Internalizing Ideologies

Our readings describe vast systems of consumption and production, but Taxidermia serves as a valuable counterpoint because it focuses so intently on the status of individuals within a macrocosmic backdrop. As Ana, Victoria and Sebnem have each already noted, the film does this by spectacularizing the processes through which prevailing ideologies of three distinct political regimes in Hungarian history manifest themselves directly through the bodies of its three male protagonists. I won’t reiterate their close readings here. Instead, I’ll focus on what strikes me as particularly noteworthy about the film’s politics:  the way that it uses a structure of genealogy to undo the ideological logics that it depicts. It seems significant to me that despite the fact that this story is a triptych, the three segments blend almost seamlessly into one another, eliding both the dramatic events that lead to historical change in Hungary and the periods of optimism that followed. The result is that all of these stories, more or less, come to the same result. Pálfi’s smooth transitions from one era to the next underscore the fact that although methods change, these political processes all seem to work toward the same end, namely creating a subject who willingly exploits and destroys himself in the service of fulfilling latent societal expectations.

Perhaps even more radically, this structure denaturalizes the ideologies that it depicts, showing that none of them is the end point that it purports to be. In the second segment we see a grotesque of the consumer-citizen figure that Couldry describes, and he’s still wheezing and farting in the film’s third segment. This concluding segment, which not incidentally concludes with a literal depiction of navel-gazing, is a crushing satire of late-capitalism, and I’m curious  how others interpret it. By situating Lajoska’s story in a lineage, both personal and political, the film gets outside of the current neoliberal mindset, critiquing our assumptions that our current political state is permanent. Here the film strikes me as schizophrenic, though, as it seems to want to state that capitalism is not the end of history, or even much of an improvement to what has come before, but it also ends by concluding its bloodline. Thoughts?