From Communism to Capitalism

Theoretical Framework: Ideological Discourse, Fantasy, Film, and Desire

This article investigates the changes undergone by the worker hero through two sets of Romanian films produced under different social, political, and economic conditions. The first set of films discussed was produced during communism, while the second set of films was produced immediately after the 1989 revolution and in the posttransition period. I am interested in the changing characteristics of the hero representing the worker, the specifics of his or her journey, the position of this hero within the story presented, and the degree of agency conferred to him or her. By comparatively analyzing these aspects of the films selected, we can understand the significant transformations in fantasy formations and the cynicism in the postrevolutionary period.

The main field of investigation in this article is film. Films are addressed as fantasy formations that may accomplish the following two tasks: cover or fill in the inconsistencies in an ideological discourse or expose the limits of an ideology. The films produced during communism generally were directed at covering the inconsistencies in the communist ideology. Films were greatly relied upon to accomplish this role within society, as valuable tools for domestication and control of the citizens. Katherine Verdery, following Skinner and Winckler, ¹ defines three strategies or modes of control as follows: remunerative (relying on material incentives) present in the second period analyzed in this research, coercive (relying on force), and normative (relying on moral imperatives, societal norms, or other ideological appeals).

During communism in Romania, the most relied upon strategy of control was the normative one. The state apparatus saw the function of art as indoctrination, and used it to provide clear answers to social questions, that in turn would guide social behavior. ² These social questions received direct, clear answers in the carefully structured fantasy diffused through the strictly controlled media. After the revolution, the films produced changed significantly in their presentation of the relationship between desire and fantasy. Films start to show desiring subjects that identify a certain object or ideal trusted to have the ability of satisfying desire. These ideals or objects usually exist outside Romanian society, but they are held and praised as ideals, only to be exposed later as frauds, unable to honor their promise and fill the lack of the subject. The films produced after the 1989 revolution make it a point to present the inconsistency of the social order, and the emptiness within the Other’s promise. The subject is provided no fantasy that would channel desire in a specific way.

The worker identity was structured differently in the two time frames addressed in this article. One of the main reasons for this difference in structure is the presence of distinct underlying ideological discourses, shaping Romanian society during these specific intervals of time. From a Lacanian point of view, ideological discourse is conceived as an articulation (a chain) of ideological elements around a point de capiton and a family of commonplaces (nodal points). As we know from Saussure, language is a system of difference. In this sense, linguistic identities are relational and as a result the totality of language is involved in each single act of signification. The identity of each element in a signifying system is constitutively split: on one hand, each difference expresses itself as a difference; on the other hand, each cancels itself as such by entering into a relation of equivalence with all the other differences in the system. It is only insofar as there is a radical impossibility of a system that actual systems (in plural) can exist. The systematicity of the system is a direct result of an exclusionary limit marked as an interruption, a radical impossibility or a breakdown of the process of signification. ³ Exclusion grounds the system by interrupting the differential logic and privileging the dimension of equivalence. In this sense, a system cannot signify itself in terms of any positive signified. ⁴

Furthermore, as all the means of representation are differential in nature, it is only if the signifiers empty themselves of their attachment to particular signifieds and assume the role of pure being of the system that such signification is possible. ⁵ Such empty signifiers exist because any system of signification is structured around an empty place (a constitutive lack, an impossible object, or the Real in Lacanian sense). The point de capiton as an empty signifier stands for this lack and as such is able to constitute the discursive center. It is a privileged element that gathers up a range of differential elements and binds them together into a discursive formation. The point de capiton is called to incarnate a function beyond its concreteness. It is “emptied” of its particular signification in order to represent fullness in general and to be able to articulate a large number of heterogeneous signifiers. ⁶ Because of this emptiness, the point de capiton becomes universal in its scope, or better put, it becomes a signifier of an absent universality, of a lack within the discourse’s core. The point de capiton has a structural role in the production of meaning, and as such it introduces a certain political element. ⁷ The structured totality resulting from this articulation is exactly what ideological discourse is. ⁸ The signified function of the point de capiton is not solely reduced to its discursive position. It is also supported by a whole fantasy construction. Fantasy comes to occupy the place of the lacking significance marking the nodal point around which the Other is structured. ⁹

