by Gabriel Tupinambá

Christopher Nolan has done as much as he could to disavowal his own achievements. At least it seems that way, when a great film like The Prestige (2006) gets buried beneath the spectacle of his more recent movies. Both the Batman franchise and the Inception blockbuster describe great smoke labyrinths on the screen, which quickly dissipate given the insipidness of the actual plot and characters. Very much in line with the current trend in Hollywood, Nolan seems to have abided to the idea that making the story more complex means ‘humanizing’ characters and making things less ‘black and white’ - today, it seems, the shades of grey of the ink are more important than what is actually written.

The Prestige, on the other hand, doesn’t fit this model at all: none of the important character traits benefit the characters themselves so much as the plot, which plays with the tenuous symmetry between the two protagonists. Actually, the fact that there are two main characters is one of the possible explanations as to why The Prestige ends up being way too formal for Hollywood’s common standards: defined by their very opposition, the two characters lack psychological depth and must rely on the plot - on what is happening to the other character, that is - to have its own characteristics presented.

Adapted from a book by Christopher Priest, the film tells the story of two rival magicians - Robert Angier (Hugh Jackson) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). After Borden’s direct involvement in the tragic death of Angier’s wife Julia, drowned during a trick gone wrong, the two magicians start aggressively to compete, trying to top each other’s acts.

The whole plot revolves around the performance of a particular magic trick, called ‘the transported man’: the magician throws a small ball across the stage and enters through a door just next to where he was standing. Then, almost instantly, he comes out of another door on the other side of the stage, just in time to catch the flying ball before it falls.

Angier witnesses as Borden first performs ‘the transported man’ and then desperately searches for its secret, trying to create an even more spectacular version of the magic trick himself. This leads Angier to ask Nikola Tesla for an impossible machine which could truly teleport a person. Telsa builds it, but there is a catch: it doesn’t only teleport the magician - it duplicates him. One subject continues to be inside the machine while a new, duplicated version of him appears in a different location. To solve this issue, Angier designs a gadget to kill the duplicate that remained in the teleport, drowning him in a water tank - just like the one in which Julia died - every time the trick is performed.

But while Angier uses this strange technological device to accomplish the trick, Borden’s secret goes in a very different direction. When, at the end of the movie, we finally find out his secret trick, the fundamental contrast between the two magicians - and the two sorts of magic - becomes clear: Angier duplicated himself - Borden had a twin brother.

Borden and his twin brother lived as if they were one. They did it by alternatively dressing up as Borden’s assistant, so that from time to time one of them would enjoy the life of the magician - fame, wife and kids - and the other would follow closely, but incognito. And this full-time dedication payed off in the performance of tricks such as ‘the transported man’.

This brief sketch of the story-line already presents us with a semblance of symmetry that cuts across the two main characters. In this review we will try to show that this slightly unbalanced duality is very useful in demonstrating what the term ‘fidelity’ means. Until now, maybe one of the best examples of true fidelity has been Alain Badiou himself, who courageously insists on how the forcing of the inscription of an Event into a given situation is not a matter of morals or opinions, but of truth.

Let us be clear here: as far as ideology is concerned - and we are only concerned with it - we lack the name of a commitment which subtracts itself from the fundamentally egotistical dichotomy of egoism/altruism. Today, to speak of a fidelity to a Cause which is based on a rational understanding that there is something more valuable than the personal freedoms is to talk of nonsense. It is truly unthinkable that there can be a rational relation to an Absolute - we only seem to be able to think what this fidelity would be by using the names of the irrational: fascism, totalitarism, madness, naivety...

What The Prestige allows us to do is to demonstrate the passage from the irrational back to the rational. Here, the name of this passage is ‘magic’.

It is a well-known chestertonian motif the relation between Reason and Mystery: Chesterton, a great detective story writer, liked to show how christians are more rational than rationalists by arguing that the true core of a detective story is in how that which seemed completely irrational and miraculous can be rationally explained by the detective as he solves the mystery. This is the true miraculous moment. The detective story would be completely insipid if the murder which happened in the room with no windows and locked from inside would find a supernatural explanation. No: for it to work, the conclusion must be of such deductive rigor that the reader cannot but see his own bleak universe turned into an adventurous place - it is through reason that the mysterious appears, not by getting rid of it. To believe in God, for Chesterton, means to believe in Reason - as he says, those who don’t believe in God, end up believing in anything...

The influence of this argumentation on the realm of magic and magicians can already be found in other films, such as Bergman’s The Magician (1958), which is directly inspired by Chesterton. In it, the magician Voegler and his crew are invited by a rich man to perform a magic trick in front of an audience interested solely in finding out how the magic is done. There is a long debate about believing or not in magic in times of such ‘scientific’ spirit and the implications of this for faith in general, but, in the end, the fact that the magic is actually a trick seems to scare the venerable Dr. Vergerus much more than if it had been a supernatural miracle. Actually, the film’s point is even more radical: in the mystery, reason is the greatest miracle.

The greatest issue with Bergman’s film is that in order for the mystery of the magic not to contradict reason, the ‘unexplainable’ was shifted from the magic trick back to the magician. Voegler is a mysterious man, always silent - his assistant speaks for him - and, in one of his confrontations with Dr. Vergerus, the doctor says that he hates Voegler precisely because he personifies the unexplainable. So there is a certain supernatural quality to the magician, which allows him to rationally invoke the mysterious.

The Prestige accomplishes the final chestertonian move: the magician’s relation to magic is itself put to the test. But before we begin our analysis, it might be helpful to strip the structure of Angier’s and Borden’s characters to their bare minimum. To accomplish this, we will use ‘the transported man’ as the common point which grounds their opposition.

First, the elements of this structure: there is always a man, his double, a death, a medium and ‘the prestige’ - the magic trick’s conclusion, the moment of ‘dazzling’ the audience. This last element deserves some extra attention.

In the beginning of the film, it is explained to us that a magic trick has three ‘acts’: the “Pledge” - when the magician shows the audience something ordinary - then the “Turn” - when the magician turns this ordinary object into something extraordinary, to the audience’s surprise. Finally, we have the “Prestige” - in which the extraordinary is turned back into something ordinary, but this movement is not a mere ‘return’: the final surprise that makes the audience ‘jump off their seats’ is that the very movement of turning the incomprehensible moment into something ordinary and fully understandable becomes itself extraordinary. As Zizek wrote, in The Monstrosity of Christ, a propos of Nolan’s film,

“Is this triple movement not the Hegelian triad at its purest? The thesis (pledge), its catastrophic negation (turn), the magical resolution of the catastrophe (prestige)?”

(Zizek, The Monstrosity of Christ, p.286)

Before we move to Angier and Borden, let’s first test our structure in a sort of laboratory experiment - one which is actually presented to us in the film:

Quite at the beginning of the film, Borden performs the classic magic trick of making a bird disappear. He puts a cage on top of a table, with a pigeon inside (the pledge), covers it with a sheet and then squashes it. The cage seems to give in and disappear, and when he lifts the veil, there is nothing there (the turn). The magician then magically reveals the bird, which appears as if from nothing (the prestige).

But at this point, a little boy starts crying in the (very sparse) audience. Borden comes down from the stage and shows the bird to the scared kid, saying that he shouldn’t be sad, that the pigeon was fine. The boy, who probably had read Zizek before, doesn’t stop crying. He knows it is not the same bird. Borden is enchanted by the little kid (and later even marries the boy’s aunt). When he goes to the backstage to put away his materials, he opens a trap door in the middle of the table and throws the first, dead bird away.

The little boy had learned the hegelian lesson: “in order for the miracle of the “prestige” to occur, there must be a squashed dead bird somewhere.” (Zizek, p.286)

Our little lab experiment featured a bird, its double, a death (the first bird’s), a medium (the trap door) and the prestige - the bird’s appearing out of nowhere.

Angier fits this structure perfectly - we have: Angier, his double (an actual duplicate), a death (the ‘remaining’ Angier), a medium (Tesla’s teleported/duplicator) and the prestige - Angier appears somewhere else, out of nowhere.

The trouble starts when we try to apply it to Borden’s version of the trick. we have Borden, his twin-brother as the double...and here things get a bit complicated: because no one dies! And even if we try to ‘skip’ this and move on to define the other elements, we stumble across a new problem, because we cannot say that the medium is the two doors on stage or the resemblance of the twins. The actual means is the very way Borden and his brother live their lives.

Even so, the prestige itself remains pretty similar to Angier’s and the bird’s: the man who entered the door one is teleported and gets out through door two. But not quite: for us, the audience in the film theatre, Borden’s prestige is actually very distinct. Something extraordinary - not only the apparent teleportation, but the whole mystery of Borden’s figure (a mystery which put Angier in a very similar position to Dr. Vergerus’s hate of Voegler’s ‘un-explicability’) - is turned back into something perfectly ordinary.

