to Three and Pray], and the remake Todeszug nach Yuma [Death-Train to Yuma]. 3:10 to Yuma tells the story of a poor farmer (called Evans) who, for $200 that he badly needs in order to save his cattle from drought, accepts a job escorting a bandit (Wade) with a high price on his head from the hotel where he is held to the train that will take him to prison in Yuma. What we have, of course, is a classic story of an ethical ordeal; throughout the film, it seems that the farmer himself is the one subjected to the ordeal, exposed as he is to temptations in the style of the (undeservedly) more famous High Noon. All those who have promised to help abandon him when they discover that the hotel is surrounded by the gang sworn to save their boss; the imprisoned bandit himself alternately threatens the farmer and tries to bribe him, and so on. The last scene, however, retrospectively changes our perception of the film totally: close by the train, which is already leaving the station, Wade and Evans find themselves face to face with the entire gang waiting for the right moment to shoot the farmer and thus free their boss.
At this tense moment, when the situation seems hopeless for Evans, Wade suddenly turns to him and says: “Trust me! Let’s jump together onto the wagon!” In short, the one really undergoing the ordeal was the bandit himself, the apparent agent of temptation: at the end, having been overcome by the farmer’s integrity, he sacrifices his own freedom for him.
In James Manigold’s 2007 remake, Evans’s adolescent son Will accompanies his father to help him on the mission; Evans’s bravery redeems him in the eyes of his son. At the last moment, when they reach the train, Wade’s gang guns down Evans; Wade is freed, but he turns his gun on his own gang members and then allows Will to put him onto the train . . . The (regressive, again) shift of accent with regard to the original is here double. First, the film shifts its focus from the duel concerning the test of moral endurance between Wade and Evans to the father–son relationship: the father fears appearing weak, so his entire effort is undertaken in order to assert his paternal authority in the eyes of his son—following the Oedipal formula, the ultimate way of doing so is to die and return as the Name, a symbolic authority, thereby enabling the son to assume his real place. Far from being the figure whose ethical integrity is tested, Wade is now reduced to the role of a “vanishing mediator” in the transference of paternal authority. There is one feature which may appear to contradict this analysis: is Wade’s change of heart not overemphasized in the remake—he not only helps Evans, he even turns his gun on his comrades and eliminates them? But the dimension of the ethical act pertaining to this change in the original is here nullified by its very overemphasis: what in the original is a momentary decision, an act of “something in me more than myself,” now becomes a fully conscious changing of sides which no longer transforms the subjective identity of the agent involved, and thereby loses its character as an act.9
Les non-dupes errent
When even products of an allegedly “liberal” Hollywood display the most blatant ideological regression, is any further proof required that ideology is alive and kicking in our post-ideological world? It should not surprise us, then, to discover ideology at its purest in what may appear to be products of Hollywood at its most innocent: the big blockbuster cartoons.
“The truth has the structure of a fiction”—is there a better exemplification of this thesis than those cartoons, in which the truth about the existing social order is rendered in such a direct way that it would never be allowed in narrative cinema with “real” actors? Recall the image of society we get from violent cartoons in which animals fight: the ruthless struggle for survival, brutal traps and attacks, the exploitation of others . . . if the same story were to be told in a feature film with “real” actors, it would undoubtedly be either censored or dismissed as ridiculously negative. Kung Fu Panda (2008, John Stevenson and Mark Osborne), the recent Dreamworks animated hit, is ideology at its most embarrassingly pure. Here is the story: Po is a panda who works in a noodle restaurant owned by his goose father Ping, in the Valley of Peace in China. He is a kung fu fanatic with secret dreams of becoming a great master in the discipline; his weight and clumsiness, however, seem to make this goal unattainable. Ping hopes instead that Po will one day take over the restaurant, and waits for the perfect opportunity to disclose the secret ingredient of his family’s noodle recipe. The tortoise Master Oogway, the spiritual leader of the Valley, has a premonition that the evil leopard warrior Tai Lung—a former student of his own protégé, the red panda Master Shifu—will escape from prison and return to threaten the Valley of Peace. Oogway orders a formal ceremony to choose the mighty Dragon Warrior who will be capable of defeating Tai Lung. Po arrives too late and finds himself locked outside the walled palace square. In a last-ditch attempt to get in, he ties several fireworks to a chair and ignites them, which sends him crashing into the center of the arena. Inspired by this sudden appearance, to everyone’s shock the old master tortoise designates Po the Dragon Warrior. Meanwhile, Tai Lung escapes from prison; upon learning of this, Po confesses to Shifu his deep self-loathing due to his obesity and his belief that he will never be a match for Tai Lung. Shifu is at a loss for a solution. The following morning, Shifu discovers that Po is capable of impressive physical feats when motivated by food. Shifu leads Po to the countryside for an intensive training regime in which Po is offered food as a reward for learning his lessons. Po excels. Shifu now decides he is ready to face the villain and gives him the sacred Dragon Scroll, which promises great power to the possessor. But when Po opens it, he finds nothing but a blank reflective surface. Both are stricken with despair at the scroll’s apparent worthlessness. Wandering alone in the city, Po meets his father, who tries to cheer him up by revealing the secret ingredient of the family’s noodle soup: nothing. Things become special, he explains, because people believe them to be special. Realizing that precisely this is the very point of the Dragon Scroll, Po rushes off to challenge Tai Lung. Despite Po’s skill, Tai Lung temporarily stuns him and takes the Dragon Scroll, but is unable to understand its symbolism. Po counter-attacks and defeats him in an explosion of light that ripples through the valley. The villagers, including Po’s father, hail Po as a hero. In the very last scene, Po rests on the floor with Shifu; after a few seconds, Po suggests that they get something to eat and Shifu agrees.
The first thing that strikes one about the film is a linguistic detail: the abundance of ironically tautological statements, from the trailer’s claim that the film is about “the legend of a legendary warrior,” to the father’s reference to the “special ingredient of my soup with special ingredient.” In the Lacanian “logic of the signifier,” tautology stands for the point at which, as Lacan put it, the signifier falls into its signified. Recall the old Polish anti-Communist joke: “Socialism is the synthesis of the highest achievements of all previous historical epochs: from tribal society, it took barbarism; from antiquity, it took slavery; from feudalism, it took relations of domination; from capitalism, it took exploitation; and from socialism, it took the name. . ..” Does the same not hold for the anti-Semitic image of the Jew? From the rich bankers, it took financial speculation; from capitalists, it took exploitation; from lawyers, it took legal trickery; from corrupted journalists, it took media manipulation; from the poor, it took indifference towards personal hygiene; from sexual libertines it took promiscuity; and from the Jews it took the name . . . Or take the shark in Spielberg’s Jaws: from the immigrants, it took their threat to small-town daily life; from natural catastrophes, it took their blind destructive rage; from big capital, it took the ravaging effects of an unknown cause on the daily lives of ordinary people; and from the shark it took its image . . . In all these cases, the “signifier falls into the signified” in the precise sense that the name is included in the object it designates.
What this means is that, to be a true anti-Semite, it is not enough to say that Jews are dirty, exploitative, manipulative, and so on: one has to add that they are dirty, exploiting, manipulative, etc., because they are Jews. What accounts for these visible positive properties is the mysterious je ne sais quoi which makes them Jews—this mysterious ingredient, “what is in a Jew more than a Jew” (or, in Kung Fu Panda, “what is in the soup more than the soup itself, more than its usual ingredients”), is what Lacan called the objet
