baldeductoe

[baldeductoe]

Žižek and Futurama: Tolerating the Dream

     In the animated sitcom Futurama, we get the chance to observe ideology seep its way into the dreams of individuals.  Fry, the show’s protagonist, is startled out of a dream in which advertisers present to him an underwear commercial.  But, the underwear are no ordinary underwear; they are quite literally the briefs of your dreams, displayed just out of reach.  When Fry makes an attempt in the waking world to obtain the mythical undies, the department store selling them outright denies Fry’s credit card.  Fry’s inability to purchase the Lightspeed Briefs instills a dark humor about his misgivings with regards to consumerism and the distance his desires maintain from being grasped.  The dejection that ensues is humorous because dreams and desires structure our reality.  By leaving Fry without any way to touch his desire in the real world, the false reality constructs itself and structures his world; with the latent craving just beneath the surface Fry keeps striving to attain them.  I would like to cross-reference a moment in Žižek’s essay “The Sublime Object of Ideology” where he breaks down a dream in which a man flies into consciousness to avoid his own dark desires.  Both dreams are relevant to the discussion on desire because both dreams involve a man running into the waking world to escape what resides latently in his mind.  

     Žižek recalls a dream of a man with an extremely ill child.  The dream places the man in a scenario where he faces his child—now deceased in the dream—and experiences the guilt wrapped up in the child’s death.  Lacan develops an interpretation where the man awakens to “escape the Real of his desire” to elude the terrors of facing the guilt the father feels over the loss of his son (722).  Because the unconscious desire “is more terrifying than so-called external reality itself,” the dreamer is thrown into consciousness to distance himself from the treachery of his subconscious and to “maintain his blindness” (722).  Rather than create elaborate dream layers to cover up the latent desire of his mind and remain in the dream-state, the man escapes the dream entirely to find solace in the real world.  The dream becomes a “fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’” by forming the waking world around the desires hidden deep in our minds (722).  If we cannot escape our desires in our dreams, we rush into the real world to hold dominion over those desires.

Dream-vertisement…?

     Fry’s subconscious traps him in a nightmare that diminishes his mental and emotional stability with nothing to alleviate his stress; he is in class in his underwear being ridiculed before a test by his professor.  The dream leaves Fry as the victim of ridicule with no answer to his problems.  At this moment, the anxiety of the situation evolves to be nearly impossible to manage.  However, the dream provides Fry salvation from the scenario in the form of Lightspeed Briefs.  The dream advertisement sets Fry up to develop a dependency on an object; supposedly, this object, the underwear, can ameliorate any of your anxieties and release you from ridicule.  The dream gives Fry a way out of his dissatisfaction after putting Fry in a demeaning position, which only exacerbates the need Fry feels to get ahold of those underwear.  The dream, structured as an advertisement, guides individuals towards the Lightspeed Briefs so that they will be able to clearly see the benefits of the commodity being pushed in their face.  The dream manifests a desire latent in the mind and articulates a possible way of achieving said desire.  Not only is the dreamer told he needs it, but he is utterly dejected by not possessing it, which generates an intense desire to remove himself from the trauma as a whole.  Before shooting him back into the waking world, the dream itself sustains Fry’s sleep state for long enough to show him the benefits of owning Lightspeed Briefs and then, only then, does it further separate the desire from its actualization in Fry’s waking.   

 Fry comes to face his “Lacanian Real,” which is the reality of his desires  (722).  In an attempt to escape the Lacanian Real, Fry seeks shelter in the waking world, a place, a “reality,” where he can actually possess Lightspeed Briefs and, by the construction of social relations, appear “cool” to those also sharing the social space.  All of these desires manifest themselves in a way that furthers Fry’s pursuit of them.  If someone has a desire they feel must be met, they will persist in working towards that desire until it is satisfied.  However, once satisfied, the desires themselves evaporate.  For instance, if I had a desire to feel “cool,” I would no longer feel the need to be “cool” since I already achieved it.  But sometimes the desire never leaves because the fear of not being “cool” prolongs the struggle to achieve and maintain that kernel of “coolness.”  

