Mad Man's Blog
'Four Lions and the Fantasy of the Other'
Mad Man May 2010
Is it not the case that our current relationship towards the Other today, verges on a pathological obsession? The recent Chris Morris film ‘Four Lions’ is testament to this. The film is funny, yet flawed, it makes a number of mistakes, while at the same time making a number of insightful observations regarding our relation to Otherness. The reason for this pathological obsession is I believe, that in an age where the substance of our cultures, identities, practices, and histories, are under constant bombardment by the incessant decoding and recoding by capitalist deterritorialization, commodification, and obsolescing, that the only way to create a semblance of stability in identity or community is to centre such identity around the Other, as that permanent identity, a fantasy, possessing a difference that possesses the very thing that we lack, but desire to possess. Before I get to talking about the film, I first want to outline what I mean here.
One of the defining features of the Other has always been the Other as fantasy. But the treatment of the Other, its abuse, or its veneration, has often been a source of pleasure. This is a state of affairs that many of us indulge in. The interesting thing is how quickly we all disavow our enjoyment of the treatment of the Other. Listen to racist gangs for example, who are an obvious case, the real source of their obsession with the Other (as Muslim, immigrant etc) is we are told, the disintegration of white working class values and dominance in certain geographical areas, caused by economic and historic factors. At some level, so the theory goes, they seem to ‘misidentify’ the Other with the real source of their grievance. They assume that by defeating the Other, overcoming it, they may once more achieve the lost thing taken from them. But there is something wrong with this simple formulation, in that it does not go far enough. It overlooks the pleasure the racist thug takes in his attack on the difference of the Other. Is this just another extension of the prevalence of hedonistic capitalism? The thug just enjoys what he gets from the other, even if he will not accept this as his motive.
All too easily, the thug wraps up his pleasure in socio-economic theory, how he has been neglected in terms of education, employment etc, how his is the identity disallowed by the prevailing politically correct ideology of elites, he may even come close to diagnosing capitalism’s ills as the real source of his troubles, but what we are forgetting, is that he has co-opted the Other as a source of shared hobby, an extreme extension of the same logic of train spotters, the thug enjoys his violence, but it is a violence of a certain kind, and he makes of it an identity, a politics, a culture and shared folk experience. Violence as a violence against a fantasy other, that justifies and intensifies the basic ‘Id’ enjoyment of violence in general. Even if he sees at some level of reflection, that his identification of the other is his ‘fantasy’ he maintains this fantasy as a symptom of something else which justifies it. Even if, his reasoning is sound to some extent, we have gone too far in allowing this as an explanation of his motive. Instead, we should bear in mind two things, the loss of identity is not the source of the violence against the Other. Instead a sense of pleasure that is gained from the Other, is the real motive. But this communal violence, this resentment and hatred of the Other is the means to develop a replacement identity: ‘we are what they are not’ a classic example of the Nietzschean spirit of ‘ressentiement’ if ever there was one. But when there is little left to identify with, this serves as a perfect substitute.
Similarly, we should be cautious about those at the other end of the spectrum, who attempt to celebrate the Other as lovers of difference. The ‘politically correct elite’ that of course, is not really an elite at all, does something similar with regards to the fantasy of the Other. For them, the pleasure gained is an ascetic one, they deny themselves the pleasure of the Id, a basic violence in order to gain access to a pleasure of the super-ego, the sense of being superior, for not surrendering to the ‘primitive’ and reactive pleasure seeking of the Id. This sense of superiority, of much of the white middle class, is driven by the sense of guilt for not delivering the impossible super-ego demand, for a perfect society, where the difference of the Other is completely absorbed into a harmonious multiculturalism. The Other is that which must be preserved at all cost. Put aside the obvious and perhaps quite apt, socio-political insight that this veneration of the Other is not simply a source of historic guilt, but is also a means of ensuring that it is only through the middle class super-ego driven type, that the Other can be protected, thus ensuring the continued political and economic supremacy of this very type (a comment that the clever racist might, quite rightly bring up to further justify their stance). Let us look beyond the simple ascetic will that drives the orientation towards the Other, where we find a hidden, even further disavowed pleasure. The Liberal has a sense of duty towards certain types of Otherness, and difference, sanctioned differences, such as homosexuals, immigrants, other religions and ethnicities etc. But at the same time, they maintain a hatred of certain types of difference, the racist, the bigot, the chauvinist. Anyone, who does not tolerate and accept the terms of permissive tolerant society, is unacceptable to them. Their tolerance is based on a false choice: ‘you are free to be different as long as you do so in the parameters we have established’. Those who do not accept this, have forfeited their rights to the protection of the super-ego imperative to protect and respect difference. No wonder they then become the Other that provides a source of Id pleasure for the Liberal, which you may think is non violent, but the existence of certain animal rights protestors, anti capitalist and anti fascist groups show, this pleasure can exist as a kind of violence. The point again, is to create a sense of shared identity: ‘I am what Glenn Beck is not’ for example (and how many get pleasure from this particular fantasy figure).
