The Big Parallax
Posted at 5:26 PMI recently watched Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty as the pertinacious reporter Joe Frady who begins to unravel a conspiracy surrounding the deaths of several people who, like himself, had witnessed the assassination of a popular RFK-esque politician three years prior. His inquiry takes him far down the rabbit’s hole, so to speak, where he finds the nebulous, but no doubt sinister, deeds of the Parallax Corporation, a corporation ostensibly designed to seek out and hire maladjusted individuals whose psychological profiles earn them the unique privilege of carrying out high-profile assassinations.
The film is undoubtedly steeped in the post-Watergate zeitgeist of conspiracy, scandal, and suspicion, comparable in many ways to Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, although I prefer Parallax for a number of reasons. But it would be wrong to not give due weight to the tumultuous events of the 1960s as well, which indelibly leave their mark on the film in the form of retrospection, subtly cued by the time-jump employed by the director. Thus, rather than immersing the viewer in the chaos of assassination, the film creates a “temporal parallax” by re-reading, as it were, the milieu of the 1960s from the frame of the 1970s: the “parallax gap,” produced by the minimal difference between the event as it was experienced and as it appears in retrospect, creates the effect of a stain, that of an unsolved crime, left upon the lap of hapless Joe.
What drew me to the film originally was the fact that it happened to share the same name of Slavoj Zizek’s “magnum opus,” but which conspicuously and, most likely, intentionally bears no mention of Pakula’s film. In Zizek’s Parallax View, “parallax” is defined as
the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. Or, to put it in Lacanese, the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its “blind spot,” that which is “in the object more than object itself,” the point from which the object itself returns the gaze.1
So where in the film do we get “parallax”? Perhaps by breaking the film down into its various constituent elements gives us a clear idea. There are three main actors: Joe Frady, the Parallax Corporation and the Senate. The object of inquiry, of course, is the assassination. At first glance, then, it would appear that the parallax is produced by the two antagonists of the film, Joe and the Parallax corporation, yet this doesn’t produce any change in the object, nor does it imply any sort of mediation between subject and object. Perhaps, then, parallax designates the very refraction of each of the various constituent elements in the film. First, there is the case of the Parallax corporation itself: when Joe visits Parallax, it does not appear ominous at all, neither from the outside nor from within, at least any more so than a typical corporation. It is only the fact that Joe approaches Parallax as Joe qua potential assassin that the truly sinister dimension of Parallax emerges. In this instance, the object itself is the Parallax Corporation, and its ontological status is affected by Joe’s change in subjective position. There is also the obvious parallax produced by Joe prior to his knowledge of the conspiracy and Joe after he becomes aware of its true nature: in the case of the former, the assassination appears to be just a disparate act of a crazy man, but afterwards it becomes clear that the assassination is part of a much wider conspiracy involving the Parallax corporation.
Yet these solutions don’t potentially tell us anything new about the film. A far more interesting effect is produced by comparing Joe as he apprehends his activity as an investigator to his concrete activity after his undertaking the Parallax indoctrination montage.
Joe thinks he is a journalist trying to uncover the mystery of the Parallax corporation, a kind of noumenal entity that seems to exist outside the boundaries of normal everyday society, reflected in the eerie darkness of their video-viewing room. Yet, in striking similarity to Glenn Ford’s character in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, Joe’s concrete actions in pursuing his investigation produce the desired consequences of the Parallax corporation itself. In a strangely Hegelian way, he carries out the very mission he intended to prevent and expose, and thus the parallax object is Joe himself, Joe as fractured by Joe qua his subjective stance and his objective status as an agent of the Parallax corporation thinking he is simply acting in a duplicitous manner. This may explain why, after his viewing of the indoctrination montage, we no longer receive much, if any, dialogue from Joe.
Yet one variable remains unaccounted for: the Senate. The Senate appears twice in the film, each time marking an assassination: once at the beginning and once at the end. The Senate is clearly the dimension of the big Other, the symbolic Law that quilts a given signifying chain in establishing knowledge as subordinate to the Master. The Senate qua big Other decide what the events “meant,” thereby lending them a certain fixity acquired through the propagation of Master-Signifiers. After the assassination, numerous stories are told about what happened, how and why: perhaps it was an inside job, or maybe it was perpetrated by a foreign country, or maybe it was simply a freak accident. All of these stories have the potential of acquiring the status of “knowledge,” but only insofar as they are subordinated to a Master-Signifier that secures the stability of their meaning: this is the job of the Senate qua big Other.
The bureaucratic stamp that provides knowledge with its ontological status, on the one hand, appears at first to be totalizing, but is in fact barred, incomplete, and marked by a certain lack that appears as a distortion. This appearance of distortion, however, is inherent to the parallax object itself: while the Master’s knowledge gives the illusion of fixity and stability to meaning, there is always the shadowy double, the “dark side of the Moon,” so to speak, that resists signification. This is the angle from which Joe proceeds in his inquiry, but gets caught up in the game and is eventually duped by the Parallax corporation as a result of not taking into account his own subjective position.
The uncanny effect produced by the disjunction between Joe’s unrelenting quest to uncover the truth against the Master’s Law and its shadowy, obscene counterpart in the frightening libidinal space of the Parallax corporation, echoes the aesthetics of classic film noir and its predecessor, German Expressionism. What gives The Parallax View its unique flavor, one that, not without coincidence, marks the historical-cinematic break between the era of classic and neo-film noir, is the undermining of Joe’s very subjective position. Moreover, Pakula’s use of negative shots (a hallmark of film noir), particularly of Joe in his apartment after he has faked his own death and is “officially” no longer among “the living”—shots which evoke those of Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo—, depict nothing other than the formal emptiness of the Cartesian cogito, the overwhelming excess and mad doubting that expels everything from the interiority of its being. Pakula’s depiction of this constant doubting, this “night of the world” inherent to the subject, marks the film’s truly radical dimension.
