Category: Bibliophilia

 

I recently rented Children of Men from the corner Blockbuster and, going through the DVD "extras" after finishing the film, was excited to find something billed as Slavoj Zizek’s commentary.

Slavoj Zizek, in case you don’t know him, is a Slovenian intellectual and provocateur who made his mark by analyzing popular culture, especially film noir, in a way that wasn’t completely cheesy.  He has pushed on in the double-naughts to generally pissing off his fan-base by doing what he always does: saying things no one expects him to say.  You may remember him as one of the few big-name intellectuals (besides Barry Smart) willing to contribute to The Matrix and Philosophy, the book which started off the whole popular culture and philosophy series.  His essay is the concluding piece in the anthology, and in typical Zizek fashion, he starts of by discussing how misguided he finds all the attempts to find deep meaning in what is basically a 90 minute animated comic book.

Zizek’s commentary to Children of Men does not disappoint.  He claims that Children of Men is actually a remake of Y tu mamá también, but without the sex.  He continues with a rambling discussion of the sixty-eighters.  Probably the only unexpected thing about the seven minute commentary is its brevity — Zizek’s loquacity is legendary.

For some reason, I had initially thought that the producers of the DVD had hit upon the brilliant notion of replacing the ubiquitous and generally tedious convention of having a "director’s commentary" with a rather clever conceit: placing an intellectual before the screen and recording him as he talks about whatever comes to his mind.

I remember when one of the early selling points of DVDs was that they could hold much more content than videos, and one of the first things that DVD producers tried out was adding the director’s commentary.  It certainly seemed like a good idea at the time.  Who wouldn’t want to hear Francois Truffaut discussing 400 Blows, or Godard explaining Masculin – Feminin?  Unfortunately, what we ended up getting were things like Penny Marshal discussing what she ate on the set of A League of their Own and Michael Lembeck’s commentary for The Santa Clause 2.  In The Lord of the Rings DVD, among others, an interesting twist was introduced by having the film’s actors provide commentary, and it was certainly interesting to listen to Sir Ian McKellen tell his theater stories whenever no one else had anything to contribute.  But even Sir Ian didn’t have enough material to fill 11 hours.

Besides perhaps David Mamet, who is an intellectual in his own right, there aren’t many directors whose opinions I really want to hear concerning … well … anything, and while vocation makes films a seemingly relevant topic for their discourse, experience has shown that most directors are not especially handy at even this.  And actors even less so.

What I would really like to experience is, say, Slavoj Zizek and Barry Smart talking for 90 minutes over a showing of the Matrix, ala Mystery Science Theater;  Christopher Hitchens doing the commentary for The Manchurian Candidate (the original, not the remake); Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky discussing My Dinner With Andre.

Perhaps the problem is that the country which hosts the world’s largest movie industry doesn’t happen to have a particularly strong tradition of public intellectuals the way, say, Britain, France and Germany do.  When I was living in the south of France for a short while I regularly saw, squeezed in between dubbed versions of Dragon Ball Z and Married With Children, discussion shows in which really smart people were asked about important matters, and they were given enough time to provide full and interesting answers to the questions posed.  (It was also on one of these shows that I discovered that Sigourney Weaver is not only really smart, but also speaks excellent French.) 

After watching a few of these talking head pieces, I began to wonder why we don’t have similar public forums in America.   After pondering it some more, I realized that the really serious question is: even if we had shows like that, who would we invite to appear on them?  There aren’t really that many people in America, despite its size, generally considered to be smart people, and among these even fewer whose ideas we think are likely to change our opinions of things.  Perhaps this is the egalitarian streak in American public discourse — we all consider ourselves to be adequately intelligent to form our own opinions, without help from anyone else.  Consequently, when it comes time to look for interesting opinions, we don’t turn to our intellectuals.  Instead, we turn to actors, to opinion-shapers like Oprah and, in a pinch, when no one else is available, to twice-cooked hacks like Thomas Friedman.

Which is really fine with me.  I am more than happy to surrender our public discourse to entertainers and hacks.  I rarely read the newspaper, anyway.  What I am more concerned about is this: now that we’ve got all the movie actors busy discussing globalization and third-world debt, who are we going to get to do our DVD commentaries for us?

 

Voldemort vs Sauron, who would win? 

