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Showing posts with label Zizek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zizek. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

LA PREMIERE for Breaking Dawn 2:Kristen Stewart and Ayn Rand's Dominique Francon: CONTEMPT For SUMMIT'S "Empty" Celebration



LA Premiere of Breaking Dawn 2
This is not a dress - link

Does Stewart appear in DEMURE as a PR person might advise her to do?
No, she appears in OBSCENE.

The "dress" is porn that is hyper-porn that is OBSCENE costing thousands of dollars by a famous designer, so how can she be criticized. It is sexier than sexy, hyper-sexy, porno, hyper-porno = OBSCENE (Baudrillard, Herzog). 
See it and look at it. Your eyes lock on her sex and you wonder if she waxes it. It is skin you see through the translucent chiffon. It is being given to the photographers and any paparazzi who are at the Premiere. Gratis, far "worse" (Nietzsche) than the photoshopped images of the media manufactured Debordian SPECTACLE of a scandal.

This "gown" designed by a designer of glamorous gowns for glamorous women, Zuhair Murad  link for Kristen Stewart to wear to Summit Entertainment's Premiere of Breaking Dawn 2 in Los Angeles, the virgin first showing of the long awaited final film. It is also the first time Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson have appeared in public since the media SPECTACLE of the scandal. 
Worse than any paparazzi image ever stolen from her and she is giving it to them. Here is my ass, take all the images you want.
But you know they would rather "steal"  an image than have it be given to them.
It is a simulacrum being worn at an event that is in itself  an event of Simulated Reality, a copy of a copy with no original.
this is not an opening, not a premiere of celebration, it is a  coarse circus to pump up the box office. To crudely bring in as much money as possible on opening weekend. To exploit the sexual relationship of the two stars.


You want sex she says with this "dress." Well I'll give you sex, dirty sex.

She is wearing it as an act of
CONTEMPT. The dress was designed as a floating sign of CONTEMPT, masking and asserting the integrity and purity of the young woman wearing it. Designed for crude, coarse, lewd, lustful, boorish, greedy, impotent LA Hollywood types, Summit Entertainment, who would exploit a loving relationship between two people, film them in soft-porn sex scenes, promote  a sexual relationship in real life by sending paparazzi after  them constantly to harass them, and then to photoshop "scandal" images, to make hundreds of millions of dollars, and save on promotional costs.

    Here is the media manufactured Debordian SPECTACLE of a Scandal



And  here is "NORMAL", ACCEPTED,
APPLAUDED!A Parody, a "dress" as Swiftian Satire.


Foucault touches here on the very structure we find in

     Swift, whereby the function of satire is not simply to

     create a strange and unfamiliar world, but rather to

     return, to rebound upon the present, such that the real

     world is shown to be itself a parody...


For there is
     a point at which the relation between the distorted image
     and the real thing becomes unstable, beyond all dialectical
     mediation, a point at which, moreover, it loses the
     *generative* force that is given in the concept of
     productive negation.  The fact that the inverted image
     turns out not to be an inversion, but to reveal that the
     normal world is itself already inverted, calls into
     question the very standard of "normality" by which one
might measure invertedness

          ^11^ Slavoj Zizek,_ For They Know Not What They Do: 
     Enjoyment as a Political Factor_ (New York: Verso, 1992), 13.
____________________________________________________
Ayn Rand's Dominique Francon is fictionalized in a similar performance, thus calling to mind that "life imitates art".

So I turn to Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead: Dominique Francon's wedding to Gail Wynand. Dominique observes the world as evil. Integrity, excellence all that we say we admire and revere is sabotaged, punished, ridiculed, undermined, and dragged through the dirt. 

A beautiful and desirable woman  she determines to choose the "worst" man she can to marry:
Gail Wynand, the owner of The Banner that has raised mediocrity to admiration to make a fortune in wealth and power.

Returning from Reno, after divorcing  Peter Keating, Wynand meets her train:

"Where are we going, Gail?"

"To get the license. Then to the judge's office. To be married."

"No," she said.

"I want a real wedding, Gail. I want it at the most ostentatious hotel in town. I want engraved invitations, guests, mobs of guests, celebrities, flowers, flash bulbs and newsreel cameras. I want the kind of wedding the public expects of Gail Wynand."

She saw him again when she stood beside him, facing a judge who pronounced the words of the marriage ceremony over the silence of six hundred people in the floodlighted ballroom of the Noyes-Belmont Hotel.