What Eliot Spitzer Teaches Us
Posted at 10:49 PM
One of the big themes in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is his skepticism of science (and we shouldn’t forget that Vonnegut studied mechanical engineering). There is a very telling passage (it would be even more telling if I could find it) when the main character is sitting in a bar and overhears a discussion about the recent discovery of DNA, yet no one reacts to the news. No one cares, because it hasn’t altered their lives in any inexorable manner. I had always been a strong supporter of the so-called “Enlightenment,” whatever the hell that means (and after all, who wants to call themselves “unenlightened”?), and I’ve always enjoyed Vonnegut’s books, but was nonetheless skeptical of his Neo-Luddism. Yet, as is clear to me now, I could only appreciate his insight in retrospect.
There is much talk today amongst the bourgeoisie about the role of science in the sphere of the political, from debates over evolution to stem cell research, as if these were somehow the most pivotal political issues at stake. And then you have radical reductionist materialists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who have become quite fashionable amongst large swaths of the very same libertine intelligentsiia. Yet, and I am hardly the first to point this out, the opposition between science and the new “fundamentalisms” (usually delimited to religious or political “totalitarianisms,” hardly ever the democratic one, which is spread by tanks and cluster bombs…) is fairly obviously overstated, and I think this has become an uncontroversial claim. And the problem isn’t the stupid pseudo-Leftist one that science is really just another form of religion, and all of that twaddle. The problem is rather that, as a rule, no one who is “seriously” oppressed (in the sense of being one of today’s “Excluded” slum-dwellers) is really concerned with upholding the virtuous nature of Scientific Reason. The contradiction is that in refashioning the debate between this science-fundamentalism binary opposition, the bourgeoisie seem to be positioning themselves in the status of victim, the same logic which dominates their liberal multiculturalist ideology. They are perceived as the victim of unchecked religious fervor, which is typically then associated with the stupid poor masses. In other ways, too, however, this straight out class antagonism is often side-stepped or obfuscated by a confrontation with the wealthy conservatives who are seen as manipulating the working-class people, such that one exclaims, “If only they knew the truth, the world would be a better place.” This view is perhaps even more patronizing, as it suggests that not only are the masses poor and stupid, but they are also passive. Their stupidity even precludes them from acting, so they can only find a real voice through their rich lords. Consequently, when they talk about science qua the political, they are not really talking about science at all. Instead, what they are really after is the right to preside over the mastery of the canaille, a right they see as their own rather than the proto-fascists.
It is a difficult issue to navigate, however, because on the one hand I’m not interested in defending any anti-scientific position, like, for example, doubting evolution. With science one cannot be “for” or “against” it, that is the entire point. This reached humorous levels under High Stalinism, when experimental physics research of “free-floating radicals” was outlawed due to a misunderstanding of what “free-floating radical” meant. The problem, then, is a paradigmatic one: who will be responsible for asserting a claim to Universality? The biggest problem with arguing that science should occupy the status of a Universal, as it was in the Enlightenment (another indication, following Badiou’s “The Communist Hypothesis,” that we are regressing back to the 19th century), is that it essentially requires a new domain of authority. Because science inhabits a privileged, largely academic discourse, those who “know,” who have the special knowledge, occupy the (Lacanian) position of “subjects supposed to know.” They are like Sherlock Holmes-esque figures, the same sort of logic which aptly fits the dynamics of the TV show Monk. Why is this? It’s because the assumption is as follows: “Wow, I don’t understand what the hell a legless Russian trapese artist has to do with a mysterious murder, but I’m sure Monk does, and he will put all of the pieces together.” The formula is always the same: Monk spots what appears to us and the idiot cops (interpellated “subjects supposed to believe”) as a meaningless stain, which for him exposes the entire logical chain (akin to the anamorphosis that takes place in Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors). So essentially, when one insists on the primacy of scientific discourse as a new political paradigm, it is implicitly an assertion of political authority.
This assertion of political authority disguised as Reason, and, unbeknownst to it, in the service of its cunning, perfectly fits the depoliticalizing trend of the past decades following the collapse of Actually Existing Socialism and the ordaining of the End of History. It involves eliminating the political will of the masses and dismissing the real problems of today’s new, slum-dwelling proletarian, instead opting to address them as a “human rights” concern, to incorporate them into state bureaucracy and so on. It involves eliminating political antagonism, which is understood as another form of totalitarian fundamentalism (like Hugo Chávez’s socialist project in Venezuela). And it involves instituting the program of the liberal utopia.
So what is the truth of the liberal utopia? To go back to the example of the detective novel, the truth seems to lie in the passage from classic detective novel to the film noir universe, where the detective is no longer outside, as it were, of the seedy underbelly of criminal life, but interjected within its perverse machinations. This is the example we learn from the recent scandal involving Eliot Spitzer: the faults of one expert administrator expose the entire perverse core of the logic underlying the liberal utopia; so-called inflexible ethics merely mask the prostitution rings, child molestation and other seeming “aberrations” that occupy the lives of the bureaucratic elite.
The only goal then, following Badiou, is to continue to insist on the primacy of the communist hypothesis:
In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis … Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.1
- Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis. ↩