Introduction

In this paper I will examine three recent Hollywood blockbusters known as the Bourne-trilogy from a Foucauldian and psychoanalytic standpoint, trying to bring the two perspectives as close to each other as possible. The films, based on the popular series of spy novels by Robert Ludlum, and hailed for their more realistic “anti-Bond” approach to the topic, feature an amnesiac secret agent of the CIA, trying to (re)construct his identity while running from the long arms of the law. Accordingly, in the focus of my study are the different modes subject-formation these movies present us with. I will show that the first of the three films, The Bourne Identity can be viewed as an illustration of Foucault’s theory about the discursive production of the subject and its immanence to the relations of power. I’m also interested in how this film delineates the possibility of resistance to a specific form of power which, following the thought of the late Foucault, I will identify as the imperative of “know yourself”. My claim is that the director ultimately refuses the framework of an identity based on the knowledge about the self and moves towards a conclusion that resembles Foucault’s late philosophy about the ethics of the subject or the care of the self. Furthermore, I will use Lacanian psychoanalytic theory developed by Slavoj Zizek and Joan Copjec among others to show the weakness of the Foucauldian historicist approach in giving account for emergence of a free subject. As for the two sequels, I’ll treat them as a regression from the merits of the first one as they are introducing the motif of guilt into the main character and through that they open up the way towards his normalization through humanization. The journey of the subject they outline is based on a juridical concept of power, emphasizing its repressive side and neglecting the productive one, the latter I will reintroduce criticizing the films’ humanist discourse.

The Borne Identity

The Bourne Identity came out in 2002, it was a relatively big budget film (60 Million) grossing over 214 Million Dollars worldwide. Although it was a Hollywood production, former indie-director Doug Liman (Swingers, Go), who had the rights for the film, produced it himself, thus having almost complete artistic control during the shooting[1]. The end result is a character-driven existential drama molded into the action-thriller form that draws heavily on its 70s predecessors (Three Days of the Condor, The Getaway etc.). The story is based on Robert Ludlum’s spy novel of the same title, and it develops around an American secret agent, (code)named Jason Bourne, who works for a secret branch of the CIA called Treadstone as an assassin. After a mission gone bad, he is shot into the Mediterranean Sea where his unconscious body is found by a group of fisherman. When he regains consciousness, he has to realize that he has no memories about his past at all; he doesn’t even know who he is. The only clue about his identity is a Swiss bank account number in a capsule implanted in his back.

Already at this point it is possible to distinguish the Foucauldian framework Bourne’s quest is presented in. His body functions like a blank page that the discursive practices he meets write themselves upon, or rather, put into play. For instance, in the multilingual crew of the fishing boat he discovers he can speak foreign languages. He can tie knots as well, but when the captain sees this and says: “see, it’s starting to come back!”, he desperately tries to make him understand that his memories are not coming back at all. He is a subject without a center, without an identity who nonetheless is continuously created by discourses. In Foucault’s terms, he is someone who is forced to see himself genealogically: his origin is taken away from him. For genealogy, “the body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration.”[2] In these early scenes the illusion of a substantial unity gets a positive representation in the bank account number while the fragments of Bourne’s identity manifesting without remembrance show the disintegrated nature of his self. My claim is that the director himself sides with the genealogical approach which can be already seen here in the way he shoots the hero’s (re)gaining his abilities. The standard Hollywood way would have been to use flashbacks into the past to anchor the performance into an original, meaningful state. Instead, we see Bourne’s actions as strictly immanent to the situations of the diegetic present, which creates the feeling in the viewer that they are somehow coming out of nowhere. A good example of this is the Althusserian moment when he is “interpellated” by two policemen while trying to sleep on a bench. They ask for his papers and when he cannot present them, they become violent, but he fights them off with a deadly efficiency that he himself is shocked by. What is crucial here is that he is not interpellated into a subject with an indentity, rather he is incited to perform within a discourse he finds himself in without having any control over it. A possible illustration of Foucault’s notion that resistance is immanent to relations of power[3].

But what about this reference to Bourne’s missing identity papers? Is it also within discourse? It can be seen as signifying the absent center of the subject, much like the bank account number earlier. Here it is worth to look at a psychoanalytic interpretation of this setting, proposed by Slavoj Zizek. “As Lacan would put it, there is no I without the stain: “I am” only insofar as I am not where I think, that is to say, only insofar as the picture I am looking at contains a stain which condenses the decentered thought– only insofar as this stain remains a stain, i.e., insofar as I do not recognize myself in it, insofar as I am not there, in it. For this reason, Lacan returns again and again to the notion of anamorphosis: I perceive “normal” reality only insofar as the point at which the “it thinks” remains a formless stain.”[4] That is to say, the stain is the blind spot of the subject, an illusion, a mirage of something outside discourse that has no positive existence (it is real in the Lacanian sense), but which nonetheless discoursive practices, like that of the law here, constantly refer to. We get unexpectedly close here to Foucault’s claim about the changing scope of confession that started in the 19^th century: “it tended no longer to be concerned solely with what the subject wished to hide, but with what was hidden from himself […] it had to be extracted by force”[5]. We have thus two dimensions of the subject (or in psychoanalytic terms: a split subject). One that is fully immersed into discursive relations, constantly created, modified, fragmented by discourses – in the case of Bourne, his almost automatic performances, activated by his interaction with others. On the other hand, the extradiscoursive illusory dimension, the one that power nonetheless incites him to bring out: his identity. The merit of the film, I will argue, is precisely that, along with Foucault, it places the possibility of freedom and resistance on the first level rather than on the second.

As the story continues, Bourne follows up on the one lead he’s got and goes to Switzerland only to find more identity fragments that don’t add up to anything: in his safety deposit box there are a dozen passports with his photo but with different names, a substantial amount of money in different currencies and a gun. He gets a new lead, of course, pointing towards an apartment in Paris that one of the names in the passports has. From this moment on, however, he is no longer alone in his investigations. First of all, he gets spotted by the CIA, that is, he becomes visible to a power that thrives to kill him to cover up the fiasco of his last assignment. On the other hand, he finds a girl (Marie) in dire need of some money who agrees to drive him to Paris for 20000 Dollars. The contrast between these two discourses can be seen in their relation to speech. Whenever the CIA reaches Bourne, whether by sending an assassin or the local police, these hostile agents are silent, they don’t have anything to say, they just want to kill (and thus silence) him. Such a strategy is a direct consequence of the panic in the agency’s headquarters about not being able to understand Bourne’s motives, not being able to extract knowledge out of him. Ultimately, it is his amnesia that makes him dangerous, blocking not only his, but also the CIA’s access to his identity, the hidden knowledge of his self through which he could be controlled. They want to silence him because he cannot speak and yet he wants to, he insists. His relation to power can be described as agonistic, the term Foucault uses to describe his concept of freedom. It is “a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation”[6]. “Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal. A relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its final moment (and the victory of one of the two adversaries), when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions.”[7] So what if Bourne disturbed a stable mechanism of power by losing the possibility of a face to face confrontation, which in my understanding involves the paralyzing relationship between the one who confesses (about his identity, his stain) and a “master of truth”[8]? As for reversal, obviously something like this happens when Bourne fights off the silent assassins in a struggle for life and death. They never have anything to tell as there is nothing to confess within “the free play of antagonistic relations”.

There is another side, however, to Bourne’s resistance which can be formulated following the early Foucault’s ideas about limits. His famous example in Madness and Civilization is how the creation of the reason/unreason binary silenced the voices of unreason that were present in the public discourse for centuries by using unreason as the limit of reason. Again, the point is not that madness represented a hidden knowledge but rather that it maintained an agonistic relationship with reason, that they were part of the same public space[9]. With the exclusion of madness the spirit of agonism is eliminated as well. Along these lines Giorgo Agamben developed the concept of homo sacer, a subject who is constituted outside of the juridical order, doesn’t have any rights: he can be killed but cannot be sacrificed (his death cannot have any meaning)[10]. One example of individuals in such a position would be illegal immigrants, those “without papers”, lacking this basic form of anchoring in the social order. Such a description fits not only Bourne but Marie as well, although their relation to the inside is slightly different. Marie, to put it simply, wants to get in and for that she develops a confessional attitude towards power: Bourne meets her in the US embassy where she is applying for a visa – not her first time – but she is rejected. She nonetheless argues passionately trying to convince the clerk that she is worthy of the reward this time. Later on in the car while driving to Paris, she continues talking about her life while Bourne seems to be ignoring her, but when she stops talking, he asks her to continue because her voice relaxes him. He is doesn’t speak much but is no less desperate – not to get in but to find an outside of the alien discourses that animate him. What is common in their struggle is that in the eyes of the law they both play the role of a limit that is about to overflow (Marie, right after his teaming up with Bourne, is classified by the CIA as a gypsy who’s chaotic past cannot be fully reconstructed and for that she has to be treated as a potentially dangerous criminal or worse).

It is their common position in the eyes of the law, their shared exposure to the panoptic gaze that constitutes Bourne and Marie as a couple on the run. They have to live as if they are being watched all the time: use disguise, remove fingerprints from hotel rooms they have stayed in. What they are effectively hiding is their identity, something none of them really has but which through the performance of its sheltering nonetheless functions as the organizing principle of their activities. After they find out what Bourne used to do for a living and why the government is after him, they try to disappear for a while in a family farm that belongs to Marie’s former boyfriend. It is here where one of the key scenes of the movie, a turning point of Bourne’s journey happens when, cornered in a vulnerable spot with a family and two kids he unwillingly dragged into his fight, he cannot run away anymore from the assassin they send to put him down. Before the confrontation, however, there is an existential moment he has to pass through when he is touched by the simple life of normal human beings in this peaceful retreat, seemingly outside the scope of power. In his moment of weakness he turns to Marie and gives voice to his desperate desire to get away from everything. Since they have enough money, they can just disappear, start a new life and live like everyone else. To this the girl says only: “I don’t know…”. That is to say, what brought them together is their common struggle, an agonistic confrontation with power; they were running because this was their only possible strategy. Her message thus can be read as the expression of the necessity to fight as well as the impossibility to run. What they are doing is not the search for an identity anymore. The situation that adds an emphasis to these reflections comes the next morning with the arrival of the CIA’s sharpshooter trapping them into the house. It is crucial that Bourne’s decision to act does not come from some kind of autonomous choice but is thoroughly embedded into the discourse he finds himself in. He reacts to the given situation by taking the family’s shotgun and shooting the gasoline tank next to the house so that the smoke would blind the assassin’s gaze. He then proceeds like a machine towards his enemy while trying to take cover in the woods. His determination wins him an advantage as the killer’s sniper rifle is useless in a close range. When Bourne sees him, he shoots first and when his wounded adversary reaches for his handgun, he shoots him again, fatally this time. The hunter becomes the hunted, the one looked at becomes the one who sees. Before the assassin dies, he reveals that he is a Treadstone agent just like Bourne. He still has headaches from the training just like him. Their battle was an agonistic struggle between two free agents not a relation between a fixed discourse of power to its subject incited to confess. As Foucault puts it: “a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries.”[11]

The final confrontation in the film which is prepared by the scene above, however, goes down in a way that is strikingly different from the spirit of agonism. Bourne goes to meet his maker in the person of his former training officer in the Treadstone program, someone who does have knowledge about his past. For this reason, their collision is a paralyzing one, they don’t fight, instead he makes Bourne remember, that is, confess what went wrong with his mission. Bourne initially resists: “I don’t remember!” – but his boss has got a hold on him: “This is unacceptable, soldier!”, and he tells him about the known details of his assignment, a discourse in which Bourne cannot but recognize himself. This is the first time in the movie when we see flashbacks: the reason he couldn’t kill his target is because the man’s little girl was there as well. I would suggest not to be too hasty and treat this narrative device as a typical Hollywood cliché about the hidden humanity in all of us. A closer look reveals that the encounter with the child was actually a traumatic experience for Bourne which can be read as the cause of his later amnesia. What happened was that while carefully and precisely executing the mission to the point where he was holding the gun to the target’s head, he noticed that the little girl was looking at him. She, however, did not realize what was happening and looked away as if nothing was going on. According to the Lacanian reading, what Bourne met in her was the gaze of the Other without the fantasmatic supplement on the subject’s part which would make it “the point of view from which the stain can be perceived in its “true meaning,” the point from which, instead of the anamorphic distortion, it would be possible to discern the true contours of what the subject perceives as a formless stain”[12]. As Joan Copjec explains, the “horrible truth” of the gaze in the Lacanian sense is that it’s blind, that unlike its panoptic version, it doesn’t pretend to have knowledge about the hidden core of one’s subjectivity[13]. For this reason, when Bourne is confronted with this horrible truth within a discourse of confession, the outcome cannot be explained with Foucauldian theory. As Zizek puts it: “Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it”[14]. That is, what happens to Bourne after his moment of remembrance is not the reintegration to the relations of power but the entering into a space where he is free from his quest for identity: “I don’t wanna do this anymore”, “Jason Bourne is dead”, “I’m on my own side now”. Remembering the ignorant gaze of the girl, a scene where he is pushed by the productive forces of power, helps him repeat his act of resistance, helps him see his boss, his “subject supposed to know” (Lacan) as impotent. I would like to emphasize that this shift does not happen in the field of an agonistic struggle.

What, then, does this tell us about the relation between Foucauldian theory and psychoanalysis? I claim that the movie presents the emergence of a Foucauldian universe parallel to Bourne losing his memories, or more specifically, the traumatic memory of his confrontation with the blind gaze. It is thanks to his amnesia that he as a subject becomes totally immanent to the discourses of power forming him. His being cut from his memories in the film has the same function as Foucault’s “ban” on the subject’s extradiscoursive identity. The question is: if there is nothing there, why all this effort to keep us from looking? If identity is impossible why is it also prohibited? What if this cut, although being productive in creating agonistic relations, is ultimately a defense against the traumatic truth that historically made possible the emergence of the very Foucauldian historicist discourse analytic approach? Or as Zizek formulates it, the problem is “how to historicize historicism itself”[15]. In the case of Bourne, it is his Nietzschean look into the abyss that makes it possible for his subjectivity to emerge in the genealogical sense, decentered, fragmented, without origin. But only the second look, the repetition of the first, repressed one does free him, not from the constraints of discourse but precisely from the need to find his truth outside of discourse.