This obsession with the Other is nothing new. But it has arguably reached pathological standards. Because what is there left but to identify ourselves in relation to the Other? (I do not mean here the ‘Big Other’ of Lacan) This brings us to Chris Morris’s ‘Four Lions’. The film follows four inept would be suicide bombers, on their path to attempt a botched attack on the London Marathon. The film is not an exercise in so called ‘moral equivalence’ where the Bombers are just as justified as we are in our attacks on Muslim countries, nor is it an attempt to shock us with controversial subject matter. The film may be an attempt to point out the absurdism of the act of suicide bombing, of martyrdom in general. But it in reality, where it does a good job, is highlighting the point we have just made: how a sense of identity (how to be a Muslim and British, but neither one completely) and a shared sense of community (among different people, the convert, the leader, the idiot, and the would be ‘gansta’) is found through a hatred of the Other. But at bottom, the real driver of their activity, is the sense of pleasure at being so controversial, illicit, of the lure of violence of being a ‘soldier’ . Among the best bits of the film are the smiles of pleasure that beam on their faces when they get to attempt a martyr video ( which often fail because they can not achieve the solemn demeanour that is needed and expected, they are ‘too happy’). Combined with this fantasy of being a soldier, is the pleasure of the explosions when testing the home made bombs in microwaves, strutting around with AK47’s, culminating in the ‘Paki Rambo’ action of living out their fantasies for real in attempting to take down a U.S spy drone with calamitous results. Basically, the group get to satisfy the Id’s desire for pleasure in violence, the real motive of their actions. The best example of this is, when forced to move their bombs to an allotment, under fear of the ‘Fed’s’ the most inept of the group attempts to reach the others, who are laughing at a distance. They then see him stumble over a wall, into a sheep, and blow himself up. They laugh for a brief moment, before the moment of horrific realization. Their friend is dead, yet they found, for a moment, it to be exceedingly funny, exceedingly pleasurable. Where the film fails, is not in its attempt to make a moral case for why suicide bombing is justified, which to its credit, it did not attempt. There is no effort to explain why the group arrived at their ideological inclinations, the usual rhetoric is spouted at times, but often in a blasé fashion. But the film can not help but engender a sense of sympathy of the Other. The message, intended or not, is that essentially, they are human beings. This is all done cynically, of course, their humanity is arrived at through their ineptness, stupidity and ignorance. Does Morris want us to realize our shared humanity with the suicide bombers, not in our shared strengths but our shared human weaknesses?
The problem with this is, that, while it might seem quite reasonable, it still based on a fantasy of the Other. The fantasy that the Other can, even in its extreme Otherness, serve as a means to reflect some shared identity with us. There may be some shared identity, but is this the point? What about the difference? That can not just be ignored. In the film, the suicide bombers do, eventually, albeit characteristically ineptly, commit acts of terrorism. The farce with which they do this is funny, but there are deaths, and damage. And could it just be that there existed a difference that was their all along (which the film never really touched upon) that drove this violence? A difference of the Other that can not be accepted by us. There are hints of this they talk of ‘slag sisters’ revealing a disdain for Western culture and white women, a desire to create revolutionary violence, by wanting to bomb mosques ‘to make the Ummah rise up’. We should not accept this. But this difference does exist, and it can not be explained away, the most chilling and seemingly ‘irrational’ aspect of the film is the leader Omar, an intelligent, likable figure, with a nice home, loving wife and son, who is the most authentically committed of all, and his loyalty to the cause is all the more baffling and disturbing, What is the difference that could drive him to want to kill himself and others? The explanation, quite brilliantly, is never even attempted to be given.