     This is exemplified perfectly in the struggles of Sisyphus, a Greek myth in which a man is punished to perpetually push a boulder up a hill only to have it tumble back down to the bottom, to its starting point.  Just as Sisyphus arrives at the crest of the hill, immediately as he grasps his desires, he loses it all and must reset.  This is the perpetual striving of desire, the tease we live for in our daily lives.  Fry, constantly facing his inability to achieve those badass underwear, fuels his life with the craving he as for an object.  But the barrier between working for the underwear and the ascertaining of the underwear must remain to properly structure reality and our desires.  If the two overlap, the desire and the achieving of it, then they both disintegrate.  

     What is most unique about Fry’s dream is the implementation of a commodity directly into the human’s inner-most desires.  The answers to Fry’s prayers lay hidden inside the fashionable underwear the dream tells him he needs to be accepted.  The entire dream structures itself around Fry’s craving to be the man wearing Lightspeed Briefs so he can reap the benefits of owning them.  When the dream doesn’t provide Fry with the release he craves, he goes into the real world to find release by actually purchasing the briefs.  However, he is denied.  The clerk informs him the store does not accept the method of payment Fry wants to use and Fry finds that even the waking life distances him from his desires.  But the failure to have the underwear does not end the desire; no, the desire stands more ready than ever.  Being pushed away from his dreams even in his consciousness saddens Fry, but in no way ends his pining. 

Desires, Dreams, and Commodity

     Žižek states: “‘Reality’ is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire” (722).  The dream, the fantasy-construction, exists as a display of our latent cravings.  While sleeping, our dreams help to “support for our ‘reality’ itself” in the way it portrays our desires.  If our desires appear more tangible, we are more likely to pursue them in the real world; if we can obtain our desires, if they are too tangible, then the desire dies with ascertaining it.  In this way, our dreams are an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations” (722).  We look to the manufactured “reality” as relief from the desires we cannot obtain.  Rather than address these desires, we break from them entirely and separate ourselves from the dream by reassuring ourselves “it was just a dream” (722).  By announcing that the horror faced is only a dream, we are “blinding ourselves to the fact that in our everyday, wakening reality we are nothing but a consciousness of this dream” (722).  Ideology is structured similarly by offering a social reality where individuals can escape from their desire.

     What Futurama does with the dream epitomizes the ideology’s hold over us in the consumerist society we live in.  The dream, like ideology, exists only to maintain the pursuit of desires.  Fry’s dream and the dream of the burning child both manifest a desire that we cannot sustain alone in the mind, so the solution is to flee.  Both the father and Fry find momentary solace in the initial waking moments only to be thrown back into the throes of desire when their cravings manifest themselves in the real world with absolutely no salvation; the son is still dead and Fry still can’t but those damned underwear.  

     But the underwear adds a commodity to the mix that supplements Fry’s craving for acceptance making the possibility of obtaining them that much more real.  By making the desire closer to actualization, the pursuit of the underwear is fueled.  The dream advertisement tells Fry that not only are the underwear of his dreams in existence, but that he can buy them.  Consumerism lives and thrives off of the desires of the population, which it manipulates to perpetuate the buying and selling of goods.  The more control consumerism has over its subjects, the more powerful consumerism becomes.  Advertising agencies and promotional campaigns exist for the sole purpose of manufacturing ideology that abuses the population’s desires because the more people want, the more the companies get.  Even when they cannot cover your inability to ascertain the objects of your desire, ideology and the dream compels you to at least try.

[baldeductoe]

Hot Potato

           They both stood in the room forehead to forehead, leaning against each other.  In the darkness, they couldn’t see anything but they felt the silent orchestra of emotions swell.  His brow would rustle and pull inwards as he leaned his heft onto her only to have his aggression soften into quiet apologies and rock slowly back onto his heels to allow for her furrowed brow to push some unspoken emotion back onto him as if he were some malleable mound of blame.  Back and forth, the slow rock of guilt and blame would shift from one to the other.  They were two entities spiraling around the same idea only resisting the coagulation of the two spirits into that conclusion.  The two forever swirling around a single point with enough energy to forever keep the two from coalescing onto an end.

           The room was void of everything except boxes stuffed frantically with memories.  There were only five boxes in the room but each with enough kinetic energy built from the colosseum of domestic abuse that registers, at this point, intimacy as large, dumb red flags.  

           The boxes, compounded with the stubbornness of the participants, made the affair far more heavy than any casual arrangements of broken hearts.  Here, in this realm of relation, the world itself is a dark, violent game of both blame and responsibility, where both parties try at their maximum capacity to shift the focus of guilt to another as if some dirty game of hot potato.

