Reality

Author Slavoj Zizek, from my point of view started off in a kind of confusing way. I could not understand what the author meant in the first few paragraphs. Zizek compares reality of xxth century to the truth of reality of xixth. In another words, I understood that the author tells us that violence often represents reality that we live in today. In second paragraph Zizek talks about a leader of Soviet Union Stalin and his methods of using violence against men of Russia to create a new men that can stand up to the threat of Fascism and defeat it. Moreover, Slavoj Zizek talks how some people cut themselves for example making tattoos on their bodies. This is done in order for a person to bring him/herself into reality, to show that they are real and alive. In addition, today we can have something like coffee that taste like it but it is not real coffee. Therefore, the author brings many movies into the essay in which reality is being compared to imagination of fake reality of Hollywood studios. “One should therefore turn around the standard reading according to which, the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite on the contrary, it is prior to the WTC collapse than we lived in our reality, perceiving the Third World horrors as something which is not effectively part of our social reality, as something which exists (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen — and what happened on September 11 is that this screen fantasmatic apparition entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e., the symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality). The fact that, after September 11, the opening of many "of the blockbuster" movies with scenes which bear a resemblance to the WTC collapse (large buildings on fire or under attack, terrorist actions…) was postponed (or the films were even shelved), is thus to be read as the "repression" of the fantasmatic background responsible for the impact of the WTC collapse. Of course, the point is not to play a pseudo-postmodern game of reducing the WTC collapse to just another media spectacle, reading it as a catastrophy version of the snuff porno movies; the question we should have asked ourselves when we stared at the TV screens on September 11 is simply: WHERE DID WE ALREADY SEE THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN?” (Zizek)
Author in many ways uses and compares the attack, falling of World Trade Center with the destruction and violence we see in many movies. Zizek tells us that September 11, 2001 brought us into a real and true reality. He compares CIA manual book to the Koran, saying that they are in some way similar to each other. Zizek also compares Kabul to Manhattan. Basically, he uses a lot of movie scenes and compares them to the real September 11. What I liked the most was how he shows us that a Hollywood producer in James Bond figured how to overcome all the obstacles and still do great damage to the enemy. So did the mastermind of 9/11 did the same thing, I just liked the way he compared the two it made a lot of sense to me personally. In other words, 9/11 brought us back from unreal world into the reality. Author Zizek tells us that we have awakened as a nation and now see what really goes on around the world and around us.
” Is, consequently, Osama Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the bombings, not the real-life counterpart of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the master-criminal in most of the James Bond films, involved in the acts of global destruction. What one should recall here is that the only place in Hollywood films where we see the production process in all its intensity is when James Bond penetrates the master-criminal's secret domain and locates there the site of intense labor (distilling and packaging the drugs, constructing a rocket that will destroy New York…). When the master-criminal, after capturing Bond, usually takes him on a tour of his illegal factory, is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist proud presentation of the production in a factory? And the function of Bond's intervention, of course, is to explode in firecraks this site of production, allowing us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with the "disappearing working class." Is it not that, in the exploding WTC towers, this violence directed at the threatening Outside turned back at us?” . (Zizek)
Finally, I think Zizek in many way is right comparing fake reality of movies to the reality of September 11, 2001, which awakened the nation. Telling us that even a powerful nation like United States is in danger at all times. That whatever we see in movies where buildings collapse and etc. can also happen in reality. The main point of this essay in my opinion is that the author tried to show us how similar the events in movies are to what we saw in real life. Today we live in a real world where the threat can come in any way no matter how powerful your nation is.