In the case of Romania, we are dealing with two distinct ideological discourses. The first one present until 1989 has as its structuring base a family of commonplaces composed of various Marxist concepts such as communism, class, capital, labor, labor power, values, production, and imperialism. ¹⁰ The point de capiton structuring the ideological discourse is the state. This specific point de capiton reorients the Marxist commonplaces into production of new meaning distinct from the meaning put forward by Marxian theory. For example, communism gains new meaning as it is constructed and understood as statism, while the dialectical reasoning of Marxian theory is replaced with a deterministic one that characterizes the tightly centralized planning development strategy. ¹¹ As a “planned economy” rationally made decisions were thought to be guiding society. This strategy relied on total mobilization of domestic resources in order to achieve rapid accumulation and economic growth. ¹² Since socialist planning was decided at the level of the state, it was equating planners’ interest with the national interest. ¹³

Nationalism ¹⁴ had a significant position within the family of commonplaces of the ideological discourse. Nationalism provided a powerful set of symbols that could mobilize mass support for the national state. The nationalistic communism variant, along with the commitment to industrial development, became fundamental ideological elements. ¹⁵ An additional one was Romania’s “cult of labor” (cultul muncii) which was at the time one of the most elaborated regimes of worker symbolism ¹⁶ in the socialist world. The cult of labor encouraged workers to identify their interests with those of the state by emphasizing worker’s roles in developing the Romanian state. ¹⁷ The communist mythical approach stressed heavy industries capable of rapidly transforming economic structures, raising a large working class out of almost nothing. ¹⁸

The 1989 revolution brought forward a new ideological discourse structured by a new point de capiton and new commonplaces. The new ideological discourse’s family of commonplaces includes the separate self-interested individual, commodities, technology, prices, money, income, savings, and investments. The new point de capiton is the market. While the market is defined as a place where individuals come with their property to sell and/or buy, for the purpose of maximizing their satisfaction, the new ideological discourse empties the signifier market of its particular signification in order to represent fullness in general. Free market is posited as an incarnation of the universality of the modern capitalist society and represents the systematicity of the capitalist system. The market is thought to be an unbiased mechanism for resource distribution that brings genuine social justice to the economic interactions of individuals. ¹⁹ The economy is thought of as the aggregate end product of individuals maximizing their material self-interests, ²⁰ while society is the collection of individuals within it. Individual wants, thoughts, and deeds combine to make society what it is. ²¹

The strong legitimacy of the new ideological discourse in Romania was rendered by the fact that the anticommunist opposition throughout the 1980s had their thinking shaped by individualistic and antibureaucratic theories of Hayekian ²² neoliberalism. In this way, the new Romanian political leaders and policy makers were predisposed to thinking of post-socialism as a process of economic convergence toward a natural market economy. Transition to capitalism and democracy was interpreted to be part of an inexorable global developmental continuum. The institutions, values, and practices of Western political economy were assumed to be universal, superior, and hence the only feasible alternative. ²³

In the Romanian ideological discourse prior to the 1989 revolution, the worker occupies a central position among the family of commonplaces, creating a powerful identity for workers. The new ideological discourse constituted after 1989 shifts the focus from work and the worker toward various aspects of the market. Since work in the post-1989 discourse is seen as labor and is no longer considered to represent the main structuring process of the society, the concept of worker loses the relevance it held during socialism. The economic order brings about the privatization of the person that Elizabeth Dunn sees as a process that implies declining respect for labor collectivities and relationships which are replaced by commodified labor relationships. ²⁴ Workers come to understand that their value and the value of others now depend on their choices and practices as consumers, rather than their contribution to the production of value. ²⁵

