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Hollywood as an Ideological Machine: A Lecture-Performance by Slavoj Žižek

12 Mar 2008

Speakers: Slavoj Žižek

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Why did the dinosaurs attack in Jurassic Park? Why do historical events like The October Revolution happen? Why do asteroids hit the Earth?

Hollywood has the answer: either to create a couple or to find a father. And, surprisingly, the Stalinist cinema concurs, as we can see from The Fall of Berlin, the Soviet equivalent to Warren Beatty's Reds. Family ideology is alive and well today, in our allegedly post-ideological era. So, as an antidote, it is perhaps time to revisit forgotten Hollywood masterpieces, from John Frankenheimer's Seconds to John Carpenter's They Live.

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