Interestingly, this outcome has an affinity with the late Foucault’s theoretical move “from subjection (the constitution of the subject through domains of knowledge and tactics of power) to subjectivation (the emergence of the subject in practices of the self, i.e. ‘self-subjectivation’)”[16]. The latter opens up the possibility of freedom through self-mastery according to the given culture’s discoursive practices. Foucault’s claim is that whereas such a concern for the “care of the self” was fully present in Antiquity, it was later it was later overturned by the imperative of “know thyself”, leading to the metaphysical search for hidden essence we are familiar with today[17]. From this point of view, the film’s conclusion can be seen as the realization of Foucault’s ideal: Bourne, fully accepting the death of his subjectivity, finds Marie in a Greek island where they start a new life “without papers”. My argument is simply that we cannot account for this shift without the use of psychoanalytic theory, without the understanding of how the subject invests into his own subjection through a fantasmatic construction of an all seeing gaze, how the “traversing of the fantasy” (Lacan) is necessary for him to be able to act freely. When this happens, the symbolic law relying on the subject’s fantasmatic investment disintegrates, as the Treadstone-project is closed down in the end of the movie when it is brought before a budget committee, one obviously ignorant about the “true nature” of what was in front of its eyes.

The Sequels

After the financial and critical success of the first film, two sequels, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum were made, together turning in a profit of 731 Million Dollars worldwide. Director Doug Liman was replaced by Paul Greengrass, known for his realistic but somewhat sentimental docudramas (Bloody Sunday, United 93). His filmmaking methods make a sharp contrast to Liman’s traditional approach: he tends to show and say everything, so tension is produced by the constantly shaking camera and the excessive amount of cuts per minute rather than suspense emerging from blind spots in the field of representation or in the narrative. In this different paradigm the story of Bourne’s amnesia is taken up again but this time it is presented as an obstacle in the process of his becoming human. Accordingly, the second film starts with Bourne having nightmares as his memories from the past are resurfacing, and he even has a notebook where he tries to create a coherent catalogue out of the dream fragments. The main narrative device of both sequels is this reintroduced quest for identity, which can be seen as a regression from the position of the first film both from a Foucauldian and a psychoanalytic point of view.

The Bourne Supremacy starts with a corrupt CIA official sending an assassin to kill Bourne so he can blame his own theft of valuable documents on him and cover the tracks. Instead of Bourne Marie gets killed, and for that he feels unbearably guilty. His upcoming quest for redemption, for making things right becomes the driving force of his seeking a human identity. That is, the universe of the film is split between two types of characters: those who are able to show human emotions, empathy, compassion and guilt and those who are cold, cynical, dehumanized. Bourne’s process of becoming-human is now countered by a Russian killing machine against whom he now has a moral superiority. Needless to mention that the spirit of agonism is absent from the film. Similarly, there is a split among the faces of power as well, the cynical CIA head is opposed by the humane female agent, playing a kind of a surrogate mother for Bourne later on. What is even more symptomatic, however, is the retelling of the story of a repressed mission, Bourne’s first assignment this time where he had to kill a reformist (!) Russian politician and his wife, and make it look like she killed her husband and then committed suicide. Not surprisingly, like the target in the first film, they also have a daughter, but not a witness to the crime this time. Bourne seeks to set things right by looking her up and confessing the truth about the events, ultimately the truth about himself to her[18]. She is now constructed as the knowing gaze of the Other, facilitating the productive function of power by extracting knowledge out of the subject. A good illustration of the Foucaultian thesis that power doesn’t come from a sovereign center like the law of the state but from below through techniques of normalization[19]. And it’s Bourne’s mistake that he looks for the enemy in a centralized state apparatus, while he is created as a docile body through confessions without even realizing it. As a reward of his repentance, in the end he gets “back” a crumble of his human identity from the good female CIA agent: she tells him that his real name is David Webb.

If the motive of the hero’s journey in the second film was revenge, the third film (The Bourne Ultimatum) goes right for the uncovering of his origins: as Bourne formulates it: “someone started all this and i’m gonna find him”. He also takes his guilt-complex to the next level as he doesn’t put the blame on others anymore; he blames the body of Jason Bourne where the soul of David Webb is imprisoned to: “I tried to apologize for what I’ve done, for what I am. None of it makes it any better”. Accordingly, the enemy is not some corrupt politician anymore but the whole system of sovereign power justifying its illegal covert operations programs that destroy the lives of innocent civilians while referring to the nation’s interest. If Bourne’s quest in the second film was a moral one, this time it becomes political – in the liberal democratic sense of the term. His task is to disidentify with the body that served the political interest of an oppressive regime and finally become what he is outside of the discourse of power. This narrative can be read as the liberal panic about the totalitarian dangers of identifying too closely and uncritically with letter of the public law. One needs a private life as well, some distance from the public symbolic identification through a process of disidentification that supposedly makes somebody human[20]. The goal is for Bourne to be able to tell that not only is he a killing machine but also something else, more substantial, a human being.

The final confrontation provides the answer to the enigma of Bourne’s origins. He meets the doctor who helped him become what he is now, who made him become dehumanized. But the film insists that it was Bourne’s decision to sacrifice himself wholly to his country. This pathetic moment of autonomous decision is depicted as yet another memory of a repressed assignment, the crossing of a line after which, it seems, there is no way back to humanity: he had to kill a man who wore a hood over his head and about whom he knew nothing about. As the film suggests, he ultimately killed himself as David Webb and it is at this moment that he became Jason Bourne. The gaze of the Other in the scene, that of the victim is a dead one. Not to be confused with the terrifying blind gaze in the first movie, such a dead gaze is the supplement of the subjective position that comes with the total self-sacrifice to the law. Greengrass opposes it to the knowing and understanding gaze of the daughter Bourne confesses to in the second film – a false opposition since it obfuscates the horrible truth about the blind gaze.

It is this false opposition that, similar to the selling of his soul to the devil, makes possible to formulate Bourne’s salvation through disidentification in decisionist terms. After his flashback to the repressed scene of murder, he simply say: “I remember everything. I’m no longer Jason Bourne”. Although this is almost exactly the same as his final lines in The Bourne Identity, the different form of the gaze in the evoked scene is crucial. Whereas the first film pushed Bourne towards a post-human life, the third one recreates him as a human being, who’s transcendental core of subjectivity cannot be corrupted by power. In the last scene, during his escape, Bourne is shot into the East River in New York, and his body starts to sink slowly into the deep, making the viewer think for a moment that he has died. Then there’s a cut to a television news program announcing that Jason Bourne’s body hasn’t been found. Cut back to the river: now he starts to move and swims away. And we can go home with the illusion that power can never fully get a hold of us.

References

Agamben, Giorgo: Homo Sacer: Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998

Copjec, Joan: Read My Desire. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Press, 1994

Fisman, Steve: “The Liman Identity” in New York Magazine. Jan 13, 2008

http://nymag.com/news/features/42823/

Foucault, Michel: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York, Pantheon Books, 1978

Foucault, Michel: “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984, 76-100.

Foucault, Michel: “The Subject and Power” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), 777-795.

Gordon, Neve: „Foucault’s Subject: An Ontological Reading”, in Polity, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring, 1999), 395-414

Pickett, Brent L.: “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance” Polity, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer, 1996), 445-466

Vighi, Fabio and Feldner, Heiko: Zizek Beyond Foucault. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007

Zizek, Slavoj: “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!” in Slavoj Zizek (et al.): Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. New York: Verso, 2000, 90-136.

Zizek, Slavoj: Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993

Zizek, Slavoj: The Ticklish Subject. New York: Verso, 1999

My question would be: is this an antifeminist movie or not? Zizek makes a convincing case that it is in fact the presentation of an authentic feminine act[1]. He builds his argument on Lacan’s formulas of sexuation[2] where the feminine and masculine position is defined in relation to the phallic function. According to his reading, all men are caught in the phallic function precisely because they maintain a subjective distance towards it, that is, because phallic signification posits its own exception.[3] This exception, the semblance of an impossible fullness presented as the real Phallus “merely ‘gives body’ to the impotence/inconsistency of the big Other.” By contrast, Lacan’s famous feminine non-all can be interpreted as the position where the subject “’sees through’ the fascinating presence of the Phallus, that she is able to discern in it the ‘filler’ of the inconsistency of the big Other.”[4] This is how we should read, Zizek claims, the paradoxical formula that not all women/not all of woman is caught in the phallic function precisely because all women/all of woman is submitted to it without exception. This is why he argues that in the final sacrifice of Bess, “she undermines the phallic economy and enters the domain of feminine jouissance by way of her very unconditional surrender to it”[5]. Such an act can be directly opposed to the feminine masquerade where the illusion of the feminine mystique, of a hidden treasure behind all the masks is maintained and thus caught in the phallic logic of constitutive exception. It is only when Bess is able to give up this Beyond, the moment coinciding with her total subordination to Jan’s wishes in her last suicidal mission, that is, her “subjective destitution”[6], when she performs the ultimate sacrifice of love.

Such a reading is criticized by Christopher Craig Brittain, who reproached Zizek, along with von Trier, for creating an aesthetic spectacle of Bess’s suffering, being only interested in the pure idea of sacrifice that they can view from a comfortable distance, without giving up any of their male privileges.[7] Andreas Huyssen makes the same point about Flaubert’s identification with Madame Bovary: such a fetishization of imaginary femininity can go hand in hand with sharing a historical period’s hostility towards real women[8]. Or as Brittain argues, such an approach serves as a great excuse not to examine and politicize the social conditions that destroy the lives of women like Bess. Although I find the somewhat hysterical demand that films should depict the suffering of actual people disconcerting, I agree with the author’s conclusion that von Trier’s cinematic style, the one that Zizek celebrates, is deeply problematic[9].

Von Trier justifies the film’s minimalistic, anti-Hollywood documentary style by claiming that without it, the story would have been too suffocating[10]. For Brittain, this translates as a (futile) attempt to mute Bess’s suffering[11]. He, however, doesn’t mention a crucial element of the film’s cinematic form: the way the director’s gaze enters the diegetic reality. Von Trier accomplishes this by instructing Emily Watson (the actress who plays Bess) to look directly into the camera for fleeting moments. Most of the time, but not always, these shots are followed (after a little delay) by a subjective shot of Bess to mediate the evoked tension. However, the uncanny effect of this procedure is not simply the taking away of the edge of whatever hardship the character has to go through on screen, but also the evoking of a real gaze outside of the film’s symbolic reality that she is ultimately performing for (that of the camera). The reaction the director thus provokes from the spectator is that “she is only acting”, that is, deceiving everyone in the film.

Theoretically this position attests to what Zizek calls a typical misreading of the Lacanian formulas of sexuation, according to which woman “is always split between a part of her which accepts the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinating the man, attracting the male gaze, and another part of her which resists being drawn into the dialectic of (male) desire, a mysterious jouissance beyond the Phallus about which nothing can be said”[12]. At the narrative level we see Bess’s entanglement in a masquerade for male desire but through the cinematic form, we see her acting for another gaze simultaneously that seems to give her control over her acts in the diegetic space. One could argue that she doesn’t know about the camera, that is, she doesn’t rely on a real gaze supporting her true femininity. When she looks at us, it simply signals the gaps within the symbolic order, as does the feminine masquerade itself. This, however, is not von Trier’s position. It’s almost like his whole filmmaking enterprise was aimed at making the gaze of beyond exist, materialize in the cinematic space. This “answer of the Real”[13] occurs with the emergence of the church bells in the end, a kind of a cynical note from the director underlining that she was acting for him (for the male gaze) all along, that the mysterious woman of beyond is just another male fantasy.

Von Trier’s cynicism challenges many theories about the fleeting nature of femininity. Sue Thornham argues, for instance, that 19^th century paintings of women which elevate them into representations of transcendence try in vain to eliminate their actual individual presence, threatening to disrupt the male fantasy[14]. In the case of Bess, however, the male gaze wins a double victory, first through her idealization in the big Other (as the village doctor puts it: “she was good”), then through destroying the illusion of her freedom from the symbolic when appearing as the Other of the Other, the cynical gaze identifies her (the message of the church bells could be: “she really was good”). This also challenges the definition of feminine masquerade as “taking control of the mask”[15].

I find Angela McRobbie’s notion of the “postfeminist masquerade” more useful in dealing with von Trier’s challenge. She identifies it as a “new form of gender power which re-orchestrates the heterosexual matrix in order to secure, once again, the existence of patriarchal law and masculine hegemony”[16]. The new masquerade involves constant references to its own artifice (Bess looking into the camera), renouncing the powerful figures of the lesbian and the feminist (Bess’s sister), performs an excessive spectacle of femininity (Bess’s promiscuity) and signals submission to an invisible authority (Bess praying to God). Analyzing fashion photographs, McRobbie also warns about the dangers of presenting women as indifferent to their lack, feeling free from subordination to men while still entrapped in the patriarchal society. Her idea is that while a photo can represent a playful relation between the carefree and self-sufficient woman and the remnants of phallic authority (like the ‘Church Father’ statue in the background of a Vogue photo showing a woman in a black dress and high heels), the very framing of the picture serves to contain and limit the female universe[17]. Such a photograph, I would argue, is framed by the patriarchal symbolic twice, just like Breaking the Waves where the church bells function as the inexorable closure and redoubling of Bess’s playfully addressed imaginary God.

There is a more affirmative reading of the relation between Bess and God possible, however, as Frances L. Restuccia demonstrates in his Impossible Love in Breaking the Waves. He argues that the shift Bess is going through is from hysteric to the Woman who doesn’t exist, the latter being the inherent excess of the hysteric’s position. The usual aim of the hysteric is to keep her desire perpetually unsatisfied by finding the lack in the phallic Other and trying to plug it to create real phallic potency. The paradox is that her very activity, were it to succeed, would undermine the aim of her act: she would be exposed to the “satisfaction of utmost pleasure”. Thus normally, she just pretends that she wants to be the object of the Other’s desire and she actually moves from one man to another. But it is possible, as Restuccia shows, that she goes to the end of the hysteric’s logic by identifying with the real-impossible object of male desire (with the Lacanian object a), thus becoming the Woman who doesn’t exist through self-annihilation, “paired with the Man beyond castration”[18] According to the author, in the end of Breaking the Waves, Bess and Jan becomes such a couple through Bess’s ultimate act of love in her self-sacrifice.

What Restuccia doesn’t see is that Bess’s heroic insistence on the realization of the impossible sexual relationship is already framed by the director’s cynical gaze, not only offering a mediating meta-level, a god’s view from where the couple is seen as completing each other but it makes Woman exist as well, enter the diegetic reality, precisely as the Woman who doesn’t exist: we only see the gaze supporting her existence in the form of her funeral bells. Another way of saying that the good woman is the dead woman.

References

Bjoerkman, Stig, “Naked Miracles: An Interview with Lars von Trier” Sight and Sound vol. 6.

