Greek Gods, Parricide and Parenting

Hesiod’s Theogony isn’t very long, but it manages to encompass a hymn to the Muses, an account of the ancient Greek creation myth, a genealogy of dozens of deities, as well as tales of murder, war, love, rape, brute strength and political power. It also shows marvelous insight into human psychology.

In the introduction to the edition I have, translator Dorothea Wender raises an interesting point:

Hesiod has allowed his world of primitive gods and chaotic forces to remain primitive and chaotic. Particularly striking is the general pattern of an oedipal struggle between generations, with father attempting to destroy son, and mother assisting son to supplant father.

One such event is Kronos’s castration of Ouranos with a “long jagged sickle.” Kronos’s mother Gaia asked him to do this because Ouranos was hiding her children so they wouldn’t replace him as ruler. The second such event comes when Kronos begins eating his own children and Rhea secrets away Zeus, who later leads a rebellion.  The war ends with the banishment of the Titans to Tartarus and the ascension of Zeus as ruler of Olympus. Hesiod’s poem is centuries older than Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex, but already we see the ancients were aware of the Oedipus in every man. To crudely summarize Freud: He wants to sleep with his mother and kill his father.

The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn, by Giorgio Vasari and Christofano Gherardi

It strikes me that these parricidal myths are less a representation of the actual early childhood situation than they are a reflection of the nascent Subject’s fantasies and fears. In the world we usually take for reality, fathers do not normally kill their children, mothers do not conspire to defeat their husbands, and children know nothing of sex and murder. In the subterranean reality of the child’s psyche, however, nothing is desired more than the mother’s attentions, and nothing presents a greater threat to that than the father.

The young Subject is faced with a dilemma: regain his lost power by defeating and supplanting the father or regain it by allying with and emulating the father. Similar dynamics occur in girls and are sometimes called the Electra complex. How this childhood drama plays out--and the possibilities are endless--has formative effects on the individual that will last throughout life. The ancient Greeks knew nothing of psychoanalysis, but their myths show they were well aware of the human realities that underlie it.

As a father, I have witnessed these realities firsthand. My son loves me and I love him more than either of us will ever fully comprehend, so father-son bonds are not to be discounted, but a rivalry also exists. It is not uncommon for a small boy to want to marry Mommy, and his father is likely to playfully express disapproval of this idea. Many a father feels real jealousy, however, when his wife’s affections appear directed entirely at their child. Boys are thrilled to best (or be allowed to best) Daddy in a game or feat of strength. And at some point, Mommy begins to encourage her child to be more independent so she can return more of her attention to her husband and the rest of her life.

My family demonstrates all of this behavior, and we try to resolve the underlying tensions in positive ways. There are no perfect methods, but spending time together is a great way to allow these human mysteries to work themselves out. If I’d played dominoes with my son this morning, maybe he wouldn’t have rebelled so much when it came time to get him out the door for school!

Over the years psychoanalytic theory and a burgeoning literature on parenting have helped explain and address what goes on inside families, but as usual, the ancient Greeks did all this first. They did it their own way and in some ways, no doubt, they did it better. Theogony is myth not science, but that doesn’t stop it from being enlightening. 

Saturn Devouring His Son, by Francisco Goya

Also on ancient Greek literature:
Heracles' Hope in the Midst of Suffering
The Ancients' Guide to Love and Sex

Oh, the Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 2

Back in August of last year, I tried to initiate a slowdown of my blog, but it didn’t go so well, so I’m trying again. I need to make time and mental space for other things, including other writing, so The Gleaming Sword must retreat into a corner. However, once an idea grabs ahold, I can’t move on until I get it out, so this is another attempt to spit out some quick summaries of ideas I've been kicking around.


In Defense of the Star Wars Prequels

J.J. Abrams has given the people what they wanted. Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been a success among critics and fans, and as a lifelong fan myself, I too found it immensely satisfying. However, it also reminded me of what I loved about the prequels.

Many said Episodes I through III just didn’t feel like the first movies. With its goofy aliens, slapstick humor, and even scatological humor, The Phantom Menace was childish. Attack of the Clones subjected us to a dorky adolescent romance that actually included frolicking in a field. Then Revenge of the Sith was daaark. However, I always saw this as part of George Lucas’s genius. He was clearly more interested in grooming a younger generation that would carry the franchise through the coming decades than he was in pleasing the original trilogy’s older fans, and it worked.

