DIVERGENT REVIEW:Eric and PC Feminism

Jai Courtney as Eric

Reading Eric through Zizek

We see Eric first on the roof asking for a first jumper into Dauntless. Beatrice says, "Me." As she walks up to the wall Eric's face is not pleased but neither is he showing his displeasure that an Abnegation girl is going to go first. He is displeased though. Very much so.

Beatrice hesitates and Eric says, "Today initiate." And she gathers her courage and jumps.

The first fight between the transferred initiates is when Eric pairs The First Jumper (Tris) with The Last Jumper (Molly). Now we see how smart he really is. I said smart, not wise.

Without getting into a psychological swamp here - too deep anyway - reading through Jung we now know by this sentence that Molly is afraid of allowing herself to fall. She is then going to over-compensate by being physically strong and intimidating and in this instance cruel and sadistic. Right at the end of her beating up Tris we see Eric give her a subtle nod and she pounds the side of Tris's head and knocks her out. 

Jung's psychological theory can be used against someone as well as to help them. This is the continental philosophical position on the uselessness and danger of theory. Any theory can be turned against you.

She is then ranked next to last for losing.

We see a young woman being treated as "equal" with no allowances made for her being a woman and paired against another woman. All very PC Feminist according to the books. Eric is observing the rules while he stacks the fight against Tris. 

This is how it is done ladies. All the laws and rules will never help you while this goes on. We have surface compliance acting as a mask for a deeper deception. And Eric is planning this. He cannot be faulted in terms of Feminist political correctness.

Tris uses parrhesia to call Eric on his punishment of Al. 

"Anyone can stand in front of a target. It doesn't prove anything," says Tris

Dauntless ideology: 

• We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, 
• And in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.

Eric tells her to take Al's place, same rules. Flinch and you're out. So Tris is challenged into an act of Parrhesia. This was the risk she took, among others.

Tris stares into Four's eyes without flinching even when nicked.

Eric: "Points for bravery Stiff but not as many as you lost for what you said. We make soldiers here, not rebels. Watch yourself."

And then Eric will treat Tris as more equal than equal.

Four is angry, telling her to be smart. Tris goes to the dorms where her friends cheer her for her bravery in standing up to Eric and being the only one brave enough to do so. This is how people become scapegoats. They say what everyone else is feeling and thinking but are afraid to say. Eric knows this and has her fight with Peter next to pay her back. She has little chance, starting strong but gets brutalized. As she is down on the floor bloody, she watches Four walking away and Eric signals for Peter to knock her out which he does with a kick. It appears that this has been his strategy since she volunteered to be First Jumper and he looked at her with hate in his eyes. She had 3 strikes at that moment: A girl; A Stiff; First Jumper

It seems that losing a fight wipes out all the points accumulated so Molly wipes out First Jumper points and Peter wipes out the rest she has earned from accomplishment. They were just skills in learning to fight. The fight itself is the real deal and Eric will gt rid of her.

But Eric has also taught her to be Dauntless and Dauntless never gives up. It is Eric who has put the finishing touches on Tris's expertise. Never Give Up. She goes into the Control Room to stop the simulation and she cannot expect herself to come out alive from THAT! So Eric's training has boomeranged on him and we can expect the same from some returning Middle East vets. 

She misses a day in a hospital bed and Chris and Will come in to say good-bye before going to war games, telling her she can't go, that she is "out" now. Eric has dropped her as she fell below the line. 

This was clever and subtle plotting by Eric and quite in line with the "equality" feminists scream about. This is what happens when your demands are turned against you. You demand equality and you get it in spades. So be ready. 

Tris runs and makes the train for the war games. Eric confronts her and asks, "Who let you out?"

Tris replies, "I did." Softly, non-aggressively, assertively as she looks him in the eye non provocatively. Eric is nonplussed for a minute then says, "OK." He can't look stupid in front of everyone here. Four picks Tris for his team to be able to watch her - ? - keep her safe from Eric? - because he values her deadly intelligence?

 Tris shines, winning the game for her team. She is initiated with the zip ride.

Tris will be the one Eric personally injects the tracker chip into. This is a man who cannot tolerate an assertive woman who does not flirt. Chris flirts a little with him and then he hangs her over the chasm. To frighten her. But Tris he is out to destroy. These men are everywhere. Learn to recognize them and watch them. Avoid if you can. Deal with them if you have to. But learn to recognize them even when they paste smiles on their faces.

Zizek would say Tris over-identifies with Dauntless ideology. She is more Dauntless than Dauntless as Nietzsche might phrase it. And by pushing the ideology to the breaking point she destroys the faction system as it works at this point. Zizek tells us this is the way to force the system to be what it says it is or crumble. Tris is exposing the mask of Dauntless that presents the "floating sign" of "lite," all nourishment and value gone. 

An empty sign exposed by Tris leading to its collapse. This is her revolutionary act. This is how anyone becomes revolutionary. Push it to the edge of the abyss then push it over. 

