Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Frontline by Slavoj Zizek

Frans Tassigny

Description

Ideology in Hollywood? Let’s begin, quite arbitrarily, with Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001, scenario by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris), which takes place in 1943, among the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park working day and night to crack the German “Enigma” code. They are rejoined by Tom Jericho, a troubled working class mathematical genius who is back after a period of recuperation brought on by overwork and an unhappy love affair with Claire, the easygoing fatal beauty, which led to his psychic breakdown.
  [Moins]

Informations

• Publié par: Une-Universite-de-la-Psychanalyse
• Nombre de lectures: 7
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hollywood Today:
Report from an Ideological
Frontline
Slavoj Zizek
Ideology in Hollywood? Let’s begin, quite arbitrarily, with Michael
Apted’s Enigma (2001, scenario by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert
Harris), which takes place in 1943, among the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park
working day and night to crack the German “Enigma” code. They are rejoined by
Tom Jericho, a troubled working class mathematical genius who is back after a
period of recuperation brought on by overwork and an unhappy love afair with
Claire, the easygoing fatal beauty, which led to his psychic breakdown. Jericho
immediately tries to see Claire again and fnds she has mysteriously disappeared.
He enlists the help of Claire’s housemate Hester to follow the trail of clues and
learn what has happened to her; the two repeatedly break the rules of the
Bletchley Park establishment and the law as their hunt gets more intense. Jericho
is closely watched by Wigram, an upper class MI5 agent, who plays cat and
mouse with him throughout the flm. Jericho is tolerated at the Park, despite his
transgressions, because of the brilliant plan he invents for uncovering the new
key. Tom and Hester at the same time uncover a British government plot to bury
the intelligence information of the Katyn massacre for fear it might weaken
American willingness to remain in the war on the same side as the Soviet Union.
This in turn leads to their discovery that a Polish cryptanalyst Jozef Pukowski was
so incensed by his own learning of the massacre that he is prepared to betray
Bletchley’s secrets to the Nazis in order to take revenge on Stalin. The fate of
Clair remains unclear to the end: was she killed or just disappeared? All we learn
is that she was in reality also a MI5 agent under Wigram’s control.
The flm was criticized for its manipulation of historical facts: apart from minor a
series of changes (say, the only known traitor at Bletchley Park was John Cairncross, who worked for the Soviet Union), the flm’s biggest alteration
concerns the character of Jericho who is obviously a sanitized version of the
legendary Alan Turing, a key fgure at the real Bletchley Park in both the cracking
of Enigma and the development of the digital computer; in the 1950s Turing was
prosecuted for homosexual acts, lost his security clearance, and submitted to
brutal chemical treatment, which resulted in his suicide in 1954. In the flm, a
frmly heterosexual Turing-Jericho fnally gets over his traumatic crush on Claire –
in the fnal scene, we see him in 1946, meeting Hester, pregnant with his child, in
front of the National Gallery in London… [1]
However, such an analysis moves at the level of what one is tempted to call
constituted ideology, following the distinction proposed by Alain Badiou between
two types (or, rather, levels) of corruption in democracy: the de facto empirical
corruption, and the corruption that pertains to the very form of democracy with
its reduction of politics to the negotiation of private interests. In a homologous
way, one should distinguish between constituted ideology – empirical
manipulations and distortions at the level of content – and constituent ideology –
the ideological form which providers the coordinates of the very space within
which the content is located. [2]
To discern the contours of the “constituent ideology” of Enigma, one should focus
on how the flm rather obviously plays upon the register of two enigmas: the
enigma of the German secret code and the enigma of the Woman. No matter how
complex the military codes are, they can be cracked – the true enigma which
cannot ever be cracked is woman. (The split between Claire and Hester is crucial
here: the only way for a man to normalize sexual relation is to erase the
enigmatic Woman and accept as a partner the ordinary woman.) What the
reframing of the story about the Bletchley Park eforts to break the German
“Enigma” code into a story about the enigma of woman adds to the narrative is
ideological surplus-enjoyment: it is this re-framing which sustains our pleasure in
the otherwise narratively rather dull work of cracking secret codes. This feature is
also what makes the flm part of the Hollywood ideological universe: if a flm on
