The American essayist Fredric Jameson died recently. One of his most famous quips (sometimes wrongly attributed to me) holds today more than ever: it is easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. What if we apply the same logic to Jameson himself? His entire way of life
Every week I check the weather in Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Svalbard. It’s about as close as you can get to a gulag with a human face – a heap of wooden houses where around 2,000 people live. It has a couple of stores and restaurants, and even a very small university. Outside the
Away from Gaza, things are getting worse in the West Bank. I’ve received many messages from Palestinian friends raging at what is going on there. To get an idea of the despair of West Bank Palestinians, remember the suicidal attacks on the streets of Jerusalem a decade or so ago. Usually what happened was an
The first thing that strikes the eye in the multitude of reviews of Matrix Resurrections is how easily the movie’s plot (especially its ending) has been interpreted as a metaphor for our socio-economic situation. Leftist pessimists read it as an insight into how, to put it bluntly, there is no hope for humanity: we cannot
When Croatian movie director Dario Jurican ran in the country’s presidential election in 2019, his campaign slogan, ‘corruption for everybody’, promised that normal people would also be able to profit from cronyism. The people reacted with enthusiasm although they knew it was a joke. A similar dynamic is present on the WallStreetBets subreddit, which subverts
Is there a movie that perfectly fits the moment we are in? I finally discovered it: Paul Franklin’s ‘The Escape’ from 2017, based on Robert Sheckley’s famous sci-fi short story ‘Store of the Worlds’ (1958). Although only 16 minutes long, the movie is done very professionally, with well-known actors (Julian Sands, Olivia Williams) in the central roles. Sheckley’s story begins
We often hear that what we are going through is a real life case of what we used to see in Hollywood dystopias. So what kind of movie are we now watching? When I got the message from many US friends that gun stores sold out their stock even faster than pharmacies, I tried to imagine the
We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 8: Slavoj Žižek on Roma: My first viewing of Roma left me with a bitter taste: yes, the majority of critics are right in celebrating it as an instant classic, but I couldn’t get rid of the idea that this predominant perception is
My first viewing of Roma left me with a bitter taste: yes, the majority of critics are right in celebrating it as an instant classic, but I couldn’t get rid of the idea that this predominant perception is sustained by a terrifying, almost obscene, misreading, and that the movie is celebrated for all the wrong reasons.