DeLillo's Yen and Cronenberg's Yuan in Cosmopolis - Reading Through Lacan

Las Meninas - Diego Valazquez

Cronenberg has gone for the literal by using DeLillo's exact words in his Cosmopolis dialogue. But then strangely Cronenberg eliminates Yen (Japanese currency), replacing it with Yuan (Chinese currency), destroying the Lacanian resonance with yen: a whim for something; an innocuous wanting; and when, "He didn't know what he wanted, then he knew,  he wanted a haircut." Actually this is not a want is it? Is it a yen turning into a want as he persists with his plan? And he will keep his Appointment in Samarra to get it. A yen. Packer then begins to yen (want?) for yen, a play on the verb and the noun.

Then Packer wants all the yen - yenning? - that there is, he wants to want, he wants to Desire, but having no Lack, cannot. He wants all the Rothkos (does he want the sudden break, the cut in his life as Rothko had?), in fact the entire chapel, a religious setting these paintings were painted for. He wants all the volts the stun gun has. "Make me feel something I don't know." Then he wants to LOSE all Elise's heritage. 

Rob has said, "I think he was searching for something. He wanted something."  Cronenberg shuts him up once again. The first time being "....the world will die" the resonating quote of Ayn Rand. Is this the time Cronenberg pats Rob on the head? Good boy.  Does Cronenberg just want to touch Rob's hair like all his fangirls want to? Is this why Cronenberg gave him a slicked down 1950's hairdo (an armoured helmet of hair as Diane Rubenstein might say), perfectly groomed, not looking at all as if he might want, have a yen for, a haircut? What is Cronenberg thinking here?

In a literal recognition of the present economic world prominence of China over Japan, Cronenberg replaces the Japanese currency of the yen with the Chinese currency of the yuan, thus revealing his complete ignorance of the importance in our thinking about our world given us by Lacan that DeLillo has mirrored. (This is an auteur filmmaker?)

Ah, but a Lacanian reading still triumphs. The word yuan in the mouth of a native English speaker does not have the same resonance as spoken by a Chinese. Yuan. Roll it in your mouth. Feel its sound. Feel all the resonance of yearning in the sound of this word, the yawning longing it draws from the native English speaking mouth. Cronenberg has concealed and revealed from himself, concealed and revealed himself to us. In wishing to dispose of yen, a very very mild and almost invisible want, he has substituted yuan, a yearning, a longing. For what Mr. Cronenberg? What are you masking  with this  "floating sign" to escape knowing something you don't want to know that you feel? What if we consider Zizek's terminology of  unknown knowns at this point? Is it Death?

"Money has lost its narrative. Money talks only to itself," says Vija Kinski.

"The New York City skyline of skyscrapers has lost its narrative," says Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism. The Twin Towers of totalitarian monolithic proportions faced each other saying that although we appear to be two, we really are one. They are mirror images reflecting each other into infinity saying, "There is no outside." How clairvoyant do you think DeLillo is now?

"Money for paintings. Money for anything. I had to learn how to understand money," she said. "I grew up comfortably. took me awhile to think about money and actually look at it. I began to look at it. Look closely at bills and coins. I learned how it felt to make money and spend it. It felt instensely satisfying. It helped me be a person. But I don't know what money is anymore." (C 29)

Didi Fancher is talking about the loss of representation; the concrete feel of money. The signifier and the signified. Vija Kinski is talking about cyber-capital, Virtual Reality Capital, money as "floating sign", the signified and the signifier parted forever, money floating free as CODE (just air as Packer says)  in Virtual Reality.

Benno Levin:

"But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.....Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link. (C 55)


The loss of representation so carefully elucidated by Foucault in The Order of Things in chapter one with Valazquez's Las Meninas. In the painting among the royal family of Philip IV,                                                                                                                                                               is the painter. The painter is looking at you. The canvas he is painting you cannot see, only its back. At the far end of the painting, among the shadowy paintings on the wall, a figure midway on stairs appears to be lit by the invisible source of the light that allows you to see the royal family and the painter himself  But it is not another painting, it is a mirror,  "It offers us at last that enchantment of the double that until now has been denied us, not only by the distant paintings but also by the light in the foreground with its ironic canvas." (TOT 7)

I attended Leo Steinberg's seminar on Valasquez and he spent an evening on this painting. He did not mention the faraway "painting" that upon a closer look betrayed itself as a mirror. In Barcelona at the Picasso Museum there are all the studies of Las Meninas that Picasso did. I wish I could take another look.

You are in the light that is lighting the painting. You are the invisible subject Velasquez is gazing at. Foucault then discusses the royal family in this painting that is a portrait of them.

These proper names would form useful landmarks and avoid ambiguous designations; they would tell us in any case what the painter is looking at, and the majority of the characters in the picture along with him. But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visual, they prove supersably inadequate. 

Neither can be reduced to the other's terms; it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.( TOT 9)

And in this way Foucault gives us THE CUT with representation in the Dominating Discourse of painting paving the way to the modernist era with its lack of representation.