So we have two questions to ask. The one of death: “Is there a death in Borden’s trick?” and the one of the medium: “What does it mean ‘to live’ as Borden?”. To answer them, we should first turn to Angier.

When Angier first tries to accomplish the trick himself, still confused as to how his rival managed to pull it off, his mentor suggests that it can only have been done using a double. So they set off to find someone who looks just like Angier - and they do find: an unknown actor who looks just like the magician. Things go well for a while. Angier is a showman, his trick is much more elaborated and well performed than Borden’s and his double does his job well. But Borden - knowing how the trick is done - finds Angier’s double and lets him know how much power he was over Angier. The whole trick depends on him.

So, things spiral out of control and Angier is humiliated as his double, drunk and completely out of his mind, blind with desire to be on the spotlight, ends up helping Borden to mess up the whole trick: Angier enters through the first door, but Borden comes out of the other door, instead of the double (who then appears all tied up, hanging from the ceiling of the theatre.).

In the same way that the little bird’s magic trick was an experiment with the same structure as Angier’s version of the ‘transported man’, this attempt of using a look-a-like is something of an experiment for Borden’s version of the trick. It becomes quite clear then that Borden’s secret wasn’t the that he used a double - this was, for anyone not willing to accept miraculous explanations, the only possible way.

The true mystery was somewhere else. Angier, afterall, found out Borden’s secret quite early on: Borden did use a double. But when Angier tested this himself, and failed, he also abandoned the hypothesis altogether. This is a really important question: Why did Angier’s failure to work together with his double amount to the failure of that version of the trick as such? Isn’t it that it was unthinkable to imagine that Borden could work so well with his double that they were not susceptible to the same, and almost certain, imbalance that power struggles bring about? Wasn’t this the real mystery?

When the two magicians still worked as assistants for the another magician, in the beginning of the movie, they went to see a chinese man performing an apparently impossible trick. While they struggled to discover how the trick was done, Borden came up with the idea that the chinese man led his life in a way as to be always ready to prepare that magic trick - which relied on him pretending to be older than he was, and a cripple. The idea of this commitment was not unthinkable for Borden - this was precisely how he himself lived.

So we know now that the name of the true mystery of the film is fidelity. The two brother’s commitment to their craft was such that they were ready to give away their personal freedoms, even their names, to remain faithful to their Cause. When we say ‘Borden’ we are not naming an individual, nor two. We are naming a fidelity, which cuts across more than one body. And as we name this mystery fidelity, we can also see that it is a mystery precisely because it appears in the conjunction of the question of death and the question of life, that we posed above. The question of Borden’s life is also the question of the death involved in his magic trick.

Around the middle of the film, Angier shots off one of Borden’s fingers, trying to get revenge for the death of his wife. When this happens, Borden realizes that to remain committed to their magic, his twin-brother would have to cut off the same finger, so that they could keep on looking like each other. Here we can see how the question of life and of death are the same: To keep on living, the twin brothers had to pay by giving up a part of their bodies - the cutting off of the finger has the place of the dead bird.

But not only that. The question of life also becomes the question of death in the final moments of the film, when Borden is sentenced to death by hanging. In a clear contrast to Angier’s final Prestige - when he reappears at the end, after everyone thought he had died in the water tank (where his double drowned every night) - Borden’s Prestige is not seen from the perspective of the brother who remains alive, but from the perspective of the one who goes to prison for Angier’s murder. The true mystery is not that he later reappears, but that he dies in order to live. (Suddenly, Joe Hill and Camilo Torres come to mind.)

We could sum up all we discussed until now in the following statement: today, fidelity is only thought as a defense of/against death. And since death is supposedly not thinkable, fidelity is a commitment done against the background of irrationality.

Let’s take Angier, for example. There was a traumatic death in his life - the accidental death of his wife, who drowned in front of him - and his will to revenge her led him to repeat her death every night: every time the trick was performed there was a death by drowning. It was against the background of an unfathomable Other - death itself - that Angier could keep on going, feeding it with the bodies of his own other.

Angier’s commitment is based on the disavowal of the dimension of death that is repeated every time he does his trick. But this is not fidelity. The closest name we have for this operation is...commodity fetishism. Just think of our previous experiment with the bird: Couldn’t we call commodity fetishism the idea that the bird from the Pledge is the same bird from the Prestige? Isn’t this the magical quality of the commodity, the mysteric capacity of real abstraction to coincide with itself?

As Marx (and more recently Karatani) already emphasized for us, the inversion of the relation between Money and Commodity in capitalism, summarized in the formula M - C - M' needs to be thought always in conjunction with the fact that this is actually a two-step operation: first M - C (production), then C - M' (circulation). The whole operation is based on the premiss that the commodity in M - C can be later sold for more money (M') than what it costed. But for it work, one needs to accept that the C in "M-C" is equal to the C in "C-M' ". One needs to equate the two, the first C - which is a product of work - with the second C - which is what is being exchanged. The inherent excess of the first C, the work put into it, which will not be payed for by the exchange, giving rise to profit, is disavowed when the second C (which should actually be written as C') is made equivalent to it.

The forced postulation that C=C’ is what gives rise to the production of surplus-value, and is the source of the commodity’s magic. Isn’t this precisely the same status of the bird in the magic trick? Doesn’t the magic trick rely on Bird=Bird’ ?

The little boy in the audience, who cried, had also read Marx and Sohn-Rethel, it seems: to guarantee the consistency of the commodity, there must be an unknown dead bird somewhere. The illusion of consistency is build on top of not-knowing this excess. In America, they call their money ‘dead presidents’ - quite an ironic coincidence...

Fidelity, on the other hand, is a commitment that is maintained not ‘in spite’ of the dead bird, but because of it. Zizek explains:

“There is, however, a key distinction between Christ’s dead body in Christianity and the squashed bird in the magician’s trick: in order for his trick to be effective, to work as a trick, the magician has to hide the squashed body from the audience, while the whole point of the Crucifixion is that Christ’s body is displayed there for everyone to see. This is why Christianity (and Hegelianism as Christian philosophy) is not cheap magic: the material remainder of the squashed body remains visible (...) A materialist does not deny miracles, he just reminds us that they live behind disturbing material leftovers.”

(Zizek, The Monstrosity of Christ, p.287)

If Christ names an Event, to remain faithful to the christian truth means to pay for one’s death as our very way of being alive. This dimension of death - which is not the traumatic beyond that comes after life - is what Freud calls death drive. It parasites life from within, reminding us of a past that, strangely enough, seems to call out for us from the future.

One can disavow this dimension - at the cost of dead birds, power struggles with drunken, failed actors, or at the cost of the lives of people in countries we don’t know the name of - but make no mistake: nothing has more consistency than something which is disavowed. It is this unacknowledged dimension which sustains for us the guarantee that everything else remains consistent - like the cartesian God, guaranteeing that subjectivity qua cogito would remain the same through time, and not only when it is itself thought.

The difference between Angier and Borden is that Angier exists as the consistent One, while the excess of his existence, the dead left-over, is kept under the veil. To protect the One of his ego, Angier produces an traumatic excess. But we know that by protecting his “Self”, what he is truly protecting is Death, this wholly-Other which spectrally returns every night, to collect a sacrifice. This is what we would like to call...capitalism.

The Borden twins, on the other hand, know that there is no “magic trick” without an excess - and that they cannot live without magic tricks. They live in the only possible way in which their fidelity to magic is not payed for with the irrational disavowal of its excess. Because of this, they invert Angier’s formula: they are faithful to the very excess, to death’s disturbance of life, and this produces the semblance of a One.

“Borden” names an inconsistent “Self” (Borden’s wife thought he was bi-polar!), held together by two unnamed workers whose fidelity to magic amounts to the fidelity to the existence of death drive itself. This is the true fidelity, based on a rational relation to an Absolute. In our day and age, the name for such a fidelity to a past Event which calls us from the future, inviting us to work from the position of the excluded, is Communism.

With Chesterton on our side, we can now affirm that those who believe in the magic of the commodity are missing out on the real mystery. The true mystery is that there is a position one can occupy in which death works for us, and not the other way around. Since Freud, there is something to be known of death, rationally. And when we consent to it, it is death which sacrifices itself. It is this mystery which opens up the space for a new Idea, which states that the price for our lives must be payed by each one of us - It was in the name of this same Idea that Brecht once wrote:

“[Narrator:] When the thinker found himself in a violent storm, he was seating inside a big vehicle and occupied a lot of space. He began by exiting the vehicle, then he took off his clothes and then he laid down on the ground. This way, reduced to his smallest greatness, he overcame the storm. (...) If the thinker overcame the storm, it was because he knew the storm and consented to it. This is why, those who want to overcome death, can only accomplish it by knowing it and consenting to it.(...)