Issue 10 (October 1996)

Brittain, Cristopher Craig: Christopher Craig Brittain : ”That is a strength he does not possess”: Slavoj

Zizek and Breaking the Waves

http://www.gradnet.de/papers/pomo99.papers/Brittain99.htm

Holland, Samantha: “Negotiating Fluffy Femininities” in: Alternative Femininities. Berg, 2004

Huyssen, Andreas: “Mass Culture as Woman” in: Modernism’s Other. Indiana University Press, 1986

McRobbie, Angela: “Illegible Rage: Post-Feminist Disorders” in: The Aftermath of Feminism. Sage, 2009

McRobbie, Angela: “Top Girls? Young Women and the Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence” in: The Aftermath of Feminism. Sage, 2009

Restuccia, Frances L.: “Impossible Love in Breaking the Waves” in: Lacan and Contemporary Film. Ed.Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle. New York: Other Press, 2004, 187-209.

Thornham, Sue: “Fixing Into Images” in: Women, Feminism and Media. Edinburgh University Press, 1996

Zizek, Slavoj: “Death and the Maiden” in: The Zizek Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 206-221.

Zizek, Slavoj: “Femininity between Goodness and Act” in: Lacanian Ink 14., 1999, 26-37.

Zizek, Slavoj: The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. New York: Verso, 1996

Introduction

In this paper I’d like to examine the discourse of coming out as heterosexual as ultimately asymmetrical to the ones involving sexual minorities. Using Judith Butler’s critique of gender identity as a starting point, I will develop the concept of the heterosexual coming out as the blind spot of Butler’s and Laclau’s politics of non-identity. I’ll draw on Slavoj Zizek’s psychoanalytic theory of the disavowed inherent transgression to supplement Butler’s notion of gender performativity in critiquing heteronormativity. Finally I’ll present the differences of the two theoretical frameworks through the case of a media quarrel between Sarah Palin and David Letterman that happened earlier this year.

Homosexual Coming Out vs. The Politics of Non-identity

When we think of a “coming out”, we usually think of it as a procedure concerning homosexuals. Furthermore, the idea some kind of isolated space, that of the closet is evoked where the person can come out from to the light of the public arena supposedly shared by all of us. Through this process, the fable tells us, even those who don’t share the sexual orientation of the majority can become a fully fledged members of society by (re)presenting themselves, since after all we are all different in some way. We all need to become what we are. It is the blind optimism of this doxa that Judith Butler criticizes in her Imitation and Gender Insubordination when she emphasizes the possible traps of the lesbian coming out and its assumption of an identity. She shows how every assertion of “this is what I am”, every disclosure of the “I” can work only through a radical exclusion, by concealing and repressing something through which process the “I” can gain clear boundaries. Coming out thus relies on and reproduces the closet, the space of being “in” in opposition to the triumphant being “out”[1].

So far, this is an argument about the impossibility of assuming any kind of identity. What makes the case of lesbian coming out more complicated, however, is the fact that homosexuality as a category has a history of designating the unnatural opposite of the heterosexual norm. Or, as Butler puts it in Bodies That Matter, heterosexual gender identity is formed through the disavowal of the same sex desire[2]. For this reason, a lesbian coming out involves an avowal of a prior disavowal, and it leaves intact the ideological framework that designates lesbian as a mere bad copy of heterosexuality as its original[3]. Someone with a lesbian identity constituted this way will count only as a secondary citizen in the supposedly equal public space. Butler’s argument is also a good illustration of what, in Hegelian terms, can be called the double inscription of heterosexuality operating in liberal democracy. It works both as the hegemonic universal (based on the normative exclusion) and as one of the particular identities in a series of apparent equivalences. The tolerant liberal democratic space thus can be viewed as a latest manifestation of what Ernesto Laclau calls universality based on the logic of incarnation where a particular is directly standing in for the universal. His example is the European universalism of the 19^th century, where, he argues, “there was no way to distinguish between European particularism and the universal functions it was supposed to incarnate, given that European universalism had constructed its identity through the cancellation of the logic of incarnation and, as a result, of the universalization of its own particularism.”[4]

Thus Butler, instead of the coming out, proposes the deconstruction of the hidden binary operating within the heteronormative universal. Instead of silently accepting that homosexuality is just a copy, the task is to demonstrate how the seemingly original heterosexuality is already an imitation. What heterosexuals imitate is “a phantasmatic ideal of a heterosexual identity, one that is produced by the imitation as its effect”. The construction of an identity always fails, so the attempt has to be repeated again and again through a performance that both sustains the ideal and exposes its vulnerability. When Butler says that “[all] gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original”[5], we can understand this statement as the starting point of a different kind of community based on the universal non-identity of its subjects. Or to use again Laclau’s formulation: “[this] universal is part of my identity insofar as I am penetrated by a constitutive lack-that is, insofar as my differential identity has failed in its process of constitution. The universal emerges out of the particular not as some principle underlying and explaining it, but as an incomplete horizon suturing a dislocated particular identity.”[6] Just to be clear: this doesn’t mean that this new democracy would work without exclusions. As Butler herself formulates it, there is neither a subject, nor a social field without a set of exclusions already at work, without them we would get an unlivable fullness of psychosis. Real equality always remains an unreachable ideal[7]. What we can do is to prevent any particular to fix the meaning of the universal, to become naturalized; we can make sure “that the hegemonic configuration is always open to contestation and change”[8].

To summarize, Butler argues against homosexual coming out partly because it remains stuck within identity politics and partly because it sustains the liberal democratic political system built on several fixed hegemonic universals[9], among them (the identity of) heterosexuality. The underlying assumption is that the original sin of politics as well as its worst possible degeneration is the temptation of essentialism, that is, the reaching for a fixed identity. But is this really the ultimate horizon for a political struggle? In the remaining sections, I will show a different kind of threat that cannot be accounted for in the framework above. I will base my investigation on a blind spot of Butler’s theory: the possibility of coming out as heterosexual.

Coming Out As Heterosexual

In their Deconstructing Heterosexuality, Celia Kitzinger and Sue Wilkinson point out a fundamental asymmetry between lesbian and heterosexual feminists in terms of their sexual identity. While lesbian feminists usually proudly embrace their lesbian identity, their heterosexual colleagues tend to deny that their sexual orientation has anything to do with their feminist politics. They prefer to think of their sexuality as fluid, one that is open to possible same-sex relationships even if they have lived all their life as heterosexuals[10]. The authors criticize this attitude by arguing that such a “lack of reflexiveness is the privilege of power”. The problem for them is that by trying to mix together into the same category lesbian feminists and heterosexual feminists, the latter take away the specific political edge of the homosexuals claiming their oppressed identity[11]. Although I agree with this evaluation, I think it needs to be supplemented to be able to stand Butler’s critique. The problem is that the authors don’t really deal with the actual coming out of heterosexuals. Their primary example is that of “brave” heterosexual feminists who are decent enough to admit they are privileged[12]. We can hardly call this coming out as it is more about guilt than pride. The other example involves a feminine man who in all his life was considered gay until he decided to come out of his closet to himself, that is, not in public[13]. Thus the question remains: what does it mean to come out as heterosexual? And also: why is it political to come out as homosexual?

To delineate what I understand by coming out as heterosexual, I will use Slavoj Zizek’s critique of Butler’s theory of the heteronormative universal created through the disavowal of homosexuality. According to Zizek, “what universality excludes is not primarily the underprivileged Other whose status is reduced, constrained, and so on, but its own permanent founding gesture – a set of unwritten, unacknowledged practices which, while publicly disavowed, are nonetheless the ultimate support of the existing power edifice. The public power edifice is haunted also by its own disavowed particular obscene underside, by the particular practices which break its own public rule – in short, by its ‘inherent transgression’”[14]. In psychoanalytic terms we are dealing here with the gap between official symbolic (written) law and its supporting superego double of unwritten rituals (like humiliating initiatory practices of fraternity houses, pedophilia in the Catholic church or married men going to brothels) where the public law is suspended. According to Zizek, this gap is necessary for the symbolic to function, which means that besides the subject’s attempt to construct his or her identity as an answer to the normative interpellation we can also talk about the ideological practice of disidentification[15], involving the subject’s false illusion that he or she escaped, tricked the call of the law.

Is it then possible to avow this disavowal, to come out being proud of the very obscene rituals that the castrated phallic authority doesn’t allow us to express openly, let alone be proud of them? It seems impossible, as long as we move within the framework of the symbolic order. In that case, public presentation of the disavowed practices can break the smooth functioning of the symbolic, make power embarrassed, so to speak. This is how I would interpret the effectivity of a movement like Queer Nation. A slogan like “I praise God with my erection”[16] can be subversive precisely because it touches upon the obscene rituals within normative religious practices, or to put it bluntly, the fact that Christians themselves praise God with their erections. However, following Dagmar Herzog’s line of thought from her book Sex in Crisis, I’d like argue that in the last 10-15 years there is another form of power has been emerging that seems to be immune to such shaming attempts as it situates itself beyond the symbolic order. Herzog presents a strange shift in the Religious Right’s discourses on sex from a more repressive take to what she calls Christian pornography. The latter manifests itself first and foremost in public confessions of one’s sexual transgressions (sex with prostitutes, sex with minors, masturbation…) in explicit details, in a way that undermines the assumption that there is guilt involved at all[17]. And although there is an identity ideal evoked, that of non-castrated “wild man” who is not tamed by bourgeois conditioning[18], this pure masculinity is more like the impossible ideal of democracy that Laclau and Butler talk about; it can be approached by confessing/sacrificing new and new elements of actual male behavior on its altar. That is to say, the construction of an identity doesn’t play a role in either case, for Butler and Laclau because they consciously avoid it, and for the conservatives because they just don’t bother with appearances anymore.

To conclude this part, I’d like to define coming out as heterosexual as the above mentioned public avowal of the disavowed obscene underside of the heteronormative symbolic law. This can also explain why coming out as homosexual (or a member of any other sexual minority) can be perceived as a political act. In my view, it involves a disidentification with, a separation from the obscene rituals supporting the heteronormative symbolic[19]. This also sheds a new light to the question of the closet. What if the characteristic feature of a closeted person is that of disidentification? No matter what the actual content of his particular self-distanciation from the official law is, the very form of his performance will reify the hegemonic order. By sharing this ideological predisposition with members of the majority, he or she not only plays along with the normative symbolic law but with its superego underside as well. Thus coming out means not so much the entering to the public space from some isolated private hideout but a first step towards subverting the ruling symbolic by withdrawing its support from the most crucial place.

Letterman vs. Palin

And finally, to illustrate the different dimensions where Butler’s critique of gender identity and a Lacanian attack on proud heterosexuals can work, I will present an analysis of the media feud that happened between David Letterman and Sarah Palin this summer. The events started when Letterman, host of the currently number one late night talk show in the US, told a somewhat tasteless joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter on the June 10 episode of his program. Here is what he said: “Sarah Palin went to the Yankee game yesterday. There was one awkward moment during the seventh inning stretch: her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”[20] As it’s well known, Sarah Palin’s 17 year old daughter got in fact pregnant last year, which was an issue that created a controversy of its own thanks to Palin’s abstinence only sex education program and the way Bristol helped her to promote abstinence serving as the bad example. As for Letterman’s joke, complications started to appear when it became public that it was in fact not the (at the time already) 18 year old Bristol but Sarah Palin’s other daughter, the 14 year old Willow who attended the game with her mother. Palin issued a statement, accusing Letterman of joking about the statutory rape of minors and how with this kind of talk he contributes to the sexual exploitation of underage girls by older men, an outrage that happens in an “atrociously high rate”[21].

The fact that these accusations apparently made David Letterman very uncomfortable is a sign that he, at the time, occupied the place of symbolic authority, who’s functioning needs the disavowal of not only rape and sexual abuse but any kind knowledge of underage sexual activity as well. The next day he spent 8 minutes trying to reestablish the boundary at the age of 18 that makes it ok to consider a person sexually active – although as a gentleman, he also admitted the low quality of his joke concerning Bristol Palin: “Am I guilty of poor taste? Yes. Did I suggest that it was ok for her 14 year old daughter to be having promiscuous sex? No.”[22] It is crucial to distinguish on the one hand the slightly male chauvinist gender performance involving a series of sexist jokes about Sarah Palin herself that Letterman told since she entered the political scene (like describing her as a “slutty flight attendant” in the same June 10 monologue), and on the other this incident that actually broke the chain of performances by uncovering the disavowed underside that was there all along.

Sarah Palin didn’t accept Letterman’s answer, and came up with another statement attacking him more directly as one of the nation’s dirty old men abusing young girls. Responding to Letterman’s inviting them to the show, she wrote: “The Palins have no intention of providing a rating’s boost to Letterman’s show… Plus it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman.” The paradox is that although this was obviously a cheap political ploy on her part to exploit a situation that happened by chance, she nonetheless was on the right track subverting a male dominated symbolic normativity. However, I’d like to emphasize, she was on the right track for the wrong reasons. When she was asked to explain the last part of her latest statement on the Today Show (“Do you suggest that David Letterman can’t be trusted around your 14 year old girl?”), she came up with a perplexing answer: “Maybe he couldn’t be trusted because Willow’s had enough of these type of comments and maybe Willow would want to uhhhhh ‘react’ to him in a way that maybe would catch him off guard”[23]. After watching Letterman being uncomfortable for 8 minutes by the mere thought of teenage sexuality, one can imagine what kind of “reaction” Palin talks about that would embarrass him even more. It might seem, again, that not counting her insistence of calling her daughter’s showing of her sexuality a reaction, Palin actually makes a valid feminist point (by presenting the agency of her daughter). But I like another reading of this little Freudian slip better, according to which Palin reproaches Letterman for not being a real enough man, not like those in the evangelical discourses, the ones who aren’t squeamish when it comes to fucking teenage girls. For me, this is the only way the whole story of Palin’s accusations make sense at the libidinal level, serving as a footnote to her political performance of self-objectification[24]. Her act is subversive, yes, but the subversion is in service of a sexual counterrevolution aiming at the restoration of the Freudian primal father.

As for Letterman, on Jun 18, he did the right thing that can be expected from a male figure of authority: he apologized to the Palins by taking full responsibility for the public perception of his joke regardless of his original intentions[25]. In psychoanalytic terms, this move is called identification with the symptom, with the return of the repressed of his gender performance materialized in an obscene joke he had no conscious control over. It is crucial to see that through this act, the “normal” order of things was restored, the disavowed content got excluded again, that is, the Palins can go back to where they belong: to the private sphere, to their family. It would be too much of a speculation to say that Palin resigning from the governorship for no apparent reason a couple of weeks later had anything to do with the Letterman-affair, but as the subsequent late show jokes suggest, the connection is made at least in fantasy[26].

What I was trying to show is that while a Butlerian critique of phallic gender identification is very effective applied to David Letterman’s performing the role of symbolic authority, Sarah Palin’s lack of concern for a coherent identity needs a different set of critical apparatus, that differentiates her gender performance from the non-identity Butler or Laclau talks about. My view is that it can be understood as serving the ideal of the “real man”, presented also in discourses of the Religious Right, the Freudian obscene father who has all the women and has unlimited sexual potential. Thus while technically siding with Butler’s project of the subversion of normative gender identities, her activities lead towards a much more sinister form of male domination.

