Humanistic film critics, who as a rule control the contours of mainstream cinematic 'analysis', locate the depth of contemporary cinema in the pure visibility of characters' psychic complexity. Two-dimensionality has always been an insult in criticism, though the prevalent discourse now takes three-dimensionality to refer solely to the ability of a character to undergo change in an outwardly obvious way - was Tobey Maguire's bathetic version of Spider-man not a horrific banalization of the Shakespearean mode of overhearing*, where the personality is not grasping (through crisis) at the unspeakable void but merely feeling the 'right' feelings in the 'right' order so that the narrative can close and the coupling can be consummated?
What is lost in this pop-humanism is the metonymy of the surface: the formal structure of the film's social space that opens onto a circulation of language and objects. In short, this is the Lacanian minimal distance between background and foreground (consider first, perhaps, the relationship established in a Rothko painting): one aspect of the frame's field centered on a traditional character development/movement and another on a quasi-social, excremental circulation of material. Thus, Strangers on a Train is ultimately the story of a man who lost his lighter, got it back, lost it again and got it back. Or Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame de..., which follows the eponymous jewelry set and its assumption of various contextual roles (not that they exhibit as much self-doubt as Tobey Maguire, obviously, but they exist at a distance from all other objects as the stain in the field or objet petit a).
The social-symbolic field of differential relations which finds its body in the irrational objective correlative of a lighter or a pair of earrings has found its body in a different location in American politics: on paper. Paul Ryan, the messiah of conservative policy wonks eager for reduced spending, is like the (theoretical) consciousness at the origin of the quantum wave function's collapse, issuing a budget out of the virtual abyss preceding materialization (which are, in other words, those conservative Ideas suspended in the primordial think tank). Those genuinely interested in politics now know nothing unless they follow the esoteric Rules of committee and chamber; that is, inevitably, where (nearly all) the action is in a representative democracy.
The Rules guarantee the orderly circulation of paper. That is, bills and riders and co-signatures. Of course, paper is an instrument of contraction: its function is to reduce a territory of thought into language by providing a canvas, which is itself a materialization somewhat akin to the action of Schelling's God (who broke out of the rotary motion of pre-cosmic drive through the pronunciation of the Word). Its sterile movement, which the good citizen watches, as a passive spectator, is the humiliating result of a non-radical system of democracy; it is the price we pay when we vote and, incidentally, sign our political power over to the Budgeteers.
It is quite hilarious that elections take on the social importance that they do, since participation is a sign not of activism but of its disavowed opposite: de-activism. Not everyone realizes that the 'Door Close' button in elevators is useless: pushing it (whether once or five times) never speeds up the process of the door's actual closure. It exists for a reason though, as a placebo, to assuage our fears of helplessness, to provide another pointless lever to push. And so the lever of the ballot box, pulled once in November, too provides little comfort when the only game in town is the tediousness of the budget process: first a conservative dream, then a clever compromise, then a hard-won victory, never anything new.
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*I do not set my life at a pin's fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself? (Hamlet, 1.4)
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