Going reel to real with the unknown knowns.It is also a form of containment of the truly perverse under the comforting auspices of the normal. In the same way, it much easier to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Will life on earth end, but capitalism go on? Is the Sound of Music not really about decent Austrians escaping Nazis , but instead a story of bedrock honest fascists resisting a decadent Jewish cosmopolitan takeover? Slavoj Zizek asserts that at the textual level, the unknown known is the opposite of what it appears. Hearty , Aryan, farmers, and seemingly anti-intellectual, the Von Trapps are really archetypal fascists, and the smaller, dark-haired, bookish, cosmopolitan, decadent,ghettoized intellectual Nazis are really stereotypical Jews…
According to Zizek, The Sound of Music achieved iconic status as it satisfied its fans’ surface desire , the ostensible plot, to identify with anti-fascism, while also satisfying their unconscious desire, the unknown known: to embrace fascism. This antagonism between surface and textural reality is also the underpinning of much of modern advertising and marketing providing the narrative tension, pretext and trigger for exaggerated consumption and justification for our normative democracy based on property law and the entire economic system supported by it. The language of social liberalism espoused in the West on the Right and Left alike is, as Zizek claims, nothing less than a pure form of intolerance. A coalition complicit in maintaining the liberal rationalism based on “tolerance”. Tolerance itself being a problem since it permits politicians of various beliefs to claim they act in the name of freedom.
What Zizek reveals is the aspect of the temporal reversal: we are “shocked” when the strained and brittle quality of innocence, a manufactured and marketed commodity that splinters easily, is exposed. The innocence industry permits a kind of false security while allowing the individual to wallow in less savory pastimes. For every Walt Disney and Rockwell in post WWII America there was a netherworld of lurid pulp fiction and Charlie Starkweather’s.
Symbolic depiction precedes the fact it depicts, history as story precedes history as a process in reality. There is a certain nostalgia for a paradise lost, if we could just find that holy grail and restore utopia. An indicator of our late modernity is that real of history is assuming the character of a trauma. When we think we really know someone, it often happens that, all of a sudden, this individual does something which makes us aware that we do not really know them. We become suddenly aware that there is a total stranger in front of us. This is what happened in a devastating way with Josef Fritzl. He transformed from a kind and polite fellow man, then suddenly changed to a monstrous neighbor much to the great surprise of the people who met him daily and simply could not believe that this is the same person. In Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil, she records that psychological testing of Eichmann showed he was all too normal….
Yet many were deeply disturbed by her depiction of an Eichmann who was not an ideological anti-Semite nor even criminally motivated–he wanted to rise in rank not by murdering anyone but by “conscientiously” doing his job. “Intent to do wrong” was not, in Arendt’s opinion, proved against him. He was not “morally insane” for in his own “muddled” way he distinguished between right and wrong, and the results of psychological tests showed that he was not a “monster” but frighteningly normal. Read More:http://international.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayc7.html
Rebecca Mead:He explained what he meant by the perverse core of Christianity-that Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross offers a way for the Christian to indulge in secret desires without having to pay for them-with an illustration from what he referred to as one of the great achievements of Western civilization: “The Sound of Music.” “After Maria goes back to the monastery because she is unable to deal with her attraction to Captain von Trapp, she goes to the Reverend Mother expecting some stem advice,” Zizek said. “But, instead of criticizing her, the Reverend Mother gives her the message in that weird song ‘Climb Every Mountain.’ I think this is the most obscene moment in the movie. The very person one would expect to preach abstinence turns out to be the agent of fidelity to one’s longings. Significantly, when ‘The Sound of Music’ was shown in the ex-Yugoslavia, the three minutes of this song was the only part of the film that was censored.” Read More:http://www.lacan.com/ziny.htm
ADDENDUM:
Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/09/slavoj.zizek
“The Sound of Music” is a much trickier film than one might expect. If you look at it closely, ok, it’s officially Austrian resistance to Hitler and the Nazis, but if you look really closely, it really that the Nazis are presented as an abstract cosmopolitan occupying power, and the Austrians are the good small fascists, so the implicit message is almost the opposite of the explicit message. It’s much more reactionary film than it might first appear. There’s an element of justice in a small mistake in the film, it’s supposed to take place in 1938, when they go into Salzburg, they buy some oranges, and if you put the image on freeze the oranges say “made in Israel”. So that’s a nice kind of truth of the film. Read More:http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/against-happiness/
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Jeremy Jennings:Drawing upon the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Žižek conjures up the category of “divine violence” as a form of pure violence that serves no purpose except as an expression of opposition to injustice in the world. Those annihilated by divine violence, he tells us, are “fully and completely guilty”. Next, he imagines that divine violence has been instantiated (although often with “deplorable” outcomes) in the revolutionary politics of terror associated with Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Each has its “redemptive moment”. Remarkably, Žižek’s suggestion is that if these revolutionary movements failed, it was not because they were too extreme but because they were not radical enough. He then conjectures that the Left of today has become ashamed of the Jacobin legacy of revolutionary terror, in part because, in his paraphrase of Robespierre, it wants a revolution without a revolution, a revolution which respects social rules and existing norms, a decaffeinated revolution. Read More:http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/603
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What if, however, we read the duality of the “normal” father and the primordial father of the unlimited access to incestuous enjoyment not as a fact of the earliest history of humanity, but as a libidinal fact, a fact of “psychic reality,” which accompanies as an obscene shadow the “normal” paternal authority, prospering in the dark underground of unconscious fantasies? This obscene underground is discernible through its effects – in myths, dreams, slips of tongue, symptoms… and, sometimes, it enforces its direct perverse realization (Freud noted that perverts realize what hysterics only fantasize about). Does the very architectural arrangement of the Fritzl house – the “normal” ground and upper floors supported (literally and libidinally) by the underground windowless enclosed space of total domination and unlimited jouissance – not materialize the “normal” family space redoubled by the secret domain of the obscene “primordial father”? Fritzl created in his cellar his own utopia, a private paradise in which, as he told his lawyer, he spent hours on end watching TV and playing with the youngsters while Elisabeth prepared dinner. In this self-enclosed space, even the language the inhabitants shared was not the common one, but a kind of private language: it is reported that the two sons Stefan and Felix communicate in a bizarre dialect, with some of their sounds “animal-like.” The case of Fritzl thus validates Lacan’s pun on perversion as père-version, version of the father – it is crucial to note how the underground secret apartment complex materializes a very precise idelogico-libidinal fantasy, the extreme version of father-domination-pleasure? One of the mottos of the May ’68 was “all power to fantasy” – and, in this sense, Fritzl is also a child of ’68, ruthlessly realizing his fantasy….Read More:http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=419
…This is why it is misleading, even outright wrong, to designate Fritzl as “inhuman” – if anything, he was, to use Nietzsche’s title, “human, all too human.” No wonder Fritzl complained that his own life had been “ruined” by the discovery of his secret family. What makes his reign so chilling aspect of his reign is precisely the way his brutal is that his exercise of power and his usufruct of the daughter were not just a cold act of exploitation, but were accompanied by an ideologico-familial justification (he did what a father should do, protecting his children from drugs and other dangers of the outside world), as well as by occasional displays of compassion and human considerations (he did take the ill daughter to the hospital, etc.). These acts were not breaches of warm humanity in his armor of coldness and cruelty, but parts of the same protective attitude that made him imprison and violate his children. Read More:http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=419