References

Berlant, Lauren and Freeman, Elizabeth: “Queer Nationality” in: The Queen of America Goes To Washington City. Duke University Press, 1997, 145-174.

Butler, Judith: Bodies That Matter: On the Discoursive Limits of Sex, Routledge, 1993

Butler, Judith: “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in: Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories/Gay Theories. London: Routledge, 1991, 13-31.

Butler, Judith and Laclau, Ernesto and Laddaga, Reinaldo: The Uses of Equality. Diacritics, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Spring, 1997), 3-12.

Butler, Judith and Laclau, Ernesto and Zizek, Slavoj: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Discourses on the Left. London: Verso, 2000

Herzog, Dagmar: Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics. New York: Basic Books, 2008

Kitzinger, Celia and Wilkinson, Sue: “Deconstructing Hetero-sexuality: A Feminist Social-constructionist Perspective” in: Nickie Charles and Felicia Hughes-Freeland (eds.) Practicing Feminism: Identity, Difference, Power. Routledge, 1996, 135-154.

Laclau, Ernesto: Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity. October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question (MIT University Press, Summer, 1992), 83-90.

Media

Hannity, Nov. 18, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3l4kUNVQw

Late Show With David Letterman, June 11, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X6FUwBmclo

Late Show With David Letterman, June 18, 2009

http://www.iviewtube.com/videos/59707/david-letterman-apologizes-to-sarah-palin-daughters

Late Show With David Letterman, July 07, 2009

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/07/letterman-takes-on-palin_n_226854.html

The Today Show With Matt Lauer, June 12, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKeZ8wgxl8U

A szamuráj

Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) francia filmrendező; a kritikusok 1967-ben, Alan Delon főszereplésével készült, A szamuráj (Le Samouraï) c. filmjét pályája csúcspontjának tartják. A hongkongi „szerzői akciófilmes” John Woo (1946-) ezt a filmet idézi meg (inkább amolyan homage-ként, semmint igazi remake-et készítve) az 1989-es A bérgyilkos-ban. Többről van szó azonban egyszerű tisztelgésnél; Woo filmje(i) tekinthető(k) a francia mester továbbgondolásának, műve, művei kiteljesítésének.

A szamuráj főhőse Jef Costello (Delon), a bérgyilkos. Életét akcióinak precíz, minden részletre kiterjedő megtervezése és hidegvérű végrehajtása tölti ki. Kifogástalan eleganciával öltözködik, mindig öltönyt és nyakkendőt hord, kalapját gondosan megigazítja. Arca mindig rezzenéstelen, történjen bármi, érzelmei nem árulják el. Lakóhelye egyetlen, szegényesen berendezett szoba, csak a legszükségesebb tárgyakkal és bútorokkal, továbbá egy kanárival egy kalitkában a szoba közepén. Emberekkel csak munkájával kapcsolatosan érintkezik. Van ugyan egy menyasszonya, de csak hogy alibit szolgáltasson gyilkosság idejére. Igazi profi tehát, akinek professzionalizmusa tudatos önkorlátozásában áll, mellyel kiiktat életéből minden fölösleges elemet, ami hátráltathatná, eltéríthetné, elárulhatná.

Jef Costello sosem hibázik. Amikor a film elején a felépítendő alibi részeként kártyapartira jelentkezik be, az egyik játékos megjegyzi: „Ne felejts el pénzt hozni, arra az esetre ha veszítenél!” mire ő: „Sosem veszítek.”. A gyilkosság előkészítése és végrehajtása (egy bártulajdonos likvidálása) tökéletesen sikerül, mikor azonban nyitja ki a tett helyszínéül szolgáló szoba ajtaját, a bár csinos zongoristája áll előtte. Ijedten mered a gyilkosra, aki egy pillanatra maga is megtorpan, a nő szemébe néz, majd sietve távozik. Két másodperc csak, amíg kiesik a szerepéből, ami azonban a lebukását jelentheti. Ő azonban nem esik pánikba, folytatja a terv végrehajtását pontosan az eltervezett forgatókönyv szerint (vagyis beletörődve sorsába, eltökélve arra, hogy rezzenéstelen arccal fogadja saját bukását).

Mikor a bűntényt felfedezik, a nyugodtan kártyázó Jefet is begyűjtik több tucat férfival együtt, akire illik a szemtanúk személyleírása. A szembesítéskor azonban meglepődve látja, hogy a zongorista lány, aki felismerte, nem árulja el. Mégsem engedik el, mert két másik tanú szerint, akik pedig nem is látták, ő a tettes (mintha Melville ezzel jelzné, főhőse nem kerülheti el a sorsát). Így behívják menyasszonyát, hogy alibije (a kártyázás előtti) első felét igazolja. Mielőtt erre sor kerül, Jef megkérdezi: „Feltétlenül szükséges ez?”, tudván, hogy a nő a másik gyenge pont, ahonnan sebezhető. És valóban, bár menyasszonya igazolja az alibit, a nő ettől kezdve a felügyelő támadásának folyamatos céltáblája lesz. Jefet ezek után bizonyíték hiányában el kell engedniük, előtte azonban mégegyszer szembesítik a szemtanúkkal. Úgy alakul, hogy a zongorista dönthet a sorsáról, ha azt mondja ő volt, benntartják, ha nem, elengedik. A lány most is fedezi, mire a férfi csak áll meredten, többször is elmondva: „Merci Madmoiselle!”.

Noha látszólag minden jól megy, Jef mégis a gyilkosság fő gyanúsítottja lesz, mert a felügyelőnek nem tetszik „túl tökéletes” alibije. Hiába rázza le hosszú, fáradtságos metróbeli macska-egér játékok után többször is a sarkában lévő rendőröket, hiába találja meg a szobájában elrejtett poloskát, ekkor már tudjuk, sorsának irányítása nem az ő kezében van.

A filmben kétszer láthatók érzelmek Jef arcán: először a bárba való visszatéréskor, amikor bambán, értetlenül ugyanakkor megigézetten mered a zongoristára (aki ijedten nemet int fejével, jelezvén a férfinak, hogy nem kéne ott lennie). Másodszor pedig a film végén, mikor tudván már, hogy mi vár rá (a maga választotta, mégis elkerülhetetlen halál), elbúcsúzik menyasszonyától. Arcon csókolja, majd néhány röpke másodpercre átöleli a nőt, végül mintegy uralkodva magán, eltolja magától (arca hirtelen újra érzéketlen lesz, nem mentesen némi, a mesterkéltségből származó komikumtól), és távozik. Távozik, hogy beteljesítse végzetét, „végrehajtsa” utolsó feladatát. A célpont a zongorista lány, aki, mint kiderült, kapcsolatban áll Jef megbízóival, azok mégis, mint szemtanút, el akarják tenni láb alól. A férfi besétál a bárba, fölhúzza a kesztyűjét, megvárja, míg a pultos felismeri és hívja a rendőröket, majd odasétál a zongorista lányhoz és fegyvert fog rá. A kiérkező rendőrök lövései (hátulról) leterítik. A felügyelő elveszi a halottól a fegyvert: nincs megtöltve.

A nők szerepe Melville-nél kettős. Egyrészt tönkreteszik, felbontják, kizökkentik az ő kizárásukkal precízen és kitartóan felépített „férfias játékok” rendjét, másrészt azok ki nem mondott középpontját jelentik. Az egyik jelenetben Jef autójával a piros lámpánál vár, amikor a mellette várakozó kocsiból egy csinos nő rámosolyog. Ő azonban fegyelmezi magát, előre néz, nem hagyja magát kizökkenteni. Hasonlóan „negatívak” azok a nőalakok is, akik a metróban (a rendőrségnek dolgozva) követik. Ugyanakkor menyasszonya nem árulja el, pedig a felügyelő mindent bevet ennek érdekében, ahogyan a zongorista sem, mégis mindketten a biztos halált hírnökei Jef számára.

A bérgyilkos

A szamuráj-ból John Woo elsősorban annak moralitását emeli át filmjébe. A Melville-univerzumban a legfőbb bűn az árulás, a legfőbb erények pedig a becsület, hűség, bajtársiasság. Így az amoralitás képviselője a besúgókkal dolgozó rendőrség, mely ahol tudja, zsarolással és erőszakkal kikezdi a kisemberek összetartását. Szintén amorális Jef megbízója (elrendeli a meggyilkolását, majd mikor szüksége lesz rá, új feladattal bízza meg), akivel a férfi nem is találkozhat, mert ő csak egy jelentéktelen végrehajtó, míg főnöke (Melville más filmjei is ezt sugallják) a hatalom képviselője (mint a rendőrök, de ők is csak végrehajtók).

A John Woo film főhőse ugyancsak bérgyilkos, szintén magányos és szintén öltönyt visel. És noha hidegvérrel és rendkívüli hatékonysággal gyilkol, titka nem az érzéketlenségében van. A Chow Yun-Fat által alakított főhősnek (Jeffrey-nek hívják) morális kétségei vannak munkáját illetően, ki akar szállni. A film elején neki is egy bárban kell likvidálnia egy triádfőnököt, mely akció (mint Woonál általában) komoly vérontásba torkollik. A képlet egyszerű: a gyilkos megjelenik, majd hősies és teljesen irreális küzdelemben a célpontot és tucatnyi testőrét (továbbá a berendezést) szitává lövi, anélkül, hogy ő maga megsérülne. Mindez balett-szerű koreográfiával és bájosan naiv humorral, ami egy pillanatra sem fordul nehézkes pátoszba vagy túlzott önreflexióba. Feladatának végeztével emberünk menekülne, ekkor azonban beleütközik a bárénekesnőbe (Jennie), közben, mivel lőnek rá, viszonozza a tüzet, és véletlenül megsebesíti a nőt. A golyózáporban fogja a sálját, és bekötözi vele Jennie fejét, majd elmenekül.

Az eset döntő hatással van rá, főleg miután megtudja, az énekesnő csaknem teljesen elveszítette miatta a látását. Visszatér a tett színhelyére, hallgatja, ahogy a nő énekel, majd megmenti őt az utcán rátámadó rablóktól. Úgy érzi, felelős azért, ami történt, segíteni szeretne rajta. Így Jeffrey-t is egy nő zökkenti ki „férfias játékaiból”, ezzel azonban nem egy sorsparadoxont tárva fel (mint Melville-nél), hanem a megváltást hozza el a moralitás dimenzióján keresztül. A bérgyilkos még egy utolsó munkát vállal, egy drogbáró likvidálását, hogy a kapott pénzből fedezhesse Jennie szemműtétét. Az erkölcsi kódex tehát kibővül a szeretet; az elesetteknek, gyengéknek, rászorulóknak való segítségnyújtás erényeivel.

A Melville-i becsületkódex azonban továbbra is érvényes. Az árulás itt is a legsúlyosabb bűn; Jeffrey már említett barátja, aki egyben közvetítője is a bérgyilkos megbízójának, éppen a két férfias erény, a hűség és a barátság között őrlődik, mikor megbízzák a főhős meggyilkolásával (mondván, hogy az énekesnőnek „felfedte kilétét”). Végül elárulja barátját, és bár az árulás nem sikerül, Jeffrey nem akarja látni többé. Woo azonban lehetővé teszi, hogy elbukott hősei vezeklés által bocsánatot nyerjenek, itt is ez történik: a barát heroikusan mazochista önlealacsonyítással és egy a biztos halált jelentő öngyilkos akcióval megszerzi Jeffrey ki nem fizetett bérét főnökétől, és csodával határos módon eljuttatja, ekkor már ezer sebből vérezve, barátjának.

Woo-nál, Melville-hez hasonlóan, ugyanúgy romlott a rendőrfőnök mint a bűnszervezetek irányítói, ennek oka azonban jóval egyszerűbb, mint A szamuráj-ban: pénzen és hatalmon kívül más nem érdekli őket, értékrendjükben egyszerűen nincs helye erényeknek, szemben Melville univerzumával, ahol a felügyelő mindig pontosan tudja, mit jelent a hűség és a barátság, de egyfajta heroikus cinizmussal, a sors kezét játszva elárulja saját meggyőződését is. Nem tehet mást: a morálnak el kell buknia, ő csak teszi a kötelességét, ez a dolgok rendje. Woo-nál viszont megszűnik a moralitás ilyenfajta paradoxona: itt nem kell feltétlenül meghalnia annak, aki morálisan cselekszik; a sötétség erői elleni harc reménytelensége az ellenség túlerejében van (ez adja a küzdelem hősies pátoszát), nem pedig a moralitás belső ellentmondásosságában.

Egy ponton viszont Woo teljesen egyetérteni látszik Melville-el: a nők nem érthetik meg, mi zajlik a férfi lelkében. Amikor a főhős és a felügyelő (aki A bérgyilkos-ban morális karakter; később Jeffrey barátja és segítője lesz) fegyvert fognak egymásra, az alig látó Jennie-nek, aki még nem tudja, ki is Jeffrey valójában azt mondják, régi futballcimborák, majd Dumbo-nak és Miki egérnek szólítják egymást. Sőt, a fegyvert is úgy fogják egymásra, hogy a lány ne láthassa. Azért Woo csökkenti ezt a feszültséget, Jennie végül a felügyelőtől megtudja, barátja valójában bérgyilkos, sőt, vonakodva, de beleegyezik, hogy elárulja (segít csapdába csalni). Jeffrey azt mondja barátjának a lányról: „megbízok benne”, de felkészül rá, hogy csapdába csalják. A találkozón aztán az utolsó pillanatban a lány kiabálni kezd, figyelmeztetve Jeffrey-t (és ezzel tisztázva morális hovatartozását), aki közben már félrevezette a rendőröket.

Woo talán legérdekesebb gondolata az abszolút moralitás és a az árulás közti határvonal elmosása, ami egyben a Melville-univerzum dekonstrukciója is. Melville bérgyilkosait egyfajta heroikus vakság jellemzi, mintha moralitásuk sorsuk (identitásuk) vakfoltjának tudatos vállalásából származna, melyről való mindenfajta tudás lehetőségét visszautasítják. Erre vonatkozó elszántságuk és kompromisszummentességük ugyanakkor komikusnak hat, különösen a nőkhöz való fegyelmezetten óvatos viszonyukban, hiszen őket tartják a rejtett tudás birtokosainak. Woo-nál éppen fordított a helyzet: a tudatlanság a nő oldalán van, így a morál sem a férfi vakságából származó egzisztenciális korlát terméke, éppen ellenkezőleg, a hétköznapi erkölcsi kódex excesszív betartásából származik, ami végső soron nem más mint annak elárulása. Így Woo bérgyilkosa számára a lányról való gondoskodás nem a munkát megzavaró, kizökkentő momentum, hanem a megbízás szerves része, annak inherens többlete, aminek köszönhetően a megbízók szemében a férfi árulóvá válik. Ez az árulás persze Melville filmjében is jelen van, de csak kimondatlanul, anélkül, hogy szimbolikus regisztrációja megtörténne: a Lacani Nagy Másik előtt Jef a végsőkig úgy tesz, mintha végre akarná hajtani az utolsó megbízását (Valérie, a zongorista lány elhallgattatását). A Másik tekintetének szerepét pedig, aki előtt a látszatot fenn kell tartani, maga a lány játssza[1].