The point to bear in mind is, that the difference of the Other should be tolerated, but our encounter with this difference should be normalized, not fetishized. There may be a common ground on which to build relationships of understanding, but there may be points of incommensurability, where our understanding can go no further. In such cases, we do not need to fall into callow relativism, we need to asses the impact of these differences, as well as our own ideological inclinations that take issue with it, see where compromise can be found, and where it absolutely can not. This process is preferable to the hysteria of either accepting relativism, or intolerance. It understands difference for what it is. The politically correct ‘agenda’ is to an extent, is a success of tolerance, but it can give way ultimately, to a divisive relativism. More than this, it is not the genuine respect for difference as it claims to be. It attempts to force the difference of complex identities into simplified identities that are more palatable to the idealised multiculturalist space.
Four Lions again highlights this, in one scene, the Convert Muslim Barry, is on a panel with a group of moderate Muslims, and a educated posh white MP played by Alex Macqueen (of the Thick of It) who is attempting to engage in the rather patronising dialogue which excites anger from the audience. This sanctimony from those in power is obviously angry to many Muslims, ‘they want to engage with us to bring us into society, but we have to do it on their terms and accept what they do.’ The effort put in by the politically correct is often admirable, but it is often an attempt to sanitize the Other, to form the Other into the kind of Other we want. This is doomed to failure, as we have seen, it provides the justification for the suicide bomber, as much as it does the white racist. One Further interesting point can be gained from this film. The Other of the suicide Bomber, the fantasy figure of ours, is not an identity that possesses some authentic identity that we lack, but is in itself driven by its own Other, the unbeliever the ‘Kafir’. This is the ultimate irony of the film, that while for us, the suicide bomber possesses some authentic and genuine (albeit perverse) identity, it is always assumed to be one of certainty nonetheless and self justification. Yet the film showed this to be a myth: our Other is just like us, with out its own Other, it has no cohesiveness. We are involved in a disavowed symbiosis, to which no one is free from, or without the fantasy, of the Other, without which we are nothing.
One of the defining features of the Other has always been the Other as fantasy. But the treatment of the Other, its abuse, or its veneration, has often been a source of pleasure. This is a state of affairs that many of us indulge in. The interesting thing is how quickly we all disavow our enjoyment of the treatment of the Other. Listen to racist gangs for example, who are an obvious case, the real source of their obsession with the Other (as Muslim, immigrant etc) is we are told, the disintegration of white working class values and dominance in certain geographical areas, caused by economic and historic factors. At some level, so the theory goes, they seem to ‘misidentify’ the Other with the real source of their grievance. They assume that by defeating the Other, overcoming it, they may once more achieve the lost thing taken from them. But there is something wrong with this simple formulation, in that it does not go far enough. It overlooks the pleasure the racist thug takes in his attack on the difference of the Other. Is this just another extension of the prevalence of hedonistic capitalism? The thug just enjoys what he gets from the other, even if he will not accept this as his motive.
All too easily, the thug wraps up his pleasure in socio-economic theory, how he has been neglected in terms of education, employment etc, how his is the identity disallowed by the prevailing politically correct ideology of elites, he may even come close to diagnosing capitalism’s ills as the real source of his troubles, but what we are forgetting, is that he has co-opted the Other as a source of shared hobby, an extreme extension of the same logic of train spotters, the thug enjoys his violence, but it is a violence of a certain kind, and he makes of it an identity, a politics, a culture and shared folk experience. Violence as a violence against a fantasy other, that justifies and intensifies the basic ‘Id’ enjoyment of violence in general. Even if he sees at some level of reflection, that his identification of the other is his ‘fantasy’ he maintains this fantasy as a symptom of something else which justifies it. Even if, his reasoning is sound to some extent, we have gone too far in allowing this as an explanation of his motive. Instead, we should bear in mind two things, the loss of identity is not the source of the violence against the Other. Instead a sense of pleasure that is gained from the Other, is the real motive. But this communal violence, this resentment and hatred of the Other is the means to develop a replacement identity: ‘we are what they are not’ a classic example of the Nietzschean spirit of ‘ressentiement’ if ever there was one. But when there is little left to identify with, this serves as a perfect substitute.