The subsequent changes in tone match Anakin as a maturing character on his way through all the usual life changes, plus some truly awful ones as he becomes a Sith Lord. Meanwhile, Lucas’s new audience was also growing up, perhaps not as quickly, but quickly enough for many to identify with the changing themes of the series. This is a metalevel to the films that fascinates me.

I also liked the epic nature of the prequels, which many considered too complicated. Whereas Episodes IV through VI focused on the adventures of a ragtag band of rebels, the prequels paint on a broader canvas that includes political intrigue and massive military campaigns actuating change on a galaxy-historical scale. Throw in the usual mythological themes, only amped up, and the prequels take the radio-serial style of the original movies and enlarge it to the scale of a Wagnerian cycle.

 

The Force Awakens, on the other hand, comes off very much like a film of its time. It’s a very good one, but there must be other viewers out there who feel something is missing, namely George Lucas’s vision and style.

 

On Feminisms

In Modernism and Nihilism, Shane Weller argues that instead of one single philosophy of nihilism, there are many, sometimes conflicting, nihilisms plural. While reading the shojo manga Revolutionary Girl Utena the other day, it occurred to me that we would benefit from viewing feminism the same way.

In one spectacular sequence in the manga, Utena is playing basketball against the boys and beating them as a series of captions states her philosophy:

“I want to be a prince. A prince is much better than a princess, who needs protection.”

Accordingly, Utena dresses like a boy, uses a masculine first person pronoun for herself, and is confident and physically fit. Later, when she joins an order whose members follow a mysterious code from beyond, she rescues a peer from an abusive relationship and assumes a strong position within the group. When she was a child, a typical handsome “prince” saved her, but at least as of Volume 1, there are suggestions that she herself is, in some magical way, her own hero. The male characters’ only chance of holding their own against her lies in treating her as an equal.

 

This is one style of feminism with roots that go back much further than the Nineties, when Utena was published. It is the feminism of Princess Leia in A New Hope (1976), who talks back to Sith Lords, greets her rescuer with sarcasm, and snatches a blaster from a space pirate so she can shoot her way to freedom. It’s the feminism of Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), determined to walk and talk like a man but accept no man as master (previous post). Both Utena and Queen Christina further their gender-bending with an affection for women that hints at the romantic and sexual.

This style of feminism reminds me of statements by Camille Paglia in Vamps & Tramps. Paglia writes that what she and other feminists in the Sixties wanted was to do what men were doing, so they went out and did it, accepting the risks and responsibility. Paglia has nothing but scorn for feminism that turns victimhood into an occupation. Reading Utena, I couldn’t help but see how different Utena’s pursuit of “strength” and “nobility” is from hyperfeminism online’s whining and bullying.

General education teaches us about the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th-Centuries and the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. Many remember how feminists in the Eighties were often portrayed as bra-burning, butch, man-hating radicals. I remember reading around the turn of the millennium how feminism had softened to embrace women who wanted to be powerful but also feminine. Now, Third Wave feminism is inescapable and anyone active online is bound to have run across terms like third world feminism and first world feminism.

Thus, feminisms plural isn’t a hard idea to grasp, but learning to be mindful of it and speak accordingly is harder. Yet I’m convinced that more of us doing so would help the current debate about feminism be more productive. I’m always saddened by the discourse of people who appear to feel feminism is one thing to be championed or rejected whole. We might find ourselves agreeing more if we were specific about exactly which of the many feminisms we are praising or condemning.

 

Hermann Hesse’s Demian and Jungian Psychoanalysis

The first time I read Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian, I didn’t know who Carl Jung was. When I dug out an old paperback recently and reread it, I realized it’s informed by more than a little psychoanalysis, and the mystical tone suggests Jung over other theorists.

 

Demian tells of Emil Sinclair’s process of developing his true self, a process Jung calls individuation. An interesting cast of characters aids this process, from his childhood enemy Franz Kromer, to his spiritual teacher Pistorius, his close friend Max Demian, and Demian’s mother Eva. Some or all of these represent psychoanalytic concepts. Is Demian Emil’s Shadow? Is Eva his anima? Are they all psychopomps?

