The Pervert's Guide To Cinema Page #11

which provides his symbolic authority.

This is, in psychoanalytic theory, phallus.

You are not phallus. You possess phallus.

Phallus is something attached to you,

like the King's crown is his phallus.

Something you put on

and this gives you authority.

So that when you talk it's not simply

you as a common person who is talking,

it's symbolic authority itself,

the Law, the state, talking through you.

So these excessively ridiculous paternal figures,

it's not simply that they possess phallus,

that they have phallus

as the insignia of their authority,

in a way, they immediately are phallus.

This is for, if they still exist,

a normal male subject...

This is the most terrorising experience

you can imagine,

to directly being the thing itself,

to assume that I am a phallus.

And the provocative greatness

of these Lynchian, obscene, paternal figures,

is that not only they don't have any anxiety,

not only they are not afraid of it,

they fully enjoy being it.

They are truly fearless entities

beyond life and death,

gladly assuming, as it were, their immortality,

their non-castrated life energy.

Okay.

This is indicated in a very nice way

in the scene towards the end of Wild at Heart

where Bobby Peru is killed.

Stop, you sons of b*tches!

This is the police!

He accepts the mortal danger he is in

with, kind of, exuberant vitality,

and it's truly that when his head explodes,

it's as if we see the head of the penis

being torn apart.

Oh, for Christ sakes.

That poor bastard.

And then at the end, these figures are sacrificed.

Oh, Jeffrey.

It's all over, Jeffrey.

Joseph Stalin's favourite cinematic genre

were musicals.

Not only Hollywood musicals,

but also Soviet musicals.

There was a whole series

of so-called kolkhoz musicals.

Why? We should find this strange,

Stalin who personifies communist austerity,

terror and musicals.

The answer again is

the psychoanalytic notion of superego.

Superego is not only excessive terror,

unconditional injunction,

demand of utter sacrifice,

but at the same time, obscenity, laughter.

And it is Sergei Eisenstein's genius

to guess at this link.

In his last film,

which is a coded portrait of the Stalin era,

Ivan the Terrible: Part 2,

which because of all this

was immediately prohibited.

In the unique scene towards the end of the film,

we see the Czar, Ivan,

throwing a party, amusing himself,

with his so-called Oprichniki,

his private guards, who were used

to torture and kill his enemies,

his, if you want, KGB, secret police,

are seen performing a musical.

An obscene musical,

which tells precisely the story

about killing the rich boyars,

Ivan's main enemies.

Let the axes drop!

So terror itself is staged as a musical.

And the gates fell to the ground

Now, what has all this

to do with the reality of political terror?

Isn't this just art, imagination? No.

Not only were the political show trials

in Moscow in the mid- and late-1930s

theatrical performances,

we should not forget this,

they were well staged, rehearsed and so on.

Even more, there is, horrible as it may sound,

something comical about them.

The horror was so ruthless that the victims,

those who had to confess and demand

death penalty for themselves and so on,

were deprived of the minimum of their dignity,

so that they behaved as puppets,

they engaged in dialogues

which really sound like

out of Alice in Wonderland.

They behaved as persons from a cartoon.

Public enemy number one.

You're on trial today

for the crimes that you've committed.

We're gonna prove you're guilty.

Just try and get acquitted.

In the mid-'30s,

Walt Disney Studios produced

an unbelievable cartoon

called Pluto's Judgement Day...

Shut up!

...in which the dog, well-known Pluto,

falls asleep, and in his sleep

is persecuted by, haunted by the dream

of cats who were all in the past

his victims, molested by him,

dragging him to the court,

where a proper, truly Stalinist political trial

is in process against him.

We've seen and heard enough.

Jury, do your duty.

Just watch us do our stuff

We find the defendant guilty

He's guilty, he's guilty

Hooray!

The Law is not only severe, ruthless, blind,

at the same time, it mocks us.

There is an obscene pleasure

in practising the Law.

Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe

in what is only a fiction,

to take fictions too seriously.

It's, on the contrary,

not to take fictions seriously enough.

You think it's just a game? It's reality.

It's more real than it appears to you.

For example, people who play video games,

they adopt a screen persona

of a sadist, rapist, whatever.

The idea is, in reality I'm a weak person,

so in order to

supplement my real life weakness,

I adopt the false image

of a strong, sexually promiscuous person,

and so on and so on.

So this would be the naive reading.

I want to appear stronger, more active,

because in real life, I'm a weak person.

But what if we read it in the opposite way?

That this strong, brutal rapist,

whatever, identity is my true self.

In the sense that this is

the psychic truth of myself

and that in real life,

because of social constraints and so on,

I'm not able to enact it.

So that, precisely because I think

it's only a game,

it's only a persona,

a self-image I adopt in virtual space,

I can be there much more truthful.

I can enact there an identity

which is much closer to my true self.

We need the excuse of a fiction

to stage what we truly are.

Stalker is a film about a zone,

a prohibited space where there are debris,

remainders of aliens visiting us.

And stalkers are people

who specialised in smuggling foreigners

who want to visit into this space

where you get many magical objects.

But the main among them

is the room in the middle of this space,

where it is claimed your desires will be realised.

I know you're going to get mad.

Anyway, I must tell you...

We are now... on the threshold...

This is the most important moment in your life.

You must know that.

Your innermost wishes will be made real here.

Your most sincere wish. Born of suffering.

The contrast between Solaris and Stalker is clear.

In Solaris, we get id-machine

as an object which realises

your nightmares, desires, fears,

even before you ask for it, as it were.

In Stalker it's the opposite,

a zone where your desires,

deepest wishes get realised

on condition that you are able to formulate them.

Which, of course, you are never able,

which is why everybody fails

once you get there in the centre of the zone.

You just make money, using our... anguish!

It's not even the money.

You're enjoying yourself here.

You're like God Almighty here.

You, a hypocritical louse, decide

who is to live and who is to die

He deliberates!

Now I see why you stalkers

never enter the room yourselves.

You revel in all that power,

that mystery, your authority!

What else is there to wish for?

It's not true! You... you're mistaken.

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