Similarly, we should be cautious about those at the other end of the spectrum, who attempt to celebrate the Other as lovers of difference. The ‘politically correct elite’ that of course, is not really an elite at all, does something similar with regards to the fantasy of the Other. For them, the pleasure gained is an ascetic one, they deny themselves the pleasure of the Id, a basic violence in order to gain access to a pleasure of the super-ego, the sense of being superior, for not surrendering to the ‘primitive’ and reactive pleasure seeking of the Id. This sense of superiority, of much of the white middle class, is driven by the sense of guilt for not delivering the impossible super-ego demand, for a perfect society, where the difference of the Other is completely absorbed into a harmonious multiculturalism. The Other is that which must be preserved at all cost. Put aside the obvious and perhaps quite apt, socio-political insight that this veneration of the Other is not simply a source of historic guilt, but is also a means of ensuring that it is only through the middle class super-ego driven type, that the Other can be protected, thus ensuring the continued political and economic supremacy of this very type (a comment that the clever racist might, quite rightly bring up to further justify their stance). Let us look beyond the simple ascetic will that drives the orientation towards the Other, where we find a hidden, even further disavowed pleasure. The Liberal has a sense of duty towards certain types of Otherness, and difference, sanctioned differences, such as homosexuals, immigrants, other religions and ethnicities etc. But at the same time, they maintain a hatred of certain types of difference, the racist, the bigot, the chauvinist. Anyone, who does not tolerate and accept the terms of permissive tolerant society, is unacceptable to them. Their tolerance is based on a false choice: ‘you are free to be different as long as you do so in the parameters we have established’. Those who do not accept this, have forfeited their rights to the protection of the super-ego imperative to protect and respect difference. No wonder they then become the Other that provides a source of Id pleasure for the Liberal, which you may think is non violent, but the existence of certain animal rights protestors, anti capitalist and anti fascist groups show, this pleasure can exist as a kind of violence. The point again, is to create a sense of shared identity: ‘I am what Glenn Beck is not’ for example (and how many get pleasure from this particular fantasy figure).
This obsession with the Other is nothing new. But it has arguably reached pathological standards. Because what is there left but to identify ourselves in relation to the Other? (I do not mean here the ‘Big Other’ of Lacan) This brings us to Chris Morris’s ‘Four Lions’. The film follows four inept would be suicide bombers, on their path to attempt a botched attack on the London Marathon. The film is not an exercise in so called ‘moral equivalence’ where the Bombers are just as justified as we are in our attacks on Muslim countries, nor is it an attempt to shock us with controversial subject matter. The film may be an attempt to point out the absurdism of the act of suicide bombing, of martyrdom in general. But it in reality, where it does a good job, is highlighting the point we have just made: how a sense of identity (how to be a Muslim and British, but neither one completely) and a shared sense of community (among different people, the convert, the leader, the idiot, and the would be ‘gansta’) is found through a hatred of the Other. But at bottom, the real driver of their activity, is the sense of pleasure at being so controversial, illicit, of the lure of violence of being a ‘soldier’ . Among the best bits of the film are the smiles of pleasure that beam on their faces when they get to attempt a martyr video ( which often fail because they can not achieve the solemn demeanour that is needed and expected, they are ‘too happy’). Combined with this fantasy of being a soldier, is the pleasure of the explosions when testing the home made bombs in microwaves, strutting around with AK47’s, culminating in the ‘Paki Rambo’ action of living out their fantasies for real in attempting to take down a U.S spy drone with calamitous results. Basically, the group get to satisfy the Id’s desire for pleasure in violence, the real motive of their actions. The best example of this is, when forced to move their bombs to an allotment, under fear of the ‘Fed’s’ the most inept of the group attempts to reach the others, who are laughing at a distance. They then see him stumble over a wall, into a sheep, and blow himself up. They laugh for a brief moment, before the moment of horrific realization. Their friend is dead, yet they found, for a moment, it to be exceedingly funny, exceedingly pleasurable. Where the film fails, is not in its attempt to make a moral case for why suicide bombing is justified, which to its credit, it did not attempt. There is no effort to explain why the group arrived at their ideological inclinations, the usual rhetoric is spouted at times, but often in a blasé fashion. But the film can not help but engender a sense of sympathy of the Other. The message, intended or not, is that essentially, they are human beings. This is all done cynically, of course, their humanity is arrived at through their ineptness, stupidity and ignorance. Does Morris want us to realize our shared humanity with the suicide bombers, not in our shared strengths but our shared human weaknesses?
