hippy revolution.

(lighthearted guitar music)

It's crucial that "Zabriskie Point" was made in 1970

when the authentic revolutionary energy

of the '60s was already losing its strength.

(lighthearted guitar music)

This orgy is somewhere between

subversion of the existing social order

and already the full estheticized

reincorporation 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.

- [Voiceover] 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.

(patriotic symphony music)

- 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,

(crowd singing and clapping)

but the egalitarian communist society was never realized.

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 revolutionizing force,

even as it serves only itself.

(eerie strings music)

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 mobilization in Greece,

the crowds on Tahrir square, they all bear

witness to 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.

(eerie organ music)

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 commercialized

every day life, this excess of energy,

what's get, 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 is not only,

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 if we're the

living dead of the past revolution

which are roaming around, unsatisfied will finally

find their home in the new freedom.

("Boldly, Comrades, In Step" by L. Radin)

(eerie music)