[Instructed Choir:] Who then dies with your death?
[Abandoned Mechanics:] No one.
[Instructed Choir:] Now you know:
No one
Dies with your death.
They have reached
Their smallest greatness.”
(Brecht, the Baden Baden Lehrnstück on Consent)

Marxian Rating:




Michael Moore's lexical revolution

By Gabriel Tupinambá and Martín López

Plato believed that love and politics were gateways to eternal Ideas. But what are Ideas? Well, Ideas are principles, axiomatic guides we are committed to. If we refuse to live without Ideas (if we refuse to accept that there’s nothing more than bodies and languages), we are making a platonic gesture. And if we add a materialist (and maybe communist) twist to this affirmation, we accept that there are truths: unique, eternal, immutable and transmundane truths. Love is an ascent from sensible things into the Idea of Beauty. Politics is an ascent from sensible things into the Idea of Justice. Yes, we should shamelessly talk about love and politics in religious terms. After all, these are things that are beyond us, and, paradoxically, in us.

Ideas can relate to each other in basically two ways: communion by intimate participation (Koinonia) and dialectical interweaving (Symploke). We can easily think of the relationship between love and politics. Since love and politics are procedures of truth, love and political stories can be eternal. We can read Sophocles tragedies and feel that we have been there. We can investigate on the events of the Paris Commune and easily take the working class side. There’s no doubt of it: there are truths, and they are universal.


The world is US

We should start with a geographical analysis: Michael Moore made a documentary about capitalism that only focuses on the subprime crisis and its effects in the US population. The movie does not even mention the rest of the world, not only once. It is like only the US exists when describing the crisis of capitalism. Moore missed at least 300 years of history. This reminds us the imperialist motto: "think global, act local" and its obverse: "think local and act global".

The first version (think global) is somehow included in the second one (act global). Thinking local presupposes a global issue is represented, and acting global removes from your locality the element of a global struggle. Because -specially with Moore's argumentation- the focus is always very filtered: where he thinks the world represents an American problem better than America, he talks about the World. Then, when he wants to talk about poverty and unemployment, he turns to... Flint, Michigan (the city where he was born). There is a continuous negotiation in his choice of case studies and argumentation, trying to keep away from the particular, the singular, and from the general, the universal. We get this obverse to work precisely when there starts to be too much truth in thinking about global issues (since the true problem of capitalism is of the order of a –false- universality) and the particular cases of action were starting to seem like very precise appearances of the system's truth. At this point, we invert the motto and again we are back at particularities which only lead to general solutions which do not touch the base beneath the superstructure.

And that’s precisely the battlefield that Moore has chosen: We cannot talk about class struggle (that would be too much). Instead, we discuss capitalism in terms of lexical struggle. Let us spoil the whole film and go straight to the ending: Michael Moore puts it in blunt words:

“Capitalism is EVIL. We should replace Capitalism with… democracy”.

Moore’s Search for Meaning

In “Capitalism, a love story”, the whole analysis of crazy financial speculation and its consequences leads not to an encounter with the Real of political struggle, but to the Imaginary of ideological oppositions. And within the imaginary oppositional frame, one word can be forever exchanged for another, said to be its opposite, and still fill the same (symbolic) function. He could have said: “we should replace evil capitalism with democratic capitalism”, but “democracy” here is taking the vacant position left by corrupted, evil capitalism. The use of the word democracy serves the purpose of humanizing capitalism, giving capitalism a human face. (A pretty ugly face, we must say.)

A few years ago the word "capitalism" was avoided by the media. Saying the word “capitalism” meant that you had missed the End of History, that you were stuck in the past. Those days are over. Now even Michael Moore says we should overcome capitalism! The problem today is democracy. What does the democracy signifier account for today? If the word Capitalism can be replaced by the word Democracy and still fill the same symbolic function, what needs to happen in order to question the basis of what we call democracy?

A nice way to think about this is to take the word democracy back into its etymological origin - because 'demos' (common people) comes from 'damo' which means 'district' or 'to divide'. Though democracy is normally thought as 'the power that is not in the hand of One but in the hand of the Many', we should maybe turn it - through this 'divide' aspect of the word - into 'the power that is in the hand of the One but applied by the hand of the Many', which means we can divide the face of Capital (the One is always faceless) into the many faces of the people.

According to Badiou, capitalism is the first socio-economic order deprived of meaning. Capitalism does not provide meaning to the world(s) we live in. There is no "capitalist point of view", nor "capitalist civilization". However, meaning is there, always trying to find its way. Religions, individualistic permissiveness, spiritualism... it's all about providing meaning. The lack of meaning caused by the social order is opposed by a frantic escape from reality. Meaning comes in handy to deal with a subjectivity tied to the state of the situation. The dirty job of controlling economy, providing the means of life is left to capitalism... why? Because it simply "works". This is another dimension of the homosacerization of human existence.

On the other hand, the frantic advocation of an abstract "change" (or “replacement”) is thus nothing but a redoubled reactionary effort to keep the Statu Quo. Here is where the multicultural, humanistic and tolerant discourse becomes more and more an archaic and fundamentalist predicament.

We can apply the same relation between historicizing and Ground/End of History to the place of meaning today... everything is under the flux of meaning/sense because there is one solid, senseless ground on top of which all discourses are being constructed, and this ground, driven further and further away from its name, ideology, is now the closest it's ever been to being called Nature.

That's why secular liberals try so hard to reduce capitalism to "human nature". It also explains why anti-speciesists try to conceive democracy among species. And it also explains why these very same liberals pretend post-welfare-state "risk societies" are seen as new opportunities of freedom. Did you lose your job? Nevermind! It's a great opportunity to develop your true vocation. Have you been working for the same company for more than 3 years? You are not prepared for the change! You have to adapt or disappear! The very instability of life is seen as a dynamic positive force of constant renovation. Otherwise you are told you are not prepared for "the market", that you are not brave enough to assume your "freedom", that you deserve to be stick to your old stable forms of existence.

Just remember that ‘Up in The Air’ movie, with George Clooney, where his job is exactly firing people but turning it into an opportunity for them to develop themselves....

As John Gray puts it: “We are forced to live as if we were free." (John Gray, Straw Dogs)


Freedom as free domination

So here’s another question: what does the freedom signifier account for today? Why is it that freedom always means freedom to exploit workers, fire employees, approve financial bailouts, invade countries and deport immigrants, or on the other hand, it means freedom to enjoy? Couldn't we say that 'freedom' became the signifier not of our commitment to a cause, but of its commitment to us? Freedom is first and foremost the choice to value something more than life (in Lacanese: the name-of-the-father, as when Lacan says:"father is the signifier that stands for life"), but now Life is (said to be) the name of the Cause itself: so we are constantly under the imperative to abdicate our commitments, to be constantly open to 'freedom' (of having no higher commitments) to exchange a fundamental choice (the name of the father) for superficial choices (which pillow do you prefer? which coffee? etc. etc.) We could say that the signifier freedom is the operator of the division of Power's effectiveness into the hand of the Many (while keeping the power's agency in the hand of no One) - which is the current ideological use of 'democracy'. This insight could maybe help us to understand why one of the most common reproaches to the communist project is the fear of the suspension of 'freedoms'. Here we should remind ourselves of the Communist Manifesto:

"You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend." (1)

This is precisely the freedom that is at stake when we, The Party, are reproached for our ambitions, with the argument that we want to do away with democracy and freedom: it means precisely the freedom of a few to live of the unfreedom of the many.

This new phenomena of openly discussing capitalism shows perfectly that 'freedom' operates this neutralization of the matter - Foucault used to say something similar about the 60's tendency to openly discuss sexual matters - it simply disexualized it. Moore's film 'destrugglizes' the issue of abolishing private property. This is a major issue today: how to proliferate an Idea without using its massification as a way of neutralization. Of course, some ideas are not easily digested by the predominant doxa. Moore is not the case: he might even be talking about the right issue, but he makes the active decision of focusing on the most generic and insipid aspects so that the issue can be fetishized without any problem.

So, back to Moore's matheme: If we are to replace capitalism... we will be abolishing the private property of the means of production, right? We can discuss that. Why not? Don't we live in democracy? Isn't this (US, the only country in the world) a free country?


Commonplaces

What are the consequences of living “as we were free”? Of course: even poverty is conceived a question of choices. If you are a poor and miserable victim of the system, it's because you have chosen to be a victim. This is totally compatible with other symptomatic displacements. For example "you have to live in a real world", which means: the logic of worlds IS one, because it is ONE. One world: capitalism, one logic: democracy. Humanity is then reduced to emotional content; we humans should learn to improve the way we connect to each other emotionally, and all this new-age propaganda. This point towards some kind of hunger for spirituality, for a theology of the Presence.

