Some Thoughts on Žižek's Thoughts on Patricia Highsmith

When you discover someone else is thinking about the exact same things you are

It seems that Slavoj Žižek has recently started a Substack. I’m not really a Žižek fan, but I once saw him speak at my university and I’ve read a few things by him. As far as I can tell, his Substack is being billed as some sort of anti-censorship thing; I have no idea what this is about and have no desire to find out. What I remember about Žižek, mainly from being an English major, is that many of my fellow students—especially film students—considered him to be a sort of prophet. I’m not sure why this is, and again, I don’t really feel like speculating on the reasons. From my point of view, he’s no different from any other academic, which is to say, he may write some interesting things, but I’m not going to hold him in any special regard.

I was attracted to read one of his posts because I saw that he, or whoever is running his Substack, had used a still from the Alain Delon version (1960) of The Talented Mr. Ripley as the cover image. This summer I went on a bit of an Alain Delon binge—my parents and I watched three of his films in three nights—and I’m also a fan of Patricia Highsmith, having written about the Ripley novel here. So it was with some interest that I began to read Žižek’s piece. As I read, I discovered that Žižek was also familiar with The American Friend, a Wim Wenders adaptation of another Ripley novel starring Dennis Hooper and Bruno Ganz. This is a little know film, but another that I’ve watched recently. It seemed that whatever qualms I might have with Žižek, he and I shared similar interests. I continued to read and discovered a reference to Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of “movement-image” and “time-image.” This is an idea introduced to me by Paul Schrader in his book Transcendental Style in Film, which I’ve written about here and here. I kept reading and discovered a reference to Tarkovsky, whose book Sculpting in Time I’m currently reading. Finally, I read Žižek’s claim that Highsmith “practiced the literary equivalent of…the shift from “movement-image” to “time-image” in the history of cinema.” This floored me. My preoccupation for the last few months has been articulating what literature based around “time-image” might look like, and here was Žižek saying that Highsmith does exactly that!

So, despite the obligatory references to Lacan and the occasional tendency to obfuscate, I can’t be too harsh on Žižek; to find someone writing about the same relatively obscure things you are also interested in feels like a blessing.

But what is the “time-image” that Žižek sees expressed in Highsmith? Here is his explanation:

“true art is not simply the telling of stories, but the telling of how stories go wrong, rendering visible and palpable the interstices in which ‘nothing happens.’ In art, spiritual and material are directly intertwined: the spiritual emerges when we become aware of the material inertia, dysfunctional bare presence, of objects around us. The spiritual emerges after a murder attempt goes wrong and the prospective murderer and his victim are left stupidly staring at each other. Highsmith is thus quite literally, more than any author, the writer who elevated crime fiction to the level of art.”

What Žižek means in “going wrong,” I assume, is when things happen that do not make narrative sense. For example, the classic example used by Deleuze (and referred to by Schrader), is a scene from Umberto D, a 1952 film from De Sica, when a maid strikes a match three times before it eventually lights. In a film with a story that “goes right,” the two failures would have been cut, or the scene would have been re-shot so the maid could light the match on the first try. The missed attempts, as Žižek says, are moments when “nothing happens,” and they don’t serve to move the narrative forward. They are not examples of “movement-image” but “time-image” because they foreground time at the expense of a smooth plot. To use Žižek’s terminology, they plunge us into Lacan’s desert of the real. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

“Time-image” is a pre-requisite for “spiritual” or “transcendental” cinema. We have to leave the plot and the narrative of the story for something deeper to emerge, which is often a sort of consciousness, a sort of being in the world, which cannot be articulated through language but only felt and shown. This is why Schrader’s explanation of “time-image” also includes such techniques as interposing narrative shots with other seemingly unrelated shots: “Man exits one room, shot of trees in the wind, shot of train passing.” The trees and the train may have nothing to do with the story, they may not “advance” the plot, but they help to express the atmosphere of the movie, perhaps the main character’s consciousness or a sense of place.

Žižek then notes that “the spiritual emerges when we become aware of the material inertia, dysfunctional bare presence, of objects around us.” To me, this sounds a lot like Alberto Moravia’s description of boredom in his novel of the same name. In my most recent essay, I attempted to articulate how boredom, in particular the acceptance and cultivation of boredom, is a necessary step on the path to a spiritual state. In Moravia’s novel, the main character expresses his “boredom” as his disconnection from objects around him. To use Žižek’s words, he realizes the “dysfunctional bare presence” of all objects. What this means is that, on a more profound level, he realizes the meaningless and absurdity of life. This allows one to look beyond the ordinary, everyday, practical concerns of living and to investigate something else. But how does one do this? It is not, as might be assumed, by looking for a “deeper” or “hidden” meaning, but to understand that such a meaning does not exist, which then allows for direct contact with reality. A spiritual state is simply a state of awareness and attention.

At the end of Moravia’s novel, the narrator contemplates a tree. That’s it. But if you read those few pages, you’ll feel as if you’re floating; it is, to my mind, an example of the spiritual or transcendental literature I’ve been looking for.

Žižek’s example of this sort of literature is when, in one of Highsmith’s novels, “a murder attempt goes wrong and the prospective murderer and his victim are left stupidly staring at each other.” I can’t comment on this as I haven’t read the novel in question, but I will say this is not what I expected “transcendental literature” to be. I’ve been thinking of it in terms of literary techniques (style); here Žižek sees it in the upending of genre expectations via plot (content).

This make me question Žižek’s identification of Highsmith as the author who brought Deleuze’s “time-image” into fiction. The whole point of “time-image” editing, or whatever we might call it in literature, is to bring the viewer/reader out of narrative time and into another sort of time via style or form. This is why one technique of “time-image” editing is to use delayed cuts: a character enters a room, but before cutting to the inside of the room, as we expect, the camera remains on the door for a few seconds longer than necessary. Then we cut. This is the style often associated with Bresson. Or, a shot begins without a character in the frame. We wait a few seconds. Then the character enters the frame and the action begins. Schrader used this to great effect in First Reformed. These strategies bring us out of the flow of the story and activate us, the viewer. We realize we’re watching a movie; we’re confused—we’re no longer a passive rider along for the trip but an active participant in the film. We become aware and attentive. These are the kinds of techniques that I’m interested in seeing used in literature.

Does Highsmith do this? From my experience, admittedly only two novels (The Talented Mr. Ripley and Carol), not really. But can a similar effect be achieved through plot, as Žižek suggests? Perhaps, but I’m not entirely convinced, as shift from movement-image to time-image is the shift from narrative to time/consciousness via style, not simply a new narrative. That being said, in playing with our expectations, we do become aware of the artificiality of the crime genre’s conventions, and we may enter into the “empty time” that Žižek references. The thing is, Moravia’s Boredom is an entire novel devoted to “empty time.” Nothing really happens; no progress is made. Yet we keep reading, and this boredom prepares us for the spiritual ending. This is what Knausgaard does as well. Nothing happens, but then the story will coalesce into something extraordinary. Then we’re bored again, and so on and so forth. Perhaps Those Who Walk Away, the Highsmith novel Žižek focuses on, achieves this feat as well. I guess I’ll have to read it to find out.