Symptomatic

I returned to the IFC Center last night to watch the terrific 1945 Ealing spooker Dead of Night, and to absorb the ravings of Slavoj Zizek. The Slovenian theorist-dervish (who's in town for the imminent opening of Zizek!, the documentary about him) had been invited to pick a movie and discuss it, and he chose Dead of Night over some other films he'd call guilty pleasures if he felt at all guilty about loving them: Dune ("David Lynch's greatest film"), Topaz ("If seen not as Hitchcock, but as a French chamber drama, then it can be redeemed"), The Fountainhead (his all-time favorite). Which movies would he actually feel guilty about showing? Antonioni's Zabriskie Point ("one of the worst films ever made"), Bergman's "pretentious late films like Cries and Whispers," or Home Alone, which is "not only a stupid film, but also secretly a reactionary film, an anti-abortion film."

Zizek never pauses. He has a cute way of pronouncing "film"—"feel-um"—and a lisp that makes his references to Lacan and Bakhtin less intimidating. His Dead of Night argument, which took off from the notion that British horror films of the '40s were a psychological substitute for the real horror of World War II, was full of fun tangents—the intersection of Buddhism and capitalism ("today's capitalism is so crazy that you have to treat it as an illusion or you go crazy"), a friend's operation that involved his eye being pulled out of its socket under local anesthesia and turned around, so that he could momentarily see himself—but it was awfully tough to follow. Maybe I was distracted by the Vader-like snoring of the guy behind me, or maybe I was transfixed by Zizek's constant fidgeting and the streaks of sweat decorating his cheeks. Or maybe it wasn't just me; after all, he hadn't seen the movie in twenty years. When Astra Taylor, the fetching director of Zizek!, politely interrupted to say that there was a line outside waiting to see a movie in our theater, he apologized for his jet-lagged vagueness. And then he continued talking.

Comments

[Brendan]

Felt like I needed to add the reason why he finds "The Fountainhead" so compelling: he loves it because it is such a sickenly clunky piece of procapitalist propaganda that it does more to undermine capitalist ideology than any critique of it ever could. He loves Veit Harlan's "Kolberg" (Harlan also directed "Jud Suss")and Eisenstein's "Staroye i novoye" (about collectivization) for the same reason--both were such pure articulations of Nazi and Stalinist ideology (the latter so much so that it was banned in the USSR!).

[girish]

Wonderful post.

[Chuck]

Zizek live is something to behold. I saw him completely jet-lagged and exhausted one afternoon at the University of illinois, and he was still incredibly energetic.

I certainly share his distaste for "Home Alone," but why does he read it as "anti-abortion?"

[Campaspe]

Well, I can't get over my excitement that he screened "Dead of Night," a great favorite of mine that I blogged very briefly about not too long ago. Please do tell what YOU thought of the movie? Which segment did you like best?

[Looker]

Sorry for my slow reply -- Looker was vacationing. To answer your questions, I wish I knew why Zizek reads "Home Alone" as "anti-abortion." He didn't say; he said only that he always sympathizes with the thieves in the movie rather than with Culkin.

I loved "Dead of Night." It was spooky. I also enjoyed seeing how much it influenced directors like Hitchcock (the ventriloquist's dummy segment clearly inspired "Psycho") and Polanski (the ticking clock during the dream in the coachman segment, the shots from below of grotesque, menacing crowds in the climactic montage), and the makers of "The Twilight Zone" (who ripped off the entire coachman segment for an episode that scared the hell out of me when I was nine). Some of it is dated, and the golf segment drags, but it's as witty as you'd expect from Ealing, and the performances are great. Like everyone else, I think the mirror and ventriloquist segments are the best.

[Campaspe]

Good for you. I'm taking a little trip this weekend. I never thought of the movie influencing Polanski, but that's really astute, I'm sure you're right. My favorite segment is the "Christmas Party" one. I wonder if this part doesn't suffer with American audiences (and possibly modern British ones too) because they don't know that Constance Kent was a real person; the murder case is a classic one. It is very quiet but I find it lovely.

[Blackmail Is My Life]

I went to grad school with Astra and I'm sorry to have missed this when it screened here in Philadelphia.

The "role" of the "public intellectual" was a hotly contested issue in our program - I met Astra around the time Christopher Hitchens was publicizing his book promoting a "philosopher-king putsch" with all its anti-democratic trappings. This was also around the time Jacques Derrida couldn't fill a classroom at The New School, so many folks turned to Zizek for a breath of fresh air. Funny how little things change when it comes to fetishizing contintental philosophers, but if this is my chance to make a film about Richard Rorty, so be it!