Is Deviance Dead?

[Your Dear Friend]

When Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal
By Slavoj Zizek, special to Britannica.com

The first words in the opening credits of The Straight
Story—"Walt Disney Presents...A David Lynch Film"—provide
perhaps the best resume of the ethical paradox of our age:
the overlapping of the transgressive and the normal.
Disney, a brand unmistakably associated with conservative
family values, takes under its umbrella Lynch, an artist
who epitomizes transgression, bringing to light the
underworld of perverted sex and violence lurking beneath
the respectable surface of our lives.

Today the culture industry itself, in order to thrive under
competitive market conditions, has not merely to tolerate
but to directly incite more and more shocking effects in
its products. Suffice it to recall recent trends in visual
arts. Gone are the days when we had simple statues or
enframed paintings; what we get now are expositions of
frames themselves without paintings, expositions of dead
cows and their excrement, videos of the insides of the
human body (gastroscopy and colonoscopy), the inclusion of
smell into the exposition, etc. This tendency often leads
to comical confusions in which a work of art is mistaken
for an everyday object or vice versa. Here, again, as in
the domain of sexuality, perversion is no longer
subversive; the shocking excesses are part of the system,
which feeds on them in order to reproduce itself.

Ethical at Heart?

If Lynch's earlier films were also caught in this trap,
what then about The Straight Story, which was based on the
true case of Alvin Straight, an old, disabled farmer who
motored across the American plains on a lawnmower to visit
his ailing brother? Does this slow-paced story of
persistence imply the renunciation of transgression, a turn
towards the naive immediacy of a direct ethical stance of
fidelity? The very title of the film undoubtedly refers to
Lynch's previous work: This is the straight story as
opposed to the "deviations" into the uncanny underworld of
Eraserhead and Lost Highway.

But what if the "straight" hero of Lynch's last film is in
fact much more subversive than the weird characters of his
previous films? What if, in our postmodern world, in which
ethical commitment is perceived as ridiculously out-of-
time, Straight is the true outcast? One should recall here
G.K. Chesterton's perspicuous remark in his essay "A
Defence of Detective Stories," his description of how the
detective story "keeps in some sense before the mind the
fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of
departures and the most romantic of rebellions...When the
detective in a police romance stands alone, fearless amid
the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, it does serve
to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice
who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars
and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives,
happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves.
The romance of the police force...is based on the fact that
morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies."

What, then, if this is the ultimate message of Lynch's
film: that ethics is "the most dark and daring of all
conspiracies," that the ethical individual is the one who
effectively threatens the existing order, in contrast to
the long series of Lynchean perverts (Baron Harkonnen in
Dune, Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Bobby Peru in Wild at
Heart) who ultimately sustain it?

The Psychotic Mr. Ripley

In this precise sense the counterpoint to The Straight
Story is Anthony Minghella's film The Talented Mr. Ripley,
based on Patricia Highsmith's novel of the same name. The
Talented Mr. Ripley tells the story of Tom Ripley, a broke,
ambitious, young New Yorker who is approached by the rich
magnate Herbert Greenleaf in the latter's mistaken belief
that Tom has been attending Princeton with his son Dickie,
who is off idling in Italy. Greenleaf pays Tom to go to
Italy and bring his son back to America and to his senses
so that he can take his rightful place in the family
business. Once in Europe, however, Tom becomes more and
more fascinated not only with Dickie himself, but also with
the polished, easygoing, socially acceptable upper-class
world that Dickie inhabits.

The film's many intimations of Tom's homosexuality are
misplaced: Dickie is not the object of Tom's desires, but
rather his ideal desiring subject, the transferential
subject who is "supposed to know," as the French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan put it, "how to desire." In
short, Dickie becomes for Tom his ideal ego, the figure of
his imaginary identification. When he repeatedly casts a
coveting side-glance at Dickie, he does not thereby reveal
an erotic desire for him but, rather, a desire to be like
him. To realize this desire, Tom concocts an elaborate
plan: On a boat trip, he kills Dickie, and then, for some
time, assumes his identity. Acting as Dickie, he organizes
things so that, after Dickie's "official" death, he
inherits his wealth. When this is accomplished, the
false "Dickie" disappears, leaving behind a suicide note
praising Tom, while Tom reappears, successfully evading the
suspicious investigators and even earning the gratitude of
Dickie's parents before he leaves Italy for Greece.

New Age Ethics

Although the novel was written in the mid-1950s, one might
claim that Highsmith foreshadowed today's therapeutic
rewriting of ethics into "recommendations" which one is not
supposed to follow too blindly: "Thou shalt not commit
adultery—unless it is emotionally sincere and serves the
goal of your personal self-realization...". Or: "Thou shalt
not divorce—except when your marriage breaks down, when it
becomes an unbearable emotional burden that impedes you
from living a full life"—in short, except when the
prohibition on divorce would have actual meaning (who would
divorce when his/her marriage still blossoms?).

