sinking feeling

To Marxists, capitalisms imminent sinking was symbolic in the Titanic. A hundred years later the Commies fell into a pit and capitalism is still around; heavily flawed and perhaps redeemable if the global plutocracy can be dismembered. Oh yeah, that ship. If there is anything Slavoj Zizek knows its Marxism, and since his living is based on Marxism, – Lacanian, Badiou and other infinitely fine intellectual strains only truly comprehensible by a select few- as a commodity he protects his turf well and does his darndest to keep the gene pool pure. As a cultural critic he seems to borrow inordinately from the less pretentious writings of Bell Hooks, but be that as it may, it is instructive how he calls out James Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism on the Titanic:

( see link at end) : In a similar way, is Cameron’s previous blockbuster, Titanic, really about the catastrophe of the ship hitting the iceberg? One should be attentive to the precise moment of the catastrophe: it takes place when the young lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet), immediately after consummating their relationship, return to the ship’s deck. Even more crucial is that, on deck, Winslet tells her lover that when the ship reaches New York the next morning, she will leave with him, preferring a life of poverty with her true love to a false, corrupted life among the rich….

…At this moment the ship hits the iceberg, in order to prevent what would undoubtedly have been the true catastrophe, namely the couple’s life in New York. One can safely guess that soon the misery of everyday life would have destroyed their love. The catastrophe thus occurs in order to save their love, to sustain the illusion that, if it had not happened, they would have lived “happily ever after”. A further clue is provided by DiCaprio’s final moments. He is freezing in the cold water, dying, while Winslet is safely floating on a large piece of wood. Aware that she is losing him, she cries “I’ll never let you go!” – and as she says this, she pushes him away with her hands.

Why? Because he has done his job. Beneath the story of a love affair, Titanic tells another story, that of a spoiled high-society girl with an identity crisis: she is confused, doesn’t know what to do with herself, and DiCaprio, much more than just her love partner, is a kind of “vanishing mediator” whose function is to restore her sense of identity and purpose in life. His last words before he disappears into the freezing North Atlantic are not the words of a departing lover, but the message of a preacher, telling her to be honest and faithful to herself. Read More:http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2010/03/avatar-reality-love-couple-sex

The idea of mining the trope of the young rich person having some sort of healthy equilibrium restored as superficial consciousness raising, with what Zizek calls a brief encounter with the full blooded life of the poor is common enough. The vampiric exploitation is unfortunately endemic to almost all commercial activity. I don’t think Cameron would make much of an argument that his film is art, its a craft and a product, and it has to sell to the masses. Its the Society of the Spectacle and Zizek wants to be part of the action as well, a somewhat volubile media inflated type in the Andy Warhol style of intellectualism as business.

In effect, in both Avatar and Titanic , the indigenous and Di Caprio are like Jews; they are to be saved or destroyed by the intervention of the other. The white man in Avatar is the opportunist leaving with the Jews out of Egypt ambitioning to be their king. Even Zizek’s purported support of Palestinians could fall into this purview: he sympathizes with their idealized imagery, a kind of romantic fancy bordering on Lawrence of Arabia, while ultimately rejecting their actual struggle, the intrinsic expansionism of Islam in favor of a reformed and redeemed Socialist Zionism ( get them to liquidate those stubborn and thorny Torah followers)  that speaks the same secular vernacular and peddles the same materialist atheism.

ADDENDUM:

In The Deadly Jester, Adam Kirsch, in a lengthy review of Žižek’s book, In Defense of Lost Causes, for The New Republic, concludes:

“What makes Nazism repulsive,” [Žižek' writes], “is not the rhetoric of a final solution as such, but the concrete twist it gives to it.” Perhaps there is supposed to be some reassurance for Jews in that sentence; but perhaps not. For in In Defense of Lost Causes,…paraphrasing Badiou, Žižek writes: “To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the ‘Jewish question’ is the ‘final solution’ (their annihilation), because Jews … are the ultimate obstacle to the ‘final solution’ of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility.” I hasten to add that Žižek dissents from Badiou’s vision to this extent: he believes that Jews “resisting identification with the State of Israel,” “the Jews of the Jews themselves,�

e “worthy successors to Spinoza,” deserve to be exempted on account of their “fidelity to the Messianic impulse.” [emphasis mine]Read More:http://cifwatch.com/2011/08/08/the-i-dont-hate-jews-only-zionists-chronicles-continue-at-cif-the-vile-logic-of-slavoj-zizek/