I’ve just recently picked up my copy of the seventh Harry Potter book and secreted it beneath a stack of Playboys.  I take it out occasionally and read it in the bathroom so Mrs. Ziffer won’t know what I’m up to.  For me, reading the adventures of the boy wizard is a secret vice — as all vices should be.

In the 60’s the U.S. had the Arthurian cycle — or at least the musical version of it — to serve as the prism through which its citizens interpreted the political world.  During the American Civil War, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights served much the same purpose.  During the American Revolutionary War, political leaders were guided by the Roman historians and able to quote Thucydides.  More recently, neoconservatives have attempted to revive interest in Thucydides as a template for forming political narratives, but facts on the ground have tended to discredit this project.  And in its place, we instead have … what?

The Dark Lord Sauron commands an army of tens of thousands, including the Nazgul and their witch-king.  He manifests himself as a far-seeing eye, and the mere mention of his name by the unwary draws his attention.  He can corrupt the souls of men.  In battle he drives his enemies before him with a wave of his hand. 

The Dark Lord Voldemort commands followers who disrupt sports matches, ripping up tents and setting off fireworks.  He uses three forbidden spells, the most powerful of which is a death spell that works when he is near his victim.  It works something like a self-reloading pistol.  It is not clear whether it can penetrate decent armor like kevlar or mithril.  Chances are that it cannot, since even common furniture has been known to deflect it.  It is also not a spell peculiar to him — he just seems more willing than most to use it.

In a no-holds-barred battle between the two, I’m not sure how Voldemort stands any chance.

Examining their respective nemeses only seems to muddy the waters further.  Frodo is armed with a magic dagger that detects the proximity of goblins and orcs.  With his short reach, however, it is only effective in close-quarters fighting, and Harry prefers to cast spells at a distance.  Frodo is also protected by a mithril coat of mail, an elven cloak, and the vial of Galadrial, which may grant him enough protection to close the distance between himself and Harry and put his dagger to use.  He prefers to use these defenses to flee from enemies, however, and appears to lack the martial skills to use his powerful defensive weapons effectively to overcome young Harry.  Again, the odds seem overwhelmingly to favor one combatant over the other.  A Patronum, Expelliarmus and Rictusempra spell should quickly bring Frodo to his knees.

Despite the fact that Frodo can be easily defeated by Harry, who is presented as a close match for Voldemort, who in turn is clearly out of the Dark Lord Sauron’s league, Sauron is ultimately defeated by the halfling, who by the transitive principle should be the weakest of them all.  How is this possible?

According to Jean-Francois Lyotard, this is an instance of a differend:

As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.  One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy.  However applying a single rule of judgment to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule).

While on their surface, both Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings belong to the same narrative genre, the paradox above reveals that they in fact belong to different genres.  The regimens which determine the outcome of conflicts in these two series are incompatible, even though they co-exist and confirm a similar theme — good must overcome evil.  To apply the narrative rules of one to the other would confound this theme, and cause evil to overcome good.  In Harry’s world, Frodo would quickly be destroyed by the Avada Kadavra (he has neither magic nor the charm of a mother’s love, as far as we know), while in Frodo’s world, Harry would succumb to the power of the ring or simply be overcome by hordes of uruk-hai.

The rules by which Harry is able to overcome Voldemort (I don’t mean to give away the ending — let us assume that this is where the story is clearly headed), and Frodo to defeat Sauron, are derived from two very ancient narratives about the nature of the conflict between Good and Evil.

According to one, good and evil are cosmic forces in conflict.  They are equal in power.  Ultimately good is intended to triumph, though this also entails many victories for the forces of evil along the way.  How goodness can triumph, when it is a power equal to the power of evil, is an open question.

According to the other, as enunciated by Plato, evil is a privation.  There is only The Good, while evil is simply a way of talking about distance from this Ideal.  Evil is nothing in itself; evil is the absence of goodness.

Christianity, while having officially adopted the latter cosmology, has in fact always vacillated between these two notions.  During times of little struggle, the Platonic viewpoint has tended to hold sway.  In times of trouble, however, the tendency to reify evil predominates, and in its wake Manichean cosmology holds sway.

