Never has marketing ideology been so clearly dissected in the guise of cinema as in Žižek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” using examples such as, most notably, Carpenter’s “They Live”. It’s no wonder that cinema itself is able to give us such an accurate description of the “modern predicament”, as Žižek often calls it – isn’t cinema the ultimate point at which art and marketing converge offering us an easier way of enjoying without “ideology glasses”? Marketing schemes and various subliminal stimuli they use have been examined for decades, phenomena such as the “Marlboro Man” are almost common-knowledge and, as such, quickly lose their charm – something new must be implemented, while not changing the formula. This something is product placement, an advertisement that escapes even the cynical attitude of the modern viewer and indulges him in the same pleasure that the “Marlboro Man” offers, but through a relatable film character. Only under this veil is the subject finally able to conceive his fantasies freely, while not having to obfuscate them due to cynical realization. What Žižek’s masterpiece conveniently evades or rather presupposes is the big Other in marketing, or more precisely the question of the lack of the big Other in it – can we even think advertisements without a symbolic totality already depicted in their essence? Becker’s 2003 film “Goodbye, Lenin!” might give us an answer.

A movie set right between DDR’s (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) 40th birthday and the fall of the Berlin Wall provides a perfect setting for the examination of both socialist and capitalist marketing. “Goodbye, Lenin” needs to be backtracked a little in order to understand the importance of marketing in it, without this we risk missing the, maybe even unintended, Lacanian point of the film. The narrator guiding us through is Alex Kerner, and right before his narration jumps to 1989 he gives a brief insight into his life 11 years earlier, when his father escaped to West Germany abandoning the family for a mistress. This was a shattering blow for his mother Christiane after which she ends up in a hospital, unable to speak for months. Upon returning to her children she becomes a full-fledged socialist and devotes her life to the Party’s cause tirelessly working for the people. This lack of husband for her and father for Alex creates an obvious gap in their life, nothing could have been the same after her return from hospitalization and this gap could only have been sutured with a strong devotion to an inanimate object – in this case, the devotion to the Party. Motivated by her husband’s lack of dignity and integrity, she becomes the embodiment of these socialist virtues and raises her children in the same spiteful manner towards the West. After depicting this crucial shift from the symbolic of the Father to the symbolic of the Party, Alex continues the narrative.

During an anti-government march right after the 40th anniversary Alex, now a fierce, cynical anti-socialist, and Christiane find themselves on different sides of the protest. Alex is arrested among a dozen protesters while his mother watches from the opposite end of the crossroad, ultimately collapsing and suffering a heart attack. After being hospitalized again she falls into a coma, only to wake up eight months later completely oblivious to what has been going on around her. At this point Alex is faced with an impasse – if his mother finds out that the Wall fell there’s a chance of a second heart attack, but if she stays in hospital she will inevitably find out. Beneath this, an ultimate Lacanian impasse is hidden, one that Alex cannot afford to accept – if his mother finds out that the Wall fell, the symbolic Wall of the Party keeping their family together will fall as well, causing a much worse outcome. This is precisely why, for Alex much more than Christiane, the Wall, as it is conceived in their symbolic, must never fall like in reality, it must never crumble – they must never touch the void. This void of acceptance for Alex is what must be avoided at all costs, whether it is his mother’s illness or any other reason – the socialist veil must not be removed. For him, however, it is not a simple point of superficial realization, he is ultimately fully conscious and even indulges into Western lifestyle, but rather a realization through the gaze of his mother which was not present while she was in a coma. Right after she wakes, it is as if Alex takes over the whole burden of keeping the symbolic intact and forgets about his cynicism from the beginning – he even reproaches a doctor for the absence of the previous doctor, similar to how Christiane reproached her home-wrecking husband (lack of integrity, dignity etc.)

