Divergent Review of Divergent:Foucault;Baudrillard;Lacan

Divergent Review of Divergent:Foucault;Baudrillard;Lacan

An ordinary girl until she became the First Jumper.

The First Jumper.

 The first image we see of her after she lands in the net is of a happy, relieved, delighted young girl wrapped in her Abnegation robes lying innocently erotic, erotically innocent in the net. 

ONDINE

Like a Silkie or a mermaid from the deep. We are not given the cliched shot of Four looking at her, their eyes locked, but we can imagine Four sees her for the first time just as we see her for the first time. Silkies are women from the sea caught in the nets of fishermen as are mermaids. They can be captured and kept but if they find their pelts they will return to the sea. This Silkie in Divergent appears to have dropped from the skies, the Heavens as a gift, lying there in the net as she does. 

Reading through Lacan, Beatrice means "Bringer of Joy, Blesses, Dante's guide through Paradise, his lifetime muse." Tris is an off homonym with the French tres meaning very, excessively so, the diminutive for Beatrice. 

But the net is also a metaphor of the Foucauldian Grid, the mesh of the net of power/knowledge, The Matrix. It carries with it a Dominating Discourse of language and action just as Abnegation does.

Image of Foucault straddling the chasm

What is concealed immediately is her jump over the chasm, the abyss. Where Foucault stops at the edge of the abyss (where one resists) - as Baudrillard writes in Forget Foucault! - The soon to be Tris hurtles across it.

This is the metaphor for the EVENT!Beatrice becoming OTHER!

As Four addresses her and grabs her out of the net, the screenplay begins its wonderful editing process of Roth’s book defining Four’s character precisely and creating the new masculine ideal: Edward Cullen, dreamed by Stephenie Meyer into existence has now morphed into Four played by Theo James opposite Shailene Woodley's Tris.

Most of the reviews compare and contrast Divergent with the other YA franchises by Scummit/Summit with female leads. Then the interpretive critique begins. Everything sinks into that “swampland of psychological interpretation” Foucault — and Sontag — have demolished. Instead of pitting them as rivals against each other, I suggest reading each one through the other to deepen the meaning of each against the resonances of the others.

Each has a love story, but many books have this theme. What is unique about these three is what is revealed/concealed in them. We have the love story following Tristan/Iseult and Twilight’s Courtly Love, the Hunger Games romance and Divergent’s master/student relation. We also have the menacing presence of: 

surveillance; 

confinement; 

totalitarianism, 

Simulated Reality and 

Virtual Reality, 

all subsumed under the label of Dystopian Worlds, all of which are invisible.

Behind the story of young adult first love, finding identity, love and the coming of age rituals - We have no Vision Quest as Twilight, Katniss, Divergent does - into adulthood (This is the reality of the movies and the books.)

 — we have the Zizekian/Lacanian REAL — the invisible REAL — 

and a YA anxious, dreading preoccupation with a future of disaster, where only love can save us, or so they think. A world of totalitarian control unvisioned and unimagined by even Orwell or Huxley, where lies are truth and truth has only the credibility of speculation. An unimaginable horror as Simulated Reality steals our real world in homeopathic doses. The Borges map becomes the territory.

No crime-no victim-no criminal-no crime scene-invisible

In Twilight Bella is caught in the Foucauldian Grid of normality as described in Foucault’s Lectures in Abnormal at the College de France in 1974-75. It is invisible. She is confined in Forks. Simulated Reality occurs as the Cullens perform as humans at school, slowing their movements, during the boredom of classrooms repeating what they have already known for decades. Virtual Reality is what Bella embraces as she turns into a vampire: the acute auditory and visual perception that reads like an LSD trip or Huxley’s Doors of Perception. She desires this and wills it and will live it forever.Like being high an d knowing you are never going to come down.

The Hunger Games divides the people into districts in which they are confined and cannot leave. Panem the capitol is Simulated Reality and the Games themselves are Virtual Reality; meaning there is no escape as Simulated Reality has become total. Katniss will shoot her arrow into the invisible covering, short circuit it with lightning, with Jove’s thunderbolts, and “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” says Morpheus to Neo.

In Divergent there are five factions into which those that have been chosen and accepted live in confinement, more obvious than our own. And each has its Dominating Discourse of language and action. Simulated Reality is a bit more complex and occurs in simulations deliberately projected into people’s minds via serums and transmitters. But there is a strange twist to them. In the aptitude tests and the fear simulations the subject is as if in a dream.

In Journey to Ixtlan — as I remember — Don Juan is lecturing Castaneda on “Controlled Dreaming.” When you are in a dream and become aware that you are in a dream, knowing you are in a dream. This is Tris’s experience in Divergent. She knows she is in a simulation and manipulates it. This is what Don Juan is suggesting Castaneda learn to do in his apprenticeship to the Yaqui Indian. The process is:

1. Become aware that you are in a dream.
2. Bring your hands up in front of your face.
3. Look from your hands to the dreamscape and back again, repeating constantly.