The peculiarity of The Lord of the Rings lies in the placement of a Platonic regime within a Manichean narrative, and that the confirmation of this does not reveal itself until the end.  The struggle between  good and evil in Middle-Earth is stark.  The good are so very good, while the bad are so clearly evil.  The corruption of men, when it occurs with Lord Denethor and Saruman, is rarely subtle.  The redemption of King Theoden and Baromir, and the near-redemption of Gollum, are central moments in the story, and in each case is caused by the forces of light — by Gandalf, Merry and Pippin, and Frodo, respectively — as if redemption were a force which these characters emanated from their very being. 

The progress of the novel involves the Fellowship of the Ring moving through Middle-Earth and recruiting allies to a cause that is sure to fail.  The overwhelming power of the Dark Lord Sauron is always clear, so in what lies their hope?  How does a hobbit resist and defeat such an evil will?  This is only possible if the rules of conflict are Platonic rather than Manichean.  Sauron is everything that Frodo is not.  More accurately, Frodo is everything that Sauron is not, and he proves this by resisting the lure of the ring.  In the Lord of the Rings, all it takes to defeat evil is to deny evil any power. 

In the Harry Potter novels, the reverse is the case.  What is required to defeat evil, in this narrative regime, is to recognize that Evil exists and to apply a more powerful force against it.  Harry recruits allies not to deny those allies to the Dark Lord.  Rather, he recruits allies in order to gather power — good power of course — that will be sufficient to overcome Voldemort’s reserves of evil force.  Moreover, unlike in Tolkien’s work, the powers involved are not based on disproportion, but rather on the similarlity in power between Voldemort and Harry, who carries part of Voldemort’s power in his famous scar.  The series builds, surely and inevitably, toward a final showdown (again, I don’t mean to give away the ending — let us merely agree that we understand the narrative rules upon which Harry Potter is built, the same rules upon which Star Wars is built, in fact, and go on from there) in which Harry must use this stolen power to defeat the powers of darkness — so unlike the burden of Frodo, who must carry Sauron’s power and refuse to use it.

We might go so far as to say that Harry Potter is a Manichean struggle in a Platonic world.  We are given glimpses of the family background that makes Voldemort the Dark Lord he is, as if to demonstrate that there are no evil people in the world, just misunderstood people.  We are given glimpses into the life of Snape, and the not always exemplary school career of Harry’s wizard father, demonstrating that the line between good and evil is not so clear as we would like to think.  Good people have their faults, while bad people (all the former dark-wizards who have changed their ways) have their virtues. 

At the same time, there is a thread running throughout the novel — more Manichean in nature — of a struggle between a wizarding aristocracy and a proletarian wizarding class, the muggle-lovers, which belies this therapeutic message.  Both Snape and Sirius Black are class-traitors not fully trusted by either side.  These issues of class resolve themselves into the more fundamental issue of whose side you will stand on when it is time to fight.  Are you with the forces of Evil?  Or are you with Us?

Harry Potter is a secret pleasure because, though I don’t like to admit it, I find Manichean struggles much more engaging than Platonic philosophizing.  Asking ‘What is the Good?’ is all good and well, but at the end of the day, I like a Hegelian Master-Servant struggle in which victory confirms the rightness of my cause and my self-worth.  In a Platonic world, the rightness of my cause is a separate matter from my success, and the only proper course of action, at the moment of true struggle, is to fulfill an obligation to Asclepius. 

It would be salutary to believe that world-affairs are guided by more high-brow narrative regimes than I am, but I am not so sure.  In the West we struggle against Islamo-fascists in our attempts to make the world a better place.  In Russia, Chechnyan separatists and their ilk in the Caucuses are the enemies of choice.  In China, they crush dissidents.  In the Middle East and other Islamic regions, they resist the modernizers and … well … us.  I sometimes wonder if the jihadis watch Star Wars and see their own aspirations and hopes acted out by Luke Skywalker.

In a similar vein, do young jihadis read Harry Potter as I do, in secret, in order to avoid public humiliation and, in their case, possible bodily violence?  If so, then perhaps we can overcome our differences through the recognition that we all have this one thing in common, an innate desire for Manichean struggles of self-affirmation.  And isn’t this how the first-steps toward peace are always made: by understanding what unites us, rather than what makes us different?