A bérgyilkos zárójelenete hatalmas vérontás egy templomban, mely során a főhős föláldozza magát, megmentve ezzel Jennie életét. A gonoszok vezetője túléli az összecsapást, és megadja magát a megérkező rendőröknek, a felügyelő azonban, saját bukását is vállalva ezzel, lelövi a triádfőnököt. Ezzel a két főhős (bérgyilkos és felügyelő) nemcsak morálisan értékelődik fel, hanem egy jobb világot is hagynak hátra maguk után.

Baz Luhrmann (1962-) ausztrál filmrendező, aki a Kötelező táncok (Strictly Ballroom) c. munkájával vált ismertté 1992-ben. Azóta még összesen két filmet rendezett, közülük az első a Rómeó + Júlia (1996), a másik, máig utolsó filmje pedig a Moulin Rouge! (2001). A tény, hogy 4-5 évente forgat csupán (ráadásul saját forgatókönyvből), a „szerzői filmes” státuszával ruházza föl, persze szigorúan a populáris műfaji kereteken belül maradva (hiszen filmjei nagyköltségvetésű hollywoodi produkciók). Mégis, filmjein egyértelműen érezhető az igyekezet, hogy a szórakoztatóipar paneleit felhasználva magáról a szórakoztatóiparról, mint egy korszak mozgatórugójáról mondjanak valamit (ezáltal mintegy ki is lépve belőle). A film értelmezését ennek az állításnak a kibontására próbálom majd felépíteni.

A Rómeó + Júlia sikeres, divatos, népszerű film volt (és valószínűleg ma is az). Első ránézésre egy olyan igazán a fiataloknak szóló Shakespeare-adaptáció: őrült tempó, videóklipes vágástechnika, partik, drogok, gengszterek, lövöldözés, autós üldözések, felrobbanó benzinkutak stb. És mellesleg egy szerelmi szál két fiatal között, a szokásos bonyodalmakkal (a szülők ellenzik, így titokban kell találkozni + a srácot pedig még gyilkosságért is körözik). Ebben a megközelítésben Luhrmann egyszerűen modern környezetbe helyezte a 16. sz-i eredetit. Az itáliai Verona helyett a valahol az Egyesült Államok déli határán, vagy Latin Amerika északi peremén található (fiktív) Verona Beach lett a helyszín (a filmet Mexikóvárosban forgatták). A Montague és Capulet-fiak kard helyett lőfegyvert viselnek, nemesi családok helyett gengsztereket találunk, a város hercege pedig ezúttal a rendőrfőnök. Valóban, minden apró részlet „modernizálva” lett, mégsem gondolom, hogy a puszta átültetés lett volna a rendező szándéka.

A klasszikus irodalmi művek integrálása a „teen movie” (Sikoly, Amerikai pite…) műfaji keretei közé nem volt idegen a ’90-es évek álomgyári törekvéseitől (lásd pl. a Kegyetlen játékok c. Veszedelmes viszonyok adaptációt). Az ilyen filmeknél azonban a tinédzsermozi szabályai voltak elsődlegesek, melyek kérlelhetetlenül a műfaj kliséinek képére formáltak mindent, amihez hozzáértek. Ennek a logikának több ponton is ellentmondani látszik a Rómeó + Júlia (láthatóan nem egy sokadik Dawson és a haverok-változatot kaptunk eredményül).

Luhrmann megtartotta az eredeti Erzsébet-kori dialógusokat. „Minden” ami a filmben elhangzik, Shakespeare tollából való (nem hangzik el viszont minden, és a sorrend is felcserélődik számtalanszor). Mondhatnánk, hogy ez csak amolyan marketing-fogás, nem kell igazán komolyan venni, „poén” és kész. Különös módon az értelmezésem kulcsösszefüggését jelenti majd a „csupán ennyi és nem több” állítás. Egy állítás, melyet szerintem a film állít önmagáról. De ne szaladjunk előre. A régies nyelvezet egyértelműen modorosnak hat. Ahelyett, hogy erősítené a film hitelét, kizökkenti, megzavarja a nézőt, hiszen a mai világban egyszerűen nem beszél így senki. Mintha magát Shakespeare-t akarná nevetségessé tenni a rendező ezzel az olcsó trükkel, elvenni a pátoszt a drámából, megfosztani a súlyától az eseményeket. Hiszen kétségtelenül komikusnak hat, amikor a fegyveres összecsapásoknál rendre az „elő a kardokkal!” felszólítás hangzik el, miközben a párbajozók pisztolyt rántanak elő. Vagy amikor Rómeó a mérgért fizet a patikáriusnak: „itt az aranyad”, mondja, és átnyújt egy köteg bankjegyet. Különösen jellemző a Mab királyné-monológ megoldása: Mercutio a hosszasan ecseteli a pszichedelikus drogok hatásait Rómeónak (aki be is vesz egy tablettát Capuleték bulija előtt).

Nem a szöveg alkalmazása az egyetlen diszharmonikus elem, amely szétfeszíti, tönkreteszi a Shakespeare-i mű kiegyensúlyozott drámaiságát. A film tele van „comic relief” jelenetekkel, melyekben a szereplőkkel hirtelen valami oda nem illő történik, rendszerint az eredeti szövegben komoly drámaiságot hordozó jelenetekben. Így pl. Rómeó számtalanszor hasra esik (pl. miközben a nadrágját húzza fel a Júliával töltött éjszaka után), vagy leesik Júlia erkélyéről (bele az úszómedencébe). A film elején a Montague-k és a Capulet-ek első összecsapásakor az egyik megrémült „pisztolyhős” egy autó fedezékében szorongatja fegyverét, közben az autó ablakán át a benne ülő idős hölgy retiküljével püföli a srác fejét. Az egész csetepaté egy westernfilm paródiájára hasonlít leginkább: a felek sértéseket ordítanak egymásra, majd pisztolyt rántanak, de senki nem mer lőni, mire feltűnik a színen Tybalt, a „főgonosz”, talpig feketében, eltapossa cigarettája csikkjét a sarkával (közben baljós zene szól), elmondja hatásos belépőjét („Peace? Peace?! I hate the word! As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee!”), majd két pisztollyal lövöldözve, akrobatikus mozdulatokkal, elegánsan megfutamítja a Montague-fiakat. Végül pedig, mintegy ráadásként, a kifolyó benzintócsába dob egy égő cigarettát, amitől felrobban a benzinkút. Hogy ez miért paródia? A már említett comic relief-eken kívül érdemes megjegyezni, hogy a Tybaltot játsszó színész (John Leguizamo) mintegy 160 cm magas. Ami pedig még ennél is látványosabb, az a gyorsítások és lassítások alkalmazása, melyekkel rajzfilmszerű stilizáltságot teremt a rendező (a már említett retikülös fejbekólintás is ezt erősíti, főleg hogy valószínűtlenül sokszor ismétlődik).

Az eredeti szöveg használata és a komikus betoldások mellett azonban a legnyilvánvalóbb elem a Shakespeare-dekonstrkció folyamatában mégis az, ami elsőkét szembetűnik Luhrmann filmjei láttán, ez pedig a giccs alkalmazása. Hiszen nem egyszerűen divatossá, modernné alakítja a dráma kontextusát, díszleteit, hanem a végletekig viszi a felszín, a látvány, a csillogás hangsúlyozását. Először is: itt mindenki az, aminek látszik. Vagyis ahogyan öltözködik, ahogyan kinéz. Ez általában is igaz: a fiatal Montague-k színes ruhákat hordanak (hawaii ingeket), hajuk színe rózsaszín, narancssárga (persze nem Rómeónak), a Capuletek feketében járnak, fekete hajjal (tehát a Montague-k vidám, komolytalan, nagyszájú „party-arcok”, a Capuletek pedig kemény macho gengszterek). A ruhák azonban igazán a jelmezbálon sokatmondóak. Capulet Caesarnak, felesége Kleopátrának öltözik, Tybalt ördögi szarvakat visel, Mercutio pedig transzvesztita diszkókirálynőként lép fel (tényleg fel is lép Kym Mazelle: Young Hearts Run Free c. számát előadva egy remekül koreografált táncos tömegjelenet keretében).

Ez utóbbi fordulat mindenképpen az egyik legeredetibb változtatás a Shakespeare-műhöz képest, és nem utolsó sorban a film egyik vizuális/zenei csúcspontját is ennek köszönhetjük. Mindezt félig-meddig Rómeó hallucinálja (a bevett tabletta hatása alatt), ami lehetőséget ad Lhurmannak, hogy az egyész ünnepélyt szabadjára engedett, a hagyományos nemi szerepeken túlcsorduló szexuális energiák elszabadulásaként mutassa be (Capuletné Tybalttal (!), Capulet valami rómainak öltözött nőcskével kavar). Mindez a ’70-es évek diszkókultúrájából merített látvánnyal és zenével, csillogó műanyag jelmezekkel, kifestett arcokkal (és testekkel), szivárványszínű fényeffektusokkal. Mikor a szédelgő Rómeó otthagyja a kavalkádot (nem megbotránkozásból, hanem mert a drog kikészítette), úgy érezzük, bármelyik pillanatban (amolyan római típusú) orgiává alakulhat át az álarcosbál.

A jelmezekre visszatérve érdekes megemlíteni Páris kosztümjét, ő űrhajósnak öltözik, ami egyszerre mutatja hazafiságát és felfelé törekvő ambícióit (láthatjuk a Time magazin címlapján mint egy befolyásos család ígéretes sarját). Tybalt Capulet-bandájának tagjai csontvázak, a Montague fiúk pedig vikingek (= nagyhangú, a sört hordószámra vedelő, lányok haját megcibáló, fáradhatatlan életkedvű „harcosok”). És végül Rómeó lovagnak, Júlia pedig angyalnak öltözik. Előbbihez annyit fűznék hozzá, hogy a film elején (a drámához hasonlóan, de hangsúlyosabban) láthatjuk Rómeót, amint költői gondolatokat jegyez le noteszába szerelmi bánatában, majd lassan, merengve sétálgat a tengerparti naplementében. Tehát ő az érzékeny lelkű és bátor hős, és mint ilyen, ő a tizenéves lánykák megelevenedett fantáziája. Júlia pedig a tiszta, őszinte, ártatlan szépség, ugyancsak egy eleven fantázia. A film nem törekszik ennél lényegesen mélyebb jellemábrázolásra, ennek érdekében számos jelenetet kivág a Shakespeare drámából:

A filmben hiányzik a hirtelen felnőtté válással járó jellemfejlődés a főhősökből, mely az eredeti szövegben jól nyomon követhető. Az ellenük forduló világ nyomása alatt egyikük sem lép túl a tinédzserkori szerepeken, melynek sok szempontból oka lehet, hogy ebben a világban igazán senki sem felnőtt. Hogy ez mit is jelent pontosan, azt a Shakespeare-szövegen keresztül próbálom megvilágítani. Ott ugyanis a tragédia abban áll, hogy két, önmagában jó és tiszteletreméltó, ám mégis kibékíthetetlen értékrend találkozik egymással. Az egyik a család szentsége és védelme mindenek felett, mely minden családtag létének és boldogulásának feltétele. Ha egy Capulet titokban feleségül megy egy Montague-hoz, azzal olyan törvényeknek mond ellent, melyek létének alapját képezik, tehát a szerelem boldogsága mellett minden pillanatban jelen van számára a kínzó lelkiismeret, hogy cserbenhagyta családját, önző módon felrúgta a szabályokat, melyekkel veszélybe sodorta szeretteit. Shakespeare zseniálisan mutatja be ezt a kettősséget, a családból való kiszakíthatatlanságot, a család nélküli életképtelenséget, ugyanakkor az ebből a kétségbeesett és eleve halálra ítélt küzdelemből származó tragikus szerelem erejét. Amikor Rómeó immár Júlia férjeként elutasítja Tybalt provokációját („Tybalt, szeretni téged van okom”), azzal ő maga lesz Mercutio halálának okozója (Shakespeare ezt ki is élezi, amikor a Tybalttal összecsapó és halálos sebet kapó Mercutio dühösen azt mondja Rómeónak: „Mi az ördögbe is jöttél közénk? Épp a kardod alatt sebeztek meg.” – tehát egy családi viszályban önző, gyáva és másokat veszélyeztető cselekedet a szeretetre hivatkozva kívül maradni). Rómeó megérti, hogy nem szabadulhat ilyen könnyen, meg kell ölnie Tybaltot (mint ahogyan a dráma végén Párist is). Ezzel válik Rómeó tragikus hőssé, aki tudatában van saját végzetének, mégsem tehet ellene semmit.

A filmben azonban ennek nyoma sincs. Hiába történik minden úgy, mint a drámában, hiába hangzanak el ugyanazok a sorok, hiányzik az őket hitelessé tevő alapzat, a kontextus, ami a 16. sz-ban még létezett, ma azonban már nem. A film családi összetartása a szülők saját érdekeinek és szeszélyeinek kiszolgálását jelenti, a felnőttek semmilyen tartással, értékrenddel nem bírnak, tulajdonképpen a fiatalok életmódját és viselkedését utánzó, örök tinédzserek, akiknek eszük ágában sincs nagyobb összefüggésekben gondolkodni, mint saját boldogulásuk és életük élvezete. Capulet azért akarja Párishoz adni lányát, mert így befolyást és hatalmat remél leendő veje által saját maga számára. Mikor pedig Júlia elutasítja az ajánlatot, hisztérikus dührohamban tör ki, pont úgy mint lánya, amikor megtudja, kényszerül férjhez menni Párishoz. Júlia hisztijének egyik legmókásabb megnyilvánulása, amikor Lőrinc baráthoz megy, és síró arccal bömböli: nincs más megoldás, csak az öngyilkosság, miközben pisztolyt szorít a halántékához. Mikor pedig a barát vigasztalni próbálja, ráfogja a fegyvert. Ugyanígy, a már említett Rómeó vs. Tybalt jelentet is a főhős személyes sérelméről és belső érzékenységének megsértéséről szól valójában, és ennek megfelelően válik hisztérikus, őrjöngő ámokfutássá, melynek során egy autós üldözést követően Rómeó egy egész tárat kilőve ellenfelére a szökőkútba lövi a csodálkozó arcú Tybaltot.

