Once again (and not to be condescending since you may be more in tune with the subject than me), FC, you seem to have a good grasp of the subject and make a lot of impressive points. Unfortunately, I’m dealing with the distraction of the latest issue of Philosophy Now and it leaves me less time than I would like to respond. Thankfully, magazines are quickly gotten through and, hopefully, by the beginning of next week, I’ll be able to get back to my focus on the subject at hand.
You mention The Fragile Absolute, which is the next book I plan on going through. And I’m towards the end of the Plague of Fantasies. I look forward, given your familiarity with the work, to our discourses on it. That said, I’ll respond to what I can in my limited window here.
“For example, I am watching Mad Men, I’ve been at it for years, it’s a fucking struggle, as it’s horrible. It’s extremely well made and beautiful, but the characters go through this meat grinder on an hourly basis, there is absolutely no room for psychological comfort, there is only misunderstanding, hypocrisy, arrogance, humiliation, lies, dominance and submission, disappointment - The Real. Anything that tears at the structural integrity of the subject, will do as a storyline.
Zizeks interest in movies is of course not a side-matter, it goes into the very depths of his subject matter. And I believe his approach (he has made Lacan accessible to me, as to so many others) allows for a more accurate description of what makes movies work, than the standard Hollywood 101 playbook of three acts separated by inciting incident and conflict resolution. What really makes us watch movies is the pain, stretched out across a narrative that conveys a lot of aesthetic values - either that, or the reverse.”
This point is profound in that it has brought to my attention the negative Jouissance involved in horror movies –especially of the slasher type. I mean you have to ask what it is that would draw people to something that causes so much discomfort. And in a sense, what you are describing with Mad Men is a more subtle form of horror. As you rightly point out, there is definite discomfort in watching human behavior at its most pathetic. The example that comes to my mind is Steve Carrell’s role the series The Office. There are times when you find yourself cringing for the guy such as when one of his workers encountered a flasher in the parking lot and he joked about it by sticking his finger through his fly; or when he was to do a lecture at a business college and, in an attempt to be some kind of radical guru, took a student’s expensive textbook and started ripping pages out of it. It was like watching a car wreck. You cringed in horror while being unable to stop watching.
And I fully agree that Zizek’s interest in movies is not just a side matter. What else could be a better expression of the push/pull tension of Jouissance than what draws us in, seemingly, for no practical function?
That said, I would present another example of Jouissance in movies that has to do with your rightly mentioned dissonance. I think one of the best endings in movie history was that of The Black Stallion. (And I write from the assumption that you have seen it.) But it was mainly a matter of buildup and pacing. First it starts with the awkward pace (in sound) of the horse’s hooves hitting the ground in a race. Then a subtle hum of a synthesizer which is how it builds up until the Black Stallion, and the boy riding him, wins. The thing is there is a kind of discomfort about the whole buildup that gets lost when Ballard compromises it by showing scenes of the boy riding the horse on the beach. And while it, on one level, may seem like a fudge, when you think it through, you recognize that there was nothing else Ballard could do to take you past the threshold and appease the unbearable of Jouissance: the (non)satisfaction of promised satisfaction fulfilled by never being truly satisfied.
Dissonance, it seems to me, is a term that is almost interchangeable with Jouissance. Take, for instance, the work of Stravinsky or Schoenberg. And it can even be felt in the piano sonatas of Brahms: the feeling of longing: the push/pull tension between presence and absence.