But all I have are intimations of hypotheses that need to be tested by rereading Demian and brushing up on my Jung, and I don’t have the time. Oh, I could Google what I want to know, but this is a train of thought I would prefer to flesh out for myself. Like my planned series of posts on Joseph Conrad, maybe I will someday.

I can tell already that these summaries aren’t going to satisfy me, but 2016 calls for a break with old lines of thought so I can pursue new ones.

 

 

Have a Holly Jolly (and Consumerist yet Discerning) Christmas

 

These days, we’re all savvy and jaded enough to see through the misdirection of television commercials. Nonetheless, a passage about advertising in the following video caught my attention. The video is part of a series called The School of Life and summarizes the thought of Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno. It covers a lot of ground, but it isn’t long. I recommend watching the whole thing, but watch for the bit about advertising, which begins at 4:10.

 

Here's the part that jumped out at me:

“When they’re trying to sell us something, advertisers show us the thing that we really want and then connect it to something we don’t actually need. So we can see an advert showing a group of friends walking on a beach chatting amiably or a family having a picnic and laughing warmly together. These adverts show us these things because they know we crave community and connection, but the industrial economy prefers to keep us lonely and consuming, so at the end of the adverts, we’ll be urged to buy some 25-year-old whiskey or a car so powerful that no road would ever let us legally drive it at top speed.”

Advertisements do many things and one of the things they do is show us something we need in our innermost being in order to sell us something that we don’t need. Coming up with examples is easy, especially in this season when every business and corporation this side of the Industrial Revolution is trying to cash in on Christmas and financial news reports constantly tell us it is our duty to shop in order to drive up holiday sales.

Consider this Coca-Cola commercial:

 

This advertisement is full of much that we all want and need. The words kindness and joy appear in written form. We see young couples holding hands, children playing, families bonding and friends smiling. Everyone looks physically fit. A red balloon takes flight from a vending machine and drifts over a quaint plaza. Christmas gifts fall into strangers’ hands, thereby linking disparate lives against the alienating forces of modern life. The community comes together and marvels, and we are encouraged to share that old Platonic concept the Good.

Which one of us does not want such communion with our fellows? Who would pass up a chance to fall in love again? Which one of us would not like to exude such physical and spiritual well-being? Who among us does not hunger to reclaim the sense of magic we held in our youth? Who would not like to rise like the Charioteer in Plato’s Phaedrus commanding his winged steeds to climb ever higher, leaving the earth below to see with clarity the Forms and even the light of the Good?

Coca-Cola’s marketers show us these things because we need them. And they do this to sell us something no one needs: a carbonated soft drink.

Philosopher Slavoj Zizek talks about Coca-Cola in the documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012):

 

For Zizek, when Coca-Cola offers us “The Real Thing,” it is offering to give us l’objet petit a, the object cause of desire described in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The objet petit a is what we think we want, but it doesn’t really exist, so we forever circle but never grasp it. You may think you want that new car, promotion or paramour, but once you have it, are you sated? Of course not. The object cause of desire switches to something else, so you stay driven, struggling for satisfaction that, due to the makeup of our psyche, is impossible.

Pringles is so sly that its classic advertising slogan explicitly states this, keeping the objet petit a in a cycle focused solely on its own product, from chip to chip: Once you pop, you can’t stop.

But are all advertisements merely a satisfying spin on a product that ultimately provides little satisfaction? Isn’t it possible that a product satisfies what its advertisements promise? Here’s a recent commercial for the video game Star Wars Battlefront:

 

Open with palpable estrangement: a man sits bored at his desk dreaming of his childhood. Once upon a time, he and his buddy drew pictures of their action figures, they had lightsaber battles with flashlights, and they dressed up as Star Wars characters for Halloween. Those were the days . . . Then suddenly his buddy shows up in an X-Wing, he busts out of his office, boards his own fighter with its own astromech copilot (R2D2 no less!), and goes to take out some Imperial AT-ATs.

At first, this appears to be no more substantial than the Coca-Cola commercial. On that reading, this commercial offers what you really want--friendship, adventure, a sense of purpose and fulfillment--while actually offering you cheap entertainment.