No wonder people today prefer the Dalai Lama to the Pope.
Even those who "respect" the Pope's moral stance usually
qualify their admiration by pointing out that he remains
hopelessly old-fashioned, even medieval, sticking to
antiquated dogmas, out of touch with the demands of new
times. How can one remain ostrich-like, for instance, about
issues such as contraception and divorce? Aren't these
simply facts of contemporary life?

How could the Pope have denied the right to an abortion
even to a nun who got pregnant as a result of being raped
(as he effectively did in the case of the raped nuns during
the war in Bosnia)? Is it not clear that, even when one is
in principle against abortion, one should, in such an
extreme case, bend the principle and consent to a
compromise?

Get with the Program

What we encounter here is an exemplary case of today's
ideology of "realism." We live in an era defined by the
death of grand ideological projects. Let's be realists, we
reason, and give up those immature utopian illusions. The
dream of the welfare state is over; we must come to terms
with the global market. One can now understand why the
Dalai Lama is such an appropriate icon for our postmodern
times. He presents us with a vague, feel-good spirituality
with no specific obligations: Anyone, even the most
decadent Hollywood stars, can follow him while pursuing
their materialistic, promiscuous lifestyles.

Ripley simply stands for the last step in this rewriting:
Thou shalt not kill—except when there is really no other
way to pursue your happiness. Ripley thus in no way
resembles an "American psycho." His criminal acts are not
frenetic passages a l'acte, outbursts of violence in which
he releases the energy pent up behind the frustrations of
daily yuppie life. His crimes are calculated with simple
pragmatic reasoning: He does what is necessary to attain
his goal.

What is so disturbing about him, of course, is that he
seems to lack an elementary ethical sense. In his daily
life he is mainly friendly and considerate (although with a
touch of coldness), and when he commits a murder, he does
it with regret, quickly, as painlessly as possible, in the
way one performs any unpleasant but necessary task. He is
the ultimate psychotic, the perfect embodiment of what
Lacan had in mind when he claimed that normality is a
special form of psychosis—in the sense of not being
traumatically caught in the symbolic cobweb, of
being "free" from the symbolic order of things.

The Two Toms

But the mystery of Highsmith's Ripley transcends the
familiar American motif of the individual who radically
reinvents himself, erasing the traces of the past and
assuming a thoroughly new identity. Herein resides the
ultimate failure of the movie with respect to the novel:
The film Gatsbyizes Ripley into a new version of the
American hero who recreates his identity in a murky way.
What gets lost here is the crucial difference between the
novel and the film. In the film Ripley has the stirrings of
a conscience, while in the novel, the qualms of conscience
are simply beyond his grasp. This is why the making
explicit of Ripley's gay desires in the film also misses
the point. Minghella implies that, back in the '50s,
Highsmith had to be more circumspect to make the
protagonist palatable to the public, while today we can
face things more overtly.

Yet Ripley's coldness is anything but the surface effect of
his alleged homosexuality. In Ripley Underground (one of
the later Ripley novels), we learn that he makes love once
a week to his wife Heloise as a regular ritual. There is
nothing passionate about it. Tom is like Adam in paradise,
prior to the Fall, when, according to St. Augustine, he and
Eve did have sex, but it was performed as a simple
instrumental task, like sowing the seeds on a field. One
way to read Ripley is to see him as an angel living in a
universe which precedes the Law and its transgression
(sin).

In Ripley Underground, the hero sees two flies on his
kitchen table and, upon looking at them closely and
observing that they are copulating, squashes them with
disgust. This small detail is crucial. Minghella's Ripley
would never have done something like this. Highsmith's
Ripley is in a way disconnected from the reality of flesh,
disgusted at the Real of life, of its cycle of generation
and corruption. Marge, Dickie's girlfriend, provides an
adequate characterization of Ripley: "All right, he may not
be queer. He's just a nothing, which is worse. He isn't
normal enough to have any kind of sex life."

This disengaged coldness that persists beneath the shifting
identities somehow gets lost in the film, but it is the
true enigma of Ripley, who remains psychotically
disconnected from any passionate human attachments, even
after he reaches his goal and reinvents himself as a
respectable art dealer living in a wealthy Paris suburb.

A Way Out?

Perhaps the opposition of Lynch's "straight" hero and
Highsmith's "normal" Ripley determines the extreme
coordinates of today's ethical constellation, with the
strange twist that it is Ripley who is uncannily "normal"
and the "straight" man who is uncannily weird, even
perverse.

How, then, are we to break out of this dilemma? The two
protagonists share a tunnel-vision dedication to pursuing
their goals. One path would be to abandon this common
feature and plea for a "warmer," more compassionate
humanity ready to accept compromises. Is, however, such
a "soft" humanity (that is, one with fuzzy principles) not
the predominant ethos today, so that the two films merely
mark its two extremes? As an alternative way out, we could
imagine a synthesis between the two protagonists, in the
figure of the Lynchean "straight" man who pursues his goal
with the cunning resourcefulness of a Tom Ripley.

/pure evil
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