The German film-maker Wim Wenders had been both fascinated and appalled by Hollywood long before he went to work there. He had been living in Los Angeles for seven years when he wrote a poem, in 1984, called The American Dream.
In it, he tried to resolve ‘why whole movies look more and more like / ninety-minute commercial breaks.’ What started with television, he suggested, had now spread to film, which expressed little more than ‘the American State philosophy. / Entertainment: advertisement for America…’
In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2011), the third in our Europeans series, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek expands on this insight. Wenders’ disillusionment with American cinema has not prevented him from continuing to work with its better traditions. So for Žižek, too, the banality of mainstream movie culture should not fool us into dismissing it as meaningless distraction, mere escapism.
Žižek’s case, on the contrary, is that these films dramatise, encode and powerfully reinforce the values we live by in the ‘real’ world. Far from being ‘escapism’, they are best understood as the embodiment of that debased dream (and not only the American one) which now makes up such a large part of our public culture.
Prepare to see Titanic, Jaws, The Sound of Music and many others as you have never seen them before.
Slavoj Žižek is one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals. He has described himself as ‘a communist in a qualified sense’ and as a ‘radical leftist’. He has written on film theory, Marx, Freud, Althusser, Hegel and Lacan. He is the author of The sublime Object of Ideology, Living in the End Times, On Belief, The Abyss of Freedom and many more. The Reality of the Virtual, Predictions of Fire, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology are his films.
‘What loneliness/ to be blind in broad daylight-/and deaf, what loneliness/ when the song’s in full swing’
3rd Lecture on Everything in our new series “Europeans”
Friday 23rd January 2015, 7.30
The Chapel in the Garden, East Street, Bridport, £6 entrance