           But, the two found their center and maintained themselves in perfect equilibrium in the center of the room.  Both forehead to forehead; both on the pure scale of blame before mighty Justice herself; and, most importantly, both humbled before the powerful realization that they are both on a level playing field.  Neither of them would come to accept this of course, but they know it.  If even for a moment, this knowledge provided both of the combatants to become humbled before the unrelenting threshold of consequence the opposing party met prior to, and even preceding, the moment of breakage.  But neither would acknowledge this.  Not one of them would openly accept their conclusion in the face of their friends, because having the power to degrade and denounce someone would grant both of them enough distance—“transcendental” leeway—to enable their departure and their movement away from an ex to completely belittle their blindness to remain in whatever shithole relationship they had established under the perfect guise of harmony and love (the two easiest fronts to fake).

And then she made him leave.  While they sat there wallowing in the past, she called it quits.  She told him he had to go, no words from him, because he knew. But he hated it.  So he leaned in to her neck.  And they melted back the anger to two years before, when they were young and stupidly passionate.  And those strong negative boxes formed into beautiful monuments to the past filled with meaning.  Their clothes slid off in the flux and flow of time while their minds drifted away in the wake of their remembrance.  

But her mind was drawn back from the past due to the functionings of the present and the future.  Her fiancé would be home soon.  He would be devastated.  Johnny had to leave.  So he did but with all of his clothes adjourned and relinquished and left behind as if his own soul.  He walked out to his car.  He started the engine; he felt the thing turn over with harsh finality.  But he sat there reveling in the sadness pouring from his pores as he leaned on the wheel and listened to the engine purr.  For a long time, he sat there, naked save for his underwear listening to the violent sounds inside of his skull.  The world itself vanished under the sensory overload the racket caused him.  The relationship between the silence of the real world and the cacophony of his mental world were completely inverse; as one marched slowly into the limelight, the other would scrape and crawl away into nothingness.  That’s when her fiancé, Alex, pulled in.  

           He was a tall slender man with a nice pair of chinos and a white button up on.  He looked like he had walked directly out of a fashion catalogue from the 40s, despite the modernity of the look.  Across his large and contoured nose rested his horn-rimmed glasses that laid carefully above the crook in his nose.  With the darkness surrounding and the angle of the car, he had no good visual on who was in the beat up BMW.  All of the features of the being in the car faded away leaving the figure looking like a large, jagged cutout.  He walked in close, hand on the knife he kept in his pocket, and peered in from the passenger side to get a better view of who or what had come out to his house, especially so late.  

           Illuminated by the stereo system like some new age votive of anguish, Alex could recognize that it was Johnny, but had problems syncing up his memory of Johnny and the creature that wallowed before him. Still, in the vibrant blue light of the stereo, Johnny’s face was stripped of its emotion, of its depth, and to Alex still looked like a large cutout of a man with the same name as Johnny, but only more removed and resigned, and flat.  Alex knocked on the window out of both curiosity and worry.  

           Johnny turned, but he turned slowly.  It seemed like it would take minutes for him to return the gaze that had been given to him.  The man took his time as if he had no more time in the world that could be wasted. His movements were heavy with time and memory and weighed down by the influx and combination of emotions that somehow arose organically in light of their Frankenstein-esque origins; all emotions whirling about in a Heisenbergian randomness that caused collisions of feeling a powerful as clashing tectonic plates and the consistency heard with the steady popping of popcorn.  Alex had only darkness in his eyes.  Tension blanketed the two of them then.

“You wanna roll the window down, buddy?” Alex’s muffled words barely moved into Johnny’s ears and he rolled down the window.  It was a manual, so it took some breath and time to get the window down, but it only went down halfway (Johnny gave up the efforts to fight the frost and ice to roll the thing down).

“What?” Johnny said after a long, awkward silence that made both men uncomfortable.

“You’re the one in my drive way.  I’d like you to tell me ‘what,’ and where are your clothes, man?” And then it hit him.  The driveway was long and the night dark, and on any given night it was nearly impossible to spot Jodie’s small black Toyota.  But be being closer to the man, seeing the car he did not account for, and smelling the smells of his bedroom on this half-stranger in the car Alex was no longer in need of an answer from Johnny.  