The background she had wished was set so perfectly that it became its own caricature, not a specific society wedding, but an impersonal prototype of lavish, exquisite vulgarity.

Then she stood with him, the mob becoming a heavy silence and a gluttonous stare behind him, and they faced the judge together. She wore a long, black dress with a bouquet of fresh jasmine, his present, attached by a black band to her wrist. Her face in the halo of a black lace hat was raised to the judge.......

Afterward the mockery of the monster reception that followed left him immune. He posed with her for the battery of press cameras and he complied gracefully with all the demands of the reporters, a special noisier mob within the mob. He stood with her in the receiving line, shaking an assembly belt of hands that unrolled past them for hours. ....untouched by these guests who had come here driven by boredom, by an envious hatred, a reluctant submission to an invitation bearing his dangerous name, a scandal-hungry curiosity. He looked as if he did not know that they took his public immolation as their rightful due, that they considered their presence as the indispensable seal of sacrament upon the occasion, that of all the hundreds he and his bride  were the only  ones to whom the performance was hideous. (F. 478-480)


Paul Pflug is a big press/PR honcho at Summit. He also co-owns a PR company called Principal Communications Group, which is “a strategic corporate communications firm serving the media and entertainment industries”.Dan Abrams co-founded Gossip Cop. He also owns a business called Abrams Research which , in its own words, “is a full service digital and social media agency, specializing in the development of web-based digital marketing and social media campaigns.” In 2009, Principal Communications and Abrams Research “formed an alliance combining the benefits of both organizations’ unique capabilities.” (http://www.deadline.com/2009/0... big honcho of press at Summit and the owner of Gossip Cop are, or at least in 2009 were, in business together.Wonder why Gossip Cop gets Breaking Dawn exclusives?from nonnie-confessions.tumblr.com

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Kristen Auditions For Furious In a Parking Lot

Furious and Beautiful

The context is below

 Here are 6 pictures of Kristen in a gym parking lot with Nick Cassavetes, the director of Cali a movie she is going to be in or not going to be in, is a producer of or not a producer of.


 There is no way to know the order they were taken in. The order influences greatly how you will read them. Since there are 6 pictures there are 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2  =  720 - divided by 6 = 120 different possible permutations or ways of ordering them for viewing, and each order will give you a slightly different reading. 
Your choice.


 "I made Welcome to the Rileys [in which Stewart played a young woman with emotional issues] a few years back and now I want to open two halfway houses, one in New Orleans and one in LA, and I want to make a documentary about why it’s important. But all this ridiculously empty charity work that you see? Like, you show up at an event and you wear a dress and you auction your dress off and you suddenly feel important. I want to do it right. Right now, I just feel it. It’s not to be wasted. Because I know my value is fucking strong."
Little White Lies Interview - HERE
 Just guess who has taken the hit for saying this. Why hasn't she already done it. Blah blah blah.
But all this ridiculously empty charity work that you see? Like, you show up at an event and you wear a dress and you auction your dress off and you suddenly feel important. 
This is what has infuriated people. 
Do you want to know why?

She has dared to cut into the Dominating Discourse 
and call it fake. When anyone does that they provoke rage.

Here Zizek says exactly the same thing. Kristen is a Zizekian.

Remember when Copernicus challenged the earth centric position of the Church, saying the earth revolved around the sun instead of being in the center with the sun and planets revolving around the earth? Gulp.

Galileo
Galileo championed  heliocentrism 
And was threatened with execution by the Church for it if he didn't recant.
He recanted

There are many more who did or did not recant, but at one time it was worth your life to challenge the Dominating Discourse.
Now they just try to destroy your career.
There are many who wish it still was judging from the way they have trashed Stewart for saying this.
_______________________________________________
But she is correct and she is spontaneously making a ZIZEK statement without knowing it. Bravo!
____________________________________________
What she is saying is that the accepted normal way for celebrities to involve themselves in charity work is
DECAFFEINATED CHARITY WORK
Decaffeinated is a favorite term of Zizek's. I like it too.


Or we can read her statement through Lacan

And Debord
The celebrity charity work is a Spectacle
Which is a "floating sign"
Masking the opposite:

That it is empty


At Little White Lies











Isn't that what she just said? 
That it is empty. Jesus this
young woman is a philosopher also. No formal schooling and she comes up with that!

A few years back Stewart said she didn't want to act forever. that acting was lying. Her father told her she had it so easy because all she had to do was be in front of a camera and lie. 
Is that a fact. 

