Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 21

If even the marginal non-Hollywood productions remain determined by the family motif, where, then, are we to find true exceptions to its rule?

In March 2005, the Vatican itself made a highly publicized statement, condemning in the strongest terms Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as a book based on lies and which spread false teachings (for example, that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and that they had descendants—the true identity of the Grail is Mary Magdalene’s vagina!), especially regretting the book’s popularity among the younger generation searching for spiritual guidance. The absurdity of this Vatican intervention, sustained by a barely concealed longing for the good old days when the infamous Index of prohibited books was still operative, should not blind us to the fact that, while the form is wrong (one almost suspects a conspiracy between the Vatican and the publisher to give a new boost to the sales of the book), the content is basically right: The Da Vinci Code does in fact propose a New Age reinterpretation of Christianity in terms of the balance of the masculine and feminine principles, that is, the basic idea of the novel is the reinscription of Christianity into a pagan sexualized ontology: the feminine principle is sacred, perfection resides in the harmonious coupling of the male and female principles . . . The paradox to be accepted here is that, in this case, every feminist should support the Church: it is only through the “monotheistic” suspension of the feminine signifier, of the polarity of the masculine and feminine opposites, that the space emerges for what we broadly refer to as “feminism” proper, for the rise of feminine subjectivity. The femininity asserted in the affirmation of the cosmic “feminine principle” is, on the contrary, always a subordinated (passive, receptive) pole, opposed to the active “masculine principle.”

This is why thrillers like The Da Vinci Code are one of the key indicators of contemporary ideological shifts: the hero is in search of an old manuscript which will reveal some shattering secret which threatens to undermine the very foundations of (institutionalized) Christianity; the “criminal” edge is provided by the desperate and ruthless attempts of the Church (or some hardline faction within it) to suppress this document. This secret focuses on the “repressed” feminine dimension of the divine: Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, the Grail is actually the female body . . . is this revelation really such a surprise? Is the idea that Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene not rather a kind of obscene open secret of Christianity, a Christian secret de polichinelle? The true surprise would have been to go a step further and claim that Mary had really been a transvestite, so that Jesus’ lover had been a beautiful ephebe!

The interest of the novel (and, against the suspiciously hasty dismissal of the film, one should say that this holds even more for the film) resides in a feature which, surprisingly, echoes The X-Files where the fact that so many things happen “out there” where the truth is supposed to dwell (aliens invading Earth and so on) fills in the void, that is, the much closer truth that nothing (no sexual relation) is going on between the two agents, Mulder and Scully. In The Da Vinci Code, the sexual life of Christ and Mary Magdalene is the excess which inverts (covers up) the fact that the sexual life of Sophie, the heroine, Christ’s last descendant, is nonexistent: she is like a contemporary Mary, virginal, pure, asexual; there is no hint of sex between her and Robert Langdom.

Her trauma is that she witnessed the primordial fantasmatic scene of parental copulation, this excess of jouissance which totally “neutralized” her sexually: it is as if, in a kind of temporal loop, she was present at the act of her own conception, so that, for her, all sex is incestuous and thus prohibited. Here enters Robert who, far from being her lover, acts as her “wild analyst” whose task is to construct a narrative frame, a myth, which will enable her to break out of this fantasmatic captivity, not by way of regaining “normal” heterosexuality, but by way of accepting her asexuality and “normalizing” it as part of the new mythic narrative. In this sense, The Da Vinci Code belongs in the series we are analyzing: it is not really a film about religion, about the “repressed” secret of Christianity, but a film about a frigid and traumatized young woman who is redeemed, freed from her trauma, provided with a mythical framework that enables her to fully accept her asexuality.

The mythical character of this solution emerges clearly if we contrast Robert as its proponent to Sir Leigh, the counterpoint to Opus Dei in the film (and novel): he wants to disclose the secret of Mary and thus save humanity from the oppression of official Christianity. The film rejects this radical move and opts for a fictional compromise solution: what is important are not facts (the DNA that would prove the genealogical link between her and Mary and Christ), but what she (Sophie) believes—the movie opts for symbolic fiction against genealogical facts. The myth of being Christ’s descendant creates for Sophie a new symbolic identity: at the end, she emerges as the leader of a community. It is at this level of what goes on in terrestrial life that The Da Vinci Code remains Christian: in the person of Sophie, it enacts the passage from sexual love to desexualized agape as political love, love that serves as the bond of a collective. There is nothing “pre-Freudian” in this solution—it can only appear pre-Freudian if one accepts the crude normative heterosexual version of psychoanalysis according to which, for a woman, everything but “normal” heterosexual desire is pathological. For a true Freudian, on the contrary, “there is no sexual relationship,” no standard of normality, but only an inevitable deadlock, and the asexual position of withdrawing from the commerce between the sexes is as good a sinthom (a symptomal “knot” which holds a subject together) to deal with this deadlock as any other position.¹⁰

In spite of this interesting displacement of the standard Hollywood formula, it would be, of course, ridiculous to claim that The Da Vinci Code belongs to the Hollywood Left. One has to look for the real Hollywood Left elsewhere—but where? Zack Snyder’s 300, the saga of the three hundred Spartan soldiers who sacrificed themselves at Thermopylae to halt the invasion of Xerxes’ Persian army, was attacked as the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to the recent tensions with Iran and events in Iraq—are, however, things really so clear? The film should, rather, be thoroughly defended against these accusations.

