In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek

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

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

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

      The same interpretive key fits science-fiction catastrophe films. In a recent example of the series of cosmic catastrophe films, Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (1998), a gigantic comet threatens to hit the Earth and to extinguish all life for millennia; at the end of the film, the Earth is saved due to the heroic and suicidal action of a group of astronauts with atomic weapons; only a small fragment of the comet falls into the ocean east of New York and causes a colossal wave, hundreds of yards high, that flushes the entire northeast coast of the USA, including New York and Washington. This comet-Thing also creates a couple, but an unexpected one: the incestuous couple of the young, obviously neurotic, sexually inactive TV reporter (Tea Leoni) and her promiscuous father (Maximilian Schell), who has divorced her mother and just married a young woman of the same age as his daughter. It is clear that the film is effectively a drama about this unresolved proto-incestuous father—daughter relationship: the threatening comet obviously gives body to the self-destructive rage of the heroine, who is single, and has an obvious traumatic fixation on her father. Flabbergasted by her father’s remarriage, she is unable to come to terms with the fact that he has abandoned her for her peer. The President (played by Morgan Freeman, in a politically correct vein) who, in a broadcast to the nation, announces the looming catastrophe, acts as the ideal counterpoint to the obscene real father, as a caring paternal figure (without a noticeable wife!) who, significantly, gives her a privileged role at the press conference, allowing her to ask the first questions. The link of the comet with the dark, obscene underside of paternal authority is made clear through the way the heroine gets in touch with the President: in her investigation, she discovers an impending financial scandal (large illegal government spending) connected with “Elle”—her first idea, of course, is that the President himself is involved in a sex scandal, that “Elle” refers to his mistress; she then discovers the truth: “E.L.E” is a codename for the emergency measures to be taken when an accident that could lead to total extinction of life threatens the Earth, and the government was secretly spending funds building a gigantic underground shelter in which a million Americans would be able to survive the catastrophe.

      The approaching comet is thus clearly a metaphoric substitute for paternal infidelity, for the libidinal catastrophe of a daughter facing the fact that her obscene father has chosen another young woman over her. The entire machinery of the global disaster is thus set in motion so that the father’s young wife will abandon him, and the father will return (not to his wife, the heroine’s mother, but . . .) to his daughter: the culmination of the film is the scene in which the heroine rejoins her father who, alone in his luxurious seaside house, awaits the impending wave. She finds him walking along the shoreline; they make peace with each other and embrace, silently awaiting the wave; when the wave approaches and is already casting its large shadow over them, she draws herself closer to her father, gently crying “Daddy!”, as if to search for protection in him, reconstituting the childhood scene of a small girl sheltered by the father’s loving embrace, and a second later they are both swept away by the gigantic wave. The heroine’s helplessness and vulnerability in this scene should not deceive us: she is the evil spirit who, in the underlying libidinal machinery of the film’s narrative, pulls the strings, and this scene of finding death in the protective father’s embrace is the realization of her ultimate wish . . . Here we are at the opposite extreme to The Forbidden Planet: in both cases we are dealing with the incestuous relationship between father and daughter, yet while in Forbidden Planet the destructive monster materializes the father’s incestuous death wish, in Deep Impact it materializes the daughter’s incestuous death wish. The scene on the waterfront with the gigantic wave sweeping away the embraced daughter and father is to be read against the background of the standard Hollywood motif (rendered famous in Fred Zinneman’s From Here to Eternity) of the couple making love on the beach, caressed by waves (Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr): here, the couple is truly an incestuous one, so the wave is enormous and destructive, not the sootheing ebb and flow of small beach wavelets.

      Interestingly enough, the other big 1998 blockbuster variation on the theme of a gigantic comet threatening Earth, Armageddon, also focuses on the incestuous father—daughter relationship. Here, however, it is the father (Bruce Willis) who is excessively attached to his daughter: the comet’s destructive force gives body to his fury at her love affairs with other men of her own age. Significantly, the denouement is also more “positive,” not self-destructive: the father sacrifices himself in order to save Earth, that is, effectively—at the level of the underlying libidinal economy—erasing himself in order to bless the marriage of his daughter to her young lover.

       . . . and out

      Rather surprisingly, one often finds a version of the same family myth underlying even the off-Hollywood art films. Let us begin with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006), often favorably compared with Ulrich Becker’s Goodbye Lenin—the claim is that it provides the necessary corrective to Goodbye Lenin with its sentimental Ostalgie, by providing an insight into the manner in which Stasi terror penetrated every pore of private lives. Is, however, this really the case?

      Upon a closer look, an almost inverted image appears: as is the case with many depictions of the harshness of the Communist regimes,

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