the same topic (eforts of military decoding) were to be shot, say, in Soviet Union,
there would have been no erotic re-framing of the “enigma” (which is why the
flm would also have been much more boring…).
What Does the Joker Want?
Today, this fundamental level of constituent ideology assumes the guise of its
very opposite, of non-ideology – how? David Grossman stands for the Jewish
attitude at its purest, as rendered in a nice personal memory: when, just prior to
the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, he heard on the radio about the Arab threats that they
will throw Jews into the sea, his reaction was to take swimming lessons – a
paradigmatic Jewish reaction if there ever was one, in the spirit of the long talk
between Josef K. and the priest (the prison chaplain) that follows the parable on
the door of the law in Kafka’s The Trial. Grossman’s work is marked by a strange
line of separation. His non-fction texts deal almost exclusively with what the
Israelis refer to as hamatzav, “the situation,” a neutral-sounding word that
encompasses everything from the intifada to the security fence to the coming withdrawal from Gaza. (Its equivalent in Cuba would be “special period,” a
codeword for the economic catastrophe that followed the disintegration of the Soviet
block.) “The situation” is not a specifc event but every event; it bleeds into every
part of life. In stark contrast, his fction withdraws into the claustrophobic space
of private passions and obsessions. However, even when he writes of marriage
and desire, jealousy and motherhood, loyalty and betrayal, he is mapping an
entire country’s anxieties and longings. Rather than explicitly reporting the facts
on the ground, Grossman constructs his own alternate reality that evoke “the
situation” as their absent Real-Cause.
We already mentioned “Frenzy,” the frst novella of Grossman’sHer Body Knows;
its central character of “Frenzy” is Shaul, an ofcial in the Ministry of Education,
who has convinced himself that his wife, Elisheva, is having an afair. Consumed
with jealousy, he conjures up every detail of the lovers’ time together. When
Elisheva goes of for a few days alone, Shaul insists on following her. Because his
leg has been fractured in a mysterious accident, he enlists the help of his
brother’s wife, Esti, who agrees to drive him to where Elisheva is staying. On this
hallucinatory journey, the normally reticent Shaul fnds himself telling Esti the
elaborate story of Elisheva’s afair. Is the afair real or is it a fantasy? Is it rooted
in Elisheva’s actual emotions or in Shaul’s obsessive jealousy? Somewhere along
the way, that distinction stops mattering: Shaul blurs into the fgure of his wife’s
lover and the Elisheva of his imagination blurs into the Elisheva of real life. Esti is
transformed as well: as their journey stretches deeper into the night, Shaul’s
story stirs Esti’s own longing for a past love.
The second novella, “Her Body Knows,” is also about jealousy and betrayal; at its
center are two women: a yoga teacher named Nili who is dying of cancer, and her
estranged daughter Rotem, a writer living in London who has returned to Israel to
read her mother a story she’s been working on – about a yoga teacher named
Nili. In the story, which takes place during her own childhood, Nili is asked by the
father of a shy teenage boy to initiate him into the secrets of sexuality and thus
“make him a man”… It is easy to recognize here the logic of fantasy at its purest:
inventing a scenario which touches on the mystery of the parents’ sexual lives.
What both novellas really are about is the transformative power of storytelling,
the need to construct alternate fctional realities: what actually happened is
beside the point, both Shaul and Nili refashion reality to create a story they need
to tell. Rewriting the past is an act of generosity which enables the subject to
change her future. Even if the fctional realities they construct aren’t pretty (there
are no happy marriages in these fantasies, no idyllic childhoods), even if it
appears that one pain is merely “replaced with another in a widening, an opening
up, of the past,” there is a secret “pathological” proft in this shift, a
“surplusenjoyment” is generated.
And it is here that ideology enters: such retreats into intimate reality take place
against the background of hamatzav, of “the situation.” No wonder that, in recent
years, this same desire for an alternate reality has become a part of Israel’s
national psyche: dealing with “the situation” generates an atmosphere of anxiety,
of a deep sense of claustrophobia, of the retreat into the relative safety of the indoors. Though an Israeli writer need not directly address the political
atmosphere that surrounds him, these concerns do seep in, quietly and
evocatively. The properly ideological function of this retreat is thus clear – its
underlying message is: “we are just ordinary people who just want piece and
normal life…” A similar attitude is part of the mythology of the IDF: Israeli media
love to dwell on the imperfections and psychic trau