The Unconscious is Out There

Music: New Order: Waiting for the Sirens' Call One of the (still current yet aged) debates in film studies concerns the relatively universalist claims of the Althusserian/Lacanian theory of spectatorship and the more or less "sociological" stress on particularized communal histories and the way these inform the experience of this or that community of viewers. There is no easy rapprochement between the two perspectives; one simply tries to give everyone a fair hearing. Of course, I still lean toward the more structuralist (modernist) accounts, but this is less because of deep conviction than politics: determinism frequently has as much persuasive force as transcendence. The two go hand in hand, and when I'm asked to survey the past century of socio-political change, I see them as much more central than the truth of multiplicity. In other words, the project of the posts may be making its way to truth in a qualified sense, and I buy all of that stuff, but Hegel gets the work done in the last instance.

Now, toward a new universalism: the contemporary media circus around the trial of Michael Jackson is a fascinating civil peda(philic)gogy in the logics of the unconscious. Although I'm painfully aware in the vested and scripted interests of the Infotainment Empire, the sheer amount of anecdotal evidence has already condemned the man as a pedophile (even if he gets off he's still a dead one, in the end of things). It also condemns the rest of us "curious straights" as unquestionably perverse, watching it unfold like a glorious, tiny-genital train wreck. I'm reminded of some comments Zizek made many years ago, long long before this trial (1996):

When a couple of years ago, the disclosure of Michael Jackson's alleged 'immoral' private behavior (his sexual games with underage boys) dealt a blow to his innocent Peter Pan image, elevated beyond sexual and racial differences (or concerns), some penetrating commentators asked the obvious question: What's all the fuss about? Wasn't this so-called 'dark side of Michael Jackson' always here for us to see, in the video spots that accompanied his musical releases, which were saturated with ritualized violence and obscene sexualized gestures (blatantly so in the case of Thriller and Bad)? The Unconscious is outside, not hidden away in any unfathomable depths—or, to quote the X Files motto: 'The truth is out there.'

Indeed, this case is habituated and to some extent very uncannily separated from the horror of the alleged abuse. When compared to the molestation scandal that most recently rocked the Catholic Church to its (strap) boots, the sheer mundane-ness of this bizarre trial (now routine on the morning news) is to be expected. Jackson's dream team is nothing if but a "dream machine," the counterpart to the nightmare of priestly indiscretions. The latter is ruthlessly repressed while the former is allowed full play. In this respect, we cannot but watch the Jackson trail in relation to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, as equally controversial, but the sadism to Jackson's dreamy masochism. Again, the universalism of "the gaze" as dominated by the patriarchical view finds footing here: Jackson exposes the limits of the gaze at the same time as his stardom reinforces it; he is a feminized object that attracts the passionate fan(atic)s of ladies and effeminate boys worldwide. Indeed, his innocence is hitched to this fantasy, and even his transgressions are tacitly permissible because of the instability of his sexuality and ethnicity (he's not quite white, but certainly not black. If Mel Gibson was caught molesting children, then the true horror lurking deep in the psyche would surface, and the media coverage would be anything but mundane. Indeed, the time is ripe for a Gibson scandal.