The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek is in the news again for having written disparagingly about Kathryn Bigelow's new film Zero Dark Thirty. A re-telling of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, ZDT shows Jihadists being waterboarded (ie tortured) by the CIA. I haven't seen the film, but by common consent it adopts a neutral position on waterboarding. When Barack Obama appears on TV announcing the practice will stop, the watching CIA operatives are unmoved.
Zizek is horrified by this. "To depict it neutrally", he wrote in the Guardian, ". . . is already a kind of endorsement. Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation . . . Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to endgender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here? Without a shadow of doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture".
When his fellow Marxists have been responsible for at least as much torture in the last century as any other political group, it's refreshing to see Zizek keen to display his opposition to the practice.
But surely he is talking hogwash. Is it really art's function to tell us what to think? Would Zizek have liked ZDT any more if Bigelow had come down in favour of torture? Or is he suggesting that the only kind of art worth its salt is the kind congruent with his own political, moral or aesthetic views? If so, doesn't that reduce art to mere Brechtian polemic? And what if someone had made a documentary about waterboarding which didn't adopt a view? Would that be bad too? Should news gathering tell us what to think about world events?
It used to piss me off no end when the BBC News would report an atrocity with the words "the IRA has admitted responsibility". You admit something when it's wrong. I am perfectly capable of concluding that blowing people up is wrong without being told to think so. Someone somewhere will have thought blowing people up was right. That's their prerogative.
No, the point about art is that it allows room for ambiguity. One of the delicious things about Pride and Prejudice is that Austen leaves open the possibility that Elizabeth Bennett finally decides Mr D'Arcy is OK when she sees the size of his, ahem, estates at Pemberley. We are joyously free to make up our own minds what we think about that. Was it wrong of Dostoevsky to just show us Raskolnikov murdering his landlady and feeling bad about it afterwards? Should Camus have included a postscript to The Outsider to the effect that killing Arabs is wrong? I doubt they would have been better books as a result.
Slavoz Zizek's ubiquity is a puzzling thing. He regularly features in the London Review of Books. He holds academic posts at Birkbeck as well as in Slovenia, and has taught widely in the US (Columbia, Princeton etc). And yet every time I read one of his articles I come away thinking, "The man's an idiot".
(A variety of recent experiences suggests that some of these lionised academics are actually not as clever as your average QC - the experience of reading Richard Dawkins on theology started me off on this, and I'll come back to it in future).
Not only is Zizek's faintly bizarre criticism of ZDT baffling (perhaps Marxists just dislike seeing the US get something right), but he also misses a crucial and obvious point about the film.
Director Bigelow and writer Mark Boal were apparently helped to make it by the CIA, being granted access to confidential material. I am not a knee-jerk anti-American by any means, but it seems to me that an Agency which can kill people by unmanned drones operated from the far side of the world and can set up a fake immunisation programme to gain access to the DNA of Bin Laden's children, is an organisation with large resources of money and cunning. It is also an organisation which, rooted in a democracy, has a vested interest in portraying itself in a favourable light.
If the CIA told me it was raining, I'd go to the window and check. And yet Bigelow and Boal were happy to take what they were told and base a film on it. That's naive.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing Zero Dark Thirty, but I have absolutely no idea of whether the story it tells is true in any particular. I won't be any wiser when I've seen it either.
As for Zizek, a story in the paper the other day stated that the Royal Opera House has commissioned four new operas "inspired" by his writings. Yes, that's the ROH, which pays its Music Director over £600,000 (some of it raised from British taxpayers), commissioning work inspired by a Marxist who one presumes despises the privilege and elitism his world-view says it stands for.
Incidentally, the ROH Director at the time this scheme was dreamed up just happens to be Tony Hall, the new Director General of the BBC.
To say this is a situation rich in ironies does not come close to encapsulating its jaw-dropping nature. As so often with Zizek, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
