/lit/ - Literature

>>12375608
i mean ask yourself what's going on in this film. why is this such a smash hit? it's not even close to as good as it might have been. but it's out now, and it's popular now. i haven't seen this yet, so maybe i'm wrong in my following meme analysis: we'll see how these speculations hold up after viewing.

here is my meme hot take until then: it is because the symbiote is not a terrible description of how Desire actually works. the symbiote looks a pretty spectacularly Deleuzian creation, the Outside grafted onto Eddie Brock. but what makes Venom Venom is the fact that *they have a relationship.* the symbiote is all Desire in search of a master; and Brock is the master who is chosen, but he's not a master-figure himself, he's a man *suffering from his desires.* again, perhaps i'm way off on all of this. but it was a thing that was on my mind.

the reason i am bringing this up is because stories like these speak to the nature of the unconscious, and ultimately the afflictions caused by desires themselves, all of which are in the Buddha's wheelhouse. there would be no way to graft a Venom-symbiote onto Sun Wukong; Wukong already works this way. and what Wukong eventually receives, from the hand of the Buddha, is a *master to serve* - that is, the monk. and this only after a) several centuries underneath the Five Elements Mountain, and b) being forced to wear a crown that keeps him in line (and which later on becomes a symbol of his learning).

Christianity is *our* thing. we don't have anything like a Sun Wukong in the West, although i think Nietzsche wanted to get there. but Nietzsche's story is a disaster, and so too i think will be the attempts to discipline or otherwise harness his thinking in the name of either modes of socialism or postmodernity (which is to say much the same thing). Desire doesn't seek *pleasure,* it seeks *self-understanding* - this is why Zizek always says that the essence of desire itself, jouissance, is in fact an *unbearable pain.* and again, this is a reason to actually link this up, i think, with an ascetic practice, rather than to harness it to political militancy. desire is the Truth, in many ways, but we can't handle the Truth. and that is precisely what makes confessions (or cynicism, or irony, or the stammering of the Everyman) what they are: the sound of bullshit, how critique comes in the end to feed on critique, how holiness spirals are born, taboos, stigmas, maybe neo-Victorian puritanism, horror, the feelings about the groteseque, the strange fascination with it...

i know this doesn't make any sense, or not enough as it should. i'm just trying to work something out here. it's hard to explain. i don't actually know what i am saying, sometimes, which is exactly why i feel the need to say it. maybe you know what i mean, whoever you are.