I analyze the transformation of the worker identity from a Lacanian standpoint, which sees the subject no longer as a unified collection of thoughts and feelings, as in traditional psychology, but “de-centered” marked by an essential split. Lacan ²⁶ refers to the new concept of the subject as “lacking,” “fading,” “alienated,” marked by an essential “lack of being,” “split,” and possessed of an “empty center.” ²⁷ Lacan ²⁸ stresses that the split subject is formed within three registers that, he argues, are tangible or that flush in one another: real, imaginary, and symbolic. The imaginary register includes the field of fantasies and images. ²⁹ The symbolic register is concerned with the function of symbols and symbolic systems, including social and cultural symbolism and is the place of the Other. ³⁰ The Other (written with a capital O) represents the locus of truth and meaning, the source of authority. This type of authority is constructed in the name of the symbolic locus, a linguistic source that finds expression in the actual person that embodies this authority. ³¹ It is the locus where the signifying chain emerges and where the subject is constituted. ³² The third Lacanian register, the real designates that which is impossible to symbolize. ³³

For Lacan, explanation of the real is always in terms of the impossible, the real is that which is impossible to bear. ³⁴ Entering into language entails the loss of a primordial level of the real (pre-symbolic real). The symbolic order itself gives rise to a “second-order” real, which is characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relationships among the elements of the symbolic order itself. ³⁵ The real when experienced is best described as episodic interruptions into the other two registers, interruptions that are traumatic. ³⁶ We gain access to reality, which is mainly a symbolic construct, but the signified of the signifier “reality,” the real itself, is sacrificed forever. ³⁷ Fantasy is the mechanism that compensates for the lack of the symbolic. Through fantasy we attempt to repress this lack and make it bearable. It becomes a simulacrum of that which in the order of the signifier resists signification. ³⁸ On the other hand, fantasy formations could stage a scenario that “frames” instead of repressing the lack. It does so by emphasizing the link between desire and political activity, focusing on the oppressive societal conditions that generate the sense of dissatisfaction that is desire. Such fantasy formations develop a narrative form in which desire continues without fantasmatic resolution. It is never clear where one is supposed to direct desire, and, as a result, one’s desire cannot find any stability or security. In this way, such a scenario keeps desire alive and does not permit its resolution in fantasy. ³⁹ Of great importance for our analysis is the fact that the domain of fantasy does not belong to the individual level. As a construction that attempts to cover over the lack in the Other, fantasy belongs initially to the social world and is a key element in understanding the functioning of sociopolitical life. ⁴⁰ I argue, following the insight of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, that humans act as directed by desire.

According to Sigmund Freud, the nature of desire is unconscious and is related to representations, therefore, it belongs to the world of fantasy. Following Freud, Jacques Lacan argues that the subject’s desire is the desire for the Other’s desire. The subject wants to be wanted by the Other, that is, he or she experiences a desire for love and recognition within the social order. Desire is seen as unconscious and mute as well as impossible to satisfy. If desire is mute and cannot be articulated in language, it will always be the desire for something else, hence desire is unsatisfiable. ⁴¹ Channeling human desire is what determines whether a certain political system functions. In this sense, every political promise is supported by a reference to a lost state of harmony, unity, and fullness, a reference to a pre-symbolic real, ⁴² which most political projects aspire to bring back. Symbolization makes us believe that what is impossible was prohibited and thus can also be recaptured. The state of happiness, embodying jouissance, has to be posited as lost if our life in the socio-symbolic world is to have any meaning, as without it no desire for social and political identification would arise. ⁴³

Films Produced During Communism

Within Romanian communism, the individual’s desire is linked to the development of the industrializing socialist state. Satisfaction of desire in this case is realized through the power of the state. By being a part of the system, by becoming a worker hero, the individual shares the system’s power. In communist films, the workplace as the place of production is the main cinematic space, while the worker ideal represents the only way of accomplishing desire. The other roles that an individual might hold—parent, partner, friend, lover, and consumer—are all subordinated to the main role, that of a worker hero.