But wait!

In today’s world, a video game can actually be the medium through which people connect. Through online and cooperative missions, Star Wars Battlefront allows players to meet and play with strangers, or play together with your favorite mop-headed childhood buddy. And while the adventures are all virtual, this has always been the nature of storytelling and takes nothing away from the magic. Star Wars and other franchises are no less inspiring to many than the plays of Euripides once were to Athenians, or Beowulf to the Anglo-Saxons. Star Wars Battlefront isn’t exactly necessary, but it has the potential to facilitate some things we truly need.

I’m more skeptical that a can of Coca-Cola can be as successful at slaking spiritual thirst, but perhaps I’m being too harsh. How many cans of Mr. Pibb have I enjoyed with friends over tabletop RPGs, sharing laughs and having a hell of a time? The beverage was a part of that, a part of our subculture, our fraternity.

As usual, I see the value in multiple perspectives, but that can be a good thing. I guarantee you will watch television this Christmas season, see the same commercials over and over until you want to start chucking nutcracker soldiers at the screen, and spend too much money on crap for yourself and others. In today’s world, you can’t help but be a consumer, which is to say a stooge to the boob tube, but you can also remember to check yourself, see through the haze of price tags and twinkling lights, and seek a holiday experience that holds something more authentic.

 

The Lacanian Real in Solaris (Zizek / Lacan 7)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

In Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), the philosopher briefly applies the concept of Otherness in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to a scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic science fiction film Solaris. I wanted to explore the connection in detail on my own, but when I did, I reached my own hypothesis: The planet Solaris represents the Lacanian Real.

Solaris was originally a novel by Stanislaw Lem first published in 1961. Tarkovsky’s film appeared in 1972, and director Steven Soderbergh released his own version in 2002. All these versions tell of a man named Kris who travels to a space station orbiting a planet named Solaris. Upon arrival, he finds one crew member dead and others coming unglued due to unwanted visitations by uncanny guests somehow connected to the planet.

 

The novel describes in detail the findings of the fictional field of study called Solaristics, the study of Solaris. All experiences with the planet for over 100 years have defied human explanation, from its orbit to its substance. In Tarkovsky’s film, it appears as a shifting viscous mass, while in Soderbergh’s it is an ethereal gas giant. In the novel, Solaris exhibits an unending variety of forms, which scientists have attempted to categorize with names like extensors, mimoids and asymmetriads. One theory is that the whole planet is an alien consciousness, but this too is uncertain. The book’s narrator states the situation bluntly:

“The sum total of known facts was strictly negative.”

Lem himself has stated that this was the intended focus of his novel:

“I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images.”

That’s a fair description of the Real in Lacanaian psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan’s concepts don’t have precise definitions so much as clouds of signifiers, but here are some of the signifiers in my notes for the Real: imperceptible, unsymbolized, ineffable, unimaginable, alien. The Real exists for us only as that which we cannot grasp. And yet, it is out of this unknown that we fashion what we do grasp. For this reason, Lionel Bailly states the following in his introductory text Lacan:

“The Real is the featureless clay from which reality is fashioned by the Symbolic; it is the chaos from which the world came into being.”

The planet Solaris is just such a clay. Shapeless, it can take any shape, and just as we each fashion our individual worlds from the Real, the scientists aboard the space station orbiting Solaris fashion bits of reality from the planet during their encounters with it: a child, a garden. In the final scene of Tarkovsky’s film, we see that Kris (or the planet through him) has recreated his home, complete with the surrounding woods, pond and his aging father.

So far, my hypothesis has held up fairly well, and it continues to do so in consideration of the closely related concept of Das Ding (the Thing), which signifies something lost. Like the Real to which it belongs, it is unsymbolizable and therefore cannot be repressed. Lost, it nonetheless sticks with you, nagging, hounding and refusing to go away. The object of desire becomes an object of anxiety, even of terror.

In Looking Awry, Zizek connects the Real to zombies:

“Apropos of this phenomenon, let us then ask a naïve and elementary question: why do the dead return? The answer offered by Lacan is the same as that found in popular culture: because they were not properly buried, i.e., because something went wrong . . . The ‘return of the living dead’ is, on the other hand, the reverse of the proper funeral rite. While the latter implies a certain reconciliation, an acceptance of loss, the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition.”

