“Zizek’s “ideology spotting” film critiques aren’t even clever anymore, it’s just the most bland “This thing you like is racist” garbage. And finding out The Hurt Locker is an evil fascist movie isn’t a revelation, it’s right there in the fucking movie. Zizek’s ostensible project, to kill our Big Other, is best accomplished when people fawn over how brilliant he is while he sucks a lot […] It’s probably tiresome to see someone always talking about how Zizek sucks, but it’s tiresome that he always sucks. […]

Instead of just asserting that Zizek sucks, I should be less cowardly and provide a concrete example: He routinely writes up these two or three paragraph discussions of some popular contemporary film, (recently Hurt Locker and Avater)…In them, he spends the first paragraph detailing the supposed reality of the film, ah wonderful aboriginals, ah soldiers with a heart, etc. In the second paragraph, he says no, that’s not right, it’s actually all racist and sexist and war-mad and super ideological. Which, of course, it is if you want to be like that about everything, but how boring and unuseful. It wasn’t interesting that Avatar was racist, it wasn’t interesting that Hurt Locker makes warriors into mushy fragile humans/victims. That’s the secondary content, of which Zizek is the tertiary, explaining how the small racisms / war-madnesses lead to our larger problem. But that’s only if ideology is experienced by audiences as ideology. It’s more interesting to ask about the non-racist content……and why a war-mad country might want to sit and see aboriginal people rise up and kill the metaphor of themselves. But even that’s not the useful stuff, because it would just trend back toward psychologism and easy bullshit about everyone’s “fascism”. The relevant ideology in Avatar was the same as in The Box, the reintegration of a lost technological people into techno-nature.

Anyway, Zizek takes the boring cultural studies moralist approach and never finds something interesting in the shit. After 2 paragraphs on this Hollywood movie, he namedrops some more-or-less obscure counter example(s) to “prove” his point. He wraps it up with something about the greatest, purest, most existing version of a type of ideology or ideological function……and closes it down with a repetition of the same banalities he wrote in the second paragraph. It’s just so unbelievably lazy.

Why not, if you’re actually interested, start with “Lebanon” or “Waltz with Bashir” and then merely comment on “Hurt Locker”? Why use another boring communist reference to link-bait your stunning four paragraph critique of the movie everyone has heard of? It’s so pointlessly /Zizekian/, a cheap shock, a handy knowledge of abstracted structural features & predictable center-left politics.”