Politics and Hollywood Cinema: Marked Woman

Abstract

It is perhaps time to set out my stall more clearly and with a substantial degree of bluntness. If, in Chapters 2 and 3, I have tried to be generous to some strands of films studies which I admire enormously—Marie Ropars, Jean-Louis Comolli, Stephen Heath and others—then in this chapter I try to refrain from my nostalgia for a lost great age of film ‘Theory’. If the spirit of Marx was key for those writers associated with Theory, then from this point on, Marx will have to take a back seat, if he has not had to do so already. The political theorists I utilize for much of the remainder of this book—Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Etienne Balibar, Claude Lefort and Jacques Ranciere—have all explicitly (though some might argue the case is implicit for Balibar) rejected Marxism as the key theoretical paradigm for understanding the politics of the contemporary world. We have already seen an indication of this stance from my mentions of Laclau’s writings in the previous chapter. His rejection of Žižek’s politics ultimately hinges on the reckoning that, for Laclau, Žižek is merely ‘waiting for the Martians’ (Laclau 2005: 232).