There are two points to be made. The first concerns the story itself—it is the story of a small and poor country (Greece) invaded by the army of a much larger state (Persia), at that point much more developed, and with advanced military technology—are the Persian elephants, giants and large fire arrows not the ancient version of high-tech weaponry? When the last surviving group of Spartans and their king, Leonidas, are killed by the thousands of arrows, are they not in a way bombed to death by techno-soldiers operating sophisticated weapons from a safe distance, like today’s US soldiers who at the push of a button launch rockets from the warships miles away in the Persian Gulf? Furthermore, Xerxes’ words when he attempts to convince Leonidas to accept Persian domination, definitely do not sound like those of a fanatical Muslim fundamentalist: he tries to seduce Leonidas into subjection by promising him peace and sensual pleasures if he rejoins the Persian global empire. All he asks from him is the formal gesture of kneeling in acknowledgment of Persian supremacy—if the Spartans do this, they will be given supreme authority over all Greece. Is this not similar to what President Reagan demanded from the Nicaraguan Sandinista government? All they had to do was say “Hey uncle!” to the US . . . And is Xerxes’ court not depicted as a kind of multiculturalist different-lifestyles paradise? Everyone participates in orgies there, different races, lesbians and gays, the handicapped, and so forth? Are, then, the Spartans, with their discipline and spirit of sacrifice, not much closer to something like the Taliban defending Afghanistan against the US occupation (or, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ready to sacrifice itself in the case of an American invasion)? Perspicuous historians have already noted this parallel—this is from the blurb of Tom Holland’s Persian Fire:

In the fifth century BC, a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, gold and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater: Greece.¹¹

Western racist investment in the battle of Thermopylae is evident: it was widely read as the first and decisive victory of the free West against the despotic East—no wonder Hitler and Goering compared the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 to Leonidas’s heroic death at Thermopylae. However, it is for this very reason that one should invert the perspective. Western cultural racists like to claim that, had the Persians succeeded in subduing Greece, there would today be minarets all over Europe. This stupid claim is doubly wrong: not only would there be no Islam in the case of the defeat of the Greeks (since there would have been no ancient Greek thought and no Christianity, two historical presuppositions of Islam); even more important is the fact that there are minarets in many European cities today, and the kind of multicultural tolerance which made this possible was precisely the result of the Greek victory over the Persians.

The main Greek arm against Xerxes’ overwhelming military supremacy was discipline and the spirit of sacrifice—and, to quote Alain Badiou:

We need a popular discipline. I would even say . . . that “those who have nothing have only their discipline.” The poor, those with no financial or military means, those with no power—all they have is their discipline, their capacity to act together. This discipline is already a form of organization.¹²

In today’s era of hedonist permissivity which serves as the dominant ideology, the time has come for the Left to (re)appropriate discipline and the spirit of sacrifice: there is nothing inherently “fascist” about these values.

But even this fundamentalist identity of the Spartans is more ambiguous. A programmatic statement towards the end of the film defines the Greeks’ agenda as “against the reign of mystique and tyranny, towards the bright future,” further specified as the rule of freedom and reason—which sounds like an elementary Enlightenment program, with even a communist twist! Recall also that, at the film’s beginning, Leonidas outrightly rejects the message of the corrupt “oracles” according to whom the gods forbid the military expedition to stop the Persians—as we learn later, the “oracles” who were allegedly receiving the divine message in an ecstatic trance had in fact been paid by the Persians, like the Tibetan “oracle” who, in 1959, delivered the message to the Dalai Lama to leave Tibet and who was—as we now know—on the payroll of the CIA!

But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This “absurdity” is simply the price of freedom—freedom is not free, as they put it in the film. Freedom is not something given, it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. Spartan ruthless military discipline is not simply the external opposite of Athenian “liberal democracy,” it is its inherent condition, it lays the foundation for it: the free subject of Reason can only emerge through ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake and a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity, one makes a truly free choice when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence—one does it because one simply “cannot do otherwise.” When one’s country is under foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not “you are free to choose,” but: “Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?” No wonder that all the eighteenth-century egalitarian radicals, from Rousseau to the Jacobins, imagined republican France as the new Sparta: there is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline which survives even when we subtract all the historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule, ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves, and so forth—no wonder too that Trotsky himself called the Soviet Union in the difficult years of “war communism” a “proletarian Sparta.”

Even more important is, perhaps, the film’s formal aspect: the entire film was shot in a warehouse in Montreal, with the entire background and many of the people and objects digitally constructed. The artificial character of the background seems to infect the “real” actors themselves, who often appear like characters from comics brought to life (the film is based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300). Furthermore, the artificial (digital) nature of the background creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, as if the story is not taking place in “real” reality with its endless open horizons, but in a “closed world,” a kind of relief-world of closed space. Aesthetically, we are here steps ahead of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series: although, in these series also, many background objects and persons are digitally created, the impression is nonetheless one of (real and) digital actors and objects (elephants, Yoda, Urkhs, palaces, etc.) placed in a “real” open world; in 300, on the contrary, all the main characters are “real” actors placed against an artifical background, a combination which produces a much more uncanny “closed” world of a “cyborg” mixture of real people integrated into an artificial world. It is only with 300 that the combination of “real” actors and objects with a digital environment has come close to creating a truly new autonomous aesthetic space.

The practice of mixing different arts, of including in one artistic form the reference to another, has a long tradition, especially with regard to cinema; many of Hopper’s portraits of a woman at an open window, looking out, are clearly mediated by the experience of cinema (they offer a shot without its counter-shot). What makes 300 notable is that in it (not for the first time, of course, but in a way which is artistically much more interesting than, say, Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy) a technically more developed art form (digitalized cinema) refers to a less developed form (comics). The effect produced is that of “true reality” losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament.

Those critics who claimed that the “synthesis” of the two art forms in 300 is a failure are thus wrong because they are right: of course the “synthesis” fails, of course the universe we see on the screen is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth.