When an Exception is just an Exception: Slavoj Zizek's The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory

Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Fall 2003 by Skaff, Sheila, Luebbe, Chris

When an Exception is just an Exception: Slavoj Zizek's The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory

Slavoj Zizek. The Fright of Real Tears: KrzysztofKieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory. BFI Publications, 2001.

Among the primary virtues of Slavoj Zizek's indefatigable, somewhat compulsive efforts to explicate the strange topographies of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and contemporary cultural politics are his ready wit and his facility in drawing upon his familiarity with diverse topics, from the finest points of Kantian and Hegelian metaphysics to slapstick teenage comedies. Both of these are evident in his recent book The Fright of Real Tears: KrzysztofKieslowski between Theory and PostTheory, based on a series of lectures delivered at London's National Film Theatre on the films of the Polish director. Significantly, the self-proclaimed aim of this study of Kieslowski is "not to talk about his work, but to refer to his work in order to accomplish the work of Theory" (9). Zizek's modus operandi throughout all of his writings is to formulate highly abstract philosophical and theoretical meditations by referring to the widest possible variety of North American and European cultural products, such as films, literature, music, and jokes. This is what he means by "the work of Theory," further specified as elaborating the notion of the subject under investigation, as opposed to merely detailing its history. Over the years Zizek has strengthened his theoretical compositions by choosing examples to size and has developed new theories by allowing the cultural products that do not quite fit to propel his theories in new directions. The films of Krzysztof Kieslowski, he claims, do just this.

The focus of Zizek's book is theory rather than Kieslowski, and he proves this by adjusting information on the filmmaker and his films to suit his needs. The book's title is taken from one of Kieslowski's reasons for his decision to move from documentary to feature filmmaking in the mid-197Os. After years of documenting daily life, provoked by the realization that he might capture something that he would rather not have seen, Kieslowski switched to feature films. he felt that by creating fictional scenes he could portray the more private aspects of life without harming anyone, and therefore avoid the worries that lead to dishonesty or leave the human subjects of documentaries without protection. Zizek describes this predicament beautifully: "[T]he only proper thing to do is to maintain a distance towards the intimate, idiosyncratic, fantasy domain-one can only circumscribe, hint at, these fragile elements that bear witness to a human personality" (73). Zizek does not mention that the footage for one of Kieslowski's documentaries was taken by the police, indirectly implicating him in the solution of a murder case. Herein lies the plus/minus of Zizek's book: for better and for worse, Fright is all about theory and events only get in the way. Zizek finds in Kieslowski's films a penchant for creating multiple versions of films with different contingent outcomes and endings in documentary as well as in fiction, which furthers Zizek's disbelief in the legitimacy of real events. In documentary, he claims, "We are shown what 'really happened,' and suddenly, we perceive this reality in all its fragility, as one of the contingent outcomes, forever haunted by its shadowy doubles" (77). According to Zizek, reality is actually "lost" in documentary instead of merely hidden as the possibility of contigent outcomes overwhelms the outcome presented on the screen (121). These worthwhile meditations are, unfortunately, offset by Zizek's unwillingness to separate life off-camera from life on-camera. he places a rectangular screen in front of Kieslowski's own life and early death and claims that it fits within his paradigm of lost reality. In doing so he ignores the very basis of the filmmaker's move from documentary to fiction and undermines a potentially excellent argument about documentation and contingency.

Zizek examines the fright of real tears carefully and succinctly, with the expertise of a good theorist who understands the fragile nature of a field that attempts to encompass both fiction and life. However, his analysis fails to reflect this understanding in all of its complexities and is weak in comparison to the existing body of criticism on the director. Zizek writes, "If documentaries intrude into and hurt the personal reality of the protagonists, fiction intrudes into and hurts dreams themselves, secret fantasies that form the unavowed kernel of our lives" (77). It is difficult to discern the fact from the fiction in Zizek's own work, which makes it interesting but in some cases less valuable than customary scholarship. When Zizek turns the director's death into the fulfillment of a wish in Freudian terms, a statement or at the very least the contingent outcome of the choices that he made, it is hard to tell if he understands that he is dealing with fact, not fiction. By disregarding very real life consequences, which are usually much more complicated than the sanitized choices presented in fiction, he is able to fit the trajectory of Kieslowski's career and life choices to his theory.