Žižek on Avatar

[sabotabby]

Zizek on Avatar and the Indian state of Orissa.

To choose between "either accepting reality or choosing fantasy" is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality. Because the hero of Avatar doesn't do this, his subjective position is what Jacques Lacan, with regard to de Sade, called le dupe de son fantasme.

ILU, Žižek. Never change.

Seriously, though. He makes a good point:

[I]n Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists.

Comments

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I was trying to remember his name! In my photo I posted today of square where I live, where he be a lecturer is in the last few houses on the far right of the row of houses, behind a bit of tree. I would read stuff but am too miserable and tired today so will later...night night!

[sabotabby]

Sweet dreams. It's something to look forward to, as it is both lulzy and largely correct.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

bugger - I dreamed that I had to retake Russian A Level in a week from now and I didn't/don't remember any Russian. Intellectual insecurity bout coming on from fear of trying to understand Zizek!!

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Ooh - I'd like to read Lacan on Sade, though, if there were ever a chance in hell of my ever understanding a word of Lacan, because I've been wondering whether to reread my once loved de Sade or whether to give away some of his more horrible books.

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

i read deleuze on sacher-masoch once, it's like the mirror of lacan on sade.

[(Anonymous)]

Sounds brain-boggling to me! Even though I have a philosophy degree my brain falls out of my head and runs to take a hot bath when things like post-modernists or structuralists or deconstructivists appear on the page, so I've never been able to process a word of 'em. Just like squiggly patterns on a page. Sigh.

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

oh it was craziness! it was during the last semester of my last year at U of T, and that's about the only time when i was able to actually understand anything. i remember the first time i read deleuze, it was something about the root structure of strawberries and we were in film class, i had no idea why we were reading it. at all. in fact, i still don't remember. yeah.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Ah, now the root structure of strawberries IS interesting. I've just been on a permaculture course and learned about mycorhyzomes or something - tiny filaments of mushroom tentacles linking all trees and vegetables and other living things beneath the soil with neurone-thin nutrient superhighways. Was it like that?

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

yep, it was about that sort of thing. which i can see how it would be interesting, but i still don't know why it connected to film theory.

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

i look forward to reading this, thanks for posting it.

[ironed_orchid]

That was lovely.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

I think I am not sure I get the first one. I definitely get the second quote. But, would you be so kind as to explain the first quote?

[sabotabby]

Beyond what it actually says (it follows a bit on how the plot in Avatar would be akin to Neo choosing to reabsorb into the Matrix), it's written in a really lulzy Lacanian style that amuses me greatly.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I think Neo should have reabsorbed into the Matrix. Much quieter life!

[sabotabby]

What I love about The Matrix, now that I'm old and cynical, is that it would have saved countless lives if he had. I mean, it's not like the humans won their revolution or anything. It all went back to the status quo, doomed to repeat forever.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I didn't like The Matrix at all when it came out, because it just seemed to be a sort of educating people about Cartesian Dualism stuff film but not as good as other philosophical films like Bladerunner, but then I appreciated it more as it went on, and my mind is boggled now and I can't remember what happened at the end at all! Was it all in computerlike programs in the end, so getting rid of Machine-baddies was just not enough? They should have got whatsisname, Terminator, on board.

[nom-de-grr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that last paragraph pretty much sums up why this movie is kind of repulsive.

[cannibal-x.livejournal.com]

Not a bad article, it kind of wanders around the middle..

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that last paragraph is a harsh one and a necessary one. I'm probably going to use Palestinians when I turn it into a talking point, but I bet that it'll work with lots of snowclone versions.

[roter-terror.livejournal.com]

Here's another commentary on Avatar, with bonus discussion of Zizek:

http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/2/avatar

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

What does he mean by "our fantasies that make us fit this reality"? I assume he means myths/fairy tales that present happy endings within the status quo, as opposed to perhaps good old folk tales that sometimes suggest a different world or reality and subvert the expectations of the daily grind. But I haven't seen Avatar. There were similar but more down-to-earth criticisms in the papers here, so I thought it sounded crap, and I like green and purple people, not blue ones.

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

It's all about Trudy Chacón.

[lopukhov.livejournal.com]

I saw this on bootleg a couple of wks ago in Indonesia (10 movies for 25 cents): it. is. awful. I didn't have the benefit of some rose-tinted 3-D glasses to blind me into being wowed by the movie. Seriously, why does the hero have to be white? Not only that, he was GIMPY.