As you do the dream will move to a different level, or as in Divergent, Tris changes the simulation as it changes in response to what she chooses to do. Just as your dream changes in response to your shifting perception going back and forth. If you stare too long at your hands their image becomes hallucinatory and you will go somewhere else without knowing anymore. The idea is to continue this practice and attain mastery over it.

In my case my spiritual quest was not so serious. After I began to be able to get my hands up — very heavy and clumsy at first — I began playing with it.

“If I am in a dream, then I could fly right now.” So I would fly higher and higher. At first it was very hard to get off the ground. Then if I were in a dangerous dream and “woke up in it” I would say to myself, “I can become invisible and they won’t see me.” And I dreamed that. Very freeing and exhilarating.

This is what Tris as a Divergent can do that the others cannot. She possesses the ability to think like the Dauntless, the Erudite and Abnegation where she was from. More flexibility which Don Juan is always forcing Castaneda into to break the conditioned frames his language and academic culture have imprisoned him.

I have much more to say about Divergent but my point here is that in our own classical Hegelian dialectical Dominating Discourse X is always rated against Y. One movie against another. This is Tabloid thinking. One book of the same genre against another. One person against another. The dichotomy of our language, our thinking, our writing, our behavior forces us into this frame.

Hey, you can just walk out of it if you want. It’s only a simulation. That’s all a Discourse is.

REVIEW:Don Jon:Reading Through Baudrillard - Welcome to the Desert of the Real

DO NOT MISS THIS FILM

And Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Neo had this book in his desk drawer in THE MATRIX

Don Jon is a movie on how we get to THE MATRIX.

It takes awhile but you have fun doing it.

Dirty Sexy Dancing.

Scarlett is hot, hot hot and she won't put out. At least not until she gets what she wants first.
Him.
Into her interfaced fantasy.

Happy Ending Romantic Fantasy

Dirty Sexy Laptop

JGL has been sensitizing himself to feel erotic looking at porno. He is becoming Pavlov's dog, salivating to the bell, - whoops, the nekkid bod and ass of the porno queen of the moment. He jerks off thus reinforcing himself for his gaze on the porno queen - or princess. His sexual responses are conditioned to the Barbie porn videos, not a real life Barbie. Just a simulacrum in Simulated Reality, and he goddamn well prefers her or her Barbie sisters. And his responses are now Hullian prepotent responses. 

Joseph Wolpe, M.D. Father of Behavior Therapy.

See any theory can be used against you.

Mark Tansey - Still Life 
Aside here: Mark Tansey is giving us the GREAT 21st century Foucauldian CUT in art history
Still Life is a painting of this movie without a happy ending.

Fuck real life. Gimme the simulacrum willya.

The Wondrous Julianne Moore
Enter Julianne Moore, a REAL woman. Who wants real?
Who wants intimacy?
Gimme that porn star willya.

No victim's body,no criminal, no crime scene,no capture,no punishment
The Perfect Crime
What Baudrillard is saying here is that our reality is stolen from us in homeopathic doses. That way we will not notice it so infinitesimal will those doses be. And we will never know when the boundary blurs, when we lose reality, when we are in Simulated Reality, and when we can't get back. As Jon learns when he can no longer close his eyes, masturbate to his own fantasies, make them up. His imagination has been stolen from him. His ability to contemplate has been stolen from him (Walter Benjamin folks.) His mind has been stolen from him. His life has been stolen from him. And he doesn't even know it.
The Perfect Crime

Jean Baudrillard, the Bear and the Screen

This embracing of Simulated Reality is our greatest danger according to Baudrillard. When Simulated Reality is total then we will be in Virtual Reality. Think Hunger Games here: The Districts are Reality, The capitol Panem is Simulated Reality, The Games are Virtual Reality. So who the hell wants reality. Gale didn't. Katniss does but then she really had her fill, an excess, didn't she. 

We are all interfaced with the media of our culture. How we fall in love, the courtship, the rituals, the wedding, they marriage, the children, the dog, the house, the mortgage, and so it goes as Vonnegut would say. We are no more free than our pet dogs. We have been conditioned to want what they want us to want. And conditioned to get it the way they want us to get it. How we fuck has been conditioned recently by porn. So we now fuck like porn stars. (Did I do OK honey? Did you get off? Performance anxiety eh.)  So we do. We obey them. To do this we Inscribe our bodies (Nietzsche's Inscription of the Body) to fit the template of normality, we think the way we have been taught to think, we do not even have the words to free ourselves from this. Sex is empowered to do this to us. We got rid of repression -  we thought so anyway -  but what is this? And we are embracing it as fast as we can learn how. 

Who will intercede? Who will give us the intervention we need? Who will be our Julianne Moore? And our prepotent responses will undergo spontaneous recovery in the future. Pavlov again, the great one.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real! - Morpheus quotes Zizek

Here's what Joseph Gordon Levitt said about his movie Don Jon:

I wanted to talk about how the media influences people's expectations, Gordon Levitt says. Pornography is a huge, huge part of our media culture. The message Don Jon is trying to bring to light - and make fun of - is reducing people, especially women, to nothing but sex objects. It happens in music videos, TV shows, movies, and magazines, and so many commercials. Whether it's rated X or approved by the FCC to sell Doritos, the message is the same.