This is true of the visitors in Solaris. The planet probes the mind of each person on the space station and sends a flesh-and-blood creation of someone it found there within the thoughts and memories--usually someone traumatic to the crew member. The crew members can eject their visitors into space or kill them, but another copy will simply show up. In Kris’s case, his long-dead wife Rheya (Hari in Tarkovsky’s version) suddenly appears in his room.

Like Das Ding, Rheya is lost and desired--and something was indeed very wrong with her death. She and Kris quarreled and he stormed out. Realizing he had left a research drug in the house, he rushed back only to find he was too late: Rheya had used the drug to commit suicide. In the years since, he has been unable to come to terms with her death--in Lacanian terms, he has yet to symbolize and integrate it into his psyche with any balance. And now, like a zombie, Rheya keeps coming back to remind him of the incident.

Tarkovsky’s Solaris is particularly rich in material for a Lacanian analysis. Soon after the first Rheya/Hari sent by Solaris appears, she passes a mirror and recognizes herself for the first time, exactly like the Mirror Stage of development. As anyone familiar with psychoanalysis knows, the early childhood drama shapes us for life, and Kris is obsessed with his mother and father. The drives eros and thanatos are also present, and when Solaris’s tinkering with the crew members becomes more than their minds can handle, they lose their grip and insanity threatens.

I would never presume to contradict Zizek when it comes to Lacan, but his thesis that the planet Solaris represents the Other does not exclude mine, for Lacanians also describe the Real as Other. As with much in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the concepts are complicated, never defined with crystalline clarity, and overlap. Focusing on the Real in Solaris simply seemed an easier point of attack for my own interpretation.

Lem’s original tale is classic hard science fiction with a philosophical bent, while the lush psychological exploration of Tarkovsky’s adaptation has made it a classic in its own right. If you’re interested, however, I recommend starting with Soderbergh’s version. As a sleek Hollywood project, it’s Solaris Lite, but it looks good and it’s accessible. No mastery of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts necessary.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown
Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window
Sex…? Impossible!!
The Big Other and the Man Who Knew Too Much

 
 

Sex...? Impossible!! (Zizek/Lacan 5)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

A phrase that kept leaping out at me as I read Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry was the “impossibility of sexual relations.” It’s an awkward and counterintuitive phrase, but also a perfect expression for an experience nearly everyone has had.

Consider the classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944). Insurance salesman Walter plots with the hot-as-L.A. Phyllis to kill her rich husband for a massive insurance payout. After the murder, their relationship cools as they each realize the other could go to the police, turn in his or her partner in crime, and make off with the loot. Walter goes to Phyllis’s mansion to kill her, but she gets the drop on him. After she pulls the trigger, you see in her eyes that she truly loves him, but she has realized it a moment too late--a fatal moment. Walter, mortally wounded but still standing, puts a couple bullets in her and stumbles away.

 

This is a perfect, if troubling, illustration of love and sex, for all the gears rarely sync up for both partners at the same time. The relationship works, then doesn’t, then does for one partner but not the other, then for the other but not the other, and so forth. If science is correct, then the euphoria early in a relationship lasts two years if you’re lucky--but the tug-of-war, the soul-searching and the confusion is powerful even then, is it not?

In Lacan, Lionel Bailly describes it this way:

[Lacan] was not saying that sexual relations don’t exist, but that those relations do not have a character of mutual understanding, agreement, or rapports. The individual man and the individual woman in a joint sexual act is each pursuing a form of enjoyment that is distinct from and irrelevant to the other’s.

We think of lovers as counterparts, but in their psyches, any two people are less like a matching bolt and screw than a square peg and a round hole fated to fit imperfectly. This is because the early childhood drama forms each of us differently. According to Jacques Lacan, boys and girls respond differently to castration, the realization that one does not possess the all-powerful Phallus. For the rest of our lives, we seek the Phallus in various objects tailored to our own symbolic economy and shared by no one.

