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A couple of years ago we were all horrified by the news of what the Austrian Josef Fritzl was doing to his daughters who were for decades held in the basement of his house and repeatedly raped. A parallel imposes itself between the Fritzl family and the von Trapp family immortalized in The Sound of Music: another family living in their secluded castle, under the father’s benevolent military authority which protects them from the evil Nazi outside, with generations strangely mixed (the Sister Maria, like Elisabeth, a generation between father and children…)

The aspect of kitsch is relevant here: The Sound of Music is the ultimate kitsch phenomenon, and what Fritzl created in his basement also displays features of a kitsch family life realized: the happy family getting ready for diner, with the father watching TV with children while mother is preparing the food… However, one should not forget that the kitsch imagery we are dealing with here are not Austrian but belong to Hollywood and, more generally, Western popular culture: Austria in The Sound of Music is not the Austrian’s Austria, but the mythic Hollywood image of Austria – the paradox is here that it is as if, in the last decades, Austrians themselves started to “play Austrians,” i.e., identified with the Hollywood image of their own country.

This parallel can be extended to include the Fritzl-version of some of the most famous scenes from The Sound of Music. One can imagine the frightened children gathered around mother Elisabeth, in fear of the storm of the forthcoming father’s arrival, and mother calming them down by a song about some of “some of their favorite things” they should focus their minds on, from the toys brought by father to their most popular TV show… Or what about an upstairs reception in the Fritzl villa to which the underground children were exceptionally invited, and then, when the time for bed comes, the children performing for the assembled guests the obscene song “Aufwiedersehen, Goodbye” and departing one after the other… Really, in the Fritzl house, the basement, if not the hills, was alive with the sound of music.

Embarrassing intimate fantasies

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Ridiculous as The Sound of Music is as one of the worst cases of Hollywood kitsch, one should take very seriously the sacred intensity of the universe of the film, without which its extraordinary success cannot be accounted for: the power of the film resides in its obscenely-direct staging of embarrassing intimate fantasies. The film’s narrative turns around resolving the problem stated by the nuns’ chorus in the introductory scene: “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” The proposed solution is the one mentioned by Freud in an anecdote: “Penis normalis, zwei mal taeglich…” Recall what is arguably the most powerful scene of The Sound of Music: after Maria escapes from the von Trapp family back to the monastery, unable to deal with her sexual attraction towards Baron von Trapp, she cannot find peace there, since she is still longing for the Baron; in a memorable scene, the Mother Superior summons her and advises her to return to the von Trapp family and try to sort out her relationship with the Baron. She delivers this message in a weird song “Climb every mountain!”, whose surprising motif is: Do it! Take the risk and try everything your heart wants! Do not allow petty considerations to stand in your way!

Hermeneutics of the uncanny: the philosopher Slavoj Zizek Quelle: Getty Images/sc

The uncanny power of this scene resides in its unexpected display of the spectacle of desire, which renders the scene literally embarrassing: the very person whom one would expect to preach abstinence and renunciation turns out to be the agent of the fidelity to one’s desire. (Years ago, an ironic review aptly characterized The Sound of Music as a movie about a stupid nun who would be allowed to lead her happy monastic life if her Mother Superiour were not to invite her to her room and start to shout at her hysterically about the need to climb every mountain…) Significantly, when The Sound of Music was shown in (still Socialist) Yugoslavia in the late 1960s, THIS scene – the three minutes of this song - was the only part of the film which was censored (cut out).

The anonymous Socialist censor thereby displayed his profound sense for the truly dangerous power of Catholic ideology: far from being the religion of sacrifice, of renunciation to earthly pleasures (in contrast to the pagan affirmation of the life of passions), Christianity offers a devious stratagem to indulge in our desires WITHOUT HAVING TO PAY THE PRICE FOR THEM, to enjoy life without the fear of decay and debilitating pain awaiting us at the end of the day. In other words, Mother Superior effectively is a superego figure, but in Lacan’s sense, for whom the true superego injunction is “Enjoy!”. One can well imagine, along these lines, Josef Fritzl visiting his priest, confessing to him his passionate desire to imprison his daughter and rape her, to what the priest answers: “Climb every mountain…” (Or, as a matter of fact – literally, much closer to facts -, a young priest confessing to his superior his pedophiliac lust, to which he gets as the reply the same “Climb every mountain”…)

Father and children are reunited

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The key fantasmatic scene of the film is the one after the children and Maria return from their trip to Salzburg, dirty and wet; the angry baron first plays the strict disciplinarian father, coldly dismissing them and reprimanding Maria; when, however, he thereafter returns to the house and hears them singing in chorus “The hills are live…”, he immediately breaks down and shows his true gentle nature: he starts to hum silently the song and then joins them singing – after the song, they all embrace, father and children are reunited.

Father’s ridiculously theatrical disciplinarian rituals and orders thus appear what they are: a mask of its very opposite, a soft and gentle heart… So what has this to do with Fritzl? Wasn’t Fritzl a fanatical-terrorizing disciplinarian with no soft spot in the heart? This, exactly, is not true: Fritzl’s power was used to enforce his heart’s dream, he was not a cold disciplinarian, but, precisely, the one who was too much “alive with music” and wanted to directly realize his dream in a private space of his own.

