Post-Modern Anxiety

Drowning in the Surreal

AS: At one point in the film, Zizek speaks about anxiety, and the idea that 'anxiety is the one affect that does not deceive', a thesis that he attributes to Freud but actually comes from Lacan (Freud said that all affects are convertible to anxiety). Also, when Zizek compares Harpo Marx to the Freudian id - a mixture of total innocence and devilish intensity - this comes straight out of Lacan. Did you make the decision not to mention Lacan in order to make the film accessible to a broader audience?

SF: I have not read Lacan and Freud closely enough to compare and respond properly. I did attend a lecture recently on Freud's writing on anxiety and I thought I could see the idea there already in Freud's writing, I will ask this lecturer who is a Lacanian. Of course Zizek is a 'Lacanian', and very often he is using the phrase 'psychoanalysis' - which I think means Lacan primarily but I think one can also think of Freud as a turning point in thinking out of which a great richness was born and I want to prioritize the ideas themselves and put them in a present tense, as far as possible. Film is a very different medium to prose writing. Footnotes are hard due to the limits of screen time. I didn't deliberately cut out Lacan's name - but I did not want to get bogged down in giving a history of psychoanalysis, which would have been a different film.

AS: If I remember correctly, the movie ends with Zizek questioning whether cinema can face the ultimate truth of desire, or whether it does not necessarily obscure this truth with beautiful illusions. On the one hand, this comes close to the Nietzschean idea that 'we have art so as not to die from the truth'; on the other, it also recalls Jack Nicholson's famous line from A Few Good Men: 'You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!' Cinema seems split between unveiling the real and ideological obfuscation, a problem that is more pressing than ever. What can we expect from cinema today, and what do you think about the notion that art's purpose is to reveal an unbearable truth in such a way that it becomes (a little more) bearable?

SF: I like what you have said, and I agree about this tension within cinema itself. I don't think it can make the unbearable bearable. It is what it is unbearable. And I think what is unbearable is anxiety itself; anxiety of guilt, meaninglessness and finitude. But perhaps cinema allows us to believe we can handle 'the truth' - and so it helps deal with anxiety. It gives us 'Dutch courage' - a kind of fake belief in our capacity to bear things. That's why its so enjoyable, like alcohol. And maybe we should be more humble and say this fake courage is the extent of our capacity to endure. We should not be ashamed, but like Beckett's heroes - be ready to laugh at our misery and this way release our selves from this unbearable anxiety - through loss itself. I love what Slavoj says about desire being the wound of reality. And so cinema puts us in a double-bind. It 'plays with our desire' and generates anxiety through this very action. Which is why directors are God-like characters who bring about as much enjoyment as devastation.

Interview by Aaron Schuster of Sophie Fiennes aout The Pervert's Guide to Cinema