A Pervert's Guide to Ideology

The latest documentary from Slavoj Zizek, one of the most influential and well-known philosophers today, is the best thing he's put out, including his previous documentaries (Zizek!, A Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Examined Lives) and his books (too many to list). Fans of his have long known that his particular intellectual energy works best when absorbed through a YouTube safari, clicking from clip to semi-related clip, and A Pervert's Guide to Ideology channels that energy into a sporadically cohesive 140 minute epic. The film jumps around from films universally recognized for their influence, like The Sound of Music, Jaws, and Titanic, to overlooked masterpieces from the early days of Hollywood like Seconds and Brief Encounter. Each film's significance is summarized neatly and engagingly, and contributes a key element to the schematic of how ideology pervades all of our lives. The film's goal is to show the importance of learning how to dream better, more practicable dreams, and to demonstrate how ideology gets in the way of effective, useful dreaming. This is what ideology is--a perversion of incorporating dreams into effective social action.

The filmmakers, led by director Sophie Fiennes, are well aware of the risk of the film turning into a bloated lecture, and wisely include a generous number of sight gags, where Zizek incorporates himself into the settings of many of the classic films he's analyzing. Some of the analyses are more persuasive and provocative than others, usually when Zizek's enthusiasm for a film noticeably kicks up as it does for The Sound of Music and Titanic--it's evident that he had a lot to say about them for a number of years, while his analyses of The Dark Knight and I Am Legend seem somewhat tacked on. The analysis of Titanic is especially rollicking, as it is so roundly mocked for its facile portrayal of Leonardo DiCaprio's lower class vitality as a resource to be leeched by the frustrated patrician Kate Winslet.

Despite the various sight gags, including a memorable scene where Zizek drinks a Coke while walking in the desert before expounding on it as the perfect commodity, as the film motors past the two hour mark with no signs of slowing down, it becomes clear how serious his intentions are. The films Zizek analyzes reach two dozen, and each is harvested fairly thoroughly for a component contributing to the wider picture of contemporary ideological control being built. It is exhilarating as the pieces pile up, and satisfyingly comprehensive, while never being boring because each film contributes something that at least seems essential to his theory. 

Anyone familiar with Zizek knows he is aware of how absurd Lacanian and Marxist theories seem to most people, and so he often goes to pains to describe the modesty and relevance of the ideas. Zizek always tries to emphasize that underneath the verbal acrobatics and irreverent humor is a modest, sane appeal being made. This is very much the case here, as he ends the film by asking us to reflect on how it is that we seem so obsessed with imagining the alien/zombie/asteroid apocalypse, but are so radically afraid of imagining something as modest as a shift in our economic relations. It's clear that what stops us from taking this seemingly basic step towards improvement is ideology itself, which we have to come to grips with in all of its nuanced forms if we want to take meaningful steps in a positive social direction. A Pervert's Guide to Ideology is an important contribution towards understanding ideology well enough to begin that elusive yet simple process.

To Wit: Raymond Pettibon

The absurdist, vaguely political artist Raymond Pettibon has an ongoing gallery show at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, and it is overwhelming. Rarely does one visit a solo artist show and feel the need to come back to make sure you not only have time to properly chew on all of the content, but to even absorb it at all in a cursory way. The main theme was an abrasive adolescent aesthetic paired with an equally aggressive earnest poetic sensibility. The result is a disorienting and memorable experience, kind of like reading some good David Foster Wallace pages.

A recurring technique in the show is to print sentences, using a highly idiosyncratic but still decipherable English dialect, along the surfaces of his drawings and paintings of genitals, insects, policemen, and lots of other things, saying intermittently absurd and profound, wise, resigned things: "The whole business of writing seems to demand a lot of verve, and I just don't seem to have it anymore. It doesn't seem to matter." Of course, the show where this sentiment is communicated is a resounding, overflowing example of verve.

Part of what makes the show so interesting is how raw and open Pettibon is, even about his own disillusionment with creativity itself. Still, he has chosen to be an artist, no matter what, and it is instructive as pertains to the business of being an artist that he was able to produce such an intricate, absorbing, detailed show despite being seemingly burdened down with the idea that none of what he was writing mattered.

And, to be sure, there are thousands of words on display here, sometimes in free-standing aphorisms unconnected to images, and sometimes filling in the space between images and figures in a painting. An example of such a free-standing aphorism is: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time, I should never have written." Again, the idea of art being a natural, flowing process is important for Pettibon, and he is endlessly frustrated that our time seems, to him, so inhospitable to the kinds of natural, flowing processes that ought to characterize genuine human agency and humanity.