The films produced during communism can be read as a fantasy with significant masochistic aspects. The stories of the communist films analyzed follow one strict scenario, that is, being enacted in the workplace, they are an interaction between the worker acting as a passive ⁴⁴ subject and the state as the one having the ability to constrain freedom and request the sacrifice of individual’s desire. In all these scenarios, the worker renounces his or her function as subject of the drive and in doing so he or she apprehends his or her own satisfaction in and through the body of the object, in this case the body of the socialist state. The communist subject inverts the loci, the worker situates himself or herself in fiction as the object of the state’s desire. This is done by embracing the idea that the sacrifice of worker’s desires and freedom increases the power and pleasure of the state. The worker sees himself or herself as a subject within and through the body of the state, which is the place of the object. The worker experiences satisfaction of desire through the body of the state. ⁴⁵

The communist films in general start by introducing us to a subject who presents a certain lack. The lack might come from the fact that the hero just came out of prison and has great troubles integrating back into society, a situation specific to Ana and the Thief ⁴⁶ ; or that the subject is a young, very promising college graduate who desires immediately a career that would offer fame, a situation characteristic to the films Bucharest Identity Card, ⁴⁷ The Take-Off, ⁴⁸ and Destination Mahmudia ⁴⁹ ; from the fact that the hero has emigrated and is returning to a Romania that has changed into a society into which he or she cannot integrate, a situation present in Return to the First Love, ⁵⁰ Transient Love Stories, ⁵¹ or from the fact that the specifics of his or her work demand the hero to part from his or her family for months or years at a time, a situation that creates great tension within the family, a theme present in films such as Good Evening, Irina, ⁵² and Angela Keeps Going. ⁵³

The social order is placed in a contradictory position vis-à-vis a dissatisfied subject: on one hand, society depends on the dissatisfaction of the subjects in order to function, ⁵⁴ and on the other hand, dissatisfied subjects represent a barrier to social stability. Dissatisfied subjects are incipient revolutionary subjects, which is why fantasy is needed to assure and maintain a certain measure of trust in the social order. ⁵⁵ In this sense, it is necessary for the social order’s continuance that the subject is offered access to a form of fantasy that would enable hope of obtaining that certain object trusted and able to fill in the existing lack. Fantasy does not have the ability of satisfying desire, for the solution it offers is always illusory, but fantasy has the ability of enacting hope and trust into the possibility of encountering an object of satisfaction, and this same hope and trust is what allows the social order to retain its power. The subject believes that by following the path imposed or suggested by the social order, he or she will reach a point of satisfying desire.

The film hero in communism is a worker, in most cases, usually in his twenties or thirties. The identity of a worker is found at the center of the cinematic narratives, while the solutions delineated for covering the lack are work-related solutions. These solutions often strictly suggest integration into a working collective and perfecting working tasks. These are the solutions offered in general for any form of lack. They are constructed as universally valid and omnipotent in assuring pleasure and happiness, being well suited in solving personal problems, family problems, and friendship problems. As the main identity of a person is that of a worker, becoming a better worker ensures the subject a higher position within the social order and guarantees the smooth functioning of all other aspects of life.

This solution is strongly made evident in the film Ana and the Thief. ⁵⁶ The main character in this story is Mihai, a student in engineering studies who, while on vacation steals a car, drives without a license and gets into an accident. This action puts him in prison, from which he is liberated after a while, and then he’s hired by an industrial compound. His past imprisonment gives Mihai a bad reputation that creates all sorts of troubles at the workplace. This is the starting point of this film where we are introduced to a lacking subject who suffers because of his past actions. Having a compromised past he is not accepted by society and this appears to be the main source of his suffering. The film brings about a solution for gaining the acceptance of the Other. In this story, the Other is embodied by Mihai’s foreman who embraces the young man and brings him into his family. The key to the secret of the Other’s desire and recognition is hard honest, labor. The film’s narrative stresses that it is because of Mihai’s impressive working skills that the foreman invites Mihai for dinner at his home where he meets the foreman’s daughter Ana who is a doctor. Ana and Mihai fall in love and their love relationship leads to Ana’s pregnancy and Mihai’s marriage proposal to her. The action of the film takes place in the industrial compound where we witness the close collegial relations among the working men. These working relations extend beyond the space of work and affect the private life. For example, Mihai enters the private life of his foreman and Mihai’s colleague visits him at home when he is sick. The work rules have the power of structuring society at large and it is through work, we are told, that the subject can find the satisfaction of desire. Immersing oneself in work and totally embracing a worker’s identity would assure the smooth functioning of all aspects of life.

