Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

Here’s a couple of bon mots from a great essay by David Bordwell, the leading film historian and theorist:

When Žižek tries to be serious and dismantle an argument critically, the results are vague, digressive, equivocal, contradictory, and either obviously inaccurate or merely banal. This might explain why he so seldom tries to be analytical. Vagueness, digressions, equivocations, etc. are less apparent if you’re playful.
…
Given Žižek’s tortured style, does he seem to have any regard for writing in a “common language, available to everyone”? And if it’s wrong for scientists to be elevated as “subjects supposed to know,” why isn’t the same stricture applied, say, to Freud and Lacan, who have become far more Delphic oracles than Einstein or Hawking? Or even applied to the “popular cult-figure” of the larger-than-life, I-am-ze-bull European intellectual who says outrageous things in order to rouse us from our bourgeois slumber?

Needless to say, Žižek is strategically vague; his comments evoke attitudes, not arguments. Nor does he mention that, whatever cult value may attend to scientists in the popular press, the general public remains remarkably resistant to scientific findings and scientific thinking. Most Americans believe in angels and a literal place called Hell. Most accept astrology, consider the theory of evolution unfounded, and think that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. This state of affairs, surely related to the class struggle, won’t be changed by another gloss on the concept of suture.

Someone will remark that at least Žižek loves movies.

To this there’s an easy reply. Who doesn’t?

Professor David Bordwell is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). You can read the entire essay here: Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything

Of course, those gullible enough to be taken in by Žižek’s “I-am-ze-bull” sudsy soft-soap will not take readily to Bordwell’s clean, cold water. One can only hope that good scholarship washes away the sloppy stuff over time.