In the last years of the Communist regime in Romania, Nicolae Ceaucescu was asked by a foreign journalist how does he justify the constraints on foreign travel imposed to Romanian citizens – is this not a violation of their human rights? Ceaucescu answered that these constraints are here to protect an even higher and more important human right, the right to have a safe home, which would have been threatened by too much free travel… was he not reasoning here like Fritzl, who also protected his children’s “more fundamental” rights to a safe home, where they will be protected from the dangers of the outside world?

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Or, to use Peter Sloterdijk’s terms, Fritzl protected his children’s rights to live in a safe self-enclosed sphere – while, of course, reserving to himself the right to transgress the barrier all the time, up to visiting the Thai sex tourist places, the very embodiment of the danger he wanted his children protected from. Remember that Ceaucescu also perceived himself as a caring paternal authority, the father protecting his nation from the foreign decadence – as in all authoritarian regimes, the basic relationship between the ruler and his subject was also the one of unconditional love. Furthermore, in his care for his own house, the city of Bucharest, Ceaucescu made a proposal which strangely recalls the architecture of Fritzl’s house: in order to solve the problem of the polluted river which runs through Bucharest, he wanted to dig beneath the existing river bed another wide channel beneath the earth in which all the dirt will be directed, so that there would have been two rivers, the deep one with all the pollution, and the surface one for the happy citizens to enjoy it…

„Mother! I can't live without Mother!“

This brings us finally to North Korea where, on August 19 and 20, Laibach will give a concert that will include their version of some songs from The Sound of Music. Is North Korea also not something like a Fritzl-land? Or is it more a country in which a figure like mother superior from Sound of Music directly holds power? To grasp the special ideological status of North Korea, one should not shirk from mentioning the mythical Shangri-la from James Hilton's The Lost Horizon, an isolated valley in Tibet where people live happy modest lives totally isolated from the corrupted global civilization and under the benevolent rule of an educated elite: North Korea is the closest we get today to Shangri-la – in what sense?

Here are the words of North Korea’s most popular political song: “Ah, Korean Workers' Party, at whose breast only / My life begins and ends / Be I buried in the ground or strewn to the wind / I remain your son, and again return to your breast! / Entrusting my body to your affectionate gaze, / Your loving outstretched hand, / I cry out forever in the voice of a child, / Mother! I can't live without Mother!” This is what the excessive mourning after Kim’s death signals: “I can't live without Mother!” As a further proof, here are the two entries (“mother” and “father”) from a North Korean Dictionary of the Korean language published in 1964:

“MOTHER: 1) The woman who has given birth to one: Father and mother; a mother’s love. A mother’s benevolence is higher than a mountain, deeper than the ocean. Also used in the sense of “a woman who has a child”: What all mothers anxiously want is for their children to grow up healthy and become magnificent red builders. 2) A respectful term for someone of an age similar to one’s own mother: Comrade Platoon Leader called Dŏngmani’s mother “mother” and always helped her in her work. 3) A metaphor for being loving, looking after everything, and worrying about others: Party officials must become mothers who ceaselessly love and teach the Party rank and file, and become standard-bearers at the forefront of activities. In other words, someone in charge of lodgings has to become a mother to the boarders. This means looking carefully after everything: whether someone is cold or sick, how they are eating, and so on. 4) A metaphor for the source from which something originates: The Party is the great mother of everything new. Necessity is the mother of invention.

FATHER: the husband of one’s birth mother.”

The leader was hermaphroditic

(Mimogrede, kaj pa če oče ni soprog matere?) Maybe that’s why, till the third Kim, the leader’s wife was not mentioned in public: the Leader was hermaphroditic with the dominance of the feminine features. This is why the feminized features clearly discernible in the official portraits of the two Kim’s are not accidental – to quote B.R.Myers:

“Kim /Il Sung/ was more a mother to his people than a stern Confucian patriarch: he is still shown as soft-cheeked and solicitous, holding weeping adults to his expansive bosom, bending down to tie a young soldier's bootlaces, or letting giddy children clamber over him. The tradition continues under Kim Jong Il, who has been called ‘more of a mother than all the mothers in the world.’ His military-first policy may come with the title of general, but reports of his endless tour of army bases focus squarely on his fussy concern for the troops' health and comfort. The international ridicule of his appearance is thus as unfair as it is tedious. Anyone who has seen a crowd of Korean mothers waiting outside an examination hall will have no difficulty recognizing Kim's drab parka and drooping shoulders, or the long-suffering face under the pillow-swept perm: this is a mother with no time to think of herself.”

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Does North Korea then stand for something like the Indian Kali – the benevolent/murderous goddess - in power? One should nonetheless distinguish levels here: the superficial level of manly-military discourse with the Leader as “General,” with Juche idea of self-reliance, of humanity as a master of itself and its destiny, is sustained by a deeper level of the Leaders as a maternal protector - here is how Myers formulates the basic axiom of North Korean ideology: “The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.” Is this not a nice example of Lacan’s formula of paternal metaphor, of the Name-of-the-Father as a metaphoric substitute for the desire of the mother? The Name-of-the-Father (Leader/General) and, beneath it, the mother’s protective/destructive desire?

We should thus wish all the best to Laibach when they will perform for the big happy family headed by the well-caring Frau Fritzl! Part of their program already is »We will go to Mt Paektu«, a popular North Korean song about their sacred recently visited by Kim Yong-un, something like the Korean version of »Climb Every Mountain«!