A filmbéli konfliktusok tehát nem két szinten zajlanak, hanem kizárólag a felszínen. A szereplők saját szenvedélyeik miatt jutnak bajba, amennyiben a rájuk írt szerepet szenvedélyesen, az átélés igényével játsszák. Mercutio, intellektusával és feminin vonásaival kihívja maga ellen a macho Tybaltot, összecsapásuk szükségszerű, mert szerepeik erre ítélik őket. Ugyanakkor komolytalan is, hiszen hiányzik a kényszer, a tragikus konfliktus, mert a szerepeket mint az átélés egyetlen lehetőségét játsszák el saját jól felfogott érdekükben (így nem lehet őket igazán sajnálni sem).

Luhrmann pontosan tudatában van mindennek. Különböző eszközökkel állandóan megakadályozza, hogy a szereplők tartósan átélhessék az eljátszott szituációt, ezzel pedig azt is, hogy a néző igazán azonosulhasson bárkivel és bármivel. Minden jelenet zavaróan gyorsan véget ér, megakadályozva, hogy bármi igazán kibontakozzon, bárminek igazán jelentősége legyen a filmben. A már említett komikus betétek ugyancsak megtörik a drámaiságot. A rendező még a nagy tragikus kettős haláljelenetet sem hajlandó egyszerre 2-3 másodpercnél tovább mutatni, állandóan flashbackekkel szakítja meg a halott szerelmesekről felülről, lassan távolodó kamerával felvett képeket.

Mindent összevetve a film mintha szenvedélyesen átélhető pillanatok sokaságának egymásutánja volna, melyek gyorsan véget érnek, ezzel is jelezve, lényegük nem tartósságukban, kibontakozásukban van. Luhrmann megpróbál ezekbe a pillanatokba a lehető legtöbb átélhető érzékiséget belesűríteni, a tobzódó vizualitás (a már említetteken kívül lásd még a katolikus giccs alkalmazását), és zeneiség is ezt szolgálja, csakúgy mint a modoros szövegek. Kiemelném még a víz, a nedvesség és a szárazság dichotómiáját. A drámai csúcspontok, melyek a szenvedélyek elszabadulását hordozzák, valamilyen módon a vízhez kötődnek. A szerelem első látásra jelenet az akvárium vizén keresztül, a játszadozás a medencében (majd másnap a menekülő Rómeó ismét ott köt ki). Mercutio halálát a tengerparton a közeledő vihar jelzi előre, Tybalt halálakor pedig elered az eső (és a szökőkútba esik bele a kapott golyóktól). Capulet a szaunában izzadva ígéri el lányát Párisnak stb. A szárazságot pedig leginkább a sivatag jelenti, ahová Rómeó a száműzetésben menekül.

A felszín akarásának realitására végül a filmnek keretet adó televíziós közvetítés tesz pontot, mely a dráma narrátora helyett szerepel. A tény, hogy a tanulságot, a herceg helyett a bemondónő mondja, újabb ironikus kikacsintás: nem kell igazán komolyan venni a történetet, csak annyira, mint egy szórakoztató tv-s hírműsort, amit másnapra úgyis elfelejtünk. Ezt a következtetést húzzák alá az utolsó képsorok, melyben a feketeségben egyre távolodó, összezsugorodó televíziót láthatjuk, benne az adásszünet zúgásával. Vagyis: a felszín átélése minden, mögötte, utána semmi sincs.

Már a felvezető „tájékoztató jellegű”, véget érni nem akaró szöveg-áradat és a fáradt narrátor-hang gondoskodik a kényelemérzet felfüggesztéséről. A kötelező sablon világosság és sötétség felállást épp hogy csak említik, hogy átadhassa a helyet Boll zavarba ejtően szenvtelen rajongásának a sötét erők iránt. Valami ősi civilizáció nem tudott ellenállni a kísértésnek, hogy rászabadítsa a világra a mindent elpusztító gonoszt. A katasztrófa most megismétlődhet, tehát megismételjük – ígéri a felütés.

Humornak, vidámságnak azonban nyoma sincs. Amikor rögtön a film elején a főhős Carnby (Christian Slater) közli a repülőn mellette ülő kissráccal, hogy szörnyek igenis léteznek, egyáltalán nem viccel. Ilyen esetben a rendezői szándék valami moralizáló dramaturgia felvezetése szokott lenni, a Gonosz megnyugtató elhatárolásával, majd közömbösítésével. De félreértés volna erkölcsi gyengeséggel vádolni a megfélemlített árvaházi nővéreket, akik a rájuk bízott gyerekeket (köztük Carnbyt) átadják a sötét oldalnak kísérleti célokra. A jelenet inkább a mindenkiben ott lappangó lebírhatatlan erők létére mutat rá, amik, mint Boll többi filmjében, automatákká változtatják az embert. Az idegen test beültetése a gyerekek gerincébe a beavatás aktusa, mellyel az emberi nem tagjává válnak, nem pedig a gonosz rontása az ártatlanokon. A főhős ugyanúgy megkapta a kezelést, de egy véletlen (áramütés) során megszakadt benne a hatása. Innen ered tudatlansága, és reménye, hogy küzdelmének eredményeként végül helyreáll majd a dolgok rendje (a gonosz legyőzetik). A film végén rá kell jönnie, hogy ez a rend sötét erők uralmát jelenti; olyan erőkét, amik mindvégig észrevétlenül irányították a sorsát.

Nehéz Uwe Boll filmjében azonosulási pontot találni. Figurái papírból vannak, céljaik nevetségesek, korlátoltak. Egyikük sem érti, mi történik körülötte, ellentétben a nézővel, aki így szenvtelenül figyelheti kisszerű erőfeszítéseiket. A múzeumi asszisztens (Tara Reid megfelelően idegesítő alakításában) lelkesen katalogizálja a gonosz kapuit megnyitó régészeti leleteket, mit sem sejtve azok valódi természetéről. A paranormális nyomozó (Slater) hiába ravasz és eltökélt, ha naivul azt hiszi, holmi világító lövedékek és egy klassz bőrdzseki segítségével megmentheti a világot. Hozzá hasonlóan a szupertitkos fegyveres különítmény vezetője is saját árnyékát üldözi (mint kiderül, a kísérletek irányítója saját ügynöksége volt). A végkifejlet csak a szereplőket éri váratlanul: amikor a végső összecsapásra a föld alá leküldött csoport tagjai szembesülnek a másik dimenzió végtelen sötétjével (ami „mindvégig alattuk volt”), csak megerősítik, amit a néző már régóta tud: az ellenállás értelmetlen. Hiába zárják be hősies erőfeszítéssel a kaput, a világot nem tudják megmenteni. Boll gonosz iróniával főszereplői ténykedésétől teljesen függetlenül idézi elő az apokalipszist. A záró képsorok a halott város üres utcáiról felfedik a film valódi hősét: a madártávlatból figyelő rendezőt, aki rászabadítja dühét a világra, elsöpörve a korrupt emberi civilizációt úgy ahogy van, saját jobb sorsra érdemes színészeivel egyetemben.

Ez a nihilizmus lehet az Egyedül a sötétben emészthetetlenségének forrása. A jobb pillanataiban is hidegen fatalista Boll ezúttal még azzal sem bajlódott, hogy emberi hősökön keresztül ábrázolja a felébredő destruktív erőket (mint Heart of America vagy a Bloodrayne esetében). Kár, hogy a szereplők jelentéktelen bábuknak mutatása és a néző azonosulási próbálkozásainak elszabotálása, mint szerzői törekvés nem elég következetes. A rendező állandóan az ellenkezőjével hiteget, mazochisztikus megszállottsággal próbálva leplezni valódi szándékát. Az eredmény sok üres párbeszéd, fölösleges erőltetése nem létező konfliktusoknak (pl. Slater és egy Jack Bauer-kópia ügynök között), és egy különös ügyetlenséggel (és láthatóan kelletlenül) megvalósított szerelmi szál (az ominózus ágyjelenet a rendezőiből már kimaradt). Az akciók pedig látványosak, de túl sterilek; egyik oldalnak se lehet szurkolni igazán: bár a jók bénázása az idegesítőbb, mégis ők a történet hivatalos főszereplői, nézőpontjukat csak ritkán hagyja ott a kamera (a záró képsor az ilyen üdítő kivételek egyike).

Boll ezzel a filmjével egyértelműen öngólt lőtt, nem mellékesen pedig anyagi katasztrófák sorát indította el, így valamennyire érthető, hogy civilizáltabb országokban közutálatnak örvend.

Introduction

When we think of Evangelicals and sex, we think of repression. We should think again, according to Dagmar Herzog’s book Sex in Crisis[1]. Since the late 90s, we are witnessing an astounding shift in the nature of the religious right’s discourses on sex, a movement towards solicitation rather than prohibition, or to put it bluntly, towards “Christian pornography” (Herzog). In this paper, I will follow Herzog’s description of this move, but give a slightly different, psychoanalytic interpretation to it. My emphasis will be on the way which Evangelicals undermine the liberal democratic consensus on sexual equality based on heteronormativity, and with it the functioning of the symbolic law. As a central figure of this move I’ll present, following Herzog, the new ideal of the real man.

Contrary to common belief, we cannot really say that Evangelicals are anti-sex, at least not since the mid 70s, Herzog points out by citing from sexual instruction manuals of the era. Sex for the Religious Right, of course, is to be confined within the boundaries of heterosexual marriage, meaning that homosexuality, premarital sex or abortion is to be categorically eliminated. But when it comes to the married couple, sex can be pleasurable, passionate and orgasmic. It is all in harmony with God’s great plan. Accordingly, religious handbooks of the 70s and 80s develop a language that can be called Christian pornography, full of explicit descriptions of vaginal juices and fingering techniques. What is important to note, however, as Herzog claims, that up until the late 90s, the underlying assumption of this ideology was that “evangelical men naturally cherish their wives”[2]. To translate this into psychoanalytic terms, we can say that it was their wives who evangelical men supposedly fantasized about during sex. Is that even possible?

I’d like to illustrate this deadlock by applying Slavoj Zizek’s description of the Lacanian categories imaginary, symbolic and real[3] to the case of heterosexual sex between married couples. The crucial distinction lies between imaginary reality and symbolic fiction. While the former involves an attempted closure, presenting a full image of the world, the latter’s proper function is to remain open, to always maintain a minimal distance towards reality. In our example, marriage works as a symbolic institution precisely and only as long as it remains open what kind of imaginary fantasy fills out the void of the symbolic, for instance, what do husbands fantasize about when they make love to their wives. Through this inherent void, gap, the symbolic evokes the dimension of the real, something that resists symbolization, in this case the never attainable object-cause of desire what Lacan calls object a. Precisely through every fantasmatic representation lacking in some way, never fully being it, is it possible to have multiple imaginary fantasies supporting the institution of marriage. This looks all very democratic, since when a man has sex with his wife, he can fantasize about whoever he wants to, let it be man or woman, human or animal, adult or a child, the symbolic functioning of the marriage will be upheld. That is, until we keep a distance between symbolic and imaginary, fiction and reality.

So what happens with the evangelical attempt to create rules for heterosexual sex that could help married couples fantasize during sex? Isn’t the whole point of the fantasy that it is not written, that it gives one the possibility to creatively fill out the gaps of the written symbolic law? Such act “saturates the void that keeps open the space for symbolic fiction”, makes object a fall into reality, which as a consequence becomes “de-realized”. The psychoanalytic term for such a state is psychosis, in which the subject makes desperate and violent attempts to “evict object a from reality by force and thus gain access to reality”[4].

Before looking at how this is done in the ideological practices of the Religious Right, however, we have to mention the role of heteronormativity in marriage as a symbolic institution. Following the Hegelian theory of double inscription, we can argue that in the series of equivalences constituted by the multiple sexual imaginary identities standing in for the gap in the symbolic marriage, it is apparent that heterosexuality has a special role. It is doubly inscribed as both one of the particular terms and as the universal that determines the meaning of the whole series. It is the norm, the hegemonic signifier, the hidden background creating the illusion of equality between different sexualities only inasmuch as it remains hidden in its normative function. Therein lies the possible trap of gay marriage, for example, as its proponents might take for granted the illusory neutrality of the symbolic institution. As for the particular heterosexual identity, it’s relation to heteronormative marriage in general can be described in Hegelian terms as the oppositional determination of the norm[5]. Opposition here means contradiction, which can be seen when evangelicals set out to defend the sanctity of marriage from its derogation by pornography for instance and they end up producing a Christian pornography of their own. This can be seen also as the Foucauldian productive aspect of power as opposed to its merely repressive functioning. However, in a Foucauldian framework we would have to situate the emergence of pro-sex discourses at the level of the Lacanian fantasy, as just another way of transgressing the laws of the symbolic and thus creating a distance towards them while sustaining their functioning. By contrast, what I was arguing is that the new Evangelical sexual discourses point towards another form of power by eliminating the gap between imaginary and symbolic, which can be called totalitarian[6]. Moreover, since it is the dominant particular (heterosexuality) that this maneuver is based on, we are dealing with a specifically right wing conservative version of totalitarism, similar to the logic of fascism.

To summarize, my thesis is that Evangelicals represent a movement towards the elimination of the symbolic law that the heteronormative status quo of liberal democracy is built on. They try to realize heterosexuality as a norm through taking it literally and thus eliminating any possible distance towards it. In the next chapters I will explore the consequences of this psychotic step in three fields: adult heterosexuality, homosexuality and underage sexuality.

Confessing Heterosexuality

According to Herzog, in the late 90s Evangelical sexual discourses start to become increasingly paranoid about the inner and outer enemy lurking at their carefully planned out design for godly sex. To battle sexual temptation, they start a full blown attack on masturbation and fantasy, as they are now identified as causes to destroy marriages: they break the real emotional bond connecting the couple and substitute it for something merely artificial[7]. Heterosexual married sex is not simply offered as joyous as in the 70s and 80s. It is now emerging as the only real sex one can have in a world where sex is in a state of crisis, where its value is in danger. Here, the historical context is important. Herzog identifies two phenomena in the late 90s that can lead to the above mentioned confusion: internet porn and the invention of Viagra[8]. Both lead to a radical change in our understanding of sexuality. First, the physical act itself is perceived more and more in purely mechanical terms: Viagra disassociates sexual arousal for men from any kind of relationship to their partner. Second, the wide availability of pornographic images leads to an extension of our understanding of masturbation. As a conservative observer notes, “a husband who uses porn is ‘masturbating inside [his wife’s] body while he is having sex with the women on the screen”’[9]. This way the site of eroticism becomes more and more openly the domain of fantasy, while the actual other person in the relationship is reduced to a stage prop. From a Lacanian perspective, this move only reveals something about human sexuality that was always part of it. As Zizek puts it, the sexual act is “a kind of ‘masturbation with a real (instead of only imagined) partner’ […] The whole point of Lacan’s insistence on the ‘impossibility of sexual relationship’ is that this, precisely, is what the ‘actual’ sexual act is; man’s partner is never a woman in the real kernel of her being, but woman qua a, reduced to the fantasy-object”[10] By contrast, for the Religious Right, the opening up of this gap signals a crisis of the sexual relationship which has to be countered through evoking the specter of real sex in which a husband has intercourse as well as sex with his wife.

