Reel Violence: Paradise Now and the Collapse of the Spectacle

A photograph has two dimensions, so does a television screen; neither can be walked through.

—Jean Genet, "Four Hours in Shatila"

We the Palestinians are a human phenomenon facing a gigantic colonizer, and we refuse to give up. . . . We are facing a project of ethnic cleansing. Our only weapons are persistence, knowledge, culture and art.

—Hany Abu-Assad, "Dear ()"

In a triumphantly planetary age, comfortably abandoned to the hypnotizing lures of reality shows and the implacable whims of entertainment industries, the aestheticization and consumption of atrocity, horror, violence, and so on, it is indubitably a daunting task to seek to produce, by way of critique, an appraisal of film that might move us beyond its inaugurating spectacular appeal. If film is unthinkable outside the conscripts of an economy of the spectacle—or without the mediatory interposition of the screen that, in Genet's words, cannot "be walked through"—it becomes critically incumbent to discern the threshold beyond which film ceases indeed to be reducible to a spectacle, pandering, as it were, to audiences' unwitting lust for melodramas, intrigues, kinesthetic thrills, and technically sophisticated stunts, dazzles, or visual gags.

Not that film can evacuate its spectacular entertainment principle or be redeemed from it, but that it can surely, or so I contend, be redeemed through it—by continually raising the threshold beyond which it ceases to be a readily consumable good and, in particular, by committing to the exigencies of historical veracity with the sense and force, patient and persistent, of responsible mimetic urgency. Without diminishing the crucial importance of always approaching film critically—and interrogating its unavoidable complicity with the historical moment of global capital of which it is a product—my priority in what follows is to attend to the critical valences of film, its optical fecundity and potential for fostering critical consciousness and precipitating political dissidence. I intend to do so partly by exploring the paradox of the spectacle in Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now: the ways in which film can surpass itself in the process of becoming itself—becomes otherwise than spectacle in the very route to becoming spectacle.

Really, this paradox is but an offshoot of our residual ambivalence toward the persistently solidifying visual cultural dispensation in which we are caught, and which has installed in us two contradictory and dueling sociopolitical malaises: an impulsive cynicism toward the visual (whether because of its mimetic unreliability or insidious conditioning forces) combined or alternating with a reluctant cognizance of its ineluctability, or, worse still, its indispensability in a worldwide society that Guy Debord had characterized as the "society of the spectacle."¹ It is necessary therefore to pinpoint and affirm the many ways in which film might mobilize the visually enchanting aura of the spectacle in order to envision and elaborate new corridors to a historical reality that might, ironically, be no longer recognizable if it were to be "walked through" firsthand, that is, without the sheltering, balmy, and even desensitizing mediation of the screen. In fact, whenever/ wherever the reality of catastrophe and violence is walked through, it does not necessarily mean that it has become witnessable (least of all from a psychoanalytic point of view), comprehensible, or graspable as such (since its effects are usually perceived as surreal rather than real). Reality itself might no longer be sustainable if it can no longer be discernible through the visual, virtual, or fictional writ large.

Since many of us nowadays "experience" reality virtually and visually, it is oftentimes argued by critics as diverse as Jean-François Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, Martin Jay, Alain Badiou, and Jean Baudrillard, among others, that we are inhabited by a nostalgia or passion for lived experiences, for a naked return to the desublimated real (through extreme sports, reality shows, etc., which both embody and displace this insatiable passion du réel). Such configurations of the passion for the real, however, pale into insignificance if compared with the brisk surfacing of the "desert of the real" at the heart of American soil, as Slavoj Žižek put it following the cataclysmic attacks on the World Trade Center...