The sheer volume of work on display is a kind of political statement against the segmentation, plannedness, and lack of spontaneity of corporate capitalism, an enactment of how to retake sovereign personhood in the face of the enervating, dispiriting forces of capital's power over the person.

Of course, this political statement does sometimes grate against aesthetic accomplishments, as many of the paintings on display are, as generously as one may read them, purely adolescent scribblings of penises with little more than basic shock value, and the penile parade does get a bit tedious at times. But this is itself an admirable example of an artist's fidelity to his political mission--he is pushing himself, his frail, debilitated, decadent industrialized and corporatized mental and bodily resources, beyond their capacity, to try to reclaim some of the grandeur and flow rightfully befitting a human being, in a 'true time.'

The final message of To Wit is just this--we are so removed from genuine humanity in our decaying capitalist culture, that the attempt to reclaim humanity is not just exhausting, but will necessarily result in grotesque, tasteless productions, simply for the fact that we have no idea what genuine humanity is in our time. All we have, if we are strict political moralists like Pettibon, is the unwavering conviction that we are missing it and creativity is the way to get it back.

On Gravity and the Role of Movies

Movies have long been our most important popular cultural artifact—the unifying element between people, the thing that we can most readily point to as representing our shared taste. Bringing up a line or a scene connects us instantly to another person, and someone without any such points of reference will be at a significant remove from us.

Still, despite the obvious importance of movies, there is something oddly dismissible about them. Try to think about the most important, formative, touchstone movies of the past twenty years or so—what comes to mind? The Departed? The Dark Knight? Pulp Fiction? None of these shed real light on who or what we are, and none of them remain with us in a meaningful way. The recent film Gravity has captured the public mind in a more dramatic way than any film in recent memory, and it is interesting to look at it deeply as a way to find out what exactly it is we get from movies.
            Gravity is a remarkably simple story, sort of like The Old Man and the Sea in space (and with a rather hot woman instead of than an old man, obviously). It is purely a depiction of the various and maddeningly minor tasks necessary to secure basic existence in an unforgivingly harsh climate. It is a straightforward representation of how the human spirit can triumph against forbidding odds and circumstances. A fire extinguisher is perhaps the central plot device in the film.

This is all to say that there may not be even a single real idea in the film—it is the ideal of self-evidence, of there being nothing under the surface, beyond the easy metaphor of transplanting Sandra Bullock’s atmospheric struggle onto terra firma. The fact that it has been hailed as a “near perfect movie” by critics is telling—movies aren’t really supposed to have ideas in them. The ideal movie can be totally devoid of ideas.

So what then does a movie do? It communicates physical reality in a heightened, distilled way. And this is supposed to be the most important means of transferring cultural information. It is a natural extension of the importance of realism in all art—presenting ourselves with a more controlled and stylized version of ourselves, prizing fidelity to sensation and experience over intellective accomplishment. It is a surefire path toward sociocultural stasis at best, and general narcissism at worst.

Treatment of Character in Recent Woody Allen Films

The three best Woody Allen films of the past decade or so, of the fourteen (!) he's directed since 2000, are by most measurements Match Point, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and Blue Jasmine. Yes, Midnight in Paris was very popular and fun, but wasn't as serious of a film, nor, with its magical realism-driven plot, was it really intended to be.

What they all have in common is the fact that none of the lead characters in Match Point, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, or Blue Jasmine learn, grow, or change at the end of the film. This of course is contrary to what most writers and writing teachers would say about what makes "good drama"--characters are supposed to be challenged by the journey of the plot and change from the beginning to the end, otherwise there's "no story."

But the whole idea of being changed by anything is a bit hacky, and doesn't fit in with actual life. Who is more irritating than someone whose had a life-changing experience and consciously tries to act differently and live a different life? Change is one of the most impossible and overrated ideas out there--perhaps this is why we have demanded that it be a staple of all character-driven fiction, we have some perverse desire to believe in change and know that fiction is the only arena where it can be rendered somewhat convincingly. But people really don't change or learn things--one's internal monologue is more or less the same throughout one's life, and the way one reacts to things and engages with the environment stays fairly consistent. Experiences really mean little--what we bring to them far outweighs what they bring to us. Yet we tirelessly seek them out--why?

