Slavoj Zizek Interview with Noam Yuran: Disaster Movies as the
Last Remnants of Utopia
What are disaster films really about? Why do Americans fantasize about the destruction of life?
I don't have a simple answer to that. I can try to give a few answers. Isn’t the same thing true of
love affairs—in order to really enjoy them, they have to be conducted under a threat that they
might disappear? In psychological language we can hypothesize that deep down the Americans
feel some sort of guilt—about being on the top, and enjoying life so much.
One other thing interests me. Unlike other peoples who have long-standing traditions and
with whom there is a suspicion that if you scratch below the surface, you will discover the old
traditions, [people] who face the problem of having to deal with these traditions. The American
vision is completely different—this is a vision in which order is not something with deep roots. It
is instead superficial and fragile. Something is liable to happen at any moment; a small disaster
might dismantle the social order.
But is there something intrinsic to American abundance that creates images of destruction?
That’s another possibility—the idea that American daily life is constructed so clearly as artificial
experience, as with the American suburb, where grass is sometimes artificial. In such an artificial
world we lack connection with reality—actual reality can penetrate only as something violent and
extreme. In the film “Matrix” daily reality is produced by computers and “real” reality comes
across as a threatening, ruined place. Americans are increasingly cognizant not only of the gap
that separates the U.S. and the Third World, but also of ghetto enclaves within their own country,
of life on the edge of chaos, of life in a comfortable, secure place that is likely to blow up.
When relating to film, you frequently use the term fantasy, and it seems to present a new type of
criticism, or even an alternative to criticism.
It is very important to stress the contrast between fantasy and interpretation. Symptoms, not
fantasies, are interpreted in psychology. On the most basic level, fantasy enters exactly at the
place where interpretation fails. When you can’t interpret something, that’s when fantasy comes
in. When I say a film is a fantasy, I'm not saying that it indulges in our desires—instead, I'm
saying that fantasy is where the political element comes in. Political space is always rife with
riddles and inconsistency. Thus, politics itself is, in the final analysis, always the politics of
fantasy. It needs to imagine answers to antagonisms. Hence, my idea is that rather than
interpreting films, and searching for keys to interpretation, we should view movies as direct
participants in political reality.
So what role does the image of destruction play in reality?
There is another meaning which we haven't emphasized. Apparently it’s so hard for us to imagine
a new global utopian project based on work and cooperation, that the only way we can entertain
the thought is to pay a mental price of extreme catastrophe. What fascinates me about disaster
films is how circumstances of vast catastrophe suddenly bring about social cooperation. Even
racial tensions vanish. It’s important at the end of Independence Day that everyone pulls
together—Jews, Arabs, blacks. Disaster films might be the only optimistic social genre that
remains today, and that's a sad reflection of our desperate state. The only way to imagine a Utopia
of social cooperation is to conjure a situation of absolute catastrophe. Disaster films might be all
that’s left of the utopian genre.