Why I Think Slavoj Zizek's Film Analysis Is Tripe

Actually, there is a lot I dislike about Slavoj Zizek.  I have never seen him as either a rigorous/useful marxist academic, let alone a principled and committed communist.  As much as I respect the fact that he is partially responsible for the repopularization of Lenin in academia, his "hipster marxism" (as one of my good comrades calls it) has generally offended my political sensibilities.  His lack of respect for actual historical materialism (such as his willingness to promote a rightist analysis of Mao in his introduction to the most recent Verso release of Mao's writing) demonstrates a serious failing for a supposed marxist scholar––without investigation there should be no right to speak.  And his seeming disdain for political economy (as judged by a somewhat recent interaction he had with Samir Amin) demonstrates a strange refusal to engage in a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.  Generally I find, when it comes to any of Zizek's writing, that there is a quality-bullshit ration of around 1:30––so in a book of 300 pages, you can probably find 10 good pages.

Zizek's analysis of film, however, is paradigmatic of his overall failings as a revolutionary scholar.  It's also the perfect paradigm to critique Zizek considering the man's "hipster marxist" tendency to pepper his texts with random pop-cultural references and lapse into the most arcane, and most often banal, tangents about television shows, jokes, and popular movies.

Although Zizek has always annoyed me, it wasn't until I read his review of the movie 300 that I was truly angered.  And though I encountered this review years ago, I was reminded of it recently due to a discussion thread where a commentator reproduced Zizek's argument in the aforementioned review in order to argue that 300 was, secretly and subversively, a progressive film.  The point being: Zizek basically chose to argue, for no apparent reason except intellectual masturbation, that this movie was not a piece of racist-imperialist art and, in point of fact, possessed a secret and liberatory message.

For those unfamiliar with the film, 300 is a movie about how a massively outnumbered Sparta defeated the Persian army but at great sacrifice.  Directed by Zack Snyder (recently responsible for defiling Watchmen and directing the sexist action film Sucker-Punch), the film is based on Frank Miller's comic of the same name––in fact, so closely based that all the characters strongly resemble the drawings and the movie is shot almost panel-for-panel.  In this film Persia is presented as the barbarous Orient whereas the Spartans are presented as the civilized Occident.  The former are even dehumanized in their depictions, some of them resembling monstrous savages from the opium dreams of the most racist colonizer.  Very European/white looking Greeks are the heroes against very dark-skinned (and often savage-looking) Persians.  At one point, the white Spartan king kicks a black Persian messenger down a well yelling, to much applause in the theatres, the movie's best known line (and now internet meme): "This. Is. Sparta!" And this is also a film that appeared at the height of Islamophobia, a film that seems designed to conflate Greece with America and the Persians with Muslim terrorists.

According to Zizek, however, 300 is not a reproduction of a racist imperialist narrative where the centres of capitalism like to see themselves as embattled victims facing an onslaught of savagery.  Ignoring the logic of the film, and how this logic fits into dominant ideology, Zizek decides to remind us that in actual history Greece was a tiny nation facing the onslaught of a more economically developed empire––therefore, he reasons, we should be able to see the Sparta as somewhat akin to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the Persians akin to Reagan's America.  And the very artificiality of the film (everything is shot on green-screened background and heavily digitized) should tell us that we are watching a film about spectacle itself!  Hence 300 is not actually dehumanizing the Orient in its depiction of non-white savagery but is making an extremely subtle and sophisticated critique of dehumanization itself.

Clearly Zizek is engaging in some sort of "death of the author" analysis, a literary theory that is near the nadir of post-modern critique.  In Zizek's analytic framework there is no inherent meaning to the text––except (and this is often what the "death of the author" approach ends up permitting) the meaning provided by the critical expert.  So for Zizek neither the intent behind the production of the film, nor the way in which this film was consumed, matters: only his interpretation, due to its expert understanding, matters.  This is where the "death of the author" thesis allows an invisible college of experts, academics trained to understand hidden meanings of any text, to have the only interpretative authority.

