“We all accept liberal democratic capitalism, even during this current pan-European disaster,” Žižek says. “We timidly ask, ‘Oh, can we have a few more rights for minorities? A little more healthcare?’ But nobody questions the frame. And that is the real triumph of ideology.”

I thought I was pretty clear, actually, but what I wrote was pretty much immediately reduced to some nonsense about how I thought middle-class protesters shouldn’t be allowed to protest because they’ve got microwave ovens or something.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that Žižek has spoken, and spoken well, at Occupy Wall Street, and seems to support them. Though his speech stands as a pretty specific warning to those who are just begging for better health care or a slightly less unequal distribution of wealth.

It is what it is. As Nick Mamatas pointed out, We Are the 99% and Occupy Wall Street are different entities, and there’s a wide variety of voices among the Occupy folks. Some are mainstream middle-class liberals who would like a slight rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic; others, the only ones I’m interested in, are looking forward to what should be done after it sinks.

In Chaplin’s films, we even find a kind of wild theory of the origins of comedy from the blindness of the audience, i.e., from such a split caused by the mistaken gaze: in The Circus, for example, the tramp, on the run from the police, finds himself on a rope at the top of the circus tent; he starts to gesticulate wildly, trying to keep his balance, while the audience laughs and applauds, mistaking his desperate struggle for survival for a comedian’s virtuosity – the origin of comedy is to be sought precisely in such cruel blindness, unaware of the tragic reality of a situation.

This bit from The Independent‘s review, which sums up much of what I like about the book.

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek enjoys a good joke. Here’s one of my favourites: two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theatre, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One feels a pressing need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet. “I think I saw one down the corridor outside,” says his friend. The man wanders down the corridor, but finds no WC. Wandering further, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it, he returns to his seat. His friend says, “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just came on the stage and pissed in that plant pot.”

This gag perfectly describes the argument of Zizek’s new book on violence. Drunkenly watching the boring spectacle of the world stage, we might feel an overwhelming need to follow the call of nature somewhere discreet. Yet, in our bladder-straining self-interest, we lose sight of the objective reality of the play and our implication in its action. We are oblivious to the fact that we are pissing on stage for the world to see.

So it is with violence. Our subjective outrage at the facts of violence — a suicide bombing, a terrorist attack, the assassination of a political figure — blinds us to the objective violence of the world, a violence where we are perpetrators and not just innocent bystanders. All we see are apparently inexplicable acts that disturb the supposed peace of everyday life. We consistently overlook the objective or what Zizek calls “systemic” violence, endemic to our socio-economic order.

The rest.

Some of the greatest stuff comes in his critique of what he calls “liberal communists,” like George Soros and Bill Gates. From a London Review of Books excerpt:

There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! — i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production — disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution — to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.

Being Zizek, he has a cure for the likes of Soros and Gates. He borrows it from a poem by Bertolt Brecht called “The Interrogation of the Good”.

Step forward: we hear
That you are a good man.

You cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider your personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend.
Are you also a good friend of the good people?

Hear us then: we know.
You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall. But in consideration
of your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth.

Now in Slovenia the structure was that if you wanted to go abroad as a researcher you had to submit an invitation, and if the invitation was a serious one, then it was pretty automatic that you got the money. So, for example, a typical scene consisted of one of my friends coming to me and saying he wanted to go abroad. I say, ‘fine, where do you want to go?’ He says ‘Chicago’. I say ‘let’s see what I have for Chicago’. At some stage I think I have picked up notepaper from the University of Chicago’s German Department, and I think I have some from Northwestern also. ‘So, OK, here is the option, which would you prefer?’ He chooses one, and then I ask what kind of colloquium he would like to be invited to? So we faked it all, whatever was needed, all the data – and of course we always invented the colloquium. I mean, I simply said ‘on behalf of’ and I faked the name so that none of my friends would be offended if it all came out. At some point I remember once that there truly was a colloquium, but I said, no, this is not ethical and so I invented another one. I said I cannot stand writing the truth, it must be a lie. So although it would have been easier to tell the truth, I invented the colloquium. I am a workaholic: I do my work, but I have this terrible desire to fake things at this level; to fake institutional things. I think that everything to do with institutions should be faked. I don’t know what this is, I never analyze myself. I hate the very idea of analyzing myself.

