Friday, December 12, 2008

Slavoj Zizek

It's a Zizek Friday night for me, and I've discovered him playing cinema on youtube. Why didn't I think to look for him there before? I don't know. Here he says that cinema is the ultimate perverted art. It doesn't give you what you desire; it tells you what to desire.

On this first clip Zizek begins by professing that cinema should not just give the audience a choice between an illusion and reality, but there is a third choice: the reality behind the illusion. He uses Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds for this end. Zizek says that the birds represent "evil" or that which comes between the two young lovers, but they replace or become a manifestation of the mother's jealousy of her son's love interest. Reverse Oedipal?



And here, Zizek explains what he thinks is sad about the left (that they take the moral position of resisting power without ever taking a positive approach to asserting the strength of their morals through power).

No comments: