THE JOKER: Reading Through Zizek's The Reality of the Virtual

The Moment When The Joker Sits Down

Near the End

And he whispers out loud to himself,

It is exactly the way I imagined it.

This is the moment when he exhibits

what Zizek has described as

The Reality of the Virtual Imaginary

He is sitting there and this time he is in control.

All IDEOLOGY has evaporated

and its veil has been shredded

"YOUR SON IS DEAD." JOKE

That's not funny says DeNiro.

No it's not funny says The Joker.

You decide what's funny, Murray.

Or to say it differently, the MEDIA decides what is funny and manufactures laughter. 

The audience laughs at their own manufactured humor.

The audience does not know what they desire or what is funny.

It is this manufacturing that Arthur Fleck intuits and verbalizes.

And in shooting and killing DeNiro as Host

The Joker kills manufactured humor

At least right now.

Virtual Reality as THE SCREEN seen by Baudrillard tells us that we are now in Simulated Reality hurrying as fast as we can to Virtual Reality as it seems no one wants Reality. Once we are in the Virtual there is no escape. It is easy to talk about this with Gamers as they understand it very well. In a game you cant get out.

UNLESS 

you unplug your computer. But in the world once you are fully in Virtual Reality, there is no escape. Baudrillard offers SEDUCTION which cannot be manufactured.

Deleuze puts down Baudrillard offering instead a REAL that is more Real than Real, a Nietzschean solution. In my opinion Kristen Stewart as an actress - I prefer the feminine as the French do in a synthetic language rather than the agglutinative English - as she is not a method actress but one who intends to be more real that the character she portrays as real. Elizabeth Taylor was another one.

Zizek however is fully Zizek in this, - reading through Lacan and Hegel as always.  

He assuredly asserts in this documentary 

that we have always been in 

THE VIRTUAL

And it is Arthur as The Joker who visualizes and exemplifies Zizek.

We will see when he escapes the police car and dances on the top of it 

MICHAEL JACKSON'S PERFORMANCE DANCING 

just as he enters the court where he is being charged with child sexual abuse. 

Or was it just after. 

And there are many other celebratory footnotes to other films embedded in this reading of 

The Joker.

He has entered the stage and planted a kiss on the middle aged woman guest reminiscent of that great moment when Adrian Brody kisses Halle Berry before presenting her with her Oscar

https://youtu.be/B4kzceTpmAY

And it begins. 

https://youtu.be/zAGVQLHvwOY

ZIZEK
There is so much more of ZIZEK in this film that can be exhumed from the gap it has fallen into covered by all the reviews using interpretive Freudian theology - and Lacanian mish-mash -  that I felt I must dig it out before it gets buried for decades.

https://youtu.be/RnTQhIRcrno

The Rover REVIEW:If You Have Never Totally Loved a Dog, You Won't Get/Love This Film

If you have ever loved a dog with all your heart, 

then you will love and understand this film.

Guy Pearce Threatening Pattinson's Rey

I have read many reviews on this movie and none of them made we really want to see it. I really wanted to see it because:

1.  Michod wrote, directed and produced it

2. Guy Pearce has always turned in an intense performance and always, with no exceptions, chooses his material with great intelligence.

3. I wanted to see Pattinson's Rey

Here's a review by the Guardian, usually sort of decent main stream reviews, that does not disappoint my expectation. Just like the rest of them misreading this film. LINK

As I said in my title, if you have never loved a dog with all your heart you probably won't love this film nor will you get it.

I have only seen Animal Kingdom and The Rover. But both of these have a secret surprise key.

A Teaser for the Key to Animal Kingdom

When it comes for just those few seconds it is so shocking you almost don't think you are seeing it.

The mother kisses one son so erotically you can't believe you saw it.

One wonders what she did with all their bodies/minds when they were infants, toddlers, adolescents, young men. And we wonder what they do with each other sometimes or did when younger perhaps. It's a return to that time Freud describes as the account of the sons killing the father to have the mother and sisters. In Animal Kingdom the father is absent, and the sons have the mother. 

Or does the mother have the sons?

Animal Kingdom is set in the dissolution of society. This mother has her sons forming a criminal gang that kills and steals and gives her lots of goodies. Her family is incestuous and as Freud points out, kinship breakdowns undermine a civilization.

So this is the story of a breakdown on its way.

In The Rover I wondered if Rey came from such a family constellation, the resonance was so strong. 