Therefore, everything from their apartment – the furniture, amenities etc. – even the food they eat must go back a year in time and pretend as if nothing had happened. This arduous task becomes an object of devotion for Alex, similar to his hospital visits during his mother’s unconsciousness, finding the right kind of brine, pickles and coffee takes a religious-like form. Mocca Fix Gold is the first thing he thinks of while entering his future apartment – the power of cheap socialist coffee turns into the power of the madeleine from Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”. However, between these two lies a fundamental symbolic difference which cannot be overlooked – the madeleine already contains, in its essence, the presence of the Other to which it is directly tied to (aunt Léonie), while Mocca Fix Gold is characterized precisely by a lack of the Other, the coldness of a cheap commodity. Even though there once certainly was an Other associated with this brand, this Other was purely external and the brand did not yet become an embodiment of it.

After a few weeks and Alex’s numerous strenuous attempts of recreating a genuine socialist cuisine – asking neighbors, helplessly hitting up empty supermarkets, even rummaging through garbage bins (in a way fulfilling Žižek’s famous example of the “trash can of ideology”) – Christiane asks for a TV to be brought into her room. The movie realized that mere socialist commodities do not provide a tangible enough link to the socialist big Other, and facing Alex with yet another beautiful impasse poses a dividing difference – this could not have happened in capitalism – why?

Here, it is worth quoting a rather complex paragraph from Žižek:

It is the same for all so-called ‘mass-media symbols’ of America – Coca-Cola, for example: the point is not that Coca-Cola ‘connotes’ a certain ideological experience-vision of America (the freshness of its sharp, cold taste, and so on); the point is that this vision of America itself achieves its identity by identifying itself with the signifier ‘Coke’ – ‘America, this is Coke!’ could be the wording of an imbecile publicity device. The crucial point to grasp is that this device – ‘America [the ideological vision of a land in all its diversity], this is Coke [this signifier]!’ – could not be inverted as ‘Coke [this signifier], this is [this means] America’ The only possible answer to the question ‘What is Coke?’ is already given in the advertisements: it is the impersonal ‘it’ (‘Coke, this is it’) – ‘the real thing’, the unattainable X, the object-cause of desire.[1]

Only because of this, because America achieves its identity by identifying itself with the signifier ‘Coke’, do the people of America identify themselves with the signifier ‘Coke’, ‘Marlboro’ etc. This impersonal manner of capitalism single-handedly allows people to identify with the brand itself, with a big Other already contained in it. And Christiane desires a TV specifically in order to maintain the big Other, the same big Other that could not have been maintained relying purely on socialist branding. One can easily imagine such a situation in the US, only without the television – American food and produce would be suffice.

Towards the end of the film, Christiane admits that she has been covering up a secret all along – her husband did not really have a mistress in the West, his migration was a planned one and she was fully aware of it. The plan was to move with the children a few months later when the papers would have been ready, but this never happened – migrations to the West were under strict surveillance and it was impossible for whole families to travel. As adding fuel to the fire she reveals that his father wrote to him continuously for years, and then suffers another heart attack. Alex rushes off and is finally reunited with his father – the symbolic is, in a way, restored. It’s no surprise that his first reaction when Christiane and her husband meet is to finally abolish the myth of DDR – the Party is no longer needed, as the symbolic of the home-wrecking father turned out not to be true and the regular symbolic of the Father is reconstructed. In the last news segment Alex creates for his mother’s gaze he employs a Sigmund Jähn lookalike to announce the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of borders. Once again, the film reminds us that in socialism proper there must exist a big Other in the flesh, that mere words and signifying brands amount to nothing.

My thesis is, however, not only that socialist and capitalist advertisements are fundamentally different, but that they are rather inherently identical. So, to repeat myself and hopefully answer my first question by posing another – can we even think advertisements without a symbolic totality already depicted in their essence – of course, do we ever do anything but that? Our predicament is not enslavement to branding and its symbolism, it is the opposite – our enslavement to a lack thereof. Žižek’s Lacan offers a succinct definition of this in his il n’y a pas de grand Autre. If there has ever been a negative trait of capitalist marketing it is this one – it obfuscates the lack of the Other and poses a vivid, palpable apparition in its branding.



[1] Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. 1989., p.106