Ideology between Fiction and Fantasy

Authors

Slavoj Zizek, Institute for Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana

Abstract

In his movie version of Franz Kafka's The Trial, Orson Welles accomplished an exemplary anti-obscurantist operation by way of reinterpreting the place and the function of the famous parable on "the door of the Law." In the film, we hear it twice: at the very beginning, it serves as a kind of prologue, read and accompanied by (faked) ancient engravings projected from lantern-slides; then, shortly before the end, it is told to Josef K., not by the priest (as in the novel), but by K.'s lawyer (played by Welles himself) who unexpectedly joins the priest and K. in the Cathedral. The action now takes a strange turn and diverges from Kafka's novel-even before the lawyer warms up in his narrative, K. cuts him short: "I've heard it. We've heard it all. The door was meant only for him." What ensues is a painful dialogue between K. and the lawyer in which the lawyer advises K. to "plead insanity" by claiming that he is persecuted by the idea of being the victim of the diabolical plot of a mysterious State agency. K., however, rejects the role of the victim offered to him by the lawyer: "I don't pretend to be a martyr." "Not even a victim of society?" "No, I'm not a victim, I'm a member of society . . . ." In his final outburst, K. then asserts that the true conspiracy (of Power) consists of the very attempt to persuade the subjects that they are victims of irrational impenetrable forces, that everything is crazy, that the world is absurd and meaningless. When K. thereupon leaves the Cathedral, two plainclothes policemen are already waiting for him; they take him to an abandoned building site and dynamite him. In the Welles version, the reason K. is killed is therefore the exact opposite of the reason implied in the novel-he presents a threat to the power the moment he unmasks, "sees through," the fiction upon which the social link of the existing power structure is founded.

Keywords

Civil Rights, Communications Law, Comparative and Foreign Law, Violence, Crimes Against the Person, Anthropology, Social Studies, Information Privacy, Land Use, State and Local Government Law

Disciplines

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Communications Law | Comparative and Foreign Law | Land Use Law | Law | Science and Technology Law | State and Local Government Law

Recommended Citation

Slavoj Zizek, Ideology between Fiction and Fantasy, 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1511 (1995).
Available at: https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/clr/vol16/iss5/3