Understand Rey - not as a low IQ, mentally deficient, retarded young man - but as a frightened stray searching for a Master to serve.

Rey is a dog. A dog wants a Master. Rey has found a new one in Guy Pearce to replace his bad Master brother. But yet he cannot kill his old Master. He's a dog. But he is  not indifferent. 

Rey's brother asks Guy, "What did you do to my brother?"

Pearce answers, "I didn't do anything to him." 

The unspoken sub text is, "But you did. You left him wounded and bleeding in the road like a roadkill. Like you would have left a dog you hit. And now you just shot him dead." 

This must have been a very difficult role for Rob Pattinson. 

There is a picture of his mother taking him to the playground, on the slide with a fucking halter and leash on him, inhibiting his movements.

It is cringe worthy but for obvious reasons I won't post it here.

His sisters used to dress him as a girl, gave him a girl's name (Claudia?I forget now), and take him out with them and introduce him as a girl to their friends. Can anyone imagine Kristen Stewart doing such a thing to a younger brother?

The Rover is a story of the breakdown that has occurred. 

The secret of this movie is as astonishing and compelling as in Animal Kingdom and in that light bulb of intuition the movie becomes organized into a different perception than the one you thought you were seeing.

Not one reviewer - and they are paid professionals - got this sudden twist which I won't reveal 

as it is a spoiler.

The entire movie spins and coalesces in a completely singular way from a dystopian sort of western into something else. 

Reading through 

John Caputo's The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps,

spiritually explains Guy Pearce's complete focus on getting his car back. Only the Granma asks, "What is it about that car that is so important?" (something like that)

And I will leave you with that to understand Pearce's rage, fury, violence from a man who had been a farmer, a man who cared about how things grew, and how you took care of them.

Reviewers discuss Pearce's violence on just getting his car back. The same way Eric Packer in Cosmopolis is discussed as going across town to get a haircut.
No one seems concerned with the violence that has devastated the world we are looking at in this movie. Oh well, that happened a long time ago. Let's move on.

If you carefully watched who he killed and who he spared you will have the key that comes from knowing the secret that you won't get until the end.

It's a "post modern" movie. The end is the EFFECT. You have been watching one thing after another happen, seeming causes leading to an effect. The end is the EFFECT that changes the entire movie jolting you to read it backwards. To infer causes. The Effect comes first. Then Causes are understood retroactively. This is Nietzsche.

Every person he killed was INDIFFERENT!

Every person he spared reflected humanity back at him as he had them in his sights.

The indifference of humanity has ruined the planet.

The planet is indifferent to what we are doing to it. 

The planet will change and survive no matter what.

Michod is indifferent as to whether this movie amuses or entertains you. 

He doesn't care. He is as indifferent to us as we are to the ruination to come. 

Michod is mirroring us in this movie.

What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn't stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody's interests but their own.
(Toby in LeCarre's A Delicate Truth)

Scene

Michod has given us a world where humans and the indifferent have both survived.

"Humanity is the scarcest resource." - The Rover

This scene occurs early in the movie, almost at the beginning. It left me wondering about him. Why would he get out of the car in the face of those criminals without a weapon knowing they had them. I didn't get it until the last frame in the movie.

WHITE PALACE, LOVE and The SCREEN GAZE

Witness to Love

October 25, 2013

James Spader and Susan Sarandon, White Palace, Universal Pictures, 1990

by Masha Tupitsyn

Seeing love on people’s faces.

When these screen lovers see each other again… When any screen lovers see each other again…

Do we see (have) these kinds of moments of seeing in real life or do they happen only in camera space? In the fiction of movies. Is the face of the lover loving and seeing the lover restricted tomise-en-scène? Is the lover’s face just another visual trope? Two visual tropes = Love. Seeing the seeing. It’s true, love is also a reaction shot. But who is witness to the reaction shot off-screen? And what is our reaction to love off-screen? In real life there is maybe only the diegetic. No one sees what you are living through. Certainly not what it looks like for you to live through it. Certainly no one sees your face looking at another face. This is why we have literature. And pictures. This is the engine of cinema, where the human face is always an action hero. But by the time art is made of it — of love — it is something else entirely. What is it exactly that we need for others to see that they can’t see? Love needs witnesses (Old English witnes, “attestation of fact, event, etc., from personal knowledge”), as that is precisely one of the things that love is: seeing and being seen.

Footnote:

The story is (told to me a couple of years ago by a reliable source) that these two had an intense affair while making White Palace. Susan Sarandon wanted to leave Tim Robbins for James Spader. Of course we never saw any of this.

