zizek: the sound of normal

Going reel to real with the unknown knowns.It is also a form of containment of the truly perverse under the comforting auspices of the normal. In the same way, it much easier to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Will life on earth end, but capitalism go on? Is the Sound of Music not really about decent Austrians escaping Nazis , but instead a story of bedrock honest fascists resisting a decadent Jewish cosmopolitan takeover? Slavoj Zizek asserts that at the textual level, the unknown known is the opposite of what it appears.  Hearty , Aryan, farmers, and seemingly anti-intellectual, the Von Trapps are really  archetypal fascists, and the smaller, dark-haired, bookish, cosmopolitan, decadent,ghettoized intellectual Nazis are really stereotypical Jews…

---Look, here is the basic Nazi idea – the Jews want to dominate the world, the are in control of the European politics, music, art, banking, culture, etc. So instead of denouncing the very idea of the cross border domination, the Nazis said that’s exactly what we Germans want to do. We want to forcibly cross-dress as the Jews and dominate all aspects of the European culture and there could not be two nations playing this role at the same time. You see how it becomes easy to reverse engineer Nazis into Jews even in the film. Except Zizek is not telling you that this was always the Nazi ethos to become the Jews and the bucolic agricultural nationalism versus the cosmopolitan industrial, rootless domination was the central stage of the horrible conflicts. And of course Hitler himself being an Austrian from a small beautiful village makes the role reversal complete.--- Read More:http://benatlas.com/2010/02/zizek-on-crossdressing-to-the-sound-of-music/ image:http://www.ukstudentlife.com/Life/Entertainment/Theatre/Sound-Of-Music.htm

According to Zizek, The Sound of Music achieved iconic status as it satisfied its fans’ surface desire , the ostensible plot,  to identify with anti-fascism, while also satisfying their unconscious desire, the unknown known:  to embrace fascism. This antagonism between surface and textural reality is also the underpinning of much of modern advertising and marketing providing the narrative tension, pretext and trigger for exaggerated consumption and justification for our normative democracy based on property law and the entire economic system supported by it.  The language of social liberalism espoused in the West on the Right and Left alike is, as Zizek claims, nothing less than a pure form of intolerance. A coalition complicit in maintaining the liberal rationalism based on “tolerance”. Tolerance itself being a problem since it permits  politicians of various beliefs to claim they act in the name of freedom.

---This parallel can be extended to include the Fritzl-version of some of the most famous scenes from The Sound of Music. One can imagine the frightened children gathered around mother Elisabeth, in fear of the storm of the forthcoming father’s arrival, and mother calming them down by a song about some of “some of their favorite things” they should focus their minds on, from the toys brought by father to their most popular TV show… Or what about an upstairs reception in the Fritzl villa to which the underground children were exceptionally invited, and then, when the time for bed comes, the children performing for the assembled guests the obscene song “Aufwiedersehen, Goodbye” and departing one after the other… Really, in the Fritzl house, the basement, if not the hills, was alive with the sound of music. Ridiculous as The Sound of Music is as one of the worst cases of Hollywood kitsch, one should take very seriously the sacred intensity of the universe of the film, without which its extraordinary success cannot be accounted for: the power of the film resides in its obscenely-direct staging of embarrassing intimate fantasies.---Read More:http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=419 image:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1062850/FREE-CD-The-Sound-Music-todays-Mail-Sunday.html

What Zizek reveals is the aspect of the  temporal reversal: we are “shocked” when the strained and brittle quality of innocence, a manufactured and marketed commodity that splinters easily, is exposed. The innocence industry permits a kind of false security while allowing the individual to wallow in less savory pastimes. For every Walt Disney and Rockwell in post WWII America there was a netherworld of lurid pulp fiction and Charlie Starkweather’s.

Symbolic depiction precedes the fact it depicts, history as story precedes history as a process in reality. There is a certain nostalgia for a paradise lost, if we could just find that holy grail and restore utopia.  An indicator of our late modernity is that  real of history is assuming the character of a trauma. When we think we really know someone, it often happens that, all of a sudden, this individual does something which makes us aware that we do not really know them. We become suddenly aware that there is a total stranger in front of us. This is what happened in a devastating way with Josef Fritzl. He transformed from a kind and polite fellow man, then  suddenly changed to a monstrous neighbor much to the great surprise of the people who met him daily and simply could not believe that this is the same person. In Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil, she records that psychological testing of Eichmann showed he was all too normal….