           Just as Johnny went to say something, Alex was already pulling away from him with the thick black knife in his hand and unfolded it with a quick sheen and a decisive, mechanical click.  The snapping open of the knife scared Johnny into silence and forced Alex into action.  He walked about the car and stabbed each of the four tires one time with a savagery that mismatched his clothes and precision.  Slowly, Johnny felt himself shrink down closer to the earth along with his vehicle and the thing felt rooted like a two-ton metal shrub.  Alex made one pass around the car with his tire rampage and sauntered back around to the driver’s side.

“Now you sit here while I go and get some answers.  If you try and leave or run I swear I’ll find you and I’ll drag your ass back here naked for every inch you moved from me.”

           Inside, the air was thick and tense.  The blanket of unease seemed to cover the entire house. All the boxes laid scattered across the floor like beige monuments; stout and heavy, they rested in all areas of the house.  Alex could hear everything so much more clearly than typical.  His senses were heightened out of some animalistic reaction to the ever growing tension in his chest.  It felt like his sternum was crumpling inward by some void just beneath the bone.  He entered their room and saw her there on the mattress on the floor with the half packed, half unpacked boxes, gripping her knees and rocking back and forth. Her head kept knocking the wall and the vibrations jingled the pulleys on the fan like some sort of wind chime that funnels the moroseness of the world.  

           She was taking it all in. The past and present collided within her mind and melted into a shimmering display, like an oil slick—where some colors and some shapes are only seen in a glancing moment before the angle, the movement, some variable, takes away that level.  Here, Jodie’s mind was between the room she shared with Alex and the room the shared with Johnny.  The conditions of moving had provided her with an already unstable surface to conduct business, but Johnny’s touch and presence opened the flood gates of Jodie’s memory that had been fighting and holding back the brackish waters of their past.  This was no ordinary arousal of emotion, this was the growth of something that never should have lived and never should have been allowed to continue to live.  The thing grew even in neglect.  The turning away of eyes does nothing against the chewing of food and the scavenging for life.  

           Left unattended, the thing was allowed to grow unnoticed and grew ravenously with a spirit that would grow to devour exponentially. Rather than letting his and her memory die, Jodie fostered the memory but never caring for it.  She knew the removal would be essential, but the pain and misery extracted from the removal of something so critical to her life—past, present, and future—that she left as if all meaning would be stripped away from life if she was allowed to so readily rearrange herself.  

           So, it grew.  And it pressed at the bounds of her consciousness when the skin of those two meaningless souls touched.  And it shattered everything around her.  Alex stood before her in fear.  His sternum felt as if it has reached his spine and gone farther, like his structure was being crippled.  He tried to speak to her, but her eyes never seemed to focus on him.  They shifted restlessly in apprehension jumping between here and there, past and present; but that’s all—only the vague, empty historicity to attempt to mend her fractured mind.

           The bland beige of the room and the boxes lost even more of their neutrality, sinking into husks of objects that used to have purpose but has shucked it off in that limbo.  The two of them became enveloped in their own uncertainty.  Alex had felt this rift before, he had seen it on her, smelled it in the air when they made love.  His nights, long nights of hard work and immense apathy, had driven him away (he claimed this, but he still couldn’t convince himself this was what happened).  He knew she wanted to leave this town.  Year after year of stagnation breeds a hunger in a person.  The lack of fuel for a soul turns ravenous, but only inwardly—because a soul can only affect itself.  So he ran off to work so they could run away to a new life, a new sanctuary.  However, the past never really dies; the embers of unwatched fires becomes the fires of God’s own wrath.  Johnny had come in, his stink of nostalgia wafting off of him, and given those coals new life, new fuel.  

           Her eyes were no longer on this world.  Her essence was torn between impotence and meaninglessness.  He said no more words, they all sailed away in the sea time.  Alex went to turn, to find Johnny, to spill that blood and kill that future, and, in turn, bleed out the pain of the past like sucking the venom from a wound.  His footsteps shook the house that now was paper thin, almost fake.  

           He left her there like that, alone and throbbing in the dim light of the beige walls.  As he walked through the house, he turned off all of the lights.  Slowly, one by one, he marked his path out with darkness. Each click of the switch seemed so loud to him, so decisive and definitive.  His feet drug over the creaky floors boards.  Just as he hit the last light switch and the darkness fell on him, thick and heavy, he saw the headlights of Johnny’s truck making horizontal slats of light break through the blinds.  