For another example, consider Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), one of my favorite films. During the Japanese occupation of China, Wong Chia-Chi is a member of the Chinese resistance who becomes the mistress of Mr. Yee, a high official in the collaborationist government. Chia-Chi and her comrades devise a plan for Mr. Yee's assassination. When she and her lover go to pick up a diamond ring he has bought for her, resistance thugs will seize the opportunity to assassinate him. However, as they inspect the ring at an Indian jeweler’s, Chia-Chee realizes that Mr. Yee truly loves her and she him. From the book by Eileen Chang:

     He really loves me, she thought. Inside, she felt a raw tremor of shock--then a vague sense of loss.

     The Indian passed the receipt to him. He placed it inside his jacket.

     ‘Run,’ she said softly.

      For a moment he stared, and then understood everything. Springing up, he barged the door open, steadied himself on the frame, then swung down to grab firm hold of the banister and stumbled down the dark, narrow stairs. She heard his footsteps break into a run, taking the stairs two or three at a time, thudding irregularly over the treads.

     Too late. She had realized too late.

This is a perfect scene. You can feel the whole drama from start to finish hinging on this one moment. Will the killers come barging in? Will Mr. Yee notice something is fishy? Will Chia-Chi warn him? It’s a much tighter scene even than the one in Double Indemnity, but it illustrates the same thing: a perfect rapport between lovers is not possible. No matter how close you get, something will always be slightly off.

But, we all know this, don’t we? As good as it gets, it never gets that good. And you don’t need Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek or me to tell you so. Not only will your partner never be perfect, but the perfect partner doesn’t exist. That’s why perhaps the longest standing piece of marriage advice humanity has come up with is accepting your partner with all his or her faults. Love and sex do, after all, provide a measure--but only a measure--of comfort.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown
Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window

Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown (Zizek/Lacan 3)

The death of unarmed teenager Mike Brown is a problem, and a persistent one (explainer). Watching livefeed of the earliest protests, I remember a commenter speculating that the furor would die down in a couple weeks. I was inclined to agree, and yet here we are two months later and Ferguson remains a prominent issue. As I write this, protests are happening all over the country for #O22 and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon is the target of a Twitter storm. This on the heels of the large protests held earlier this month as part of Ferguson October.

The protesters’ reaction to police officer Darren Wilson’s actions has become an action in itself, thereby instigating a reaction in the form of anti-protesters. The anti-protesters range from racists who hurl verbal abuse at protesters to everyday decent folk discomfited by the whole incident, and it is the objections of this latter group that most interest me. I am convinced they know Darren Wilson was horribly wrong that day on Canfield Drive but for some reason still side with him.

In debate, they will say that riots are bad, that protests achieve nothing and that it’s all race-baiting anyway. They will say the police are heroes who protect the people for little reward. They will say the call to arrest Darren Wilson is a witch hunt and we should wait for the results of an investigation. They will say it’s in the past, so let it go. As mind-boggling as it is, they will complain about young men who wear their pants too low.

All of this avoids the central problem of Darren Wilson shooting Mike Brown to death.

They will even blame the victim. They will tell you things that appear to be true, that he hung around with gang members, wrote rap lyrics, smoked marijuana, shoplifted, and physically threatened a store clerk. They will tell you things alleged, that he assaulted Darren Wilson and tried to grab his weapon. They will tell you things proven false, that he beat Darren Wilson so badly the officer had to be hospitalized with severe injuries. And in doing this, they support a position contradictory to what they know to be true.

Namely, a police officer killing an unarmed teenager is bad, bad business.

The arguments of the anti-protester crowd are the result of defense mechanisms for avoiding the ugly truth at the point of origin: A police officer shot an unarmed teenager dead. Specifically, Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department fired repeatedly at unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, hitting him at least six times (twice in the head) according to a preliminary autopsy. Mike Brown’s death--to say nothing of broader problems such as social inequality and abuse of power--is a stain on the fantasy view of the world that we often trick ourselves into believing is reality. His death is a threat to a more comfortable view of society and therefore must be repressed.

I suspect that what really rankles the average anti-protestor isn’t anything more than mild distaste for people who go into the street (or online) and make a scene. They find all the tears and the gnashing of teeth to be unseemly. Raising a fuss and being an eyesore in public spaces isn’t what decent people do. It may sound trivial, but there is a culture in America within which this is motivation enough to ignore the unjust death of a boy at the hands of the law.

