What's missing?

The oddest element of The Parallax View is what's missing, namely, the film. What's up with that? Zizek talks ad nauseum about tons of films, but not this one. Why?

The obvious, boring answer is that his use of the term is drawn from Karatani and has nothing to do with the film. Well, that might work in your grad seminar, but that's not enough for LS. There has to be something more.

Could it be that the film is not very good? That is rarely enough for Zizek. His bread and butter is Soviet era melodramas, "Logan's Run," all the Alien and Matrix films.

Could it be that the film uses parallax primarily to designate the name of the shadowy big other, the bad guys, The Parallax Corporation? Zizek is moving ever further away from discussions of the Symbolic and toward the Real, so returning to that well-worked theme wouldn't take him very far.

But, it seems to me that parallax in Zizek's sense is present in the film in the gap between explanations that account for the immediacy of an event and explanations that account for the totality of forces behind them; or, perhaps, better, in the way that investigating a crime or matter shifts imperceptibly into becoming part of the very crime or matter. Beatty's character moves from being a reporter to being part of the situation, to being involved, hence suggesting the presence of the observer within the frame (our good old anamorphic stain from the early days, filled out better as the gaze, then the shift from desire to drive, really, the strings here are endless...).

So, why doesn't he talk about the movie?

Comments

[Amish Lovelock]

Maybe he forgot.

[Adam Kotsko]

IS NOT HIS VERY SILENCE ON THE FILM THE MOST DETAILED COMMENTARY?!?!?!?!

[Padraig]

Adam is, of course, partly quite right.

Nothing particularly intriguing about this: Zizek is always playing games (a few weeks ago, when I was talking all things Lynchian with him, he dismissed Dune as Raaaabish, yet its on his Top Ten Movies of All Time at the Sight & Sound Website, and on and on). But he's already discussed the "properly paranoic" US movies of the 60s/70s eg. from The Manchurian Candidate up to Rosemary's Baby, The Conversation, Chinatown.

His bread and butter is Soviet era melodramas, "Logan's Run," all the Alien and Matrix films.

??? You can't be serious? He's written extensively about these films only to dismiss them, just as he's recently written about Ayn Rand only to then rubbish her literary and ideological trash. [Ditto Leni Riefenstahl].

Take a look at his Top Ten: Hitchcock, Lynch, Harlan [yes, that one], as would be expected. (Kieslowski and Tarkovsky hovering on the sidelines) ...

Needless to say, his knowledge of world cinema is necessarily a bit limited. What's new?

Besides, Pakula's film is not a particularly striking example of parallax. Maybe, on this basis, he should have called his book Chinatown ... or better, Mulholland Dr. :-)

[RG]

Padraig, if that is your real name, it's great that you're such good buddies with Zizek, I'm sure everyone is quite impressed. But why must you write everything you say in bold? Is every word you utter really that important, or are you also playing games with us?

Needless to say, his knowledge of world cinema is necessarily a bit limited.

Why needless to say? Honestly, I wouldn't know..

[Amish Lovelock]

Doesn't the fact that Padraig has deliberately (no doubt) read Jodi's assumption that Zizek did not comment on the film not because the film is not very good because of the very fact that Zizek has "written extensively" about not very good films because of Padraig's "playing games with us"?

Ah ha!

[Padraig]

RG [is that a name?], your attempt at provocation is indeed charming, if not quaintly nostalgic.

[Your post has considerably more Boldness than mine but whatever, maybe its your eyesight]

Have you ever heard of Google, Yahoo etc Search Engines [I already know Much about you]?

You'd like to erroneously fantasize that Padraig is not my "real" name in order to engage in some contemptible sniggering to guillotine my credibility, then allege I'm "buddies" with his nibs (I certainly am not!).

Yes, you "honestly" wouldn't know.

Now, have you anything specific to offer to this thread apart from some infantile gloating? [You're new to all this, ain't ya?).

[RG]

Hi Padraig,

I don't see as how those comments do you any particular good but nonetheless, Sorry, no offense intended. (I really don't know you, and not sure how you could possibly know me. Judging from Google you are a famous golfer?)

Listen though, if you can trust me, I mean it sincerely when I ask, if you embolden things because of your eyesight? That would make sense then, and I can sympathize.

Just thought you might be interested in not risking coming across the wrong way, is all. You're obviously a very smart fellow, and I'd like to hear more about your experiences with Zizek, if you're at all so inclined.

Take care.

[Charles]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padraig_Pearse

[Kenneth Rufo]

Adam, thank you. I'm still giggling from that one. :)

[Jodi]

I think Adam's remark is hilarious.