The most peculiar aspect of this new war on fantasy is that it is executed through confessional practices. In a Foucauldian manner, fantasy is not simply repressed but perpetuated through the incitement of its confession. Herzog quotes an example of this from Arterburn and Stoeker’s Every Man’s Battle, where a man recounts in lucid detail how he couldn’t help but masturbate to the sight of his sister-in-law laying on her stomach in front the TV with the lines of her panties and her upper thigh clearly visible[11]. The same method is applied to process of coming to terms with a sinful, (hetero)sexually promiscuous past, involving making a teenage girlfriend pregnant then aborting the baby, having multiple sexual partners simultaneously or having sex with prostitutes[12]. There are more bizarre cases as well, like a husband’s account of his extramarital affair with a 15 year old girl where the bragging tone of the confession taps into the realm of sexual taboos as opposed to simple prohibitions. I will return to the complications this latter poses in the section on abstinence.

I would argue that in these confessions we are not simply dealing with the Foucauldian productive aspect of power where the multitude of regulatory discourses leave their mark on the subject without giving him agency, but rather the emergence of a new political subject position who becomes the agent of power as well. Herzog notes how Evangelicals obsessively admit their attraction to the things they supposed to hate. This strategy has the effect of making them impervious to “the traditional liberal strategy of muckraking exposé of conservative hypocrisy. For there’s nothing anymore to expose. The sins have all long been confessed.”[13] The logic of these confessions is then quite similar to the process of sacrifice in totalitarism. There, too, as Zizek shows, there is a shift from the specific content of renunciation to the form it is performed. “The Fascist ideology is based upon a purely formal imperative: Obey because you must! In other words, renounce enjoyment, sacrifice yourself and do not ask about the meaning of it – the value of the sacrifice lies in its very meaninglessness; true sacrifice is for its own end; you must find positive fulfillment in the sacrifice itself, not in its instrumental value: it is renunciation, this giving up of enjoyment itself, which produces a certain surplus-enjoyment.”[14] Moreover, as Zizek notes, this surplus-enjoyment that is produced through renunciation is precisely the Lacanian object a, the unreachable object-cause of desire normally falling outside of reality. The totalitarian subject, as well as the Evangelical one, on the contrary, makes an attempt to realize, to grasp this object in its impossible purity. This can be viewed as a sign of the psychotic behavior presented earlier, the endeavour to evict object a from reality which however always fails since there is no symbolic law to support it; object a in the form of the pure norm always collapses back into reality.

Far from leading to mental collapse, such a subject in practice can benefit greatly from positioning himself into the short circuit of universal and particular, norm and practice. The fact that from the start we are dealing with a male dominance and heterosexuality on both levels, becomes crucial here. As Herzog shows, the impossible pure sex Evangelicals set out to reach is not some abstract objective but the sexual purity of the husband[15]. This is why, she argues, the apparent feminist streak of the religious sexual discourses should not deceive us. True, God now allows married couples to explore the domains of oral and even anal sex, to use sex toys, masturbate together etc. It is even all right for the woman to come first during intercourse[16]. But behind all this move towards the equality of sexes in bed, there is one clause that colors their emancipatory potential a little darker: the general advice for wives to be sexually available for their husbands all the time[17]. Thus, Herzog concludes, the project Evangelicals are working on together is not the new couple but the new man, the real man, a wild man, every woman’s dream as well as God’s will[18]. This is the point where the modern bourgeois masculinity is left behind as castrated, feminized and passive. And to push the argument to its logical conclusion, as cites Herzog from Robert Bly’s Iron John, when it comes to it, real heterosexual masculinity has to be saved also from itself as presented by the church even in its tamed, domesticated version[19]. The new, non-castrated man wants to have it all. God wants him to have it all.

It is easy to distinguish in this new male ideal the specter of the Freudian non-castrated father, leader of the primal horde who not only has all the women as his property but has the unlimited sexual potential to have them all the time. According to Freud’s narrative, this obscene figure has to be killed in order to civilization to be born through the son’s access to their father’s women. The name of the dead father then functions as the symbolic law in the hand of the newly founded brotherhood. One possible interpretation of Evangelical discourses on sex is to see them as an attempt to restitute this primal father figure of real manhood as it existed before the institution of symbolic authority. As Herzog shows with regards to the wife’s sexual duties towards their husbands in these practices, their role propping up the myth of men’s limitless sexual potential. It is always men who want to have sex more and they have to have sex all the time based on the scientific sex that their sperm has to be released at least once in every seventy-two-hour cycle[20].

To conclude this section, I’d like to present the Quiverfull-movement as a possible realization of the new non-castrated father ideal. The movement dates back to the 80s and offers a more overtly antifeminist edge to its new traditionalist message of restoring the patriarchal family unit. The main organizing principle of the group is their anti-contraception stance, but they present it as a positive program: to follow God’s will by having a limitless number of children. The ideological fantasy supporting their purpose is about a state of war the families are waging against “what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.”[21] That is to say, they are building an army for god out of children, as they put it, children are the arrows in the battle. Not surprisingly this idea came from a psychotic literal reading of a Biblical passage: “As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath a quiver full. They shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.”[22]

Feminist critiques warn about the return to the “cult of domesticity” for women as the sole purpose of their life is now to serve their husband in producing children for the good cause[23]. This means not just the standard Evangelical “available for sex all the time” but the acceptance of tenets like “my body is not my own”, as one of the founding texts of the movement puts it[24]. It is important to see that most Quiverfull families are working class. As The Nation’s Katryn Joyce notes, for these “poor women, the feminist fight for job equality won no career path but rather the pink collar labor as a housekeeper, a waitress, a clerk”. But how did we get from the understandable antifeminist backlash to a movement that is formulated in positive terms with the capability to expand?[25] We might apply here Walter Benjamin’s thesis that every fascism is a sign of a failed revolution to the sexual revolution that also neglected economic hierarchies of class while it remained within the liberal democratic framework. As we have seen, the liberal notion of equality always privileges white middle class heterosexuals, their identity is always doubly inscribed. The Quiverfull-movement thus can be seen as an attempt to overcome the lack of privilege by becoming more normative than those bourgeois liberals ever dare to be. By evoking the ideal of the overpotent obscene father, they ultimately uncover the hidden hierarchies of the liberal democratic consensus, creating an affirmative relation to them, accepting them as natural (as God’s will). It is precisely for this move that they can be called counterrevolutional.

Curing Homosexuality

How did the shift in Evangelical discourses on sex in the late 90s change their relation to homosexuality? Can the Religious Right’s attacks on homosexuals interpreted along the lines of their renunciation of heterosexual transgressions mentioned in the previous section? According to Herzog, the dominant conservative treatment of homosexuality until the mid 90s was to present it as the unnatural binary opposite of the natural heterosexuality. Based on this perception, anti-gay activism did everything to associate homosexuals with sex criminals, child molesters and perverts[26]. The stake was the mobilization of the Christian Right around a pro-family anti-gay agenda, as Pat Buchanan’s 1992 campaign slogan “Family Rights Forever/Gay Rights Never” proclaimed. Such treatment of homosexuality can be described with Judith Butler as abjection. She argues, following Kristeva’s line of thought that the price of creating a subject with discrete boundaries is the exclusion from the body the alien, non-fitting elements and putting a taboo on them, creating them as “Other”, “not-me”, ultimately as excrement. According to this logic homosexuality functions as the abjected constitutive outside of heterosexual identity[27].

This relation changes in the mid 90s when the new strategy of the Religious Right becomes the emphasis on the curability of the homosexual condition. Gays and lesbians are not criminals anymore but victims (usually of some kind of abuse). But most crucially, as Herzog points out, they are “insecure heterosexual wannabes”[28]. Does this mean that they are not constituted as an outside anymore? Not exactly. What happens is a less overt version of the Nazi differentiation between good and bad homosexuals. Herzog herself gives the description of such a procedure in her Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German Fascism, performed by Dr. Johannes H. Schultz. “Schultz and a commission of coworkers forced accused homosexuals to perform coitus with a female prostitute while the commission watched. Whoever performed heterosexually to their satisfaction under these conditions was set free; whoever did not, and hence had revealed his incurability, was sent to a concentration camp.”[29] The latter category created this way can be interpreted, to use Giorgo Agamben’s terms, as homo sacer, a subject who is constituted outside of the juridical order, doesn’t have any rights and most importantly cannot be sacrificed[30], that is, cannot participate in the performance of renunciation characteristic of totalitarian identities as well as, I argued, Evangelical ones. Coming back to the our context of the mid 90s, on the other hand, by creating good homosexuals as heterosexual wannabes, Evangelical ideology puts them alongside other never pure enough heterosexuals, offering them the psychotic identity of endless renunciation in pursuit of “gender wholeness” [31], real manliness for men, self-sacrifice to help men’s quest for women.

Performing Abstinence

Along with Evangelical’s discourses on marital sex and homosexuality, there is an obvious shift in their treatment of abstinence as well in the late 90s. While abstinence pledges among religious youth were not uncommon during the 80s and the 90s, they worked more along the lines of an incitement discourse, that is, by preserving technical virginity they opened up the way towards a non-penetrative eroticism such as mutual masturbation or oral sex[32]. By the new millennium, however, the world purity started to take up a different, more literal meaning, closing up the gap between ideal and practice. In this shift, the movement’s apparent gender neutral balance toppled, the focus on young women became obvious. Much like the Quiverfull wives, abstinence girls started to talk about their body as not really belonging to them (instead it belongs to God, of course) as well as the necessary sacrifice they have to make for their future marriage sex life to be perfect. Combined with the conviction that God has already chosen the ideal man for the young virgins, it is not hard to see the new abstinence movement as a supplement of the new cult of real masculinity.

To elucidate this even more, I will finally look at the so called purity balls, a social ritual among Evangelicals popular from the late 90s. According to a Glamour Magazine headline: “It’s like a wedding but with a twist: Young women exchange rings, take vows and enjoy a first dance… with their dads. ‘Purity balls’ are the next big thing in the save-it-till-marriage movement. Smart or scary?”[33]. This question can be reformulated like this: is pledging your virginity to your father hip, cool, a fun way of exploring a different site of sexuality and pleasure or is there something more sinister going on here? There is certainly a trend to be a purity girl, as playful slogans on T-shirts and underwear pieces suggest: “Abstinence Ave. Exit When Married” or “No Trespassing On This Property. My Father Is Watching.”[34] But how can one ignore the obscene references to incest and underage sexuality present in these rituals? As the Glamour article notes, the purity ball guidelines describe the majority of the girls as “just old enough…[to] have begun menstruating” making a perplexing reference to the well known obscene joke. Also, the girls in their sexy black dresses look more like wives or girlfriends of their fathers. Fathers are encouraged to tell their daughters how beautiful they are. The song the couples dance to is called “I’ll Always Be Your Baby.” [35] etc.

This is not to say that purity balls actually work to promote father-daughter incest. But I think it is also not enough to handle the phenomenon as just another instance of the productive side of power where abstinence becomes a form of pleasure. This, no doubt, happens, however I’d like to emphasize that when Foucault talks about the “perpetual incitement to incest in the bourgeois family”, he stresses that this was possible by eliminating actual incest among the lower classes. “On the one hand, the father was elevated into an object of compulsory love, but on the other hand, if he was a loved one, he was at the same time a fallen one in the eyes of the law.”[36] In psychoanalytic terms, incestuous desire can emerge only with the castrated father, the symbolic law, in who’s eyes the real, obscene father becomes a fallen one. But what happens when the gap that made the symbolic possible is eliminated? Incestuous fantasies collapse into symbolic rituals, they create a new obscene public texture of the law organized around the returning primal father.

In this paper, I gave a psychoanalytic reading of the Evangelical sexual discourses in the US materialized in the past 10-15 years. I showed that the common aim of these practices is to move beyond the liberal democratic politics struggling for equal rights for different sexual identity groups. By openly standing by a heteronormative and male dominated form of social organization, Evangelicals aim to overthrow current symbolic order based on a hidden heteronormativity. I described this move as a psychotic and an ultimately totalitarian one, organized around the idea of a new man, an impossible norm of a real masculinity which can be seen as a return to the Freudian primal father. I also suggested that this new male figure somehow escapes the logic of the Foucauldian power by standing in a short circuit of its functioning, thus getting a hold of an agency.

Nagypál Tamás

References

Agamben, Giorgo: Homo Sacer: Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998

Baumgardner, Jennifer: “Would You Pledge Your Virginity to Your Father?” in: Glamour Magazine, Jan. 1, 2007

Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, Routledge, 1990

Dixon, Kate: “Multiply and Conquer” in: Bitch Magazine Issue No. 37., Bitch Publications, 2007, 34-39.

Foucault, Michel: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York, Pantheon Books, 1978

Glanton, Dahleen: “At purity dances, virgin belles ring” in: Chicago Tribune, Dec. 2, 2007.

Herzog, Dagmar: “Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German Fascism” in: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 11, Nos. 1/2, January/April 2002, University of Texas Press, 2002, 1-21.

Herzog, Dagmar: Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics. New York: Basic Books, 2008

Joyce, Katryn: “The Quiverfull Conviction” in: The Nation, Nov. 27, 2006, 11-18.

Zizek, Slavoj: The Metastases of Enjoyment. London: Verso, 2005

Zizek, Slavoj: The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989

Zizek, Slavoj: Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993

Film a mexikói határ mentén tanyát vert három sorozatgyilkos ámokfutásáról; Ulli Lommel valós eseményeken alapuló DTV-horror ciklusának újabb darabja. Noha maga a rendező ezúttal nem tűnik fel, az életmű legújabb szakaszának összefoglalását kapjuk sűrített formában.

A három szociopata furcsa együttélését a szükség diktálja: egyéni tömeggyilkos ambícióik megvalósításához a munkafolyamat felosztásán keresztül visz az út.