The common pattern of the widespread liberal slogans is this kind of pragmatic conformism. "We have to live in the real world" is a paranoid conjunction of our world. "We have to dare facing the world as what it is" means: "we must accept misery because it simply IS". Politics is reduced to history: In the current hegemonic discourse, the world 'as it is' is 'all there is'. We get the final disavowal of the Real of repetition, of the insistence of struggle throughout the centuries, in favor of a consistency of the Imaginary, history as a collection or archives of 'what there is'. This confluence of Imaginary and Real, the final naturalization of our fantasy, leaves us at the mercy of a ruthless Symbolic, which constantly addresses us as the superegoic imperative to enjoy (To enjoy what? The fact we can get the Real paying only for the Imaginary!).

But without the concept of struggle (rather than opposition) we lose the place of the object a in politics. We lack in our current discourse the coordinates to even state our situation as a failure, to locate the place where things went completely wrong, and the way we are attached to this failure. Because we cannot name the real failure, we can only change the names of what surrounds it, keeping the structure intact.

The emotional lack is more of the same thing. The objectification of the world is not to blame, but the individual who is not yet ready to enjoy it. However, the remedy to alleviate the effects of the commodification of social relations is further objectification. There is only one direction: Growth. Happiness is growth and vice-versa. Every time there's a plane crash and people die, the GBP per capita shows a small growth: Insurance companies interchange money, interchanging money makes the market flow, capital flies from one hand to another, and economy grows. We should be happier then! Our economies are growing!

Economies grow. The prices of commodities grow. Commons are converted into Rent. Economists say value has been "added". Neo-liberal free-market fundamentalists say value has been "created". In a sense, they are both right. They both have some part of the truth, but not the whole truth.

The thing here is all these predicaments are somehow genuine. We should paraphrase Freud; this is all caused by "Das Unbehagen in der Kapitalismus". The poor conditions of existence are not to blame, but the fact that that “we are stuck in the past, prisoners of an outmoded discourse”, etc.

All in all the guarantor of exchange value is still human labor and exploitation. Where equality exists, there's no revenue. There where capitalist production relations do not exist, they are installed with violence. From then on, the common pattern of exchange is human labor. No matter how fetish is what you're buying, you're paying with your work because someone took ownership of it before. There could be human labor objectified in the commons, or not. Either way, capitalism cannot escape but forwards.


Structural problems

We should ask ourselves whether or not capitalism can be conceived as an organic totalization (that could be simply “replaced” by a low-calories alternative). Of course it’s the most totalizing social organization in the history of humanity, but we should not fool ourselves with the illusion of Unity. Capitalism fails. And when capitalism fails the State comes to fill the holes. Today, the State is the State of the ruling class, more than ever before.

Capitalism is not a self regulating logic that should be replaced by a new self regulating logic. We must de-naturalize capitalism and affirm it’s not a totality, nor a natural order that absolutely determines our lives. Capitalism does not respond to any “human nature”. On the other hand, the world is not unjust because there are unjust people, but because we live in an unjust system, a social order that excludes the majority of people, a productive organization that exploits the inventive capacities of humanity and appropriates the collective wealth, the commons.

We cannot replace this alleged Totality that operates in capitalism with a new Totality conceived in books and theories. That’s the big lesson we should learn from the last emancipatory sequence, that of Lenin and Mao. If we think of emancipation as a program, as a pre-established guide for freedom, we are not changing the coordinates of they way this system tell us how to think.

Of course, if we are facing a systemic crisis, if corruption itself is systemic, the solution has to be systemic. There cannot not be any objection here: If we are dealing with structural problems there's no way to resolve them unless we provoke a change in the structure. The more patching we do, the more unstable the system becomes. No matter how many reforms are made, how moralistic turns are taken. That's the big question today: how to make a radical change in the way our lives are structured?

It's not the excessive State control per se what caused the crisis. It's not a value crisis either (even the Pope jumps into that train). It's a crisis of capitalism, not a crisis of State intervention. It's global capitalism itself going out of control (once again and counting). At this point we know very well that we can't throw the dirty waters of financial speculation and keep the healthy baby of real productive economy. But don't get confused here: We should fully advocate the widespread liberal argument according to which it was the state intervention in the banking system and in the economy what caused the crisis. How?

State intervention is behind the interests of economic groups. The more powerful the corporations become, the more they determine the vicissitudes of the state. Marx already said it, 150 years ago: The state is the state of the ruling class. This is today more true than ever! It was Badiou who developed the ontology of this political statement: the State is the state of the situation. Yes, there are classes... and they struggle! The fact that the modern state intervenes the economy is derived from the existence of social classes. The existence of a particular social class that has to sell labor in order to survive IS Capitalism! So yes, if you want it to put it that way: State intervention caused the crisis, because Capitalism caused State intervention.

It is time to accept that we can't overcome capitalism from inside the State. We have to overcome capitalism AND the State. Only then we will be able to talk about democracy. We know very well the "market" is not the solution, nor the "state". The solution is politics. And, to cite Badiou once again, only emancipatory politics are worthwhile.

With Moore’s documentary, instead of discussing the structural problems of “replacing capitalism”, we get the perverse turn of the cold inhuman corrupted corporations undermining democracy values. The song remains the same... human rights, individual freedoms, etc. We can say whatever we want, as far as it does not concern what is going on in the antagonistic basis of our societies.


The proletariat disavowal issue

This particular film is actually quite funny in this aspect: his explicit objective is to talk about the relation between people that is hidden within ‘derivatives’ - but Moore gives the critic of the fetish a new twist, by fetishizing the very people whose hidden relation he was about to show - after all, he made Flint into the signifier of the whole Third World! - the derivatives synthesize the relation between...rich and “poor” Americans.

Misery can be understood as the exploitation by Capital of the signifier of Life. Hence Homo Sacer is the contemporary subject, the proletariat is not a class of individuals, but the incapability of relating to onself as part of a class, the lack of a relation to this More-Than-Life which makes life worthwhile, through which a group of people can gather not because of their particularities (minorities discourse) but through their singularity (true political movement).

In the same way that, instead of pointing to the constitutive issue, each crisis finds a new constituted culprit - a war, greedy corporations, etc etc - there is always a new constituted exploited, instead of the constitutive ones, the proletariat!

Moore’s pick, as we said above, is ‘the worker from Flint’. In film genre terms, Moore is like an American indie film director, who thinks that the renegades from society are the ‘common people’ who work shitty jobs in bars and supermarkets and have low aspirations and dreams, and just “hang out’ (a kind of ‘Clerks’ type of character).

The main structure at work in the whole ‘proletariat disavowal’ narrative structure is that the struggle needs to be neutralized by taking away its weight, making it not fundamental and basic, but the product of a certain political/scientific/mystical configuration. So there are ‘outcasts’ but it is a moral matter, not a ‘hontological’ issue (Lacan writes ontology with ‘h’ -as in ‘honte’, which means shame). If you choose a Scientific Big Other to fill in the irreducible gap of the class struggle, then you get scientific outcasts: bad experiments, aliens, etc - if the Big Other is a Mystical figure, then we get fairies, monsters, etc...

Žižek comments on how the place of work in culture is becoming the locus of obscenity today:

"In today's predominant ideological perception, I'm tempted to claim work itself - that is to say manual labor as opposed to so-called symbolic activity - work, not sex is more and more becoming the site of obscene indecency to be concealed from the public eye. The tradition which goes back to Wagner's opera, Rhinegold, or to Fritz Lang's film, Metropolis, the tradition in which the working process takes place underground, in dark caves, today culminates in the millions of anonymous workers sweating in the Third World factories, from Chinese gulags to Indonesian assembly lines. In their invisibility the West can afford itself to babble about the so-called disappearing working class. Of course, it's disappearing from here. But what is crucial in this tradition is the equation of labor with crime, the idea that labor, hard work, is originally an indecent criminal activity to be hidden from the public eye. Significantly, we ask ourselves a simple question: Where in Hollywood films do we see still today the production process in all its intensity? I claim, as far as I remember, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, only at one place: in James Bond or similar films when the good guy, James Bond the agent, penetrates the fortress of the master criminal. And then you see it's either the drug processing or putting together of some lethal weapon. That's the only place where you see the production process. Of course, the function of the agent is then to explode, to destroy, to repress again this sight of production." (2)

More, Michael, More

In Moore’s film the capitalist values are so deeply rooted in him, in his very critique of the system, that he can actually point his finger everywhere and trash-talk the way of life which supports him in such a way that even if the whole system came actually to the ground with his film, just the fact that Moore exists would be enough to rebuild it all again exactly as it was before!! This relates back to the issue of ‘freedom’ today: Moore is free to complain about anything - as long as he doesn’t have any other higher commitment than this ‘to be free’, he doesn’t propose anything else instead of the thing he complains about - and this commitment to noncommitment is the very name of the passion of the subject of capitalism!

