From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe by Peter Y. Paik (review)

The discomfort that comes from reading Peter Paik's tome on the politics of contemporary cinema and comic book narratives lies in finding out that their heroes are really terrorists. It is difficult not to think of Osama bin Laden as Paik recounts the atrocities of Ozymandias, the hero of the Watchmen comic book series (Moore and Gibbons US 1986-7) who kills millions by teleporting a giant alien octopus into downtown New York. This is not a real alien but a simulated one, whose arrival is designed to unify a human race that is mired in its own battles. Paik argues that Ozymandias is a utopian figure, as he gives birth to a peaceful world. He reminds us that Thomas More's original Utopians were not averse to wars of liberation, or persecuting those who did not share their ideals. There is violence at the foundation of utopian societies, and such violence haunts the comic and cinema heroes that Paik tracks.

These characters live out a moral ambivalence, a skewed sense of social guilt. Ozymandias, for instance, feels more self-doubt about murdering three of his servants than his invasion of Manhattan. The experience of violence has changed this comic hero, giving him the capacity to carry out extreme acts, in an infinite regress from which the only escape is victory. Before going any further I should make clear that Paik does not himself make the analogy with contemporary terrorism, but that his writing plays out the tensions of a post-September 11 world. For in a world that has declared war on itself, the revolutionary is no longer a moral figure but a victim turned torturer, a liberator and libertine all at once. Such ambivalence, for Paik, is the only way to navigate the systemic hypocrisy of contemporary life. He turns to Simone Weil's saintly subject and Slavoj Žižek's model of the militant to flesh out the problematic place of political action in this global scene. The saint and revolutionary are alike in having experienced an unbearable suffering that has brought them beyond good and evil. If like Žižek Paik goes some way to valorising the experience of such figures, he also recognises their tragedy, that their psyches are scarred by their own traumas and those of others.

Paik's second strong textual example lies in another of Alan Moore's comics, V for Vendetta (Lloyd and Moore UK 1982-9). The revolutionary V justifies his torture of others by invoking his own experience of torture. In this, V is not so much an analogy for bin Laden but for the state terrorism of George Bush, Jr, as he mirrors the grotesque realism of a global order that tends to violence in the name of peace. V is at once the product and perpetrator of systemic brutality while campaigning for a humane society. If working through such paradoxes sounds familiar, it is for two reasons. The first is that Paik takes much of his inspiration from Žižek, whose arguments also set out to shock and awe their reader. A second reason is that his arguments at times resemble those of the mainstream right, whose justification of state-sanctioned violence and torture often rest upon the purported realism of a violent world. Paik is not shy from taking a few swipes at what he sees as a weak-kneed left, represented by armchair activism, cultural studies, Marxism and poststructuralism. For Paik such academic trends have turned utopia into a literary scene, rather than an idea washed in the blood of its victims. Ironically, Paik's opinions might be closer to Marx than the Marxists he accuses of hypocrisy, as Marx himself was critical of a utopian fantasy that avoided the necessary realities of revolution. Yet there is a deeper point at work here, which lies in the problem of a utopianism that in advanced capitalism has been...