In any case, Zizek's analysis is dead wrong if 300 is held up to an actual historical materialist analysis.  And his failure to provide such an analysis, and lapse into assertions of secret meanings that only he is expert enough to understand (perhaps this is a product of his background in pscycho-analysis), demonstrates his failure to be the supposedly "marxist" scholar we are supposed to believe him to be.

300 is a piece of reactionary film-making for three reasons.  First of all, the author of the graphic novel source material, Frank Miller, has openly bragged that his comic is meant to be a metaphor for the war on terror and "Western civilization" standing courageously against tides of "Eastern barbarism."  Miller is a right-wing libertarian racist (who currently really wants to write a "Batman versus Al Queda" graphic novel) who intentionally drew the Persians as dark and grossly monstrous, and the Spartans as white and altogether human, because he actually believes the myth imperialists ideologues propagate that the "western world" is engaged in a clash of civilizations with those who hate America because they hate freedom.  Secondly, in order for 300 to be a critical film, Snyder would have to shoot the bloody thing in a way to intentionally disrupt the narrative: and yet, judged by his interviews, he was interested in doing an utterly faithful adaptation, transposing the comic identically panel-for-panel unto the screen.  Nor is Snyder someone capable of doing a critical piece of political film-making: his adaptation of Watchmen removed the majority of the source material's critical content; his Sucker-Punch was predictably sexist.  Third and finally, the vast majority of viewers interpreted the film 300 in the way that Miller intended the comic book to be interpreted: as propaganda about the War on Terror––audience members at some theatres even cheered the ending of the film by chanting "USA! USA!"

So if the 300 was both produced and consumed as racist-imperialist propaganda, any historical materialist worth hir credentials as an historical materialist would have to accept that, by this very materialist fact (production/consumption), the film is racist-imperialist propaganda.  Otherwise, by the very same logic, we could argue that Triumph of the Will or Birth of the Nation are secretly progressive pieces of film-making: Reifenstahl is really satirizing the Nazi Party, D.W. Griffith is interrogating the dehumanization of African Americans!  Only the most banal apologists for fascism and racism pretend that these films were not works of reactionary propaganda: we understand the social-historical context––a context of production and consumption––in which these films were made; we would look like fools to pretend that these films were not racist.  And we can speak of a more sophisticated understanding of the "death of the author" thesis by arguing that even if Reifenstahl or Griffith had other intentions (which is doubtful), then it didn't matter because the films were produced within a context that made them reactionary propaganda.

And yet Zizek, our supposed marxist scholar, fails to understand the context of the film's production and its consumption.  Apparently he can circumvent the meaning behind its production and consumption with his own expert analysis which, for some bizarre reason we are supposed to accept, approaches some inner truth.  This is akin, again referring to the above examples, of a film critic claiming that, regardless of how important Reifenstahl films were for propagating Nazi ideology, none of that matters because they were "secretly critical."  The appeal to some esoteric understanding of a cultural product that wears its values openly is not only elitist, it is counter-revolutionary because it allows reactionary art to be whatever we want it to be.  If we extend that logic outside of art and into other areas of production––which we should do if we, as marxists, do not believe that art is more special than other forms of social production––then why not just imagine that the ideas produced by Glen Beck and the Tea Party are secretly revolutionary?  Or, if we extend that logic to its opposite, why not argue that there is a hidden meaning to Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto and, lo and behold, it is secretly a text that is arguing satirically for capitalism!  All we need to understand anything is an invisible college of experts to explain the hidden meaning of every act of social production––and if they don't agree, well, they'll probably work it out.

So what does Zizek's inability to do an honest and historical materialist analysis of a film like 300 tell us?  Only that if he cannot do the simple investigation required to analyze an obvious reactionary propaganda film, and still shoot of his mouth without any materialist investigation, then it is doubtful that he can perform significant historical materialist analyses of the complexities of human life in general.