Nietzsche was already aware of this, when he wrote about passive nihilism which - against active nihilism (to will Nothingness) - wills nonwillingness. And Alenka Zupančič even asks if this is not one of the appearances of Badiou’s “passion of the real”: such a violent dismissal of ‘representation’ in favor of ‘pure presence’ that the very notion of an Ideal needs to be emptied out (not even Emptiness can stand as an Ideal)

And this is something we can say of documentaries in general: the passion of the real appears today both as the passion of historicization and the passion of documentation (they often convergence... Foucault’s archeology being a good name for it). There are but a few documentary filmmakers who really don’t fall prey to this trap... the temptation to think that to trust that either time (when historicizing) or space (when documenting) will guarantee some real...its funny, because if EVERYTHING was truly treated as historical and ‘in time’, one would have to ask the question “but isn’t the very process of historicizing in time as well? From which MOMENT are you historicizing?” the very fact that it is over a solid ground that one can reduce everything else to its flux in the history of situations shows that the will to historicize is constructed over the solid, steady and (supposedly) immortal site of capitalism itself. Talking about this new wave of documentaries, maybe we should talk about the passion of the Reel as well.


Fetishistic postcard love

The postmodern individualistic emulation of love is the denial of love as a procedure of truth. In the same way, parliamentary democracy is today’s false emulation of politics. Capitalism implies social relationships between things and material relationships between people.

The only true love story in Moore’s documentary is that of the love between State and Capital. State makes Capital think that it exists, like a God of infinit accumulation hanging above us, while this monstruous lover turns back to the State and endows is with the substance of an enjoyment that is beyond any representation of the people, its infernal couple.

Here’s where we should take Michael Moore’s title serious - ‘A Love Story’: One thing which has become increasingly common as a break-up motif is that one wants to focus on the ‘career’ or on ‘self-discovery’ or ‘being independent’ - as if those things somehow contradicted or opposed a love relationship. What is actually being said is that these aspects of life now have the status of a lover as well (and not only that the lover has the status of a job...). Also, and even more to the point, if we read the history of Capitalism as the history of a Love Affair, shouldn’t we actually understand the capitalist crisis from time to time as those fights between a couple which happen only to let off steam and release some libido?


On an end note

We should not forget about Moore's typical low blows: His bad habit of doing personal interviews and making the interviewees cry, and the way he ridicules himself with stupid games, such as entering Wall Street buildings with a sack of money and asking security employees to return the money to the taxpayers, and so on.

Not only Moore follows the imperative to ‘humanize’ the object of his film, but he goes all the way and does it to himself! This complete obscenity works as a guarantee almost - it is probably Moore’s buffonic attitude which allows for his film to exist in the first place (first you turn the position of enunciation into some pathetic stance, then you are allowed to state any enunciated, since it will always be neutralized in the first place, the Clown in the Court of the King principle)

Just think of it: In how many of his films do we see him trying to enter a corporation building and being stopped by the security guards? Doesn’t it build up the fantasy that if he could just talk to the CEO we would finally find someone who is accountable for the whole crisis? Maybe for once the security guard should not stop him, and we would be exposed then to the fact that there is no (constituted) master mind behind the corporation, they are as stupid and lost as we are - where would we have to look for answers then?

We know where: the true battlefields: love and politics.



Notes:

1. http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
2. http://www.lacan.com/zizek-human.htm

Keeping in mind that Godard recent film productions have been received by professional and amateur critics alike with the same basic approach - “it is a multifaceted film, it would take many viewings to unlock its many layers, and besides, it is a audio and visual experience, we shouldn’t try to intellectualize it too much, it is a film about everything, but about nothing as well” - it became clear that such a (unified) fragmented perspective should be countered with the text-form which can answer to both the recurrent aspect of these reviews, as well as to the apparent fragmentation of the film’s form: the dialogue.

As Plato already realized - back then, when being a sophist was a profession and people didn’t do it for free yet - the dialogue is a form that can answer to the apparent multiplicity of views that philosophy has to analyze and discriminate, as well as to the basic core of all sophistry, which remains the same in all of the different discourses. We will thus try to proceed with a dialogical review of Godard’s new film - Film Socialisme (2010) - presenting the following characters to develop our critique:

VA: the video-artist
FC: the film critic
CL: the cleaning lady
WE: we, the party.

Our characters meet at a movie theatre. The film is over, the characters are all seating close to each other - except the cleaning lady, who is standing in front of the screen, picking up empty Coca-Cola cups from the floor.

CL: Are you people leaving any time soon? I need to clean up your seats.
VA: We are all in shock, woman. Give us a minute!
CL: Why? Did something happen?
VA: Yes! This film...this...
FC:...this intriguing film!
VA: Intriguing? You talk as if you just saw a murder-mystery film! This is not intriguing! This is an explosion!
FC: That’s not what I mean. There is no mystery per se...
WE: I’m sorry to interrupt, but you don’t seem to be so far off the mark there! Just by hearing both of you, it becomes pretty clear that there is indeed a mystery!
VA: What do you mean?
WE: Well, while the intrigued critic wonders what sort of puzzle those fragments composed, you are in awe of the puzzle’s dismemberment - we could say that while he is interested in how the fragments could be put together, you are interested in how they cannot be put together - is that correct?
VA: Yes! The explosion of meaning! The priority of the presence of the images over their constructed narrative of their coming-together!
WE: How you both can agree that the film is brilliant while arguing opposing reasons...that’s a mystery to me!

FC: Hm.
WE: What?
FC: Well, the explosion of meaning, the fragmented narrative...this is not an end in itself. The beauty of this approach is that Godard allows us to interpret the film as we like. The meaning explodes and now we can think whatever we want. We are free.
WE: We are not free.
VA: No, I agree with our film critic friend on this one: the fact that I am interested in the power of the presence and he is still worried about the possibilities of the interpretation of this power, just attests to the fact that the great accomplishment of this film is to move away from the conventional film syntax, this authoritarian normative code which ties us down. Seeing a film by Godard frees us to think, like our friend here, and frees us to feel, beyond thought. We are free.
WE: I would like to understand better why do you both think this film attests to some kind of freedom.
VA: Don’t you feel it?
FC: Don’t you interpret it?
WE: I don’t feel anything, besides an itch in my butt, and I don’t interpret anything - I’m rather worried with the things I cannot interpret, very much like this itch in my butt.
FC: Allow me to explain - maybe explain is too strong of a word - let me present to you my point of view. Though I believe to be in accord with our friend from the art world on the liberating power of Godard’s recent work, it is probable that my broad interest in different films and film forms might make it easier to present to you what is new in his work, when compared to other, more accessible film productions.
WE: Please continue.
FC: The first thing to know is that we should not ask “what this film is about?” - the very fact that the film leaves us wondering about this is its quality.
WE: The fact that we don’t know what it is about?
FC: This is the difference between a bad experimental film and this masterpiece by the french realisateur - if I can already give away what I’ll be writing later on in my review. I mean, it surely would take more than one viewing to unlock all of the film’s mysteries...
VA:...or to assimilate all of the textures, images and sounds...
FC: ...that as well. It is a multifaceted film. But still, the thing which separates this from a bad experimental film...
VA: Let me just say that I believe that your position is very colonialist and authoritarian. Who are you to call a film ‘bad’? All films can have beautiful images. I, myself, have started a project to rehabilitate romantic comedies...
CL: Ah! I like those!
VA:...by screening them with a 300x digital zoom on a couple of pixels of the screen. It produces beautiful textures and images!
WE: To me that’s truly a romantic comedy! But please, my friend, proceed, if you like...
FC: As I was saying, what makes this film a work of art is that it plays with its political context as well. It’s form supports its premiss. This is the sign of a great film!
WE: What do you mean by that?
FC: It is a film about 'socialism', as the title already announces us, and we are invited to interpret the film as we like. Do you see the connection?
VA: I see what you mean. Its a beautiful interpretation!
FC: It’s just my point of view, you don’t need to feel obliged to accept it as the truth.
VA: There is no truth. This is the genius of Godard.
WE: Do you imply then that the film gives us freedom because it doesn’t give us truth?
FC: It doesn’t give us ‘a’ truth. You can construct your own.
VA: Yeah. Godard stopped being an authoritarian film director, trying to impose on us his view on the world. His films are plastic experiences.