In Vicki Cristina Barcelona, this inertia of character is suggested, as Vicki and Cristina go on a whirlwind summer holiday in Barcelona that challenges their core ideas of who they are and what they want from life, but at the end of the film they are in exactly the same place they were before. The challenge is that they are both given an opportunity to get exactly what they think they want--Vicki gets a shot at escaping from her safe, predictable monogamous life with Doug, and Cristina gets a bohemian, creative, (pseudo)intellectual haven in which to test her (ultimately obtuse and facile) avant-garde ideas. Yet they ultimately choose to go back to who and what they were before Barcelona--even though they seem to have little idea of who and what that is, and even though they fled to Barcelona to escape their lives and "find themselves." So one's core self is necessarily held in low regard, yet it is ultimately what we retreat to because it is inescapable. We value experience more highly than anything, but it has negligible effects on us. This is the deep pessimism of Allen's recent serious work. At the end of the film, Vicki is safely marrying Doug and has her whole life more or less mapped out, and Cristina is confused and impulsive and lost amid her tedious notions of foggy avant-gardeism. They've learned nothing from their dramatic, romantic experiences.

Blue Jasmine spells this out more explicitly, as Jasmine/Jeannette begins the film by maniacally bearing her soul to a stranger on an airplane, who gets away from her as soon as possible, and ends it by seeking out a lone stranger minding her own business on a park bench and starts confiding in her like they were old friends. This is despite her best efforts to sincerely humble herself through menial labor, making herself vulnerable by getting deeply romantically involved with someone, taking a computer science course that was, for her at least, very challenging, and being kind to her simple, low-class sister who she's always regarded as beneath her. She couldn't have gone through a more dramatically different set of circumstances and couldn't have thrown herself into this attempt at starting over more deeply. And yet she is the exact same disaster of a person at the end of the film, because that's who she is. She learned nothing, she did not grow at all, and her experiences had no impact on her, other than giving her a new set of stories to spew at strangers she can somehow corner in public places.

What's exciting about this remarkably fruitful period in the almost 80 year old filmmaker's life is that his innate gifts for drawing believable characters have fused with an accurately pessimistic view of life, personhood, and character. We see fully formed, relatable characters in all of their inimitably Allen-esque luminescence, but they are consistently confronted with the inefficacy of their actions, the transience of experience, and the absurdity of life--which absurdity, it is becoming clear, is mainly that of deeply desiring change, yet being incapable of change.

Exploring Heisenberg, or, a Few Hundred Words about a Single, Freeze-framed Facial Expression

Breaking Bad is justly considered the greatest serial drama ever produced, I think, at least partly because it charts in such painstaking detail the acceptance of change as enacted through a human face. We see each detail of consciously choosing to do the wrong thing as enacted through a face that shows no regret. That's the thing about a face--it shows what the soul consists of, and souls are not half-formed things, but complete remnants of the choices and habits we engage in every hour.

People know what and who they are to a certain extent--if we did not have at least semi-workable/plausible narratives to operate according to, we would be complete nomads, incapable of holding a job or paying rent or doing anything that relies on a basic measure of steadiness. Telling ourselves something about ourselves every day is a basic human necessity, like food, water, air, and orgasm. A soul is a definitive expression of what the true being of a person is, and the face of that person fairly directly communicates this. To live is to make a choice every day and to be aware of this choice and to accept it.

I don't think that quite enough has been made of just how aware Walter White has been of his choices. The image above shows exactly this--he knows that he will have to kill Hank, and this has become part of his being to such an extent that there is no question at all in his mind that he will do it. It is a foregone conclusion, like gravity or the sun rising, that he will brutally murder anyone who threatens him in any way, as if he, Heisenberg/Walter White, the killer, has no choice in the matter, and the fact that he has no choice is not even big news to him.

What an impressive level of being it must be to not deliberate, but to know as fully as water knows which direction to flow what needs to be done, and to know fully well that it will be done, because you have done it before. This is the beautiful, admirable, enviable thing about Heisenberg, and about the resolute aspect of this facial expression.

But, of course, it is all in the service of evil--and the truly bad thing about joining this absolute, classical excellence, this Kierkegaardian purity of heart and singleness of willing, of being so in control of one's bodily and psychical resources that an emergent problem is pitied because of how completely you know it will be dealt with, with evil, is how it shows a fundamental ugliness of human nature--the kind of forceful purity attending singularity of purpose so perfectly displayed by Heisenberg here has perhaps no un-evil counterpart.