---

About the Author:

Masha Tupitsyn is a writer, cultural critic, and multi-media artist. She is the author of Love Dog(Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (ZerO Books, 2011), Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007), and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009). Her fiction and criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in the anthologies Women in Clothes (Penguin, 2014), The Force of What’s Possible (Nightboat Books, 2014), The American Tetralogy (Blackjack Editions, 2013), Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology (2012), The Encyclopedia Project Volume 2 (F-K)(2010) and Volume 3 (L-Z) (2014), and Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), with additional works published by The White Review, The New Inquiry, Fence, Bookforum, The Rumpus, Boing Boing, Indiewire’s Press Play, Animal Shelter, the Shepparton Art Museum, and Ryberg Curated Video.

_____________________________

Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson Eclipse Premiere

THE HOST: A Terrible Review of One Trick Pony Stephenie Meyer

Director:Andrew NiccolWriter:Andrew NiccolActors:Saoirse Ronan
Diane Kruger
Max Irons
William Hurt
Bokeem WoodbineProducers:Stephenie Meyer
Nick WechslerComposer:Antonio Pinto

Stephenie Meyer is never going to eat lunch in this town again.

 Be grateful that she only got the clout to ruin Breaking Dawn I and II and had no input to speak of in Twilight, New Moon or Eclipse.  Breaking Dawn I, II made huge amounts of money and now we know Meyer had nothing to do with it. 

And Pattinson and Stewart had everything to do with the success of the franchise.

The Host has an excellent cast and that's it. Even excellent sounds dumb with these lines.

How Andrew Niccol could do the screenplay for The Truman Show and the screenplay for The Host will forever remain a mystery. His direction is awful also. 

Every visual cliche is in it over and over and over and over again and again and again. You feel as if you are watching one of those terrible movies from the 1950's.

The musical score is awful. The syrup flows with each passionate kiss without any passion. 

I cannot pan this movie enough. I even groaned aloud while watching it in all the right places.

It pulled in about 6 to 7 million above production costs. How it even did that I'll never know. Maybe because the Twilight audience came hoping against hope for another Edward. They definitely didn't get him.

________________________________________

I am quite sure now that this is what I have done with The Host. I have been programmed to perceive it as I have written about it above just like all the other reviewers. I shall be re-reviewing it reading it through the paintings of Mark Tansey. CLICK HERE

Herzog: The Jungle Is Obscene - Rob Pattinson's Next Director; A Blessing

Herzog will direct Rob Pattinson (as Lawrence) in: Queen of the Desert

This is the director Rob Pattinson has been waiting for. 

This month’s issue of Harper’s features a fantastic collection of diary entries by German film director Werner Herzog. These entries are excerpted from the forthcoming book: 

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. 


Released in 1982, Fitzcarraldo tells the story of a would-be rubber magnate who attempts to haul a steamship over a small mountain in Peru so that he can access an area rich in rubber trees. The infamous Klaus Kinski plays Fitzcarraldo, a European who pushes his crew to the breaking point in this mad quest; the semi-fictional plot was doubled in the real-life production disasters that plagued the movie. Fitzcarraldo dramatizes one of the oldest narrative conflicts, man vs. nature, in an earnest yet completely unromantic way. Fitzcarraldo, the opera-lover who brings ice to the natives, shatters any romantic illusions one might have about the power and majesty of nature in his mad schemes. This theme repeats throughout Herzog’s work, from the conquistador opus Aguirre, the Wrath of God to his outstanding 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. Again and again, Herzog’s films ironize, disrupt, or otherwise show the folly of romanticizing nature. His diary entries from Conquest of the Useless lay these sentiments bare in ways both bleakly poetic and terribly funny.

Take this entry from December 8, 1980: “The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin.” Here, Herzog provides a succinct antithesis to Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage.” Herzog’s view of man—de-politicized, that is—seems more Hobbesian, actually. In an entry from April 6, 1981, he writes:

“This morning I woke up to terror such as I have never experienced before: I was entirely stripped of feeling. Everything was gone; it was as if I had lost something that had been entrusted to me the previous evening, something I was supposed to take special care of overnight. I was in the position of someone who has been assigned to guard an entire sleeping army, but suddenly finds himself mysteriously blinded, deaf, and effaced. Everything was gone. I was completely empty, without pain, without longing, without love, without warmth and friendship, without anger, without hate. Nothing, nothing was there anymore, and I was left like a suit of armor with no knight inside. It took a long time before I even felt alarmed.”

