Savoj Zizek

I was listening to Radio 4 this morning, when I heard Savoj Zizek's rather interesting take on Schindler's List - it's a remake of Jurassic Park and the Nazi's are the dinosaurs. I found the article in which he refers to that here and then read his equally fascinating view of Night M. Shyamalan's The Village.

**********************SPOILER ALERT**********************

For those of you who haven't watched it, the following section does give away every single nuance of plot. If you don't intend to watch it (or already have) then please read on, as I think it says quite a lot about the way the threat of terror is presented in the UK (and the US).

This threat is, as we learn, in the best "totalitarian" manner staged by the inner circle ("elders") of the community itself, in order to prevent the non-initiated youngsters to leave the village and risk the passage through the forest to the decadent "towns." The "evil" itself has to be redoubled: the "real" evil of late-capitalist social disintegration has to be transposed into the archaic magic-mythic evil of "creatures."

The "Evil" IS a part of the "inner circle" itself, IMAGINED by its members. Are we here not back at Chesterton's Thursday, in which the highest police authority IS the same person as the super-criminal, staging a battle with himself? In a proto-Hegelian way, the external threat the community is fighting is its own inherent essence...

And what if this is true in a much more radical way than it may appear? What if the true Evil of our societies is not the capitalist dynamics as such, but the attempts to extricate ourselves from it (while profiting from it), to carve out self-enclosed communal spaces, from "gated communities" to exclusive racial or religious groups? That is to say, is the point of The Village not precisely to demonstrate that, today, a return to an authentic community in which speech still directly expresses true emotions, etc. - the village of the socialist utopia - is a fake which can only be staged as a spectacle for the very rich?

The exemplary figure of Evil are today not ordinary consumers who pollute environment and live in a violent world of disintegrating social links, but those (top managers, etc.) who, while fully engaged in creating conditions for such universal devastation and pollution, exempt themselves from the results of their own activity, living in gated communities, eating organic food, taking holidays in wild preserves, etc.

And thus, it is the middle class who are the true evil -as argued by The Devil herself on many numerous occasions.