A solution to a subject’s lack that emphasizes fully accepting the identity of a worker is made clear in the film Bucharest Identity Card. ⁵⁷ The film’s narrative focuses on the Romanian policy of providing jobs for new university graduates from cities outside Romania’s capital Bucharest, and the intense desire of these new graduates to remain in Bucharest. The film’s main character is a young female student who in order to remain in Bucharest bribes a taxi driver to marry her to obtain a Bucharest Identity Card and through marriage be allowed to remain in that city. The marriage does not provide the necessary conditions for the young lady to get residency and a job in Bucharest, rather it turns comical, with the girl’s parents participating in the fake wedding with the taxi driver who is introduced as a doctor. As she cannot escape the path that the communist society designated for her, the young college graduate leaves Bucharest and accepts the work she was entrusted in a village where the taxi driver, who actually turns out to be a doctor who drives taxis part-time, follows her. The film’s message is that no illegal act can lead to the defeat of the state’s policies and that the only path to accomplishing desire is following the society’s rules even, when at a first glance, these rules seem to be the least appealing.

In a number of communist films the subject is not offered the satisfaction of desire. In these films, the subject is left with an unsatisfied longing. I am referring here to films that address the story of Romanian emigrants who, after a certain number of years, are returning with a great sense of lack to a Romania that has changed much meanwhile through rapid industrialization. In this specific situation, the lack of the emigrant subject is not satisfied, for he or she seems to have been stained in a certain way by the foreign places visited. Even though the subject strongly desires the embrace of the state and nation, the embrace appears empty at this point. This is a punishment for the emigrant who abandoned the nation and the state. The emigrant exists in a painfully acknowledged, perpetual lack, knowing that the only valid satisfaction for his or her desire must come from the nation and the socialist state, but in this situation the nation refuses (or is unable) to satisfy the subject.

Such a story is presented in the film Return to the First Love. ⁵⁸ The main character of this story Petre, a Romanian diplomat in Brazil, returns to Romania after several years spent outside the country. Upon his return, he finds a beautiful country that brings back memories. His former girlfriend Ana is a recently divorced doctor, whom Petre still loves very much. Together with Ana, Petre decides to take a trip to his home village in the mountains. The recently returned diplomat wants to restart a relationship with Ana. This attempt ends up in failure, for Petre finds it hard to reconnect to the places and people he abandoned years ago. His inability to continue the relationship with the woman he still loves is a metaphor for the impossibility of his reconnecting to his country and childhood places. Something has changed in Petre, he has been changed by the foreign place he lived in. The stain of otherness left on Petre permanently separates him from his nation and family.

Another source of dissatisfaction comes from family problems created by the intense program of work that takes the worker away from his family for months or years at a time. This is the story of Good Evening, Irina, ⁵⁹ which centers on the problems faced by a married couple going through difficult times because the husband works as an officer on a ship that takes voyages for months at a time, leaving the wife Irina without the company of her husband. This situation so affects Irina that she asks for a divorce when her husband Victor returns from one such voyage. The film’s story celebrates Irina’s reconciliation with her husband’s work commitments and her acceptance of her role as an honest wife who waits alone months at a time to share a few days with her husband.

The film’s story takes place mostly in the working environment, on the ship where all the male colleagues have known each other for many years, on different voyages, and relate to each other as an extended family. Victor’s identity is determined to a great extent by his work, by his duty to his colleagues, and he does not even for a moment question this duty nor thinks about giving it up in order to save his marriage with Irina. The story of the film places Irina on the ship when Victor is involved in dangerous repair underwater. Victor’s job importance is made clear to Irina and it seems to have determined her decision of continuing her difficult marriage. The film emphasizes the prevalence of respect for work and work duties that deserve the sacrifice of love. The woman understands that it is important to be near her husband in this sacrifice.