Amish, thanks for your response to Padraig. I found his response to my 'bread and butter' statement quite strange. To say 'bread and butter' is not to say admire; it is to say 'get a lot of mileage out of discussing,' and/or 'discuss often.' I also don't think the criterion of admiring or praising a film is a very good one (which is why, as Amish rightly points out), I dismiss that possibility as grounds for including or excluding Parallax View. And, I also thought that I gave some promising examples as to how the movie does exemplify parallax.

Really, Adam's answer may be the only possible one!

[nnyhav]

40 possible answers:
http://www.parallax.com/html_pages/resources/custapps/app_bust-o-lenin.asp

[Padraig]

Jodi writes:
I also don't think the criterion of admiring or praising a film is a very good one (which is why, as Amish rightly points out), I dismiss that possibility as grounds for including or excluding Parallax View.

I wasn't suggesting that the criterion was simply aesthetic. I said Zizek was playing [intriguing] games: he doesn't discuss the film precisely because - as you so clearly and succinctly summarise in your post - of its status of being a perfect [political] instance of parallax in the imaginary real of cinema. In narrative terms, it's his book's MacGuffin. He almost did the same with his book on Kieslowski (not even mentioning the film-maker until he's well into the text) and similarly with the Lynch pamphlet. So, yes, Adam is right ...

Amish: I'm not sufficiently inebriated or psychedelicly neuronal to comprehend your interesting sentence.

RG: I hate golf. Zizek anecdotes pending, subject to boldness being permitted.

[RG]

let boldness be permitted then. only everything in moderation, maybe, hm?

[anonymous]

Look at the way this affects your reception of the book. No critic is going to be able to resist making this connection, nor is any reader who knows 'The Parallax View' (I'd be curious as to where the younger of you heard of this movie). Zizek is no doubt sitting on a reply to this nonsense which will shame us all.

More importantly, Zizek has opened a space for superficial critique, and hence severely limited it. Those who are engaged with Zizek's thought will thus be clearly distinguished from those who are attempting to best him in trivia.

That said, I haven't read Parallax yet. Salt to taste.

[Padraig]

On the contrary, anonymous [and isn't the practice of cyberspace anonymity a key instance of Zizekian trivia?].

And is this shift [from idealism to materialism] not also the shift from Kant to Hegel? From tension between phenomena and Thing to an inconsistency/gap between phenomena themselves? The standard notion of reality is that of a hard kernel that resists the conceptual grasp. What Hegel does is simply to take this notion of reality more literally: nonconceptual reality is something that emerges when the notional self-development gets caught in an inconsistency and becomes nontransparent to itself. In short, the limit is transposed from exterior to interior: Reality exists because and insofar as the Notion is inconsistent, doesn't coincide with itself. The multiple perspectival inconsistencies between phenomena are not an effect of the impact of the transcendent Thing—on the contrary, Thing is nothing but the ontologization of the inconsistency between phenomena. The logic of this reversal is ultimately the same as the passage from the special to the general theory of relativity in Einstein. While the special theory already introduces the notion of curved space, it conceives of this curvature as the effect of matter: it is the presence of matter that curves the space; that is, only an empty space would have been noncurved. With the passage to the general theory, the causality is reversed: far from causing the curvature of the space, matter is its effect. In the same way, the Lacanian Real—the Thing—is not so much the inert presence that "curves" the symbolic space (introducing gaps and inconsistencies in it) but, rather, the effect of these gaps and inconsistencies.

There are two fundamentally different ways to relate to the Void, best captured by the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: while Achilles can easily overtake the tortoise, he can never reach her. We posit the Void as the impossible-real Limit of human experience which we can only indefinitely approach, the absolute Thing toward which we have to maintain a proper distance—if we get too close to it, we get burned by the sun. Our attitude toward the Void is thus thoroughly ambiguous, marked by simultaneous attraction and repulsion. Or we posit it as that through which we should (and, in a way, even always-already have) pass(ed). Therein lies the gist of the Hegelian notion of "tarrying with the negative," which Lacan rendered in his notion of the deep connection between the death drive and creative sublimation: in order for (symbolic) creation to take place, the death drive (the Hegelian self-relating absolute negativity) has to accomplish its work of, precisely, emptying the place and thus making it ready for creation. Instead of the old topic of phenomenal objects disappearing/dissolving in the vortex of the Thing, we get objects which are nothing but the Void of the Thing embodied, or, in Hegelese, objects in which negativity assumes positive existence.

Someone who has read [or heard of]Zizek but hasn't seen [or heard of] Pakula's film: is there such a negative being, apart from your void-unembodied self?

[Look! No Boldness ...].

[RG]

http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/2006/03/knowingness-and-how-to-communicate-it.html"

[Padraig]

Adam [via RG's Link, above]: There is something about an encounter with Lacan that produces arrogance in the subject

There is something about an encounter with Lacan that reveals arrogance in the subject