The problem with this is, that, while it might seem quite reasonable, it still based on a fantasy of the Other. The fantasy that the Other can, even in its extreme Otherness, serve as a means to reflect some shared identity with us. There may be some shared identity, but is this the point? What about the difference? That can not just be ignored. In the film, the suicide bombers do, eventually, albeit characteristically ineptly, commit acts of terrorism. The farce with which they do this is funny, but there are deaths, and damage. And could it just be that there existed a difference that was their all along (which the film never really touched upon) that drove this violence? A difference of the Other that can not be accepted by us. There are hints of this they talk of ‘slag sisters’ revealing a disdain for Western culture and white women, a desire to create revolutionary violence, by wanting to bomb mosques ‘to make the Ummah rise up’. We should not accept this. But this difference does exist, and it can not be explained away, the most chilling and seemingly ‘irrational’ aspect of the film is the leader Omar, an intelligent, likable figure, with a nice home, loving wife and son, who is the most authentically committed of all, and his loyalty to the cause is all the more baffling and disturbing, What is the difference that could drive him to want to kill himself and others? The explanation, quite brilliantly, is never even attempted to be given.
The point to bear in mind is, that the difference of the Other should be tolerated, but our encounter with this difference should be normalized, not fetishized. There may be a common ground on which to build relationships of understanding, but there may be points of incommensurability, where our understanding can go no further. In such cases, we do not need to fall into callow relativism, we need to asses the impact of these differences, as well as our own ideological inclinations that take issue with it, see where compromise can be found, and where it absolutely can not. This process is preferable to the hysteria of either accepting relativism, or intolerance. It understands difference for what it is. The politically correct ‘agenda’ is to an extent, is a success of tolerance, but it can give way ultimately, to a divisive relativism. More than this, it is not the genuine respect for difference as it claims to be. It attempts to force the difference of complex identities into simplified identities that are more palatable to the idealised multiculturalist space.
Four Lions again highlights this, in one scene, the Convert Muslim Barry, is on a panel with a group of moderate Muslims, and a educated posh white MP played by Alex Macqueen (of the Thick of It) who is attempting to engage in the rather patronising dialogue which excites anger from the audience. This sanctimony from those in power is obviously angry to many Muslims, ‘they want to engage with us to bring us into society, but we have to do it on their terms and accept what they do.’ The effort put in by the politically correct is often admirable, but it is often an attempt to sanitize the Other, to form the Other into the kind of Other we want. This is doomed to failure, as we have seen, it provides the justification for the suicide bomber, as much as it does the white racist. One Further interesting point can be gained from this film. The Other of the suicide Bomber, the fantasy figure of ours, is not an identity that possesses some authentic identity that we lack, but is in itself driven by its own Other, the unbeliever the ‘Kafir’. This is the ultimate irony of the film, that while for us, the suicide bomber possesses some authentic and genuine (albeit perverse) identity, it is always assumed to be one of certainty nonetheless and self justification. Yet the film showed this to be a myth: our Other is just like us, with out its own Other, it has no cohesiveness. We are involved in a disavowed symbiosis, to which no one is free from, or without the fantasy, of the Other, without which we are nothing.
Comments/Thoughts