CL: I know about plastic...People sometimes forget in their seats here those small plastic toys that come in their Happy Meals, you know? I take them all home to my kids. You just need to be sure they won’t swallow it!
WE: They are dangerous, those plastic toys. They come also inside those Kinder Egg chocolates.
CL: Yes, those are a bit smaller, even more dangerous!
WE: Have you heard of Zizek?
CL: No. Is that a chocolate?
WE: No, he is a man. He talks about these plastic toys we are rewarded with inside of Happy Meals and chocolate eggs.
CL: What does he say about them?
WE: He says that they are there just to stand in for the fact that the egg is empty.
CL: Empty?
WE: Yes. What do your kids do with the toys you bring home to them?
CL: Ah, they don’t care much for them. They play with the little cars and animals for two, three minutes, then throw them away. And I have to pick them up and throw them out, just like here, in the screening room.
WE: So the toy is not important.
CL: No, no really.
WE: And have you ever bought them the actual Kinder Egg?
CL: Yes, sometimes.
WE: Do they care more for the chocolate than the toy then?
CL: No, not at all. They rip the paper, then torn the chocolate apart to get to the toy inside. Sometimes they don’t even eat the egg!
WE: So the chocolate is also not important.
CL: No...


FC: Zizek is a funny little cultural critic, you know...his opinions are very radical, leftist. You don’t need to agree with him.
VA: Yes and he is very antiquate and authoritarian in his positions too... a totalitarian, old fashioned right-wing! Anyway, we are drifting off. I meant to say that Godard films are plastic in a different sense. The visual image is not conveying something more than itself. That’s what is beautiful about it.
WE: Are you saying that the beautiful is that something is itself? Would you agree with that?
FC: I see what he is saying. And I think that Godard manages to show us that the beauty of world is that we can have different points of view on things. So you can see that the title of his film is ironic.
VA: Yes, he is deconstructing the totalitarian notion of socialism. We have the right to define our own notions individually!
WE: That’s interesting - but if you remember what that old man was talking about with the young woman in one of the scenes in the ship...those were people mobilized around a single, similar notion...
VA: Yes, but that was just their opinion, you see? Different points of view...
FC:...and none of them are "the truth". In our globalized world, in need of tolerance, we need films like this, to show us that a unified Europe needs to learn how to tolerate all different beliefs and races. And a film which works by showing us many sides of the story, many individual truths, is helping us to think this new Europe.
WE: From what you are saying it seems that 'socialism' is now not a word to be opposed to 'capitalism'.
VA: Not at all! Capitalism is evil, but we are fighting it on different grounds now. We could say that socialism is the name of a strategy to create not a new economical system, but a new attitude in people. It has started already. Just look at Godard’s country: France. They have a socialist mentality and a capitalist organization. Though they know there is nothing better beyond capitalism, because the human being is a capitalist being, the artists are trying to remind us constantly that we are human beings all the same. Each one with his or hers own story.
FC: Precisely. You know, "socialism" is not some crazy utopia like the one those naive revolutionaries used to dream about. It is here, now, doing small things, thinking about the Other, hearing him or her. That’s why it is called ‘social’-ism. It’s about opening yourself to the social, to other people’s selves and their side of the story. That’s why Godard goes from city to city, showing us different terrible events from the history of each country.
VA: Really? He does that? I didn’t see it. I guess I was paying too much attention to the film to notice these hegemonic representations!


WE: I am very interested in understanding how you two can still agree on the film’s quality while also agreeing you practically didn’t see the same film. Would each of you, for the sake of making it clearer to me, mind summarizing the film we just saw? I hope I am not imposing.
FC: It’s not an imposition, but having seen the film only once - and it is still so fresh in my mind - it’s hard to say. I would summarize it as a symphony in different movements, a symphony on the theme of humanity - of how we all have different points of view about the world. It could be said that the synopsis of this film is that there is no unified synopsis.
VA: I would put it differently. It seems to me that there is nothing to say about the film because it is not a linguistic experience, it is a sensorial experience. This is also the political core of the film. It shows us that it is the skin that matters, the touch, in the same way that the film is treated as a skin, with different textures and sounds presented to us.
WE: So, if I understood it correctly, you think that the film could be summarized in the sentence that ‘there are only languages’?
FC: Yes, that’s a very good condensation of what I said. Though it is not the only one. Each one can have their own opinions about it, of course.
WE: And you stated that the core of the film is that ‘there are only bodies’. Would I be wrong in saying that?
VA: No, not at all!
WE: And you? Have you ever seen this film?
CL: No, I haven’t. But I have been in the screening room sometimes during the projection, cleaning up the empty seats when people left the screening before the film actually ended. It happens very often, and I can go home earlier this way. Even so, all I’ve seen of the film are the flashes that light the room and help me see underneath the seats I need to clean. But action films are better for that. But wait - is this an action film?
FC: No!
VA: Yes!


FC: It’s ok, I tolerate your opinion! But tell us yourself, how would you summarize Film Socialisme?
WE: Well, listening to what she had to say about the film, I must admit I don’t think I understood much more than she did. I know most people will leave this screening before the end of the film.
VA: They don’t feel it...the media is numbing us...
FC: They can’t interpret it...its the problem of the educational system in this country...
WE: As for where the problem lies - Again I believe to be in accord with what she said.
VA: But what did she say?
CL: Yeah, what did I say?
WE: The film’s utility for me was also that of shedding some light into places I had to reach, but couldn’t properly see.
CL: I did say that.
WE: I must admit: I came to the cinema not so much because of Godard, but of Badiou. I had heard that the philosopher would be appearing in this film. So this was what caught my attention in the first place. Then, like the two of you, I believe, who drew so many interesting conclusions almost exclusively focusing on this, I was interested in the title. ‘Film Socialism’. I wanted to find out what sort of film would feature Badiou and this word, ‘socialism’, together.
FC: What’s the difficulty there? Doesn’t that other cultural critic, Zizek, also have a film? Don’t we have now films featuring the word ‘Capitalism’ in a derogatory sense as well? We can all express our views now.
WE: This is exactly what I believe the film’s utility was.
FC: To show Badiou’s opinion?
WE: No. Not at all. Actually, if you remember it, the scene in which he appears has really bad sound, recorded from a far, so we can’t hear what he is saying, and he is speaking to an empty auditorium.
VA: Who’s Badiou?
CL: He is a philosopher - are you not paying any attention?
WE: And that empty auditorium was the only thing that I could think of from that point on. I watched with mild interest the pretty images of the ocean moving, the family walking around the petrol station, talking very superficially about topics connected to politics, all those people in the ship, that strange singer...
VA:..that’s Patty Smith!
WE: I don’t know who that is.
CL: Me neither.
FC: I also don’t know her - but that doesn’t devaluate her work, of course.
WE: But all the time I was worried about the double nature of that empty audience of Badiou’s lecture.
VA: What do you mean?
WE: I was worried because I could see myself inscribed there in a twofold manner: as the absent listener of a truth, and the absent viewer of a film. And I wonder if the two are not connected.
FC: You are wondering if the fact we didn’t hear Badiou speaking is the reason the cinema tends to get empty during the screening of Godard’s film?
WE: Yes.
VA: Oh...I don’t think you knew where to look...you looked at the film, but you didn’t see the film - do you get what I’m saying? This man was just one more body in the film - that’s why the sound of his lecture wasn’t clear, and also why there was no one in the audience to treat him like a master: he was exposed, deconstructed into the beautiful body, the beautiful image he actually is, just like the rest of us.
FC: Yes, what he had to say was just one more thought, one more perspective on the world. It is important to gather all perspectives, but you shouldn’t get too attached to any of them, otherwise you are not impartial and you might fall trap of some authoritarian stance. It is important to remember, always, that there are only different languages.
WE: Its a curious thing, the point you two are making. This is precisely why I think the image of Badiou speaking to an empty hall is the symptom that gives the truth of the film.
CL: I did talk about an empty room, but I didn’t know I was speaking about the truth of anything...
VA:..that’s because there is no truth, only...
WE:...only bodies and languages?
FC: That seems precise enough!
WE: “There are only bodies and languages” - this is what Badiou calls democratic materialism...

FC: That's a beautiful name!

WE:..which accounts for the attitude of including in the same series all different things, under the pretext that serialization has only itself as a guide, and no over-arching principle.

VA: It's ryzomatic! Yes!

WE:...the attitude which allows us to put in the same series this chair, the film, these clothes...

VA:...the experience of being here, yes!

WE:...labour...time...a woman...as if it was all just like chairs, or bricks.

CL: I'm no brick! My husband does say sometimes that I am 'stupid like a door' though.

WE: Well, against - or better, beyond - the principle of democratic materialism, Badiou argues, and I - we, that is - emphatically agree, the formula of a materialist dialectics, which needs to be affirmed: “There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths”.