Yet many were deeply disturbed by her depiction of an Eichmann who was not an ideological anti-Semite nor even criminally motivated–he wanted to rise in rank not by murdering anyone but by “conscientiously” doing his job. “Intent to do wrong” was not, in Arendt’s opinion, proved against him. He was not “morally insane” for in his own “muddled” way he distinguished between right and wrong, and the results of psychological tests showed that he was not a “monster” but frighteningly normal. Read More:http://international.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayc7.html

---“What if culture itself is but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?” But at another level Žižek is the perverse goader of our worst tendencies, pushing the most vulgar spectacles of the media age to their madly logical conclusions. Take, for example, his – on the face of it, bizarre and tasteless – comparison of the crimes of Josef Fritzl with “a much more respectable Austrian myth, that of the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music”. Fritzl’s incarceration and rape of his daughter, his abuse and neglect of the children she bore him: all of this is appalling but, Žižek ventures, also entirely of a piece with kitsch visions of the perfect nuclear family. Fritzl, to an admittedly extreme degree, had merely fulfilled the deepest fantasy of the patriarchal father: to “protect” his family to the extent of destroying it. --- Read More:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7916506/Living-in-the-End-Times-by-Slavoj-Zizek-review.html image:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/joseffritzl/4788509/Josef-Fritzl-satirical-play-opens-in-Vienna-with-tight-security-after-death-threats.html

Rebecca Mead:He explained what he meant by the perverse core of Christianity-that Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross offers a way for the Christian to indulge in secret desires without having to pay for them-with an illustration from what he referred to as one of the great achievements of Western civilization: “The Sound of Music.” “After Maria goes back to the monastery because she is unable to deal with her attraction to Captain von Trapp, she goes to the Reverend Mother expecting some stem advice,” Zizek said. “But, instead of criticizing her, the Reverend Mother gives her the message in that weird song ‘Climb Every Mountain.’ I think this is the most obscene moment in the movie. The very person one would expect to preach abstinence turns out to be the agent of fidelity to one’s longings. Significantly, when ‘The Sound of Music’ was shown in the ex-Yugoslavia, the three minutes of this song was the only part of the film that was censored.” Read More:http://www.lacan.com/ziny.htm

---In The Reality of the Virtual, Slavoj Zizek makes what at first seems an absurd claim: that the Sound of Music is a racist film. But, when put under analysis, his argument is hard to deny. Basically, Zizek makes a distinction between the narrative reality of the film (i.e. Mary Poppins and the seven dwarfs must escape the fascist Nazis) which only seems to appeal to an anti-fascist sensibility, and the overriding virtual texture of the film which is overtly fascist. That is, if you look at the visual coding of the film, you can see that what is really at stake in The Sound of Music is not just a Nazi invasion but the sullying of Austria’s blonde-haired blue-eyed population and their “down-to-earth” provincial lifestyle. Or in other words, the purity of the Austrian nation is under threat--- Read More:http://www.screenmachine.tv/2010/02/16/you-say-one-thing-when-you-mean-another/ im

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2006/nov/17/soundofmusic

 

ADDENDUM:

Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/09/slavoj.zizek

“The Sound of Music” is a much trickier film than one might expect. If you look at it closely, ok, it’s officially Austrian resistance to Hitler and the Nazis, but if you look really closely, it really that the Nazis are presented as an abstract cosmopolitan occupying power, and the Austrians are the good small fascists, so the implicit message is almost the opposite of the explicit message. It’s much more reactionary film than it might first appear. There’s an element of justice in a small mistake in the film, it’s supposed to take place in 1938, when they go into Salzburg, they buy some oranges, and if you put the image on freeze the oranges say “made in Israel”. So that’s a nice kind of truth of the film. Read More:http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/against-happiness/
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Elfriede Jelinek play. Rechnitz. ---With regard to Austria, instead of the miserable attempts to blame for Josef’s terrible crime the Austrian Nazi past or the Austrian excessive sense of orderliness and respectability, one should rather link the figure of Fritzl to a much more respectful Austrian myth, that of the von Trapp family immortalized in The Sound of Music: another family living in their secluded castle, under the father’s benevolent military authority which protects them from the evil Nazi outside, with generations strangely mixed (the Sister Maria, like Elisabeth, a generation between father and children…) The aspect of kitsch is relevant here: The Sound of Music is the ultimate kitsch phenomenon, and what Fritzl created in his basement also displays features of a kitsch family life realized: the happy family getting ready for diner, with the father watching TV with children while mother is preparing the food… However, one should not forget that the kitsch imagery we are dealing with here are not Austrian but belong to Hollywood and, more generally, Western popular culture: Austria in The Sound of Music is not the Austrian’s Austria, but the mythic Hollywood image of Austria – the paradox is here that it is as if, in the last decades, Austrians themselves started to “play Austrians,” i.e., identified with the Hollywood image of their own country.---Read More:http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=419  image:/2009/11/tampering-with-the-reckoning-to-come/

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Jeremy Jennings:Drawing upon the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Žižek conjures up the category of “divine violence” as a form of pure violence that serves no purpose except as an expression of opposition to injustice in the world. Those annihilated by divine violence, he tells us, are “fully and completely guilty”. Next, he imagines that divine violence has been instantiated (although often with “deplorable” outcomes) in the revolutionary politics of terror associated with Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Each has its “redemptive moment”. Remarkably, Žižek’s suggestion is that if these revolutionary movements failed, it was not because they were too extreme but because they were not radical enough. He then conjectures that the Left of today has become ashamed of the Jacobin legacy of revolutionary terror, in part because, in his paraphrase of Robespierre, it wants a revolution without a revolution, a revolution which respects social rules and existing norms, a decaffeinated revolution. Read More:http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/603

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What if, however, we read the duality of the “normal” father and the primordial father of the unlimited access to incestuous enjoyment not as a fact of the earliest history of humanity, but as a libidinal fact, a fact of “psychic reality,” which accompanies as an obscene shadow the “normal” paternal authority, prospering in the dark underground of unconscious fantasies? This obscene underground is discernible through its effects – in myths, dreams, slips of tongue, symptoms… and, sometimes, it enforces its direct perverse realization (Freud noted that perverts realize what hysterics only fantasize about). Does the very architectural arrangement of the Fritzl house – the “normal” ground and upper floors supported (literally and libidinally) by the underground windowless enclosed space of total domination and unlimited jouissance – not materialize the “normal” family space redoubled by the secret domain of the obscene “primordial father”? Fritzl created in his cellar his own utopia, a private paradise in which, as he told his lawyer, he spent hours on end watching TV and playing with the youngsters while Elisabeth prepared dinner. In this self-enclosed space, even the language the inhabitants shared was not the common one, but a kind of private language: it is reported that the two sons Stefan and Felix communicate in a bizarre dialect, with some of their sounds “animal-like.” The case of Fritzl thus validates Lacan’s pun on perversion as père-version, version of the father – it is crucial to note how the underground secret apartment complex materializes a very precise idelogico-libidinal fantasy, the extreme version of father-domination-pleasure? One of the mottos of the May ’68 was “all power to fantasy” – and, in this sense, Fritzl is also a child of ’68, ruthlessly realizing his fantasy….Read More:http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=419

…This is why it is misleading, even outright wrong, to designate Fritzl as “inhuman” – if anything, he was, to use Nietzsche’s title, “human, all too human.” No wonder Fritzl complained that his own life had been “ruined” by the discovery of his secret family. What makes his reign so chilling aspect of his reign is precisely the way his brutal is that his exercise of power and his usufruct of the daughter were not just a cold act of exploitation, but were accompanied by an ideologico-familial justification (he did what a father should do, protecting his children from drugs and other dangers of the outside world), as well as by occasional displays of compassion and human considerations (he did take the ill daughter to the hospital, etc.). These acts were not breaches of warm humanity in his armor of coldness and cruelty, but parts of the same protective attitude that made him imprison and violate his children. Read More:http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=419

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