KultureDrome

Žižek's Dream

Of all the myriad possible intellectual embarrassments the Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek dreamed he was thrust into an adventure on the classic hegemonic American TV show Mission Impossible (1966-1973). In all fairness the show had one of the coolest theme songs, at least as good as the musical intro to Hawaii-Five-O and Rockford Files, and given the US ADD bubble-gum culture of sublime stupidity, the missions were remarkably complicated. Žižek wore the clean-shaven silver-haired mask of Mr. Phelps over his black beard, and whenever he went out — to the corner grocer’s for beer, or the gas station for an energy drink — he was enthusiastically greeted with the applause of Cold War veterans and nerdy kids that had watched every episode so many times they knew every line by heart. One of the signatures of the show was the ever more idiosyncratic and implausible scenario that introduced us to the facts of the case. Phelps had gone up in a Ferris-Wheel gondola, had test-driven a speedboat, visited penny-arcades, gone to countless secluded spots in parks, and was a well known denizen of unpopulated tourist vistas. Later episodes started with a vignette to introduced the villain before the Impossible Mission Force’s assignment was revealed. Mr. Phelps was the IMF contact (the brain that planned the strategy and chose the secret operatives with the necessary skill-set to pull it off), but the directions he received for his next assignment pick-up were so convoluted they totally exasperated him. “Doesn’t Washington have more important things to do than come up with this stuff?” he wondered. Phelps was supposed to navigate an active set from David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), somehow manage to stay off screen during the filming of one of the more schizophrenic episodes that involved the heroine, and find the package containing the tape and photographs on the Honeymooner’s era soundstage used for the surreal scenes with the family of bunny rabbits. Lynch is great with contemporary beauty, the problem is the last few movies totally blend together. Phelps not only had to navigate Inland Empire, he somehow had to keep it separated in his memory from Mullholand Dr., and Lost Highway. He was sure he was screwed, but as it turned out, the package was set out on the couch where he didn’t have to go digging around for it in the dark. Phelps looked around the room to make sure no giant bunny rabbits were eavesdropping and started the tape player. A noticeable twitch came over his face when the familiar voice revealed the true nature of the assignment: A cabal of despotic fascists were attempting to take over the US, and it was his mission to make sure they did not succeed. Two familiar headshots looked up at him when he emptied the content of the manila folder on the coffee table: The President’s and Vice President’s. The self-destructing tape ended with the same pledge as always — to disavow any knowledge and destroy all evidence of any member of the team who was captured — but Phelps, Žižek cheerfully recalled behind his sweaty rubber mask, was like a real American cowboy and never gave up on his operatives. He returned to his stylish modern apartment to mull the problem over: how to turn the despots against each other and bring down the corrupt American administration. Phelps would need super-agents for what he had in mind. He pulled out his gold embossed leather folder and flipped through the glossies. Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard were dead. Forget them. Norman O. Brown had name dropped the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno when he quoted the line: “The wretched consciousness shrinks in the face of it’s own annihilation.” Anyone who was brave enough to make that reference was on his team, even if Brown took a dim view of "the death drive", a Freudian principal Mr. Phelps believed was crucial to the success of the mission. He struggled with which of the original cast members he should employ. Cinnamon Carter, Barney Collier, and Willy Armitage were shoe-ins. Whether he should go with Rollin Hand, played by Martin Landau, or The Great Paris, played by Leonard Nimoy was a little harder. Phelps decided to come back to it later and make the sixth member of the team another guest-star. He liked Julie from Return of The Living Dead 3 (1996). Curt is the boyfriend who brings her back to life with a military drug after a freak accident breaks her neck. The teen sweethearts are celebrating after having broken into his dad’s army base and discovering the US is secretly training an army of zombies to become the next super weapon, virtually indestructible because they are already dead. There was a scene in which the ID card Curt has stolen from his dad doesn’t work on the first swipe and Julie licks the information strip to get the door open. Phelps was sure it was a great example of his academic idea of the “real real” — a moment in a horror movie that hits you in the gut because the artifice of the flick is broken by a baldly sensual interruption. There are a few other moments in the movie that are as equally visceral as a girl’s saliva, but what he liked most about Julie was that she is a zombie with feelings, she inflicts hideous mutilations on herself to avoid eating her lover, and ultimately sacrifices herself for him. Julie is a zombie with a sympathetic consciousness, someone Phelps considered pretty normal by today’s standards. He believed she could easily infiltrate the Bushevick Administration’s council of corpse-fuckers, and provide a desirable antidote to their outrageous extravagances of inhumanity just by showing a little humility, some plain old self-doubt about whether the fact that she could kill both viciously and efficiently, and in fact liked the taste of raw human entrails very much, made it the correct course of action in absolutely every case. Besides, if they didn’t agree with her she could always eat them! It was a virtually foolproof plan. Barney was showing everyone the special toilet bowl he designed for the mission, while Mr. Phelps explained his theory behind the plan: “And here I came to think of the toilets in America, France and Germany. They make up a semiotic triangle that correlates exactly to Levi Strauss’ triangle, so we also have an excrement triangle. Now the German toilets are built in a way that the excrement falls on a flat surface in the back and is flushed through a hole in the front. This way you are directly confronted with excrement — and you can see whether you have worms, etc. This is a German ritual. The French toilets have the opposite system: the hole is bigger at the back so excrement can fall directly into the hole and vanishes immediately. The American variant is a kind of correlative of Levi Strauss’ cooked food, combining the elements: the excrement remains, but it floats in the water. I had a look at some books on the topic and came to the conclusion that every nation believes their system makes most sense. But clearly, a complex system is at work here. And if I am to carry on… here is the right answer for Lyotard and all those who say the end of ideology, period. Yes, but as soon as you flush the toilet, you’re right in the middle of ideology.” Afterwards no one really knew what to say. Phelps talked about Chaucer’s and Rabeleis’ obsession with scatology in literature and the central importance for it in the theology of Luther’s Protestant Reformation, but the agents were no less confused about how exactly Phelps’ planned to take down the administration with a simple toilet bowl. As excited as Phelps was about the Julie zombie, it was more of an intellectual curiosity than anything else. Cinnamon Carter was a real woman. Sensing an opertune pause, the silver fox swooped in on Ms. Carter, played by the sexy Barbara Bain who would later inflame the adolescent loins of pointy headed geeks in Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999. Žižek closed his eyes behind the Phelps mask and breathed in her perfume. He had saved the best part of his research for her. “Friends from Vienna told me,” he furtively whispered into her ear, “that in avant-garde student circles the pubic haircut was strictly codified. There is the triangle, the New-Age hippy way, where everything grows profusely, the yuppie way, where only a small strip may be visible, and the punk style with pubic hair clean-shaven and rings hanging in the clitoris, etc.” Mr. Phelps a.k.a. the masked Žižek was pressing Cinnamon to divulge her preferred way of grooming her own pubic region when her old beaux Landau came to her rescue and rudely interrupted their conversation. It was then the Slovenian cultural critic realized the tragic flaw in his plan: he should have definitely hired Paris instead.