Entertainment October 4, 2013 #1279

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Let me tell you it is so much more than what he thinks it is. It is a fictionalized account of Jean Baudrillard's The Perfect Crime

The title is taken from a short story by 
Jorge Luis Borges.
wiki on Borges

It was almost all map for Jon.

I am going right over to hitRECord.org to tell him so.

Review:Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises - Darren in Ireland at The M0vie Blog

The M0vie Blog 

I see no point in reproducing perfection so read Darren at his blog www.them0vieblog.com 

There are some things I wish to say about his review. 

Darren's awareness of the poignant absence of The Joker. Not even a throw away reference to him as Darren wishes.

 I agree with Nolan. The absence of The Joker is a void that is "Less Than Nothing" to steal from Zizek's book on Hegel. Nolan has invited Death as a presence in The Dark Knight Rises. The absence of The Joker resonates with the death of Heath Ledger, his irreplaceability, his singularity. Could there be any more beautiful memorial to Ledger than this film that mourns his non-being, depriving it of the focus that was his alone.

Darren has merged Bane and Wayne into an indivisible whole. As Babette Babich reminds us, each opposition includes its opposite. No division. Baudrillard will write an entire book on The Intelligence of Evil, how absolutely necessary evil is, which disappears in Simulated Reality. Ayn Rand tells us what evil is in her fictionalized character of Ellsworth Toohey, the man who would elevate mediocrity until our ability to perceive excellence disappears.  

Darren's recognition of masks, how they act as "floating signs" to affirm what they deny. How Wayne's mask and Bane's mask reflect each other in a mirror darkly. 

Nolan is teaching us our new world of simulation. He is addressing what DeLillo addressed in Cosmopolis, but what Cronenberg was afraid to touch. See here.

As Darren asserts, this is the first film to acknowledge the importance of Occupy, which Cronenberg misreads, thinking "they just want a piece of the pie."

Nolan plays on inversion which Darren recognizes. The mirror.

One discovers the same speculation in Baudrillard's concluding meditation on Borges' story of the 'mirror people', which prompts his suggestion that behind every reflection or representation 'a defeated enemy lies concealed'; a defeated 'singularity', which 'will one day rebel'. (Baudrillard in his The Perfect Crime quoted in Performance Research 1.3 - Richard Gough p.7)

Here begins the great revenge of otherness, of all the forms which subtly or violently deprived of their singularity,; henceforth pose an insoluble problem for the social order, and also for the political and biological orders.  

In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms, and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off....shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. (Borges -T he Book of Imaginary Beings p. 67-8)

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A postscript.

Darren emphasizes the fact that Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises has an ending, breaking the trope of comic hero stories. And ending signals DEATH and Death does not belong to this genre.  Another tribute to Ledger or perhaps Ledger lodged it in Nolan's mind.

Review: Reading Black Swan Through Foucault and Baudrillard and Nietzsche

Black Swan

Jean Baudrillard-Forget Foucault

Becoming a professional ballerina begins at age 3 to 4. Nina's mother  planned this for her, so Nina was caught in the grid of power/knowledge from the beginning, which Foucault defined and wrote about his entire life. It is obvious she had no wiggle room. Ever.

As she rehearses for her role we are treated to a particular kind of torture of the body. The






Inscription of the Body begins with a ballet


dancer immediately with the classes. We are


shown her master teacher's back where every muscle and tendon is delineated under a skin so devoid of any excess, or fat, that it is transparently stretched over the skeletal structure beneath. To feel each individual muscle in her back where vestigial wings can be imagined she digs with her fingernails to create pain to give her the muscular feedback she requires. When her mother sabotages her self torture, she employs tiny screws to dig in to make each muscle and tendon perceivable as she practices. Reading through Nietzsche this is why she does it: to bring each fiber into her consciousness. To feel so acutely she can move her arms as if they really are wings. She has the knowledge of a lifetime of training to know how to do this role, to perform a technically perfect interpretation.

But she does not have the emotional experience to play the Black Swan.

In experimenting on herself sexually she is watched while she sleeps and is left no alternative but to break out of her cage at home, but the cage of the dance studio is even more confining. There the grid of power/knowledge is absolute, totalitarian. She has no chance. Success will only delay her inevitable replacement, her future to teach others, or to follow her predecessor into disfigurement. No. Way. Out.

Leda and the Swan   by W. B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                    Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

And this is where Baudrillard begins his defiant challenge to Foucault in his Forget Foucault. Baudrillard sees Foucault has come to the edge of the abyss. But he says that he stops. This is the end of linear time, the end of history and the leap is into Simulation. When simulation is total, then we will be in Virtual Reality.

It is the terrorist model to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess. - Baudrillard

Living under complete surveillance and terrorism, Nina leaps into the Symbolic Order of Impossible Exchange, an excess of reality paired with Sacrificial Death.

I wanted to be perfect, she says. All perfection is destined for death.