CL: What an odd thing to say!
WE: Odd indeed. But when I think of Godard’s film, it frightens me that this goes unnoticed. It is not only us, the audience, and the potential audience of Badiou’s lecture in the film, who are deprived of this odd, paradoxical, supplement to the otherwise clearly stated formula of the film. It seems like Godard himself didn’t attend that lecture Badiou was giving. It was an empty auditorium - empty of us, of them, and of the director! To actually listen to Badiou would put in jeopardy the whole film.
FC: Why do you say that?
WE: Because if we caught that word - truth - somewhere, as a hard bone which doesn’t get dissolved in the ocean of fragments and cut-up informations, we would have to ask ourselves where is the truth of this film. And the truth of this film, as you two stated so clearly, is that it proposes the stratification of scenes and situations, the multi-perspectivist approach, the dissolution of truth as the very truth. This is proposed here as the Good.
VA: “The Good”...you are funny...
FC: Wait. Let’s indulge him for a second. Yes, this is the Good. This is democracy. And this is what this film does, it brings democracy and socialism together, by having a democratic approach to the discussion of the theme ‘socialism’.
WE: My lady, if I told you ‘I am good’ what would you ask me back?
CL: What do you mean?
WE: If I came to you and said - while trying to make myself useful, for example - ‘Hello, I’m good’...
CL: I would ask you “Good for what?”
WE: Exactly. This is the whole point here. When we agree that ‘there is only bodies and languages’ is the proposition that defines a certain Good - a certain mode of action, an attitude towards others, etcetera...we should also ask...
CL: Good for what?
WE: And good for whom?
FC: For all, of course!
CL: You seem pretty certain of that!
WE: You see? In presenting such a multi-faceted, fragmented view of the film’s subject - a subject which is itself mixed up in this attitude, because it is a film about politics, about a subjective stance, a position - the film hides its attachment to a very solid and particular position under the grounds of a welcoming of all opinions. It does welcome all stories. But it does more than that. It is the Empire of Stories. It is the sovereignty of opinions.
VA: Well, thats just your opinion, my friend!
CL: Oh...
WE: It is my opinion, no doubt. But it is more than that. And the fact is that I can answer you from a position that demarcates a disjunction from you - while you two have opposed opinions, but you cannot but agree on everything. Should I say that you two share the same opinion...
VA: No!
FC: Of course not!
WE:...or that my position is not one of opinion at all?
CL: You do sound different!


WE: You know what the only difference is? It is simply that I want to know where the work is taking place, and they prefer not to know. And because of that, the empty cinema is not a surprise for me.
CL: I didn’t understand what you said. But I must say that I agree that somehow it is not a surprise.
WE: Let us just for the sake of the argument agree that this film is a work of art. In the arguments both of you used to convince me of this, it became very clear that there is some sort of participation of the audience - feeling, interpreting - which accounts for the brilliancy of the film. Is that correct?
VA: Yes, I think you could say that.
WE: So my point is that the reason why this happens is because the film does not work - it is the audience who works.
CL: It does seem like a lot of work is involved in watching this film.
WE: The audience works, this is the truth of this film. And because most people do not come to the cinema in order to ‘redeem’ a film through their own conceptual powers, they just leave. Who would like to pay to work, and then to have the product of one’s intellectual labour named ‘Godard’? It makes 'Godard' sound a lot like 'Bill Gates'...
FC: Wait - Are you suggesting the film should be screened for free??
WE: Yes, of course! That’s the minimum we should ask for! There is a patent contradiction in the form and the contend of this film. Though I’m not sure it could be made to be useful even if it was watched without the audience paying for it, maybe the audience should get payed.
VA: You have no respect for the artist!
WE: The question is rather: does the artist have any respect for us?
FC: Oh-oh! It looks like we have ourselves a socialist here!

Right about this time, the manager of the film theatre comes in and gives a fierce look at the cleaning lady, who gets up from the seat in a quick beat, prompting everyone to follow her to the exit door. The three leave the cinema. The film critic goes on discussing the multiple interpretations of the film with the video-artist. We, the party, leave the cinema quietly, wondering what is the next word that might soon become a cynical reminder of itself.

By Gabriel Tupinambá

The Scene

After being rescued by Arab women in a public market in Abu Dhabi from men who were outraged with their flamboyant dresses, our protagonists are taken by their saviors away from the public gaze, where it is revealed to them that, underneath those women’s burqas, they are all wearing haute-couture outfits, just like their new foreign friends.

The Mise-en-Scene and the Ob-scene

Sex and the City 2 (2010) is the sequel to a film, which in turn is based on a tv series, which is itself based on a book by Candance Bushnell. To sum up the whole thing, let’s quickly turn to Cyriaque Lamar’ review of the film, which not only painted it with interesting colors (Sex and the City 2 as a Sci-Fi), but also managed to condense the entire franchise in five bullet points:

“1) The lead of SATC2 is book writer and former sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica-Parker). Carrie is the main character but also the least likable one. Her defining character trait is vacillation. Carrie ≠ SJP's witch in the seminal Neopagan documentary Hocus Pocus.

5) The four of them live in New York City and have sex (not with each other). They eat brunch.”
(We owe this reference to miss Luck)

The first question to be raised then is: Doesn’t Sex and the City 2 go against Lamar’s 5th bullet point? There are brunches, but there is no New York here!

This is exactly what the Scene described above comes to solve, giving a geopolitical twist to the portuguese saying that “If Mohammad won’t go to the mountain, the mountain will come to him”, which can now be read “If Carrie is not in New York, New York will appear to her from underneath a burqa”

The expansion of the City is thus made clear: It is not that the main characters traveled to another country - it is their country which expanded to include new territory.

But let us not be mistaken here: the operator of this expansion is not fashion per se, but the fetishistic relation to it - It would be a completely different situation if the other women displayed their designer clothing in their armoires, but to reveal them underneath the veil, as if they gave ‘the truth’ of their position (we are forced by men to wear this burqa, but underneath we are just like you!) is a completely different matter.

In his new book, Living in the End Times, Zizek gives a brilliant account of the relation between the veil and the face talking precisely about burqas:

“why does the encounter with a face covered by a burqa trigger such anxiety? Is it that a face so covered is no longer the Levinasian face: that Otherness from which the unconditional ethical call emanates? But what if the opposite is the case? From a Freudian perspective, the face is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing: the face is what makes the Neighbor le semblable, a fellow-man with whom we can identify and empathize. (...) This, then, is why the covered face causes such anxiety: because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension. The very covering-up of the face obliterates a protective shield, so that the Other-Thing stares at us directly”

(Zizek, Living in the End Times, p.2)

And he concludes:

“Alphonse Allais presented his own version of Salome’s dance of seven veils: when Salome is completely naked, Herod shouts “Go on! On!”, expecting her to take off also the veil of her skin. We should imagine something similar with the burqa: the opposite of a woman removing her burqa to reveal her face. What if we go a step further and imagine a woman “taking off” the skin of her face itself, so that what we see beneath is precisely an anonymous dark smooth burqa-like surface, with a narrow slit for the gaze?”

(Zizek, Living in the End Times, p.3)

In Sex and the City 2 the dichotomical relation between face and veil takes place within the scene, so that as we identify with the gaze of the main characters, which merely observe while the Other divides into two, we are on the side of unity. But, with a little help from Lacan, we can remind ourselves of a way out of this idealist, double-reality structure: the fact is that “it is not reality which divides itself, what gets divided is the subject when faced with reality”. And so we should turn this division back into Carrie and her friends, who are otherwise just ‘being themselves’ and ask what is the burqa they are wearing beneath their Halston Heritage dresses.

Many many years ago, in a land not that far away...

Knowing that the biggest mistake one can make with an ideologically charged film is to dismiss it as ‘just fun’, let us take this film seriously and do some serious historical research on its foundations. And what could be a better foundation to understand what is happening in the United Arab Emirates today than a look into the Achaemenid Empire, back in 400 b.C? We have a faithful source of historical material for analysis in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), Jerry Bruckenheimer’s attempt of finding a new Caribbean for his Pirates.

Many aspects of the two films point towards the fruitfulness of this historicist endeavor of ours: Both films pretend to take place in other areas of the Middle-East while being actually shot in Morroco - where they can get cheap labour and the authorities don’t mind the distortions of the portrayed countries’ cultures; the two films are accounts by the same group of materialist democratic ideologues (Hollywood) and were shot around the same time, so the ideological distortion in them take similar patterns, making it easier to cross-reference the discourses without losing important information due to lack of understanding of the political developments of the time, as it could happen if we went back to more traditional sources of historical data...such as a proper book.

So, let us turn our attention to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and see if we can spot Carrie Bradshaw’s ancestors in the background somewhere.

