Scene and Herd- Andrew Hultkans on Slavoj Zizek at the NYPL

With all due respect to the cantankerous Dr. Ž, I was more attracted to last Wednesday’s event—“They Live! Hollywood as an Ideological Machine” at the New York Public Library—by its title than by its star. John Carpenter’s They Live is one of my favorite cult films, a tacky sci-fi gem that built on David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and made The Matrix’s point a decade before the Wachowskis hipped gamers to “the desert of the real.” A withering satire of Reaganite America, They Live boasts perhaps the longest fight scene in cinema history and is certainly the only leftist critique with a professional wrestler (“Rowdy” Roddy Piper) in its leading role. The movie is understandably beloved by film theorists of a certain stripe, Slavoj Žižek among them, so I was eager to hear his take. Admittedly, I was also curious to get a closer look at a man who resembles a Slavic plumber but somehow managed to marry an Argentine lingerie model half his age. Sure, her parents were Lacanians, but really

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