Perhaps it's my anti-humanist tendencies that are preventing me from swallowing
wholesale the successes of Slumdog Millionaire.

But as someone interested in films from the perspective of psychoanalysis,
philosophy, and ideological criticism, I found Slumdog Millionaire, while
visually stunning, well edited, paced and generally satisfying all of the
criteria of a 'good' or even 'great' film, it still left a sour taste in my
Marxist mouth.

I'm not trying to espouse any naive anti-establishment sentiment against
Hollywood or the 'culture industry' as Adorno put described it, but I still feel
that the Academy wouldn't have given the Oscar to a film whose subtext wasn't so
blatantly intertwined, through some unconscious umbilical chord perhaps, to the
ideologemes of the likes of Horatio Alger, whose works, bearing titles such as
Abraham Lincoln: the Backwoods Boy; or, How A Young Rail-Splitter Became
President or Adrift in New York; or, Tom and Florence Braving the World,
propagated the worst of American fantasy and capitalist ideologies, the very
ideologies utilized and 'meme-tized' to justify the very poverty which it
supposedly draws critical humanist attention towards. The all too common story
of 'pulling onself up by our bootstraps' (slumdog being a very slight
permutation of this trope) endorses the same old capitalist story about hard
individual work being the sin qua non of a rational, healthy democratic society.
A probing of this trope reveals however that no, not everyone can pull
themselves up, it is in a sense 'predestined' or 'written' (option D of the film
I believe) - in other words, determined or shaped by the contours of the system,
in this historicity, it is the shadow of capitalism, overaccumulation and
urbanization.


In other words, I found Slumdog Millionaire to be eminently de-politicized. The
tale ends in a rather typical hollywood ending, with many of the Oedipal
requirements satisfied: the production of a couple and the murder of the Primal
Father, all glazed over with a warm humanist coating. Despite its
cinematographic merits, and all of the other 'objective' ways of judging a film,
I will have to take a side here and critique it for its realism, a Capitalist
Realism to be precise (google K-Punk's blogs for more of this). Through the very
gesture of using realism as a standard - in the most basic sense, injecting the
reality principle as a governing mechanism into the production of the film, a
subversion of the dream-work- through which we can supposedly highlight, draw to
view, all of the miseries, joys, happiness, failures and complexities that
compose the human-condition, the film itself, and as some argue ARt in general,
become depoliticized, stripped of any political efficacy or meaning. It is
decontextualized in the name of realism, in the name of portraying situations as
closely as we can imagine experiencing them within the first-person. One can
only imagine a bio-pic of Hitler, where as much as his brutality and insanity is
highlighted, his human and touching moments with Eva Braun, images of his
weakness and misery, would all be BESIDE the point. Of course Hitler was a human
being, and this is exactly the problem. Human, all too human, perhaps.

Although I loved the Dark Knight, Zizek's criticism is proper. By attempting to
humanize the character, show all their complexity and depth, etc. films like
Iron Man, Spiderman and the Dark Knight simply de-politicize themselves, bury
their political subtexts beneath humanist dross, the idea that we are all the
same somehow inside, etc. etc.

One might protest, why does a film need to be political? Well, like Freud has
shown, everything is sexual, and everything is Political. The political and
libidinal are (including the history of the latter), the ultimate hermeneutic
background to our understanding. They, whether absent or present, condition our
very capacity to know, or in the case of film itself, to show.

In Slumdog, these horizons are deflated and shoved under a carpet. Although the
very contingency of everyday life is emphasized by the protagonist's almost
fatalistic journey towards love and money, this emphasis on fragmentation,
chaos, etc. works to undermine the hard-work of politicizing slum-dwellers.
Instead, a private, 'atomic' and 'nuclear' path is the structuring core. The
protagonist doesn't care about anything, really, other than his lost love, his
objet petit a, and the money necessary to sustain a comfortable life with her.
Although it doesn't seem like money is an issue, he says basically this much
while trying to convince his love to run away with him, although not verbatim:
"We will have all the money we need to live comfortably if I win this, run away
with me."

the only character here that could possibly be construed as an ethical ethical
agent is Salim (perhaps the feminine jouissance of Latika but I would find
plenty reason to find contention with a reading like that).