Prince of Persia gives a strange twist to Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce”: The film revolves around the turning back of time so that the same event is experienced first as a tragedy - the invasion of a Holy City by the Persian Army, the killing of innocent people, the forced marriage of the sacred city’s princess to a persian prince and the bringing about of the end of the world - and then as a farce - the invasion is not needed because the main character, the young, illegitimate prince who lived to see the consequences of the tragic invasion goes back in time and prevents it from happening, only to be rewarded with the love of the princess (and thus uniting of the Holy City into the Persian Empire anyway!).

This shift from invasion-as-eradication to invasion-as-appropriation could help us to understand the terrorist dimension of the anti-terrorism campaigns propagating quickly around the globe today, specially in the guise of the ‘tolerance discourse’. It is not difficult to see the conceptual problem with tolerance: It implies that we already have common ground with the other - otherwise, I could tolerate the other but not be tolerated! Zizek, apropos of Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion, writes:

“there are all the self-referring paradoxes centered on the impasse of tolerating intolerance. Liberalist multiculturalism preaches tolerance between cultures, while making it clear that true tolerance is fully possible only in the individualist Western culture, and thus legitimizes even military interventions as an extreme mode of fighting the other's intolerance - some US feminists supported the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as a form of helping the women in these countries...”

(Zizek, Tolerance as an Ideological Category)

Isn’t this paradoxical issue the one obliterated by Sex and the City 2 when the film posits as the truth of the veil the dress underneath it, a dress just like ours, so that the obscene terrorism of the Manhattan-girls behavior can be understood as “girl bonding”?

And the narrative of Prince of Persia tracks the opening of this possibility. It shows us the passage from a direct Mastery to a form of indirect one, one which first posits in the other a certain common ground, so that there is a turn from eradication of otherness into a ‘recognition’ of the same, thus making it an indirect form of subjugation, which cannot be tracked back to the workings of a Master, because the first step of assimilation was a given, it was naturalized into a ‘common feature’.

By the time the hero, Dastan, has turned back time, stopped the war from happening and unveiled the plot of his uncle to take the throne, what we find out is that Princess Tamina, the guardian of the sacred city of Alamut, would have given the key to the city out of love for the Prince. This strange redundancy allows us to sum up the film as:

1) First Dastan lifts Tamina’s veil, and finds horror and destruction.
2) Stop, Rewind.
3) Now Dastan lifts Tamina’s veil, and finds a woman who (really) looks just like him.
4) The end.

Not only this gnomic arrangement of the film already makes it clear that Carrie Bradshaw is a descendent from old Persian Kings (what would explain a lot just by itself), it also shines a light on the mechanism at play in both films. Couldn’t we say that:

1) works with the structure of Terror: the forcing of the Event, taking the veil off of Being, looking to force the Trauma by trying to escape the order of the Symbolic (the city was sacred, but they invade it anyway, moving away from the paternal-symbolic prohibition towards the ‘integration’ of the City-Thing)

But then, 3) doubles this structure, because 1) was the terrorist forcing of the Event - but after it happened the Terror should have been inscribed into the Symbolic order as a failed-Event. What the ‘second coming’ does is that it obliterates this inscription and turns it into the first movement of a real Event (Love, between Dastan and Tamina).

We should ask ourselves if the Trauma doesn’t come about not by the first tragical situation, but because in its repetition as farce, the first tragedy is left unnamed.

And, by the end of the film, every bit of the terror inflicted by the Persians (who are the bad guys in the film, invading Almut in the beginning, trying to kill Dastan when he flees, etc) is neutralized because we don’t have to inscribe it in the past, it got caught in a time-loop, it is ‘what could have happened’, an ‘alternative’ reality. This is the important aspect here: it never happened, but at the same time it did happen: It actually fills the place of the well-known freudian ‘Other Scene’ - The phantasm implicated by a certain situation, though not directly enacted in reality.

The Princesses of Persia!

And, mutatis mutandis, isn’t this the same ‘Other Scene’ taking place in Sex and the City 2?

Couldn’t we imagine that when the four friends left their hotel to go shopping in the market in Abu Dhabi, they had at first decided to dress more appropriately - but still their behavior offended the locals, creating a big confusion which ended with the brutal death of three of them, stoned to death because they didn’t know that making flirty comments with everyone was not well taken by the population.

Luckily Carrie escaped, with the help of a woman who was oppressed by her husband into wearing a burqa, and who helped her and taught her that they are share the same dream (Manolo Blahnik shoes etc). They then looked for a magical shoe, which turned back time, so that the american-quartet managed to re-live the situation, now dressed like ‘themselves’, and safely escape, because all the local women could identify with them now.

The passage from the ‘old mystical dagger’ to the ‘Manolo Blahnik shoe’ is also very fruitful to our analysis, because it is the very combination of the two which gives us the double dimension of the structure of the commodity: it operates a condensation of both Time and Space.

What was not clear in Prince of Persia gets explained through Sex and the City 2: the dagger does not only turn time back, so that things can be re-enacted, it also operates a change in space, it brings America to Persia, because this very re-enacting is done in accord to the most democratic materialist principles.

And the other way as well: We can now understand that the ‘shoe’ doesn’t only bring New York to Abu Dhabi (after all, the film is called ‘Sex and THE CITY’, not ‘Sex and MANY CITIES’), but it does so by re-introducing the temporal logic which is structural to the inner-working of the modern capitalist discourse - terror as the Other Scene, while the mise-en scene is of tolerance/love.

1001 Nights revisited

Another comparison which is well worth attempting to make is regarding the particular place of narration both film-fantasies.

Sex and the City (the tv series specially) works in an almost anti-Altman narrative way: All the different threads of each woman’s storylines are united by Carrie’s narration of the episode, normally ending with a ‘moral of the day’ speech, one last thought by the main character, showing us what they learned from the conflicts they went through. This can be set in opposition to Altman’s exquisitely crafted stories because rather than exposing the contingency of the fragments, her final narration (accompanied by hovering shots of all the characters going to sleep safe and sound) comes in to tie all the loose ends, to show us that whatever tragedy might have happened, it was actually just part of the farce.

Prince of Persia also features a sort of narration, but a slightly different one: Every step of the way, while Dastan and Tamina are trying to prevent Armageddon, Tamina constantly introduces new - completely out of the blue - information on what they are doing. They go into a cave, fleeing from bad guys, and suddenly she starts...”Oh, this is the mystical cave of xxx! If you do this and this, x will happen!”. Then the dagger stops working and the sand that went inside of it - before said to be irreplaceable - is gone...then Tamina starts again: ”Oh, but there is a secret place, where the wizard kept some of the sand!”. Most of the back-story she slowly unveils has no place whatsoever in the plot, or is related to things which already happened (a bad guy is killed and we see he was infiltrated amongst the good guys...then she says “He was an assassin, but he infiltrated in the order of the priests! That’s the curse of xxx!!”). Here, the farce is directly superposed to the tragedy as they go, almost bluntly improvised by the Princess, to make sure that the much more intricate situation actually turns into the magical adventure they actually want to live. (The american crusade for nuclear weapons in the Middle-East strangely springs to mind here....)

We should ask ourselves here what it would mean to have these entropic narrations removed from the films. Wouldn’t the Other Scene shine through a bit more?

(In a sense, this is a question worth asking regarding V for Vendetta (2005) as well, since one of V’s main character traits was narrating his own adventure as it happened, some sort of revolutionary subject who tells himself the revolution is happening now, so as to be aware of the moment of the Event)

Final note: Alice as a friend of Carrie

As a quick final note, it would be also interesting to sketch the parallel between Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Sex and the City 2. Don’t we get the exact same narrative structure? Woman with marital problems escapes to magical Wonderland to deal with her problems.

It is enough to shed some light towards the turning points in these narratives - they are always similar moral deadlocks, which end up justifying the intrusion into the world of an Other, the staging of this other territory as a place to articulate problems which don’t belong there, at the cost of their very difference. The disavowal of these deadlocks turns Descartes’ insight...

“I further recognized in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not necessarily barbarians or savages, but may be possessed of reason in as great or even a greater degree than ourselves.”

...into:

‘I further recognized in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not completely barbarians or savages, but are possessed by the same reason as ours, they are just unable to articulate them because they don’t know freedom of speech’

And wasn’t it that the way Tim Burton managed to transform Carrol’s Wonderland into Carrie’s Wonderland was by portraying it not as the Other place, the place where the Symbolic articulates itself without the inertia of our own imaginary identifications (even if there is an Imaginary consistency to Wonderland, Alice didn’t understand its coherence), but by turning it into a continuation of the same Scene? The whole Wonderland became a big farce staged for Alice to solve her issues with her family, by listening to everyone’s stories and finding they all share a lot in common. Underneath the Symbolic, Tim Burton unveiled a beautiful Imaginary tapestry.

No wonder the Mad-hatter became such a prominent character in his film - isn’t he the fashion designer of this Wonderland?