Mike Brown’s death is indeed a stain, a blot, a blemish on the face of American society, and this is less figurative than you might think. Mike Brown’s body was eventually removed from the street, but his face continues to show up in photographs in the news and his name appears on the protesters' signs and in their chants. This week, a mural in New Jersey showing Mike Brown’s face accompanied by the phrase “Sagging pants is not probable cause!!” had to be painted over because it made the local police uncomfortable.

Stain removed. Blemish hidden. Truth repressed.

Through terminology such as defense mechanism and repression, I am applying rudimentary psychoanalytical theory to a social phenomenon. I just read in Lacan by Lionel Bailly that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed some signifiers buried in the unconscious were so integral to the psyche’s coherence that unearthing them would cause the patient to come unraveled. Thus, they were better left untouched. But as individuals faced with Ferguson, we are not facing a truth as psychologically identity-shattering as that, are we?

So you have a choice. Assuming you do know in your heart of hearts that police officers gunning down unarmed teenagers is wrong, you may face this or avert your gaze. You may identify with the victim and say “I am Mike Brown” (earlier post), or you may keep making excuses to avoid looking at the ugly truth. If you choose the former, the world will not fall apart, only your picture of it will. If you choose the latter, you will have further chances to redeem yourself: The next Mike Brown, the next Eric Garner, the next Trayvon Martin will be along all too soon.

 ***

Earlier posts in this series:

Ferguson: How Did We Get Here?

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom

Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past (Zizek/Lacan 2)

(For the first post in this series, see "Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom.")

 

This is the second in a series of posts commenting on the ideas in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. While the last post applied Zizek and Lacan to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, this one is about film. Zizek expresses an idea that I was pleased to realize I had once arrived at myself, and then he takes it one twist further.

In “Classic Movies: Three Levels of Experience,” I posited three modes of interacting with old cinema. The first is immediate experience of a film’s express content--the story, acting, special effects, etc.--the way we would interact with any film. The second is the experience of a classic movie as a representative of the past, with its different cultural context, cinematic techniques, and so forth. But it was the third that I was most itching to express:

“The third level of experience is where it gets really interesting. No longer are we simply experiencing a classic movie for its content, or viewing it as a curious relic from times gone by. Instead, we now see it through the eyes of its contemporaries. We assume, as best we can, the standpoint of movie-goers in the early to mid 20th Century and experience the movie as they would have at the time, as if viewing the past from the past.”

The example I used was Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930) wearing a men’s tuxedo and kissing a woman. It doesn’t matter that two people of the same sex kissing each other is no big deal to us today: the scene was shocking then, so it remains electric today. Zizek says much the same thing with regard to classic film noir, only in the more sophisticated terminology of Lacanian psychoanalysis and film theory:

“That is to say, what fascinates us is precisely a certain gaze, the gaze of the ‘other,’ of the hypothetical, mythic spectator from the ’40s who was supposedly still able to identify immediately with the universe of film noir. What we really see, when we watch a film noir, is this gaze of the other: we are fascinated by the gaze of the mythic ‘naïve’ spectator, the one who was ‘still able to take it seriously,’ in other words, the one who ‘believes in it’ for us, in place of us.”

For Zizek, this is the gaze of nostalgia, which the philosopher goes on to say takes its “purest form” not when we watch a movie from the past, such as the 1944 film Double Indemnity, but when we watch a modern film, perhaps even about modern times, that nonetheless borrows an aesthetic from the past (such as the Double Indemnity-inspired Body Heat). Despite all the dizzying Lacanian theory that Zizek employs, this idea of nostalgia is exactly how the word is used in reviews and so forth to describe any movie today that hearkens back to films of the past.

The first example of such a film that comes to my mind is Open Range, the Kevin Costner film based on the novel by Lauran Paine. Released in 2003, it came out long after the heyday of western cinema, at a time when straight-up westerns were not only rare but likely to be mocked. Nonetheless, Open Range is unflinching in adopting the cinematic and narrative techniques of classic westerns to tell its story. It avoids newfangled techniques used in films like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) to update the genre.

Consider Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse films Planet Terror and Death Proof (2007). These films are grossly obvious examples of films in which, in Zizek’s words, “the logic of nostalgia is brought to self-reference.” These movies aren’t just what they are on their own, they gain something more by recalling the vision and style of their outmoded precursors, the exploitation films of yesteryear.

