Back in Plato’s Cave After Reading Dorothy Parker’s Philosophy
By daylight, her shadows, by dark, I am a prisoner to memorization.
Did she? Did she not consecrate? I seriously doubt or maybe it’s true;
she’s from New Jersey, she blazoned cigarettes, she marked up paper
with do’s and don’ts, took her glasses off, so many valorous questions.
Life as Film
Noir: you’re saying everything’s swell all day.
Mystery: the onion is peeled and there’s a note.
Action: your blood pumps and you’re a hero.
Comedy: your whoopee cushion is in the coffin.
Adventure: the house cat got out of the house again.
Foreign: you want chocolate, a baguette, a cigarette.
Indie: you could have told them that grass itches.
Drama: you say out loud what you are really thinking.
Sci-fi: self-driving cars crash.
Horror: hair in the drain is frightening.
Sports: you pull a muscle in your dreams.
B-movie: eating chips on the couch is a great weekend.
Documentary: you love artists, you hate corporations.
Fantasy: you do not want to live in the real world.
Criterion: your eyes are witness to someone eating nails.
Thriller: your mind lingers like a night train.
Romance: love is unbelievable.
At the Movies with Slavoj Žižek
—after A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology
Slavoj: When you take the symbolic meanings of movies,
like for example,
in the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas,
the famous scene,
Michael Douglas walks into a fast food place called
Whammy Burger,
where he wants to order breakfast, but gets denied by
the young, female cashier
Sheila and manager Rick, it is really only
a couple of minutes past
11:30am, but Whammy Burger has just stopped serving
the Wham and Cheese Whamlette,
and so forth, it is this idea of rejection, and it is this idea
of consumer mentality, take for
example, also in the classic film, Silence of the Lambs,
Sir Anthony Hopkins
plays the cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter, he has
a similar appetite while being
behind the prison glass, the customer not getting what he
wants, it is a clear, translucent view
of the failure of capitalism, when Anthony Hopkins does
that perverted
fluttering lip sound to Jodi Foster, it’s a fundamental sound;
to put it in sociological terms,
the multiple multiplicities of the people of the United States
and other capitalist countries,
of course this is not a turn-on to Jodi Foster, but she is forced
to try to understand
the fascination, delusion, suppression, the trifecta that is
the feeling of everyday,
of everyday people, and it is why Michael Douglas goes
fanatic and finally
takes out the semi-automatic weapon from his duffle bag,
and effectively points out
the ideology of fast food corporate America, how the actual
hamburger that
he finally gets served does not look like the picture
of the hamburger
that is advertised on the overhead menu, let us also take
the movie Adaptation,
with Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep, this is pure symbolic
capitalism at face value,
the writer’s block, the chase for ghost orchids, the scene
where Meryl Streep is lying in bed
talking on the phone to Chris Cooper, she says she doesn’t
feel anything anymore,
she is living life, not in a state of homeostasis, but a stasis
of numbness, so she decides
to take obscure drugs that Chris Cooper had given to her,
and all of a sudden,
Meryl Streep becomes fascinated with her toes, and then
she brushes her teeth
and she can hear and feel every brushstroke, she has found
a quick way to happiness,
this is once again a reflection upon the delusory pursuit
of the American Dream
or whatever you want to call it, the dangled carrot,
the grass is greener,
this is not the kind of thing you will find in Marxism,
the perfect political persuasion
to Stalinism, no, in the consumer capitalist perverted mind,
the grass is
always greener, it is always pain for pleasure, as we see
in the movie Dodgeball
with Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn, to learn this, they
throw wrenches
at dodgeball victims as a form of practice, what is this,
they say
“if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”
Me: Slavoj, would you like some Raisinettes?