The Pervert's Guide to Ideology Page #11

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because there is no God.

This is the Jesus Christ

who says,

among other things,

"I bring to earth not peace. "

"If you don't hate your

father, your mother,

"you are not my follower. "

Of course this does not mean

that you should actively

hate or kill your parents.

I think that family relations

stand here for

hierarchic social relations.

The message of Christ is:

I'm dying but my death

itself is good news.

It means you are alone,

left to your freedom,

be in the Holy Ghost,

Holy Spirit, which is just

the community of believers.

It's wrong to think that

the second coming will be

that Christ as a figure will

return somehow.

Christ is already here when

believers form an

emancipatory collective.

This is why I claim that

that the only way really

to be an atheist

is to go through Christianity.

Christianity is much

more atheist than

the usual atheism which

can claim there is no

God and so on -

but none the less

retains a certain trust

into the 'Big Other', this

'Big Other' can be called

natural necessity,

evolution or whatever.

We humans are none

the less reduced to a

position within a harmonious

whole of evolution or whatever,

but the difficult thing

to accept is again -

that there is no 'Big Other'.

No point of reference which

guarantees meaning.

We are in John

Frankenheimer's Seconds,

a neglected Hollywood

masterpiece from 1966-

from the very heart

of the hippy era

which preached

unrestrained hedonism.

Realise your dreams,

enjoy life fully.

The film is the story of a late

middle age businessman

leading a gray, totally

alienated life,

and then he decides

at some point

that he has enough of it.

Through one of his

friends he contacts

a mysterious agency,

which offers him a deal.

They will reorganise

his life so that

he will be reborn.

The cost runs in the

neighborhood of

thirty thousand dollars.

I know this seems

rather high but in

addition to the rather

extensive cosmetic

renovation by way of

plastic surgery for you,

CPS has to provide

a fresh corpse that

perfectly matches your

physical dimensions and

medical specifications.

CPS?

Oh, Cadaver

Procurement Section.

They use some corpse; they

change it to look like

his own body. They plant this

corpse, stage a pseudo accident

so that police think he is dead.

Now, mister Wilson, you

represent something

of a milestone around here.

And then, the agency

organises an ultimate life

in a nice villa somewhere

around L.A. -

they even organise a nice

lady who conveniently

stumbles upon him when

he is taking a walk

along the beach.

He is thus reborn...

no longer as a boring

businessman but as a

modernist painter...

Tony Wilson.

...called Tony Wilson,

played by none other

than Rock Hudson.

So, the woman, Nora,

his new love,

tries to engage him in life,

even takes him to some

wine orgy where

people get drunk,

dance naked and so on.

Everything seems OK,

but Tony Wilson starts

to miss his old life.

More and more he is

haunted by his past.

Finally he breaks down,

approaches again

the agency,

telling them that

he wants to return

to his old life.

The boss of this

mysterious company,

a kind of kindly cruel...

- Hello, son.

...superego paternal figure

tells him the truth.

He disappointed them

by not being able to

adapt himself to

his new life.

You know, I sure hoped

you'd make it,

find your dream come true.

What?

I said, I sure hoped

you'd make it,

find your dream come true.

You can call it wishful

thinking, son,

but life is built on wishing.

You've got to just keep

plugging away at them.

You can't give up...

and you can't let the mistakes

jeopardize the dream.

So what went wrong here?

The problem was

that his past

in it's material

existence was erased.

Well, here's your

transportation.

- What?

- Surgery, sir.

He lived in a totally new

environment, new job,

new friends and so on.

What remained the same

were his dreams -

because when the company

organised his rebirth,

when the company

provided a new existence

for him, they simply

followed his dreams.

His dreams were

wrong dreams -

and this is quite a deep lesson

for the theory of ideology.

Just remember, son. We've

got to keep plugging away

at the dream. The mistakes teach

us how. It wasn't wasted.

Remember that.

On the way to the operation

hall, he discovers

the horrible truth.

He will not be reborn

but he will be used as a

cadaver for another person

who wants to be reborn.

We should draw a line

of distinction

within the very field

of our dreams.

Between those who

are the right dreams

pointing towards a dimension

effectively beyond

our existing society

and the wrong dreams:

the dreams which

are just an idealised

consumerist reflection,

mirror image of our society.

We are not simply

submitted to our dreams -

they just come from

some unfathomable

depths and we can't

do anything about it.

This is the basic lesson

of psychoanalysis

and fiction cinema.

We are responsible

for our dreams.

Our dreams stage

our desires,

and our desires are

not objective facts.

We created them,

we sustained them,

we are responsible for them.

This is an area of ancient

lakebeds deposited

five to ten million years ago.

The scene of mass orgy

in Zabriskie Point

is a nice metaphor

of what went wrong

with the 1960s

hippy revolution.

It's crucial that Zabriskie Point

was made in 1970

when the authentic

revolutionary energy

of the sixties was already

losing its strength.

This orgy is somewhere

between subversion

of the existing

social order

and already the

full estheticised

reincorporation

of this allegedly

transgressive activities into

the hegemonic ideology.

Although Antonioni

meant this

as a kind of transcendence

of the existing constraints,

we can easily

imagine this shot

in some publicity campaign.

The first step to freedom

is not just to

change reality to

fit your dreams -

it's to change

the way you dream.

And again, this hurts

because all satisfactions

we have come from

our dreams.

The great supreme

commander chairman Mao

issued a world shaking

call to us:

you should pay attention

to state affairs

and carry the great proletarian

Cultural Revolution

through to the end.

One of the big problems

of all great

revolutionary movements

of the 20th century -

such as Russia,

Cuba or China -

is that they did change

the social body,

but the egalitarian communist

society was never realised.

The dreams remained

the old dreams

and they turned into

the ultimate nightmare.

Now what remains of

the radical left

waits for a magical event

when the true revolutionary

agent will finally awaken.

While the depressing lesson of

the last decades is that

capitalism has been the true

revolutionising force.

Even as it serves only itself.

How come it is easier for us to

imagine the end of all life on earth -

an asteroid hitting the planet -

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