Have you ever heard it said that there is no such thing as an anti-war movie? That by its very nature, film as a medium is so powerfully a function of its own very deliberate staging that there is no way to depict war (or rape, or maybe racism) in a way that is not a glamorization, or in a way that does not feed the very thing you're trying to pose as problematic. The problem is, for example, when Jodie Foster in The Accused was raped, there was far more getting off on that for the audience than anyone would acknowledge. I remember someone talking about how pissed they were when they watched that movie, did not at all leave feeling self-righteous about having watched something harrowing, but left disturbed by the blatant eroticism of the rape, then searched the terms on google and came up with STILLS from the rape scene that were labeled "Jodie Foster naked!! Hott!!"
I hear this sentiment repeated all the time, and especially from the pro-war Right and the pro-war Left. And it doesn't help when we hear the "intentions" of supposedly anti-war film-makers justifying their pro-war narratives as
really being anti-war - many Vietnam movies, among countless others, are especially guilty here:
Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Deerhunter, films drowning in gliberal "anti-war" sentimental platitudes while oh so on-screen explicitly and thrillingly glorifying the gratuitous violence of that war ... but this problematic of interpretation is hardly just confined to film, but to all media and texts, all of which are a quagmire of conflicting interpretations and libidinal affects (from the Bible to the music of Wagner); and much worse than this is to succumb to the pomo deconstructivist temptation of resigning oneself to the conformist-nihilist "everything is just a matter of, is mere, interpretation and representation", so depoliticising all social reality for the easy benefit, and smooth perpetuation, of the (consumerist) status quo.
What all this is attempting to demonstrate is that textual interpretation, along with actual social "reality," is a social construct, is a
political determination. Denying this, "diavowing" it ("
Everything is just a matter of mere opinion, so I'll not bother to express any, nor take anyone else's seriously") is the dominant contemporary pomo ideology at its core, is just what it demands, enabling it to reproduce and multiply itself without any serious challenge.
Many would say that there's something about the way images work that is such that all war, all rape, all depictions of violence, are going to have an erotic charge. This is something that has always been a huuuge discussion point among my classmates and I've had to search very hard to decide whether I agree. But I think this is part of the principle the anti-Borat camp are employing.
No, its the excuse the pro-Borat camp are using to justify the [comically charged] racism; it is to mistakenly reason that, as all depictions of violence and rape, etc., are libidinally arousing, therefore we should dispense with all morality and politics and ethical commitment and simply (fetishistically) embrace all our irrational unconscious desires to voyeuristically and uncritically consume all manner of violent, pornographic imagery. while conveniently forgetting how such "desires" are socially constructed and conditioned.
As you say, "
I'm trying not to get involved in this discussion because I will have to see it rehashed in so many classes" - but aloof, non-committal procrastination doesn't obliterate away belief into the permanent skeptical, it simply disavows it, while the underlying belief, of course, always-already remains fully intact ...
BTW, whoever claimed that
The Accused was anti-rape?? Hollywood movies like
The Accused want it both ways: because you know that you are covered or absolved from any guilty or voyeuristic impulses by the official narrative trajectory and story line (the big Other of the Law ultimately prevailing at the film's end, the symbolic order and patriarchal authority re-affirmed), you are allowed to fully indulge in dirty fantasies - of explicit rape and violence etc - which do not count in the eyes of society (the big Other). Here, there is no need even to consider TWO spectators [the self-righteous versus the voyeuristic one] – one and the same spectator can be simultaneously split into two. So the depiction of the rape in
The Accused is not for the conscientous "benefit" of the big Other of law and order, but for our dirty fantasmatic imagination.
