Žižeck, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. (1991) Revised Edition. New York, NY: Rutledge, 2001.
I think I have to start by saying that on a fundamental level I don’t buy the Freudian premise, and therefore Lacan isn’t particularly appealing to me. When the basic ‘givens’ of a theoretical perspective aren’t things that I accept at face value, the pronouncements they arrive at aren’t of much interest to me. That’s not Žižeck’s failing as a critic, but my position as a reader. I suppose his work simply fails to interpellate me, if you want to look at it that way.
I’m also fundamentally uninterested in the psychoanalytic perspective in literature. Who, exactly, are we to psychoanalyze? The author? I can’t say I particularly care about that, as a critic. As a fan, a casual reader, and a would-be writer, I’m fascinated. I’d love to know the process by which creators arrive at their creations, but as a critic, I’m much more interested in what happens after the work leaves the artist’s hands. Are we to psychoanalyse the reader/viewer? If so, which one, and why would I want to focus on just one? Are we to merely psychoanalyse ourselves as critics? Seems like self-absorbed wanking to me, philostrobation, as a colleague at Queen’s put it.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I don’t get much out of Žižeck’s commentary on Hollywood film. I don’t buy his premises and his methodological goal seems pointless, to me. So sit back and watch while I presumptuously attack a respected, published theorist whose name holds almost infinitely more weight than my own. With any luck, the exercise will as quaint and cute as a kitten attacking the sock-covered foot of a grown man.
In the revised edition of Enjoy Your Symptom!, there is a new last chapter on The Matrix in which Žižeck makes the unforgivably arrogant mistake of analysing not the movie that the Wachowskis did make, but the one that ‘failed’ to make. You know the one. It resides solely in Žižeck’s mind, and is therefore immune to outside criticism. Its pseudo existence is based on the fact that we can never open the box to see if the cat is dead. He insists, in a moment of fantastic ignorance of the simplest plot points of the film, that no one who dies in the matrix should die in reality because if the subject “does […] know or at least suspect the actual state of things” (227), that he is in a fake world, “then a simple withdrawal into a prelapsarian Adamic state of distance would render us immortal in VR” (227).
I have two objections to this blithely moronic claim. First, IT DOESN’T. The film explicitly demonstrates, through the dialogue of trusted characters and through events in the plot, that dying in the matrix kills your body. It just does. Second-guessing plot points based on foisting an outside ideology onto a film is a cheap parlour game that any idiot can play. If I go to watch Superman Returns and object that people can’t fly, then that’s my problem. I’m the wanker. It is not the movie’s fault that I’ve failed to understand the premise of the film.
Second, as an example, Žižeck insists that “Neo who is already liberated from the full immersion in the VR should survive the struggle with the agent Smith that takes place within the VR controlled by the matrix (in the same way he is able to stop bullets, he should also have been able to derealize blows that wound his body)” (227). I am astonished and astounded by how little attention Žižeck must have paid to this film for him to make such an utterly foolish statement.
First, he ignores the chronology of the plot. Neo doesn’t become “liberated from the full immersion in the VR” until after he gets shot. The resurrection image is central to the themes of the film. How could anyone possible miss that? Second, Neo just can do the things Žižeck seems to insist are missing. This claim is a simple factual error. Finally, to say that everybody ‘should’ be able to perform the same feats as Neo is nonsensical to the logic of this narrative. The One simply is ‘he who can break the laws of the matrix,’ whereas everyone else can merely bend them. Morpheus specifically says so in the dojo fight and in the jump program. Did he even watch the movie?
Žižeck also repeatedly comments on perceive inconsistencies in the film that only exist because he’s insists upon them. He points out (accurately!) that Morpheus and Agent Smith give opposing explanations for the matrix’s existence (226). Morpheus claims that the matrix is “That feeling that something is wrong with the world,” while Smith explains that “the first matrix was designed to be a perfect human world [… but] No one would accept the program […] Which is why the matrix was redesigned […]” Like any zealot, Žižeck attempts to shoe-horn this apparent inconsistency into his pre-existing view of the world, Lacanian psychoanalysis. For him, the desire for a perfect reality combined with the inability to accept it, represents the ever-unreachable but ever-desirable Lacanian ‘real.’
Hogwash.
The first Matrix film implies strongly, in Morpheus’ speech in the training program and Neo’s own path towards being ‘woken up,’ that only a small number of people are ready for the truth. The sequels (which Žižeck didn’t have access to at the time of the book, I admit!) make this explicitly clear during Neo’s audience with the Architect: 10% of the population of the matrix subconsciously rejects the illusion, while the other 90% accept it. It’s a major plot point. On a related note, Ken Mondschein’s Corporate Mofo Reloads the Matrix, points out that “Not coincidentally, most of the people in Zion seem to be black or Hispanic, which, besides adding a natty Rasta feel to the place, makes perfect sense: If you're a white suburban Matrix resident, driving your Matrix SUV to your Matrix golf club, why doubt the nature of reality?”
Herein lies my biggest beef with psychoanalytical criticism: it assumes all viewers are the same. Psychoanalysis is the study of the singular human mind; it’s specifically designed (and very good at!) analysing one mind at a time, but throw a group at it and ask it to analyse the group, and it’s useless. It becomes merely another false universal, projecting a particular kind of psychology at everyone, and it does so without knowing who is actually in that audience. It attempts to analyse a subject who isn’t there. One of the more interesting facets of the film is that it demonstrates, as Mondschein points out, that people have different points of view, that the disaffected and excluded have more reason to reject the reality that is presented to them. Žižeck doesn’t seem to want to grant that variation in either the audience or the characters in the film.
I realize this reads like grad student arrogance, the rejection of an ideological framework that I don’t as yet understand, and that may be true, but neither does Žižeck understand the film that he so arrogantly dismisses as something that only makes an interesting point by accident (229), and for whom “the ideal spectator [is] an idiot” (213). Theorists seem to think that they can wander into a genre―one that has its own unique language, shorthand, motifs, and implied methods of interpretation born of generations of cultural development―and make grand pronouncements about it from a position of obvious ignorance. Mr. Žižeck, I’m sure you’re quite insightful in your field, but you don’t know jack about science fiction. Leave it to those of us who do, okay?
Posted by orion at June 26, 2006 5:55 PM