Nature seems to nullify Herzog, to void any essential humanity he might have had. His repetition of “Nothing, nothing was there anymore” reminds me of King Lear’s famous lines “Never, never, never, never, never.” Although Lear is weeping over the body of his kind daughter Cordelia, the psychology of these lines surely reflect his own terrible experiences, his own nullified identity of homelessness on the wild heath.

For Herzog, nature is a war, nature will eat you. “Moss grows on lianas, and in the knobby places where the moss is thicker, a leafy plant like a slender hare’s ear grows out of the moss: a parasite on a parasite on a parasite,” he observes. If Herzog is melancholy or mordant in these grim reckonings, he’s also very, very funny. Take this hilarious June 4^th entry concerning a giant albino turkey that’s been terrorizing the set:

“The camp is silent with resignation; only the turkey is making a racket. It attacked me, overestimating its own strength, and I quickly grabbed its neck, which squirmed and tried to swallow, slapped him left-right with the casual elegance of the arrogant cavaliers I had seen in French Three Musketeers films who go on to prettily cross swords, and then let the vain albino go. His feelings hurt, he trotted away, wiggling his rump but with his wings still spread in conceited display.”

And yet one senses that Herzog’s humor is a defense against the absurdity of nature, one that derives from an acute awareness that humanity is at once of and apart from nature, and at that by its own definition, its own choice. In a June 2^nd entry featuring his nemesis the albino turkey, Herzog details an incident that highlights the essential ugliness of a Darwinian world:

“Our kitchen crew slaughtered our last four ducks. While they were still alive, Julian plucked their neck feathers, before chopping off their heads on the execution block. The white turkey, that vain creature, the survivor of so many roast chickens and ducks transformed into soup, came over to inspect, gobbling and displaying, and used his ugly feet to push one of the beheaded ducks, as it lay there on the ground bleeding and flapping its wings, into what he thought was a proper position and making gurgling sounds while his bluish-red wattles swelled, he mounted the dying duck and copulated with it.”

There we go. We get it all, all the order of nature. Food, sex, death, the whole deal, laid out keenly and with grim humor, neatly compacted into a single, grotesque episode. If these excerpts are any indication of the rest of the book’s trajectory, Conquest of the Useless promises to transcend standard making-of fare. Indeed, Herzog’s book seems nothing less than a profound meditation on the intersection of man, nature, terror, and mortality.

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo is available June 30th from HarperCollins.

Reposted from Biblioklept: http://biblioklept.org/2009/05/15/the-jungle-is-obscene-werner-herzogs-visceral-nature-writing/

"a suit of armor with no knight inside" is Lacan and Baudrillard. The suit of armor a "floating sign" asserting strength, a mask denying the emptiness of the signified, the knight inside is empty, weak, nothing.

And this is exactly what Kristen Stewart means when in LIttle White Lies Zine she said that celebrity charity is EMPTY! Herzog will love her.

“The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin.” 

Baudrillard's definition of obscenity:

When simulated reality will be total we will be in 

Virtual Reality

An Obscenity

Pornography is not obscene. 

Sex is now everywhere except in sex.

Since sex is everywhere, totalized, that is the obscenity. 

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Žižek – The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology - Zizek At TIFF Tonight 9/7/12 In Person

Žižek – The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

Posted from Progressive Geographies

After the success of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, 

director Sophie Fiennes and the only philosopher-

turned-film-star Slavoj Žižek return with 

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

, 

Tonight marks the premiere of the film at the TIFF

with both Žižek and Fiennes in attendance.

Bringing his unique style and “penetrating

insights” to popular and obscure cinema alike,

Žižek is at once captivating and clownish,

bringing unique knowledge and interpretation- as 

well as a deep love of cinema- to a host of films.

In this edition, Žižek examines film for a deeper

ideological implication, both obvious and 

undiscovered, and questions these outcomes for 

our own time.

Through skillful editing, Fiennes weaves Žižek into  

the narrative and histories of films as diverse as  

Jaws, The Triumph of Will, Brazil and The Sound

of Music.

Not many films can tackle capitalism, 

consumerism, left-wing radicalism and  

philosophy among other things. But ones with

Žižek certainly can.

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology premieres Friday 

September 7th at 6pm at the

Toronto International 

Film Festival

. Tickets can be purchased here.

Also at VersoBooks