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Monday, December 28, 2009

Film Zizek on the Ambiguities of the Age of Terrorism

Posted by Charles Mudede on Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 5:27 PM

Let's begin with a scene in Patriot Games. It goes like this: Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst whose research shows that a terrorist group is operating in a North African desert, enters a command center...

Inside the command center, there is a live satellite feed of special forces flying by helicopter to the camp in the desert, landing, and killing the terrorists. A version of the 3rd movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5—melancholy, moody, dark, elegiac—plays as the special forces execute a mission that is based on Ryan's careful analysis.

Something like this scene appears at the opening of Eagle Eye (2008). The command center, which is deep within the Pentagon, has a live satellite feed, a variety of surveillance technologies, and special agents retrieving or inputting information. This time, however, a supercomputer, Autonomous Reconnaissance Interrogation Analysis, ARIA (which looks like the future of Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, TIDE), and not a CIA analyst is processing the data and presenting interpretations—is it a terrorist camp or not? The supercomputer thinks it's not; the Secretary of Defense agrees with this assessment, but the bellicose president believes inaction is worse than action and orders a military attack. SecDef follows orders. Missiles are fired at the village. Everyone dies.

It turns out that the president made a huge mistake: the missiles did not kill terrorists but civilians. ARIA, which has been programed to place the safety of Americans above all other concerns, rightly decides that the president is a greater danger to national security than terrorists, and comes up with a plan to eliminate him and his cabinet and place the more cautious and rational Secretary of Defense in power.

Here is the twist: The plot turns the rational computer, which has a female voice, into an evil computer. Why? The movie never offers an explanation why the computer is evil. It's not exactly HAL 9000; it never loses its mind or has a meltdown. Sure it's killing innocent people to reach its goal, but so did the president. The only difference? The computer is killing American civilians and the president killed Arab civilians.

Eagle Eye is one of the most intriguing films of the 00s, and Zizek's analysis it, which is here (it begins 15 minutes into the lecture), gets to its dark core—a core that's far darker than the one in The Dark Knight. Even if the president is wrong, even if he has blood on his hands, we must still support him and his dangerous war on terror.

Comments (8) RSS

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hmm. word.

Posted by fgr on December 28, 2009 at 5:54 PM

Wait a second - Žižek claims that the computer basically did the right thing, identified the president as the threat to national security and thus went after him. So the last paragraph is a little misleading, since it could be read as if Žižek is claiming "we must still support the president and his dangerous war on terror", when in fact he's praising the computer.

And what does the title (Zizek on the Ambiguities of the Age of Terrorism) actually have to do with the text, which is basically a short summary of what happens in Eagle Eye? Sure, it references Žižek who did the analysis and Terrorism, which is referenced in the movie, but that's as vague as you can get with a title.

And if I remember correctly (I've seen the movie a long time ago) this was explained, perhaps not explicitly, but it was an understandable movie, I didn't need Žižek to explain this to me..

- Simon, mariborchan.com

Posted by Mariborchan on December 28, 2009 at 6:08 PM

I love the collection videos on your YouTube channel, Mariborchan. I stumbled across it a week or two ago looking for Zizek videos.

Posted by SuperMatt on December 28, 2009 at 6:18 PM

Eagle Eye is far more enjoyable if you just root for the computer to snuff out Labeouaeueueauef.

Posted by dirge on December 28, 2009 at 8:47 PM

sounds like a bit of a rip-off of the movie (book) Colossus (the Forbin Project).

Posted by slugbiker

on December 28, 2009 at 9:50 PM

A MESSAGE FROM CHARLES MUDEDE

At the heart that resonates like an iron string of all life is the inherent dichotomy of all life. We choose one, we choose the other. My confession: I'm a PC. I'm not a Mac.

A PC runs ARIA. This is a personal affront. What more must I suffer? What more must the machine of commercial entertainment capitalism push down my throat?

We beat on, boats against the current. Borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Posted by Jubilation T. Cornball on December 28, 2009 at 11:36 PM

"The 53-year-old is the first European executed in China in 50 years."

Charles?

Posted by paulus on December 29, 2009 at 6:09 AM

And here i was thinking i was the only one to root for ARIA while watching this movie. Even though the means were excessive (what crime did the Secretary of Agriculture or of Education commit to qualify as a target?). Then why blowing up a whole assembly hall, when you have the might to change medication labels, poison food and achieve 100% sucess probabilty. Better to lay all your hopes on a very fragile causality chain.
By uploading all available information on the event onto Wikileaks Aria could have achieved its goal even without one single civilian casuality by just triggering a congress investigation fuelled by public outrage. Or maybe not. The most interesting stories are still written by life, i guess.

Posted by SSPS (Skynet strategic planning subprocess) on January 10, 2011 at 9:51 AM