These posts are learning experiments allowing me to hopefully get a better grasp of the ideas in Looking Awry by turning input (reading) into output (blogging). This time, I enjoyed being able to say, “I knew it! Even before I read it in Zizek!” But the reader is advised to take all of the above with a grain of salt since I’m still figuring a lot of this out.

 

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom (Zizek/Lacan 1)

For some time, I’ve been contemplating a series of posts inspired by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, and today I ran across a passage that seemed perfect for getting started. Most of the posts will concern film, but this one touches on the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the resulting protests and continuing debate (explainer).

Looking Awry was first published in 1992, but the paragraph I want to discuss reads as if written with the controversies surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and others in mind. It begins with the following:

“There is, perhaps, an experience in the field of politics that entails a kind of ‘identification with the symptom’: the well-known pathetic experience ‘We are all that!,” the experience of identification when we are confronted with a phenomenon that functions as an intrusion of unbearable truth, as an index of the fact that the social mechanism ‘doesn’t work.’”

According to Zizek, successful psychoanalysis sometimes ends with the analysand clinging to something that represents the very problem. This is what is meant by “identification with the symptom.” He makes the example of a character in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Robbers force the character in his youth to play the harmonica even as he must participate in his own brother’s murder. The incident emotionally unhinges the boy, and from that time forward, the only thing that holds him together is playing the harmonica, the very item that ties him to his brother’s death.

Zizek draws an analogy to a similar phenomenon on a social scale and Ferguson is exactly such a traumatic event. Discomforting yet undeniable truths have come to light, showing us that our society is broken. The original event presents us with our broken justice system, especially with regard to young black men, and the resulting controversy brings out the worst American society has to offer: fetishization of violence and enduring racism. Even now as more evidence has come to light and the police themselves have admitted Officer Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown as he was running away, the trolls are out there blaming the victim.

Zizek uses anti-Semitism as an example to elicit a number of attitudes one may take when faced with such an “unbearable truth,” and eventually arrives at one that has been openly adopted and employed in the wake of the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown shootings:

“Let us take, for example, Jew-baiting riots. A whole network of strategies—simple ignorance; treating it as some deplorable horror that does not, however, really concern us . . . ; ‘sincere compassion’ for the victims—allow us to evade the fact that the persecution of Jews pertains to a certain repressed truth of our civilization. We attain an authentic attitude only when we arrive at the experience that . . . 'we are all Jews.' And it is the same for all traumatic moments of the intrusion into the social field of some ‘impossible’ kernel that resists integration; ‘We all live in Chernobyl!,” “We are all boat people!,” and so on.” (boldface mine)

This is exactly what we have seen in the “I am Trayvon Martin” and “I am Mike Brown” movements, whether it be hashtags using those words on Twitter, wearing hoodies, or confronting the police with your hands in the air. In all these cases, a number of people confronted with the usually hidden dark side of their society react not by denying the reality of the dark side, but by identifying with it, recognizing that it belongs to them, too.

The passage continues with a return to more psychoanalytic terminology:

“Apropos of these cases, it should also be clear how ‘identification with the symptom’ is correlated with ‘going through the fantasy’: by means of such an identification with the (social) symptom, we traverse and subvert the fantasy frame that determines the field of social meaning, the ideological self-understanding of a given society.”

In other words, we abandon the fantasy version of our society, the one that we usually hold, according to which police officers are always kindly gents who lend a helping hand, the courts never fail to deliver a just sentence, and people of all races experience equal opportunity and success. Instead, we recognize--because some blight that was always there has raised its ugly head--that this vision of our world is a fiction that serves as palliative. In reality, sometimes police officers shoot unarmed teens as they run away and that is just the beginning of the disgrace to our systems of power, to our nation, and to ourselves.

This transformation of consciousness is integral for positive change and healing.

My posts on Looking Awry are likely to be more of a learning experiment than any statement of my own original ideas. I find both Zizek and Lacan to be difficult to grasp, but hopefully I can learn something while writing about them, and without mucking up the concepts too much. In any case, the above passage of Zizek’s seemed so applicable to Ferguson that I felt compelled to return to this troubling event.