The exemplary figures of evil today are not ordinary consumers who pollute the environment and live in a violent world of disintegrating social links, but those who, while fully engaged in creating conditions for such universal devastation and pollution, buy their way out of their own activity, living in gated communities, eating organic food, taking holidays in wildlife preserves, and so on.

Rumor has it that Zizek hasn’t actually seen the film yet. But, then, neither have I. I kept hearing that I needed to see it in the theater, in 3D, so I could properly get the experience, and have decided instead to wait until it comes out on DVD, buy the shittiest bootleg I can find outside of Chubby’s, and watch it on a black-and-white television. I want to remain unpolluted by the special effects and enjoy the full force of Cameron’s narrative skill.

Avatar’s fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the “military-industrial complex” of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of abeautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man’s fantasy.

At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded.

Arundhati Roy, in Outlook India magazine, writes that the Maoist guerrilla army

“is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India’s so-called independence, have not had access to education, health care or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadres who have lived and worked and fought by their sides for decades. If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have – their land . . . They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated . . . their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.”

The Indian prime minister characterised this rebellion as the “single largest internal security threat”; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about “red terrorism”, replacing stories about “Islamist terrorism”. No wonder the Indian state is responding with a big military operation against “Maoist strongholds” in the jungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in this brutal war, that the “people’s justice” of the Maoists is harsh. However, no matter how unpalatable this violence is to our liberal taste, we have no right to condemn it. Why? Because their situation is precisely that of Hegel’s rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.

So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself — the film substituting for reality.

The rest.

The Hurt Locker brought back to Hollywood the trend which also accounts for the success of two recent Israeli films about the 1982 Lebanon war, Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz With Bashir and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon. Lebanondraws on Maoz’s memories of being a young soldier; most of the action claustrophobically takes place inside a tank. The movie follows four inexperienced soldiers dispatched to ‘mop up’ enemies in a Lebanese town that has already been bombarded by the Israeli air force. Interviewed at the 2009 Venice festival, Yoav Donat, one of the actors, said: ‘This is not a movie that makes you think: “I’ve just been to a movie.” This is a movie that makes you feel like you’ve been to war.’ Maoz has said his film is not a condemnation of Israel’s policies, but a personal account of what he went through: ‘The mistake I made is to call the film Lebanon because the Lebanon war is no different in its essence from any other war and for me any attempt to be political would have flattened the film.’ This is ideology at its purest: the focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict.

The Hurt Locker’s depictions of the daily horror and traumatic impact of serving in a war zone seems to put it miles apart from such sentimental celebrations of the US army’s humanitarian role as John Wayne’s infamous Green Berets. However, we should bear in mind that the terse-realistic presentation of the absurdities of war in The Hurt Lockerobfuscates and thus makes acceptable the fact that its heroes are doing exactly the same job as the heroes of The Green Berets. In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there.

The rest.

There’s another trope that pops up with some frequency to do the same work, only instead of focusing on the trauma experienced by individual soldiers, it peddles a kind of mawkish brotherhood-between-soldiers as the greater moral good in war. There was a period there of about fifteen years when nearly every Vietnam movie ended with an overdub that ran something like, “In the end, we didn’t fight and die for our country, or for any grand ideal, but for the man next to us.” My favorite example was We Were Soldiers and Young Once. Or, looking away from Vietnam, The Four Feathers, which was one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen in its attempts to wriggle out from under the weight of historical reality.)

It’s an obvious dodge, of course. As in The Hurt Locker, it’s a way for the film writer and director to pretend to be making some kind of statement about something significant while ensuring nothing is ever said that could alienate a single potential movie-goer. (And, seriously, I probably would have liked The Hurt Locker better as a straight pro-Iraq War movie, because at least then it might’ve avoided its goofy clichés and cardboard characters.)

It’s also a pretty sketchy sentiment on the moral side, if you think about. After all, if the only thing that matters in war is the brotherhood created amongst soldiers, than there’s no culpability for individual soldiers in advancing the war’s aims. To think it through it to its logical conclusion, those Nazis on the Easter Front suffered horrendous hardships, and each probably bonded tremendously with his brother soldiers, but it seems like any movie about them would be just a bit remiss in not pointing out what their aims were.