Egyikük, a legszívesebben fekete bőrcuccokban flangáló leszbi vamp vonzó ajánlatokkal (szex, fotózás, pohár limonádé) a közös rejtekhelyre csábítja a gyanútlan hölgyeket, ahol aztán az ártalmatlannak látszó kopasz melák egy váratlan pillanatban rájuk veti magát. A harmadik ember egy fekete mágus cilinderben, sállal a nyakában (francia ráadásul), neki pedig a sírásás és temetkezés a szenvedélye. A közös erőfeszítés eredménye egy kisebb magántemető a hegyoldalban több mint 400 rögtönzött sírhellyel (mindegyiken az áldozat egy személyes holmija, rendszerint véres bugyi, melltartó stb.).

A különös társaság hétköznapjait Lommel zavarba ejtő természetességgel ábrázolja, amit csak erősít a rejtekhelyül szolgáló villa bukolikus idillje a gyönyörű dél-kaliforniai tájban. Beteges törekvése, hogy a kommuna és a figyelemre, hírnévre vágyó hullajelöltek viszonyát megfeleltesse a társadalom és a sorozatgyilkosok közti (média által közvetített) cinkosságnak, rendkívül szórakoztató, a gondolat látszólagos hűvössége ellenére is. A kelepcébe sétált leányzók először szembesülnek az átverés tényével (és a bőrfetisiszta csaj nőgyűlölő kitöréseivel). Ezt a legnagyobb természetességgel követi a mészárlás aktusa a hallgatag kopasz részéről (aki gyerekkorában kiscicákat darabolt fel és húzott le a WC-n). Ilyenkor fölhagy kedvelt időtöltésével (légycsapóval hadonászás a bokrok közt), hogy az éppen a keze ügyébe kerülő kerti alkalmatossággal (ásó, kapa, nyárs, zacskó) hozzálásson feladatához, vagy ha olyan kedve van, inkább bezárja a csajt a csirkeólba. Áldozataival elszöszmötöl egy ideig, aztán ha készen vannak, jöhet a temetés, az egész folyamat művészi megkoronázása.

A film csúcspontjai közé tartozik két tyúkólba zárt nő óbégatása: egyikük kijutni próbálna kétségbeesetten, a másik meg közben csörgőkkel a kezében cigánytáncot lejt és énekel hozzá. Médiakritikának röhejes, egyébként viszont roppant szórakoztató (a különben nekrofil táncoslány végül SPOILER túléli az eseményeket, lelki társat találva a sírásóban). Szintén emlékezetes a kivégzés fejre húzott zacskón keresztül beszúrt nyársakkal, ahol a bizarr csomagolás egyúttal sírhely kialakításában is szerepet kap.

Bár Lommel társadalomkritikája bántóan direktnek tűnhet (a három főszereplő például videóra veszi egymás vallomását a hírnévre áhítozásról), az eredmény (nem szándékolt?) komikus volta és nulla költségvetéshez képest kreatív vizuális megoldások (álomszerű képek) kellemes élménnyé teszik a filmet. Mindenképpen jobb, mint a rendező újabb próbálkozásainak többsége, de a Zodiákus-feldolgozások eszementségével nem versenyezhet.

Confession of Love in Slumdog Millionaire

Finally, let’s look at the finale of Slumdog Millionaire and try to delineate the theatrics of the love confession it presents us with. The game show setting itself quite clearly positions the main character of the movie (Jamal) as the Nietzschean ascetic priest, performing his confessions about episodes of suffering in his past (as witnessing the death of his mother, being used as a beggar by criminals etc.) in front of an audience of believers and the representative of the big Other in the figure of show’s host. In the latter, we can witness from the start the split between subject supposed to know and not to know as he both knows all the answers and is completely ignorant about Jamal’s personal experience (of jouissance) that gives him the key to the questions. The split between subject supposed to believe and not to believe is played out as well, the latter manifested in the ruthless police interrogator while the former in his benevolent and naïve assistant[1]. Jamal as a subject is stretched out in this matrix and is asked to confess. He does, and the excess in every one of his narrated fragment works as the driving force of the game (and the film’s plot): it helps to push forward to the next question, to a higher level. This part of the movie fits perfectly the Nietzschean model of the guilt-suffering-machine.

After successfully overcoming all the challenges by drawing on personal traumas and constructing his life’s story through them, Jamal is faced with a last question he doesn’t know the answer to: it’s about his desire for Latika, his significant Other, from whom he is separated due to unfortunate circumstances. It is a desire he couldn’t deal with so far. Before the finale, there is a scene between the two of them testifying to his failure in a very similar way to the […] scene I described in a previous section. Latika is trapped in the household of a local gangster and Jamal goes there to tell her about his feelings and take her away. To get in, he poses as a dishwasher. Inside, when they are alone Latika asks him: “Why are you here?” – “To see you.” – “You’ve seen me. Now what?”. At this point the crime boss walks in and Jamal goes to play his cover. For this reason, even though he tells her he loves her, this confession is wholly confined in the imaginary, it relates to the fantasmatic mirror image of the capricious woman (subject supposed to know) forever separated from him, telling him to forget about her. Their separation is stressed by a glass door with grates she closes after him.

The last question of the game asks for the name of the third musketeer, a character Latika played with Jamal and his brother Salim when they were kids, without any of them knowing the actual name though. Thus she cannot help Jamal when he calls her using the “phoning a friend” lifeline. It is him who has to name her, the final symptom to cure, the last obstacle standing between him and his salvation. And he does it, in line with the psychoanalytic rules of phallic signification as ultimately arbitrary: “A.” – he says. “Because? – Just, because.”. This is the moment of a symbolic confession of love which is here fully institutionalized; it’s about the social registration of what was known before only privately. In this sense, the actual naming is only a formality; the crucial moment is the phoning of the girl in public and her voice answering in front of the audience that does the registering. This scene is worth a closer look as the official addressee of the phone call is not the girl but Jamal’s brother, Salim. Through a series of contingent circumstances, however, the interpellation finds Latika, thus retroactively creating her as the true addressee of the call. As if the director would have wanted to demonstrate the Lacanian thesis “the letter always arrives to its destination”[2] and the ultimately arbitrary nature of symbolic signification. . Jamal’s love is registered with the host’s uttering: “I’m guessing this isn’t your brother”.

What is crucial in Jamal’s journey is that he doesn’t have to actually fight for his girl, the evil father figure of the crime boss is taken care of by his brother, the only character in the movie who actually loves Latika. For Jamal, it is as if from a fantasmatic relationship with the girl he would have immediately jumped into (an arranged) marriage, that is, from one form of defense against the desire of the Other to another one. She has thus no subjectivity, no agency throughout the movie, she simply materializes when needed, the way she is needed. This is the core of the director’s ultimately cynical view of his hero’s success, emphasized by his the cross-cutting of Jamal’s victory with his brother’s self-sacrifice gone unnoticed by everyone. With this Boyle stresses the illusory nature of his hero’s self-overcoming, his attempt to leave behind the believer’s position. In the end, we are left with the characters performing a Bollywood-style dancing routine, apparently happy in their newly found carefree innocence (underlined by their act being cross-cut with the child Jamal and Latika dancing). Ignorance is bliss, Danny Boyle seems to suggest, but he cannot really stand by his happy children, he has to show us what the cheerful crowd misses, making them effectively guilty of ignoring the brother’s tragedy. Jamal thus looked and acted guilty throughout the movie but only in the end can we say that he is guilty. Boyle’s cynical gaze makes him like that, which can be strictly opposed to the sympathetic look on the blind enthusiasm of Strauss and Proudhon exercised by Nietzshce and Marx. Does this mean the director places his hope in Salim, then? Quite the contrary, his sacrificial death, full of pathos, is presented to us as an absolute necessity, leaving no place open for a free act. As everything in this movie, “it is written”.

Abbreviations

CIS Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

CWN The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

E Jacques Jacan: Écrits

GM Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals

HF Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Holy Family

HRL Slavoj Zizek: How to Read Lacan

LM Hannah Arendt: The Life of the Mind

MECW Marx/Engels Collected Works

S7 Jacques Lacan: Seminar VII.: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

References

Arendt, Hannah: The Life of the Mind. New York: Hancourt, 1978.

Boyle, Danny (dir.): Slumdog Millionaire 2008.

Butler, Judith: “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, in: Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories/Gay Theories. London: Routledge, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles: Coldness an Cruelty. New York: Zone Books, 1992.

Deleuze, Gilles: Nietzsche and Philosophy. Continuum, New York: 2002.

Laclau, Ernesto: “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter To Politics?” in: Society, Politics, Ideology. London: Routledge, 2003.

Freud, Sigmund: Totem and Taboo. Great Britain, Routledge, 1950.

Habermas, Jürgen: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1989.

Lacan, Jacques: Écrits. London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Lacan, Jacques: Seminar VII.: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.

Lacan, Jacques: “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” in Écrits. London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006. Nr. 11-61

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich: Marx/Engels Collected Works vol 4.,

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume04/index.htm

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich: “Capital vol 1.” in: Marx/Engels Collected Works vol 35.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume35/index.htm

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich: “The Holy Family” in: Marx/Engels Collected Works vol 4.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume04/index.htm

Marx, Karl: Letter to J B Schweizer “On Proudhon”, in Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 2

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/sw/progress-publishers/volume02.htm

Nietzsche, Friedrich: “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer”, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. London: T. N. Foulis, 1910, vol. 4.

Nietzsche, Friedrich: On the Genealogy of Morals. transl. by Ian Johnston, 2009.

http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm

Nietzsche, Friedrich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, any edition

Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Will to Power, any edition

Rorty, Richard: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Zizek, Slavoj: How To Read Lacan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.: 2006.

Zizek, Slavoj: “The Interpassive Subject: Lacan Turns the Prayer Wheel”, in: How To Read Lacan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.: 2006. p. 22-40.

Zizek, Slavoj: The Ticklish Subject. New York: Verso, 2000.

Rorty’s Critique of Nietzsche

We thus can summarize Nietzsche’s critique of Strauss from a Lacanian point of view: he looks like an epigone, acts like an epigone, but don’t let that fool you, he is an epigone. It is to break out of this deadlock that Nietzsche proposes the destruction of the slave values, breaking with the machine of guilt, clearing of the air, and forgetting the baggage of the past so that new creation can be possible. Why would, however, the new values be different than the personalized master-signifiers of Strauss? Why would Nietzsche be the one with the hammer, the one with authority, which he clearly opts for, despite the ironic tone of his self-celebrating outbursts? This seems to be the gist of Richard Rorty’s liberal critique of Nietzsche[1]. Rorty splits Nietzsche in two, fully endorsing him as poet of new metaphors, that is, his perspectivism and irony, but refusing to accept his post-belief utopia about the Übermensch:

In his view, in achieving this sort of self-knowledge we are not coming to know a truth which was out there (or in here) all the time. Rather, he saw self-knowledge as self-creation. The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, tracking one’s causes home, is identified with the process of inventing a new language – that is, of thinking up some new metaphors.[2]

If he had been faithful to his own perspectivalism and antiessentialism, he would have avoided the temptation into which Hegel fell. That was the temptation of thinking that once you have found a way to subsume your predecessors under a general idea you have thereby done something more than found a redescription of them – a redescription which has proved useful for your own purposes of self-creation. If you go on to conclude that you have found a way to make yourself quite different from those predecessors, to do something quite different from what they did, then you are doing what Heidegger called “relapsing into metaphysics.”[3]

Rorty, I would say that, thus basically eliminates the gap that separates Nietzsche and Strauss by saying that everyone has a right to create his own private vocabulary of metaphors by a specific appropriation of the past (its personal, random fragments of influence). To put it simply, one can “confess” these fragments of influence without anxiety since what makes them new and unique is the historically contingent way they effect the individual. The only thing not to forget is that there is nothing really new under the sun, one cannot discover the truth, every new vocabulary is bound to be utilized later as part of the public language when it has lost its unique appeal. To put it in Laclau’s terms, uniqueness is a temporary effect of the always changing symbolic created as a byproduct of putting to the hegemonic position ever new master-signifiers that are immediately undermined the moment they are installed, that is, believed in.

I claim that the best way to understand Rorty’s offering of private and unique metaphors is through the process of betraying one’s desire I delineated in the previous chapter. What he calls the becoming literal of metaphors based on the needs of a community[4] I described as the emergence of moralizing relying on the subject supposed to believe, while his concepts of contingency and irony can be connected to confession of guilt for the subject supposed not to believe. Or, to put it differently, he is cynical about the possibility of a true confession, something that is not simply a redescription shaped by what the self needs at a given moment. Like the confession of love. What Rorty cannot imagine is what happens in the scene involving our boy and girl in the bathroom if the boy simply utters “I love you”. At that moment the clear separation of the Other into two separate images breaks down, which means the dissolution of the capricious superego as subject supposed to know and its externalized manifestation as supposed subject of disbelief. The very framework that makes possible to perceive one’s actions as redescription, as confession of influences, as always already guilty collapses. That is not to say the weight of the linguistic past suddenly magically disappears. It means, rather, that love is blind for those who are in it, and this blindness is a necessary condition of love.

I propose to find Nietzsche’s and Marx’s alternative to the subject of belief precisely in a blind subject of love rather then the usual reading pointing to their postideological subject of knowledge (the Übermensch and the working class). Here is Nietzsche on the Strauss who wrote The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, the powerful and controversial book which he read as a student:

Once upon a time there lived a Strauss, a brave, severe, and stoutly equipped scholar, with whom we sympathised as wholly as with all those in Germany who seek to serve truth with earnestness and energy, and to rule within the limits of their powers. He however, who is now publicly famous as David Strauss, is another person[5].

And here is Marx on Proudhon’s first book What Is Property?, no less controversial at the time, having an impact on Marx as well:

In this book of Proudhon’s there still prevails, if I may be allowed the expression, a strong muscular style. And its style is in my opinion its chief merit. It is evident that even where he is only reproducing old stuff, Proudhon discovers things in an independent way – that what he is saying is new to him and is treated as new. The provocative defiance […] a revolutionary earnestness – all these electrified the readers of Qu’est-ce que la propriété? and provided a strong stimulus on its first appearance.

On his later “petty-bourgeois” works:

Charlatanism in science and accommodation in politics are inseparable from such a point of view. There remains only one governing motive, the vanity of the subject, and the only question for him, as for all vain people, is the success of the moment, the éclat of the day[6].

In both cases, the second persona of the author in question corresponds to their activity after a significant betrayal, we might say “selling out”. The first figure described, on the contrary, is defined by his earnestness, style and energy, which more than compensate for the lack of originality. What I find crucial in this account of their colleagues by Marx and Nietzsche is their decision to support them 100% despite the fact that they are under influence, that they have false consciousness. Their support can be viewed as the fidelity to the love-event provided by Proudhon and Strauss in their writing, and it can be opposed to a more cynical reading like that of Rorty, who would only see their unambiguous contingency.