Slavoj Zizek, filosofo e psicanalista sloveno, profondo conoscitore ed interprete del pensiero di Lacan ed Heidegger, nonchè della Scuola di Francoforte, ha spesso messo al centro della sua riflessione il cinema e la letteratura popolari, come chiavi interpretative privilegiate, per comprendere la realtà.
I suoi scritti, frutto di una personalità poliedrica e di una non comune capacità critica, affrontano senza timori le contraddizioni della nostra condizione contemporanea, confrontandosi in un dialogo continuo con molti filosofi postmoderni francesi e americani, mentre il suo interesse storico è sempre stato limitato agli anni compresi tra l’affermarsi della filosofia critica kantiana e la dialettica hegeliana.
Questa volta, per In these times, Zizek ha deciso di occuparsi dell’immagine della guerra, propagandata da The Hurt Locker e da Lebanon, due film controversi, eppure capaci di imporsi agli Oscar come alla Mostra di Venezia.
When Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker won all the big Oscars over James Cameron’s Avatar, the victory was perceived as a good sign of the state of things in Hollywood: A modest production meant for independent festivals clearly overran a superproduction whose technical brilliance cannot cover up the flat simplicity of its story…
Maybe—but that’s a big maybe.
For all its mystifications, Avatar clearly sides with those who oppose the global Military-Industrial Complex, portraying the superpower army as a force of brutal destruction serving big corporate interests. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, presents the U.S. Army in a way that is much more finely attuned to its own public image in our time of humanitarian interventions and militaristic pacifism.
The film largely ignores the big debate about the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, and instead focuses on the daily ordeals of ordinary soldiers who are forced to deal with danger and destruction…
This choice is deeply symptomatic: Although soldiers, they do not kill, but daily risk their lives dismantling terrorist bombs that are destined to kill civilians.
Non solo, ma Zizek ritiene che The Hurt Locker introduca nel panorama hollywoodiano un virus già diffusosi nelle più recenti produzioni israeliane sulla guerra del Libano.
But there is more to the film. The Hurt Locker brought to Hollywood the trend that accounts for the success of two recent Israeli films about the 1982 Lebanon war…
Maoz said his film is not a condemnation of Israel’s policies, but a personal account of what he went through…
This is ideology at its purest: The re-focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict: What was the Israeli army doing deep in Lebanon? Such a “humanization” thus serves to obfuscate the key point: the need for a ruthless analysis of what we are doing in our political-military activity and what is at stake. Our political-military struggles are not an opaque history that brutally disrupts our intimate personal lives—they are something in which we fully participate.
Zizek chiarisce ancora più esplicitamente:
The notion that, in spite of political differences, we are all human beings with the same loves and worries, neutralizes the impact of what the soldier is effectively doing at that moment…
And this brings us back to The Hurt Locker. Its depiction of the daily horror and traumatic impact of serving in a war zone seems to put it miles apart from sentimental celebrations of the U.S. Army’s humanitarian role, like in John Wayne’s infamous Green Berets. However, we should always bear in mind that the terse-realistic presentation of the absurdities of war in The Hurt Locker obfuscates and thus renders acceptable the fact that its heroes are doing exactly the same job as the heroes of Green Berets. In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: We are there, with our boys, identifying with their fears and anguishes instead of questioning what they are doing at war in the first place.
Stanze di Cinema 