Films Produced after the Revolution

The capitalist ideological discourse needs to be supported by a fantasy scenario that directs desire not toward the production space but toward the market space and its pleasure-promising commodities. In such a fantasy scenario, the workplace loses its grip on humans’ desire, as pleasure is not expected to be reached through work. Labor in capitalist discourse is not viewed as a heroic act but is addressed as just a commodity exchanged for wages used to buy pleasure-promising objects on the market place. In films produced after the 1989 revolution, instead of encountering the specifics of the capitalist fantasy, we find a fantasy scenario in which the worker hero identifies the emptiness of the market place’s promise and acknowledges the impossibility of accomplishing desire.

This represents a radical change in the way fantasy addresses desire. There is no specific way in which the film is directing desire, there are no trusted solutions and no promised objects or plans that would fill the lack and bring pleasure. Fantasy is constructed in such a way that it bluntly exposes the underside of social authority (embodied by businessmen, foreign investors, and the West) and the inconsistencies within the new capitalist ideology. If an ideal or solution is presented in the film, that is done only to expose finally the emptiness of the ideal, the hidden part of it. In the films produced immediately after the revolution, the worker hero is still maintaining the central position in the film narrative. The films produced after the revolution belong to a generation of young Romanian directors who produced an impressive body of films that have consistently landed at the top of international critics’ polls and in the coveted top tier of film festivals from Cannes to New York. Critics and cinephiles call these films “The Romanian New Wave” and perceive them as a hotbed of fresh, expressive, and pertinent cinematic renewal.

These directors have a common and recognizable style, that is, long takes, hypernaturalism, and handheld camera. ⁶⁰ They make everything worthy of being the subject of a film (a kino-eye premise). Everything can be represented as is, in its momentary occurrence. ⁶¹ Tragedy, irony, and satire are their moral and aesthetic arsenal. ⁶² The films show the worker struggling to maintain his or her existence in a system that is radically changing. In contrast with the worker hero during communism who was predominantly young and lacking vices, we find now an older male who suffers from alcoholism, whose actions are less than heroic and who is not portrayed as triumphant but instead defeated, imprisoned, or even killed.

For example, in Maria, ⁶³ the worker hero Ion appears as a tragic character, a husband and father to a large family of seven children. He is constantly fired from unstable jobs because of the weak economy. His sense of frustration pushes the hero to the abuse of alcohol, an abuse that induces violent behavior toward his wife. Ion squanders on alcohol and gambling in a suburb tavern, the money saved to provide food for his children, while his whole family shelters inside a damp basement of a block of flats. In Maria, ⁶⁴ we see the worker hero as a dark character with his soul smashed by an unforgiving society. Similarly in Look Forward in Anger, ⁶⁵ the central character Stefan Ciugudeanu, a middle-aged engineer, becomes unemployed. The postrevolution political and economic shifts bring tragedy in Ciugudeanu’s family: the daughter prostitutes herself, the elder son ends up in prison, the youngest son becomes a thief, while Stefan Ciuguneanu is killed in a workers’ protest.