It is perhaps not impossible to attain the fullness of being displayed above in service of selflessness, charity, or some other manner of positive behavior--but it's unclear as of this writing how exactly it would result to the above pictured/described order of complete self-knowledge. Perhaps the real allure of becoming evil for Walter White was not love of harming others or of earning millions in a matter of weeks, but the cheap, shortcut access to self-knowledge and self-awareness. He is a fuller man than a genuinely good person like Hank could ever be--but is such fullness Icarian?

Matt Jones - Planetary (at Bleecker Street Arts Club)

Brooklyn artist Matt Jones has an all acrylics on canvas show running for the rest of the summer, and it does an effective job of conveying a lot of unnerving things about deep outer space and the native weirdness of our own chunk of space.

The paintings represent the enormity of outer space in a way that conveys its vastness in a unique sense--an enormity that creeps, a creeping enormity, a vastness that is sentient. That is the most unsettling thing about space--not its vastness, but the idea that there's some logic to it that has nothing to do with us. The images and use of color suggest menace, but unconscious menace. We aren't frightened of large earthly vistas really--we respect their scope and grandeur, but don't feel disquieted. Space is far more vast, but this isn't why its eerie--its vastness seems alive, and our idea of vastness usually goes together with dumbness, blankness. Seeing some kind of operative logic, or even suggestion of it, on such a vast scale, is unnerving.

Some of the pieces are more geological than cosmological or galactic, and they convey a similar sense of swirling chaos, but with more familiar, less alien colors and patterns.

 

 

 

There are two interesting pieces continuing the swirlingly chaotic theme, but in a somehow simpler, more peaceful aspect:

The neon vitality of the piece suggests a solar burst--this is the sun, or any star, or any formative energy concentration, which act as the catalyst for all of the universe. Sun, heat, simplicity--stars are the root of it all, but are somehow innocent in their patterns and unforbidding. Simplicity and innocence begetting complexity and terror.

On Natural versus Human Beauty

“We love what is great in nature, and we have discovered this—because in our heads great human beings are lacking. It was the other way around with the Greeks: their feeling for nature was different from ours.” –La Gaya Scienza, aph. 155

-The urge to go to nature to find what is missing in the human community—Into the Wild, of course, but even something like Spring Breakers, where provided-for teens feel some ‘necessity’ of going to a wild land of suspended consciousness and contrary values (St. Pete’s, what what!) to regain some lost sense of fullness (the incentive behind festi-hopping too)—is perhaps a newer thing. This is a very interesting suggestion—a real idea, a genuine idea. What if a human being were able to embody everything that could be conceived of as surpassingly desirable? This would be the more civilized, dignified way of behaving, culturally—how brutish, how pessimistic, really, to imbue photosynthetic organisms, however grandiose and sprawling, with the utmost ideals of what being might and should aspire toward. We’re transferring our hopes and dreams for what the singular form of being in the known universe, human life, human consciousness, may potentially encapsulate and express, onto a load of inanimation. How pessimistic and vile is this?

What has made us collectively so defeatist to have more hope in nature than in human greatness? The Greeks placed their wildest and best dreams in the idea of a great human being—we do so in nature. Why are “great human beings lacking” in our minds? Can a great human being encapsulate everything that can ever be? Are we capable of formulating, conceiving of, or even feeling something greater than the greatest human being can embody, express, evince, emit? What is behind the urge to escape human potentiality and oddly stride toward nature, hoping that nature can fill some kind of gap in our being? What can staring at a striking vista do for us that the infinite excitations of our synapses cannot? Do we not realize that these alluring vistas are only powerful because we are there to view them? The majesty and sublimity of the most compelling natural phenomenon is only thus because we are there to imbue it thusly.

What was the Greek conception of nature? Was it expressed in their view of the gods, just a forbidding matrix of wrath, chance, and cruelty? Nature was a compendium of inhumanity, and this was seen as a bad thing. For us, nature’s inhumanity is seen as its promise of salvation—it is wise and good because it is contra-human, not terrifying, as it was for the Greeks. We are more at home in the inhuman than in the human. The concept of the human has lost its allure and promise and even its interest for us. No longer is it a realm of infinite possibility—it’s a dead end, a lack, a frustration.

White Snow at the Park Avenue Armory

Most will be familiar with the theme of this much buzzed about installation--the story of Snow White is taken as a jumping off point for a variety of films played on huge screens around the massive installation space of the seven dwarves pouring whisky in "Walt Disney" (played by McCarthy)'s mouth, and peeing in his mouth, and eventually murdering him by shoving a very long wooden pole through his ass and out the front of his face.

