Romania 4/4: Nicolae and Elena Bequeath their Bodies to Television

Libération, 4 Apr 1990

Fourth and last text of the Romania series. 

Nicolae and Elena Bequeath their Bodies to Television

While we might fault Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu for having ruled Romania so poorly when they were alive, we can only congratulate their corpses for appearing so frequently – and with such success – on television. Monday night they astounded us once again with the chilly hauteur of seasoned professionals, turning up their noses at the pale extras who shot them all over again. 

In the same way, if we might fault television for having kept us so poorly informed about the Ceaușescus during their rule, we can only congratulate it for giving their corpses the opportunity to debut on the global market of emotion. Deader and deader, more riddled with bullets, bloated and stained, the terrible couple seemed poised to become the most underpaid extras in television history. Fortunately, some people have stepped in at last (Sulitzer!) to demand a cut and restore things back to normal, meaning to a normal level of squalor.  

How did we reach this point? This is what has been thoroughly discussed at many conferences (the most recent one in Valence, Drôme) devoted to how Romania and Television ended up manipulating one another. This raises at least three questions. Why did the Romanians make such a mess of the symbolic gestures that should have allowed them to turn the page on Ceaușescu without too much damage? To what extent might this failure have been worsened by the morbid workings of Western television stations? Is it not futile to expect that television can achieve any kind of symbolic effectiveness?  

We can begin to answer the first question. Accustomed to lying for bad or wrong causes, the Romanians didn’t imagine that anyone would mind very much if they laid the news on a bit thick the day their cause became a just one. Hence the sham summary trial and the Timisoara mass grave hastily presented to foreign journalists. The cost of this operation: high. Forced to retract the mass grave and finish the trial, the Romanians not only gave the impression of having missed the “unique televisual act” of their revolution, but instead offered a macabre soap opera, a sloppy production, full of gaps and thick with hidden truths and ulterior motives. The exemplary nature of the freeze frame on the Ceaușescus’ fall had been too quickly glossed over; like a revenant, the video phantom of that image continues to haunt us. This is a genuine failure.  

The second question can be answered as well. And all the better, since our television is known to us and obeys a regime of truth specific unto itself. A strict regime that we can break down as follows. 1) There is no other truth on television than the live image. 2) The only live image worth anything – at a push – is death. 3) The only proof of death is the possibility of producing a corpse*. In this sense, the perpetual return of the Ceaușescu corpses to the screen is the ultimate event, and there was no genuine interest when commentators Monday evening (poor Cotta!) pretended to find value in the long version of the trial beyond pure voyeurism.  

The third question, by contrast, is so serious that it demands extreme caution. If a symbolic act is one that emphasises duration and sets the time for a group of individuals who thereby achieve a common recognition of being in the same situation, then television struggles, now, in the past and in the future, to create such acts. Paradoxically, its very omnipresence renders it powerless. Being global and continuous, it no longer stresses anything. Overworked and easy to ignore (remote control in hand), it knows no catharsis. Stripped of any off-screen, it also lacks an Other. Hence the fearsome perversity of its effects. An event that would have passed as “symbolic” just yesterday (let’s say the Pope’s visit) becomes pure parody in the great deadpan tradition of late Bunuel films. Conversely, what would have been a product of raw “realism” just yesterday (let’s say the execution of the Ceaușescus) becomes, once televised, the frenzied simulation of a symbolic act that has not “taken hold”. 

Today, this frenzy can be felt everywhere, especially on television. Let’s return to the Ceaușescus: the fury of the victim-spouses, the stunned fury of the executioners, the incompetent fury of commentators, the obscene fury of audience ratings, the virtuous fury of those feeling manipulated. What is this fury? Isn’t it the fury born of definitive disappointment, the fury well known to the deviant who, condemned to endlessly replay the same film, forever unable to see or capture everything of the decisive moment that obsessed him (small or large death), knows himself doomed to invariably stumble over the refuse of his jouissance and the remains of his fantasy: a stupid body after sex (a sad animal) or an obtuse corpse after the burst. One more step and he will stumble over what he is already stumbling on. It is precisely this attempt to inscribe the symbolic into the real and to expect god knows what unobtainable truth from the bloodiest acts that led once to fascism. How could we be certain that the desire for such acts isn’t returning today? 

For the more we abandon interpreting the world, the more we turn against the bodies that populate it. The body is not the prop of an individual's history but the scorned refusal of a dream. The less we understand Lebanon, the more Lebanese corpses become filmable. The more opaque Romania becomes, the more the Ceaușescu corpses are back in service. This is humanity’s phobia about its own image; this is this tautology gone wrong which television has chosen to embrace. For worse rather than for better.  

This phobia is the only possible explanation for the contorted rage with which moralists of every stripe attacked the program by Karlin and Lainé – L’Amour  en France – who are guilty only in bringing within reach of the average TV viewer the human interest of the average guinea pig – you and me. It is urgent – lest matters worsen – that, with these beings and things now within our grasp, so close, obscene and threatening by virtue of their availability, we begin to learn to do something other than count the bullets striking their bodies.   

It is well known that cinema often serves as the displaced conscience of those without conscience, namely the television clergy (which, if it has nothing else, has a price: Guillaume Durand’s thoughts, for example, cost seven million centimes an hour, for those interested). Thus a film coming soon – the new “last Fellini” – says, in its own equally frenzied way, two or three things about the disaster that may be threatening us. What is The Voice of the Moon about? As always with Fellini, many incomplete events culminate in an one all too final. One day, in a small Italian town, workers manage to capture the very symbol of what is remote: the Moon. So the Moon is on earth, a huge, pallid disc of light, a prisoner amid gawkers, dignitaries and onlookers. First they look at the Moon and then they talk to it, asking it for explanations, the meaning of life, things like that. Since the foolish Moon stays silent, some hothead fires on it and you see a little black hole on the moon’s left side. A disaster.  

Fellini has long been describing the world we inhabit, a world where the object of desire is present even before the desire itself arises, a world where, as Virilio says in his splendid new work (Polar Inertia): “From now on, everything happens without the need to go anywhere.” The moon that is shot at is like Mr and Mrs Ceaușescu: brought to us through a kind of availability that is at first marvelous, then unexpected, then astonishing, then disturbing, then panic-inducing, then bent on every outrage.  

How are we to reinvent distance?  

* Is there really a difference between this macabre Romanian and the subsequent surgical Iraqi? They are rather two external edges of the world of images. On one side, gore, relentless action on the bodies; on the other, video erasure of the same bodies. Two ways to put an end to what resists.  

First published in Libération on 26 April 1990. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Cinéma, télévision, information, Aléas éditions, 1991.