The films mentioned show that life after the revolution lacks a sense of balance, order, and morals. A clear portrayal of this situation is made in the Conjugal Bed, ⁶⁶ which focuses on the life of Vasile Potop, a movie theater manager who tries to find money for an abortion for his wife Carolina, because he cannot afford to raise one more child in addition to the two he already has. There is a grim atmosphere in both Potops family and the movie theater that Vasile manages. The cause of this atmosphere is a stringent lack of money. Vasile and Carolina Potop both see the new social order as causing their personal problems. They have passionate debates in which they take turns in blaming the economic and political system for their difficulties. There is an obvious sense of imbalance portrayed in the extreme mood swings and violence within the film. As the Romanian film critic Alexandru Serban writes, this was a general characteristic of the films produced in the ten years after the 1989 Revolution, in which people would shout, spit, and lash out in anger. ⁶⁷ Similarly, The Conjugal Bed, ⁶⁸ feelings, actions, and the language are over the top. Besides the shouting and aggressive language, the film shows extreme and absurd violence when Vasile puts a nail through his wife’s head. The Conjugal Bed ⁶⁹ makes visible the workings of the new point de capiton—the market—shown to be responsible for reshaping families, relationships, and society at large. It seems that genuine friendship and family relations are being displaced by predatory forms of exchange. ⁷⁰ The film accentuates the grotesque transformation of all aspects of life into commodities. Everything is for sale and can be acquired for a certain price: Potops’ unborn child, the love of Vasile’s mistress, and Potops’ home which is rented to serve as a setting for a pornographic film. The new values pervading the society are perceived as foreign as the worth of all new commodities are determined from outside of Romania. Potops’ child is to be sold in Western Europe, Vasile’s mistress plans to practice prostitution in Turkey, while his wife invests in a pornographic film to be distributed in France. The dark, hopeless atmosphere present throughout the film, marking characters’ thoughts and actions is directly attributed to the economic and political transformations specific to Romania of the 1990s. In this sense, the lack of the subject is attributed not to the individual but as inherent to the social order. ⁷¹

In a number of films, the place of the Other is taken by a certain social ideal, a venerated social identity that holds the secret of the desired object. The hero tries hard to emulate this ideal and to seek its recognition, only to find out in the end that the ideal had only appeared to hold the solution for addressing the subject’s lack. This situation is specific to films such as Stuff and Dough, ⁷² The Italian Girls, ⁷³ and West. ⁷⁴

In West, ⁷⁵ Cristian Mungiu addresses the Eastern European envision of the West as the dreamland that renders any sacrifice acceptable. ⁷⁶ The film brings together three life stories. The story of a young man Luci who finds it difficult to assure basic living conditions for himself and his lover Sorina, intersects both with the story of Mihaela, an abandoned bride whose mother tries to find her a Western husband, and with the story of Luci’s cousin who left Romania before the 1989 revolution and who recently passed away in Germany. The stories present the West as the one trusted to hold the secret of the characters’ happiness. Events taking place in Romania are seen as lacking in value and are quickly discarded in order to embrace an idealized life in the West. In this sense, Sorina leaves the man she loves to join a Frenchman who might offer her a more financially secure life, while Mihaela disavows her newly found feelings of love for Luci and leaves in search of happiness in Germany. The West fascinates, although its envoys to Romania are mostly ignoble characters disguised as charitable donors, disinterested helpers, or men-in-search-of-an-easy-bride. ⁷⁷ The West appears as an idealized embodiment of market economy, without concrete characteristics, representing instead a space where dreams could come true and desire could be fulfilled. For example, both Sorina and Mihaela choose to leave Romania for the West without knowing much about where exactly they would be going or what they would be doing. They only know what the West fantasy allows them to imagine, that they are leaving for a place where desires are to be fulfilled. The third story exposes bluntly the false belief in this fantasy. We find out that Luci’s cousin had a sad and empty life in Germany devoid of the imagined Western glamour. The only remnants after his death were objects that reminded him of Romania, objects he always kept by his side.

A significant number of films, including Asphalt Tango, ⁷⁸ Liviu’s Dream, ⁷⁹ The Fury, ⁸⁰ Francesca, ⁸¹ and Too Late, ⁸² show a grim picture of the workers’ lack of power in the capitalist system and their manipulation by an obscene Other and its Law. In Too Late, ⁸³ the narrative’s main theme is the investigation by the public prosecutor Dumitru Costea of a number of murders occurring in the mines during the years following the Romanian revolution. Dumitru Costea enters an underground world haunted by the fear of its own imminent death. Its death is dictated by the market, the point de capiton of the capitalist system. It is the market that decides that the coal has become scarce and hard to extract, rendering the mines unprofitable and making their closing necessary. Most of the film’s scenes portray a decaying world consisting of dark mine galleries full of rats and miners who mingle with the dirt in the darkness. ⁸⁴ There are numerous close-ups of soiled men’s faces who eat food tainted with dust and mud and of soiled naked bodies that lose their individuality as they blend into their underground surroundings. The language used is violent and so is the acting, there is an abundance of scenes in which men scream, use vulgar language, and brutally hit each other or the objects around them. These elements create a sense of imbalance, general hysteria, desperation, and the need to grasp any possible escape from their decaying world.