 

The opposite of the dream we savor but never fulfill, a frailty of both the great and the small (how long did Richard Feynman plan his trip to Tuva?), is the fate we dread but never find the courage to face.  Instead we tell ourselves that it is not really so bad.  We curse our own weakness and blame ourselves for not taking it better.  We try to find the bright side, and in the end justify our circumstances in terms of what we gain through our sacrifice.

This is how I think of my daily commute, about which the current New Yorker has an article.  Normally I read The New Yorker when I arrive home from work.  It is my quiet time, during which I shrug off the cares of the day, and escape into a fantasy world of cosmopolitan effetism and intellectual escapism — John Colapinto’s article The Interpreter, also in this issue, about a tribe in the Amazon and how their idiosyncratic language, which lacks a feature of most tongues known as recursion, has turned the world of linguistics upside-down and pitted neo-Whorfians against Chomskyites, is a case in point.

When I got home today and openned up my newly arrived magazine, however, I found an article about my own life.

The lure of Atlanta is the plenitude of jobs and cheap housing.  Our house, as my West Coast relatives frequently remind me, would cost a million dollars in the Los Angeles suburbs.  I paid a fraction of that for our four bedroom house on an acre and a half lot, sheltered from our neighbors by a thick copse of pine trees.  What they never tell you is that the jobs and the houses are frequent but far between.  The good areas are quickly overdeveloped and become congested.  To get away from them, you have to move further out.  To afford them, you have to get a higher paying job which more often than not is further away.   I drive from the east side of town to the west side of town, while others drive from the west to the east.  Why this should be I do not know, but it is a central feature of living in Atlanta.  Still others drive from the north to the south, or from south to north.  Atlanta is a city shaped like a doughnut, and driving from one edge to another is still better than driving from the edge to the center.  Very few people live near where they work.

The article makes more frightening observations about the phenomenon of commuting.  For instance, Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard, points out that “[e]very ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections.  Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”  According to economists Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey at the University of Zurich, “if your trip is an hour each way, you’d have to make forty per cent more in salary to be as satisfied with life as a noncommuter is.”  They call this The Commuting Paradox.

To this list of things given up should be added simpler things such as spending time with one’s children, time with one’s spouse, time in church and other communal activities.  The average American male is overweight, has few to no close friends, and leans right-wing.  Sociologists and pundits often attempt to tie these features to such things as the American gun-culture, video games, a laxity in contemporary cultural values, an increased commoditization and objectification of sex — but couldn’t these be merely the superstructure imposed by the infrastructure of the daily commute?  Take for instance the rise of Conservatism in America.  Nominally it was inspired by Reaganism, but isn’t Reaganism just the ideology fomented in the frustration of the Carter era, dominated by and remembered for cars lined up waiting for gas? 

The gas line has grown into the commuter jam.  As we sit in our cars, we listen to shock jocks on the car radio who reflect back to us the frustration and resentment we feel as we make our way through unpredictable and ultimately irrational choices on the road — Don Imus in D.C. (until recently), Neal Boortz in Atlanta, and Howard Stern just about anywhere since he is on satellite radio.  The lonely driver feels a false sense of control and liberty as only being locked in a small space can inspire.  The lone commuter hates his fellow man and is determined to cut him off before he can be cut off.  Who needs a political franchise when he has a horn, strategically positioned before him like a lab rat’s food bar, with which he can instantly articulate his feelings about the state of the nation?  Has a study ever been done correlating a person’s daily commute with his political leanings? 

Yet this isn’t exactly my life, since my life isn’t nearly so bad as all this.  About six months ago, I switched from a job for which I drove an hour, each way, to the job I currently have for which I drive only about 40 minutes each way.  My company also has a progressive policy about occassionally working from home, which is nothing less than a reprieve and release from the obligation of meeting my fellow man on the road.  An extra 40 minutes each day probably doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is enough time for me to get home after work and open my New Yorker and read for a while.  It is enough so that, after reading, I am relaxed and can play with my children rather than turn on the news.  I can put my children to bed and talk with my wife rather than watch Grey’s Anatomy plus whatever comes after that until I fall asleep.  I am no longer the sort of man who beats his horn in anger against the world, and perhaps even my politics have mellowed a bit.

Of course were I still at my old job, my commute would be longer and I would not have had time to read this article, and would never have had the leisure to reflect on homo comutus.  A different sort of commuting paradox.