Picasso: All art is a lie.


What if the reality being mirrored in acting is the lie? 
Then her acting would be a lie of a lie. 
As Zizek would say in his most recent book -  Less Than Nothing, which is on Hegel, and  is more Hegel than Hegel, (Just trust me on this.)

 -  yes it is.

A lie based on a lie. 
The negation of a negation.
A negation of a negation is the truth. 


Here she is in an Interview in a zine called Little White Lies
and she is telling the truth.
When all is lies, the truth is a weapon - Bane 
The Dark Knight Rises
I just really am trying, trying, all the time. I mean, Walter [Salles] actually said to me several times during On the Road, ‘Stop reaching. You’re already there.’ But I like to be scared. I love to suddenly feel out of control. Actors walk around wearing these little tool-belts of acting skills. And I just don’t find that interesting to watch. 
Neither do we Kristen
So she is taking a "lie" (the acting) and pushing it to its limits and beyond to implosion! Loss of control. Letting the world will her in her performance.

When it is so excessive for her it is no longer a lie.

Nietzsche here folks. Push to excess to expose the truth lying there all palpitating before the cliched language and gestures covered it up.

She is doing the same thing DeLillo's Eric Packer did but not cowardly Cronenberg's Eric Packer.



And again she is trashed for saying the truth when all else is lies in the Dominating Discourse
But those of us in the know know she doesn't mean
Kate Winslet
Michelle Williams
Meryl Streep
Noomi Rapace
Michel Fassbender
Viggo
and many many others we love because they don't carry around a toolkit
the way Tom Cruise does, Bruce Willis does, Ashley Greene does, etc.


Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Edward Cullen as a "FLAT" character


 

Stephenie Meyer and Ayn Rand have been accused of writing "wooden" - read flat - characters: Edward Cullen, Roark, Galt (Galt rhymes with halt), are the most celebrity examples. It seems like Meyer is in good company eh? BTW Twilight has more than a few floating signs referencing Ayn Rand - Edward's bronze hair signaling Roark's unruly orange hair for one, inflexible integrity another. Still think Meyer is a dimwit running to the bank, folks? 

This "flatness" has tarred the actors playing the "flat" characters: Gary Cooper, Robert Pattinson for easy quote examples. It seems Diana Hsieh is not the only idiot in town, as almost every reviewer of Fountainhead and the Twilight movies says the same. She is in good company with twenty-fifth rate minds. Exactly where she belongs.

Saturday, 17 March 2012  darren writes of FLAT characters:

A "flat" character does not mean a "boring" character. It's a technical term in literary theory popularized by the novelist E. M. Forster in his monograph on writing titled "Aspects of the Novel." According to Forster, a "flat" character is a kind of token: his or her psychology and values do not grow, change, evolve, or come to any kind of crisis during the course of the narrative because characters — like plot points — have functions within the story; it is simply not the function of a flat character to steal attention away from the main character(s) — the protagonist(s) and the antagonist(s) — by growing, changing, evolving, or reaching any sort of "crisis" within the story in which they must exercise his or her will, and come to a decision — or initiate an action — that would be surprising, i.e., a new pattern of behavior inconsistent with their previous pattern. "Flat" characters remain who they were throughout the entire course of the story, because they are there simply to provide a particular kind of obstacle (or point of affinity) for the main characters. They are part of the stock-in-trade of every playwright, screenwriter, short-story writer, and novelist. They are a particular kind of narrative tool
For quotes from Forster go to the above link.


Meyer has solved her problem by making Edward Cullen a vampire. Vampires never change. They are frozen - read flat - where they were when they were changed. Forever.
Edward in the books and more so in the films exists to love Bella. Everything he does and says is to show his love for Bella when really he desires her so much he wishes to kill her and drink her blood until she is drained. (For a fanfic version see Hide and Drink by savage.)


In discussing the Hays Production Code of the 1930's Zizek  (RL p.84)....."it generated the very excess whose direct depiction it forbade.....The Production Code did not simply prohibit some contents, rather it codified their enciphered articulation, as in the famous instruction from Monroe Stahr to his scriptwriters in Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon":


At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard...whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her enough strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would even consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified. (Fitzgerald,TLT, 1960,p.51)


Could we say that every time Edward Cullen is on the screen it is only  to desire Bella. 


A film flat character. A floating sign to assert and deny. 


Zizek - sigh