pinnochio v. hasselhoff

It is not helpful for us dissect celebraties, to ruminate over a seperation of man and myth. But when we turn our attention towards the allure, the human condition that goads us into glory, we begin to illuminate our idols and construct their image conscoiusly. Many people do this on a daily basis in fact-publicicsts, PR firms, narraters, ideologogues. They speak to a body of yearning who can neither be seen or felt, but like a hungry ghost it is heard in echoes of adulation and wanting. Those who would trace its profiles draw the rainbow of desires and common sensibility; they illuminate the heavans and cast shadows upon everything in its horizon. But those who would dispell the world of ghosts like Marx, who would surrender ideology and aesthetics to a false consciousness, are haunted by a spectre of their own-indeed communism has been given this name..."A spectre is haunting europe, the spectre of communism." They are haunted by a spirit who would have nothing to do with spirits. The exorcists of desire erect souless buildings and mosaics that reflect nothing other than material necessity. Moses engaged in a similar project, but was scandalized by the fact that the 'One True' had no face that would not consume us, no voice that would not destroy us utterly. The 'thing' of our dangerous and disgusting desires is sublated and the 'Golden Calf' returnes in jahweh's 'lessor faces' -divine messengers and a holy ghost in that we may know his glory about the world. Our heros and villains are just like this; not individuals in the sense that we know them (not to you or I); they live in our gazing upon, as conjured object-images that move in the world as apparitions do (they walk through walls or appear suddenly in your sleep). All of this is explained in popular media and culture.The story of superman (uber-man) opens with the plight of villains who were nefarious enough to warrant a condemnation within mirrors indefinitely, who return via the folly of a desperate man seeking their power; he is consumed upon first contact. This is not only the price of opening a “Pandora’s Box” but a necccessary step for the narrative to complete itself, where the forces of evil come to face their epic conquest by powers of goodness. This is accurately depicted as powers discovered along the way (they were not given but conjured) who were administered by a single man, the phallic body of our precipitous adulation. But how did the uber-man find his way to earth? When the world is turned upside down a great mourning appears and a haunting is set forth. The thing of reconciliation is set just above the horizon and although we are forced to grasp at this as if it were a real body, as if Pinocchio were a real boy, the sun burns our fingers off. This is why Lois fell in love with Clark Kent only after she knew him as the heroic figure in the news. Were he to become real again his phallic appeal would vanish entirely (it was only when he sought to give up his special status, his Je ne sais quoi that the world became vulnerable to all the evils of the nether world). When in the film Brazil Sam Lowry escaped his captures and his liberator Harry Tuttle immediately falls under a fatal duress. Instead of running he comes to his to his rescue and he recognizes for the first time in this embrace the person who he had wish to become; that the entire time Tuttle was the the expression of all his most controversial desires. This is when Harry Tuttle disintegrates into a mass of worthless paper shards that blow about the cold cityscape untended and forgotten. This is because Lowry was a realist, an iconoclastic spoiler of illusions. Idols and graven images and all great ideas are Harry Tuttles. As ghosts, they are ethereal bodies of lacking in every aspect but name (the corporeality of being-in-names, its body of speech). Names are spoken in hauntings, invocations that carry with them the unfinished business of a world not quite at home with itself. Without its name it cannot be conjured, cannot appear to us in our sleep. When Hamlet proclaimed 'The time is out of joint' he was invoking the spirit of his dead father, who was the name for unspeakable horrors, foul crimes of a past made present who's only salvation lived in the promise of a future indulgence. The experience of the present is always consumed by a kind of spectral lacking, the shadow play of an impossible belonging that permeates the world like a holy ghost. Even though it eludes our grasp, that it has no voice that will not destroy us, no face that will not blind us; even though Harry Tuttle disapears the moment we think we've got him finally, the world moves about its whims, without this ghost, without its continual conjuration, we are merely the profane flesh bags attested to by the stoics, toiling about obscure mundanity. Just ask Mr. Hasselhoff.