           He stood there in the darkness illuminated by Johnny’s car.  He held his knife limply in his hand, relaxed.  A shadow passed over the lights with sluggish steps and a bowed head as if some monk had wandered too far from his monastery.  The jerking movements and swinging of limps disturbed Alex to his core and the drumline of Jodie’s head slamming the wall only added to the bastardized symphony rolling out of the world.  Then he heard the sloshing, like water.  He heard it as he watched the votive statue shuffle around the yard with a beat and a rhythm all his own.  Everything clanged together while his mind assessed all of the sensory input and try to analyze it properly through the ragged system he was currently working with despite broken time ripping away at his mind.  The bitter effluvium from the fluid stung Alex’s nose and he couldn’t pin the scent to the object, his mind was too hung up on events; hung up on the build up.  

           The door creaked open with an agonized groan.  And the gasoline filled his nose completely. It was almost as if his very brain was encased in the aroma of the gas.  Johnny never gave up his part of the orchestra, his movements remained in time and purposeful even before the eyes of Alex.  The two men made eye contact once Johnny emptied the can in the living room.  Alex fell on him.  Johnny’s retort was lost in the fumes and Alex’s knife was buried into his chest and the blood spilled out in ebbing waves, slow and thick.  As the blood mixed with the gasoline and the copper smell only worsened the harshness of the gas, Alex continued to pummel in the face of the man he once never had any opinion of, some ghost of his girlfriend’s antiquity, and here he was, moving that poor soul into the most profound antiquity—death. The storm of fists continued so that the bones in Alex’s hands were nearly obliterated and hung like wet sacks of gravel, dripping with the red wetness of his solidified jealousy and confusion.  

           Alex rose and stood above Johnny like God looking upon man.  His horn-rimmed glasses still there, only splattered with red like his shirt and the floor.  The gurgling, mumbling, bursts of Johnny’s breathing nearly drowned out the sound of crackling wood.  Alex had, in his frenzy, completely transgressed into a different world; he had somehow not noticed the blaze swelling in from the front door.  All over the porch, the fires danced in its red and orange hue as if hell had come early to take Alex away.  The complete darkness of the house was now destroyed by the swirling, chaotic illuminations of the fire around the still and dead looking contours of the two men’s shadows on the wall.  Below the growing roar of the fire, the thudding in Jodie’s room continued with sickening steadiness.  

           With the flames nearly at his face—truly, they were licking out at him as if to taste him with their long heated tendrils—he gathered up Johnny, knife and all and left the room.  His walk was slow and heavy,but not because of the cargo.  Each step echoed in his mind a memory.  Some pure and real, others artificial; like the speculation of Johnny’s time walking through this house, of him holding Jodie on the couch of the listening room while they listened to all their shared favorites that Jodie never told Alex about (she said it was too painful, but not enough to throw them away, and definitely not enough to prevent from her being caught listening to those antiques when not expecting him).  He followed the banging on the wall.  The smoke grew too thick for his eyes to be his best guidance.  Once in Jodie’s room, the banging stopped.  When Alex rolled in with the smoke and a near corpse dangling from his shoulders, a hush fell and the fire whispered behind them.  Alex threw the man on the ground with a mortal thud, rolled the man over, and pulled the knife from the bare chest—he put his foot on the dying man’s neck to assist in the removal, pushing down while ripping the knife away.  

           As Alex turned to leave, the blood began again to pool out and away.  Once out of the door, he turned back to look and saw the blood reaching out to the bed where Jodie sat and she reaching out towards it.  The door slid shut and he was back into the inferno that tore through the house like a titan.  The swelling in his brain pushed out all of the sounds and he felt as if he were weightless, as if her were in some painting, staring into the red void of hatred that was summoned before him (possibly out of him).  He took this as his moment of retreat—surrender, rather.

           The fire trailed and reached for Alex as he walked coolly out the back door, and once through the frame, after the click of the knob, sound blasted his ears.  The screaming—of the fire and of the girl inside—disoriented space and time itself. Every crackle and pop by now had matured into the snapping explosions and crashing.  Like a swarm of locus, the house sang its macabre melodies into the orange black of the night reaching up over and above the trees where the fire raised to and set fire to.  Stepping back, giving himself the perspective he needed to take in the proud monster he had begot.  Red ate everything.  

_page/i���M�Y