There's a plastic "lifecast" of Walt Paul Disney thusly impaled, face in a bin filled with water and apples, flecks of shit generously strewn about his dead asscheeks, etc. (We do see, in extreme closeup, a dwarf taking his penis out and peeing in Mr. McCarthy's mouth in one of the films. Apparently this really happened--how profound!).

There was one film playing in a separate room called "The Prince Comes" which was just that, and was easily the funniest thing in the installation. One would have to imagine that laughter is more or less the only thing the artist was going for--who can really hope to 'shock' anyone anymore, when twelve year olds are weaned on goetse, tubgirl, Mr. Hands, and countless other Internet classics? I confess to having chuckled a bit when a dwarf (the lack of character development precludes me from saying which one, they all seemed to blend together in a morass of lame partying) pulled his wrinkly cock out and placed it in McCarthy's mouth and peed and peed.

But the funniest thing, by far, was "The Prince Comes," in which a professional porn actor happens upon a plastic sex doll on its back in the legitimately creepy plastic forest McCarthy constructed and begins methodically lathering his penis up into a champion erection before fucking the doll for a very long time. Prince Charming kept pulling out to jack himself off before putting it back in (I guess the doll's vagina wasn't doing the job), so it was quite a while before he finally came--and there was a fair bit of suspense built up as we all waited for our Prince to cum: where was he going to cum, inside the doll or on her stomach or somewhere else? Or was he not going to cum?

The walk-through viewing room collected about five viewers, all male, oddly enough, and there was a palpable tension in the room as we waited for the money shot. Unfortunately, it seemed like it/he would never come, so I popped out to check on another screen, and when I came back the Prince was walking away in triumph, presumably after having plopped a big load inside of plastic vaginal floor. But my question was answered--McCarthy didn't even go all the way and have him cum on her face. Also--why missionary sex only? Oh, but the humor, right--the Prince was wearing a hilarious, Rod Blagovich/Lego person-esque jet black hair helmet. That was the punch line, and it worked really well--I couldn't stop laughing for almost a minute. He banked on the fact that no one had ever filmed a Lego person-haired porn actor fucking a plastic doll in a plastic forest before, and that people would only be able to process it by laughing hysterically.

The rest of the installation was much less inspired. There was a tedious film on another screen of White Snow (and really, that was the name he settled on?) wearing uncooked pastry dough on her face while Walt Paul Disney photographed her and traipsed around the kitchen being creepy. It went on and on and communicated little, beyond I suppose a remark about the folly of wanting to be impossibly, inhumanly sweet, blending oneself with pastry goods to become as saccharinely perfect as fairy tale heroines.

Here's the point though--fairy tales, get this, I hope you're sitting down, aren't true to life, and real human beings have sex drives! Sorry everyone who thought that human beings didn't enjoy cumming or drinking or have to piss and shit--they totally do!

It might be an alright thing if subtlety in art were celebrated as loudly as the most unsubtle works were, or if more focus were put on what a work proved and communicated than the audacity of its imagery or the iconoclasm of its themes. The single best thing about WS, aside from the hilarious "The Prince Comes," were the Good Humor ice cream coolers tucked discreetly off to the side of the main installation, filled with dirt and moldy old plastic covered pizzas and other signs of disregard. There was something truly creepy and insightful about this minor bit of the detritus attending entertainment spectacles being shoved off in the corner. If the artist had incorporated this kind of subtlety into the rest of the installation...well, that's not a good suggestion, because if that much subtlety had been involved, the 'piece' wouldn't exist.

Art like WS seems to assume that our daily lives are orthodox, conservative, and intellectual, when they very much are not. Such art works on the basis of assuming that jolting us out of our comfortable, conservative lives is an important task. In reality, we see horrid things every day (especially in New York, where we see, smell, and hear things nearly as bad as anything in WS all the time), and there are few norms, regulations, expectations, or rules to any of our interactions with anyone, or with the patterns of our own thoughts. Neither do we receive clear communication on an intellectual basis--of course we receive emotional, rhetorical, or just gossipy messages from most people we interact with.

Our lives are filled with ghastly, shocking images, a lack of defined boundaries, and muddled messages--exactly the kind of thing WS offers us. What would be truly radical, even shocking, would be something subtle, mannered, and clearly communicative. Art with something to say, rather than art that scoffs at the idea of saying anything, or even of hearing anything that could possibly be said. Nothing is more boring than art that tries to shock.