There are two planes portrayed in the film, namely, that of work and that of the market that differ in significant ways. While the work space is a decaying underground space, the market is striving. The workplace lost value and also did the worker as a human being and a social category. ⁸⁵ The workers find themselves uneasy in the market space because they are dissociated from the symbols of power specific to the capitalist system. For this reason, there seems to be no possibility for them to escape the decaying underground world and to live in the safe space that the new capitalist market creates. The film suggests that the only solution for the miners is to go deeper into the galleries and transform themselves into new beings that could survive in those austere conditions. The narrative identifies as the killer of the miners one worker who decided to remain in the underground, developed the ability to see in the dark, and was killing for food. In the film, this creature that the worker became is deemed the only perfect product created by the Romanian political system, the matrix or the prototype from which everything will follow.

Conclusion

This article has presented the transformations the Romanian worker hero underwent as constituted by and constitutive of the changing ideological discourse and the fantasy that supports it. In the prerevolution fantasy formations the worker hero represents the main social identity, and all other possible identities, such as that of a spouse, parent, or friend, were all seen as secondary. Desire was to be fulfilled through a perfect embodiment of the worker ideal. In the second part of the journey we are tracing, the worker ideal loses its once held symbolic position of power and it is dissociated from pleasure. The worker hero is depicted in a state of lack, without a possible solution for filling this lack. Displaying deep cynicism, the Romanian films produced after the revolution show the lack not belonging solely to the individual but instead as inherent to the social order.

It is important to pay attention to this fantasy shift that accompanies the reorganization of the discourse around a new point de capiton, as it could offer insight into emancipation possibilities at the moment in which a community is confronted with a traumatic event that is able to make evident social aspects hard to acknowledge in everyday life. ⁸⁶ The cynical depiction of human existence in films could be read as a result of cultural trauma or of an encounter with the real. The traumatic experiences I refer to are the rigidity of the communist social order combined with the sudden and rapid change in the ideological discourse. Coupled together these two events were experienced as traumatic, for they exposed society to the overbearing power of the Other, that prior to revolution held the ability to regulate all aspects of life, and to the Other’s lack and inconsistency, that at the 1989 revolution led to its demise in a matter of hours. ⁸⁷ The swift discourse change meant that familiar identities and ways of life lost effectiveness and were replaced with new ones that appeared alien. The symptoms of cultural trauma caused by transition are identified by Piotr Sztomka to be a sense of distrust, a bleak picture of the future, and political apathy, ⁸⁸ aspects that are abundantly present in the recently produced Romanian films. Piotr Sztomka also argues that traumatizing events could disrupt the universe of meaning as:

symbols start to mean something other than they normally do; values become valueless, or demand unrealizable goals; norms prescribe unfeasible actions; gestures and words signify something different from what they meant before; beliefs are refuted, faith undetermined, trust breached; charisma collapses, idols falls. ⁸⁹

In what follows, I propose two separate readings of the Romanian postrevolution cynical view of the world. The first reading sees cynicism as an attempt to see the world for what the world is and in this sense to keep a safe distance from its coercive powers and from its desire trap. It follows McGowan’s ⁹³ argument that cinema as fantasy formation besides covering up the gaps of ideology has the ability, through cynicism, for example, to stage a scenario that “frames” instead of repressing the lack. Because of the revolution’s blunt exposure of the Other’s lack, the subjects stop demanding the Other’s desire and recognition, becoming instead distrustful of the social prevailing norms and rules. This situation is specific to the Lacanian notion of traversing the fantasme and to that of an act. The crossing or traversing of the fantasme expresses the subject’s possibility to be aware of and to accept his or her fundamental fantasy without guilt feelings or fears. ⁹⁴ Once the fantasy is traversed someone is reinaugurated as a subject, an expression of the emancipatory element mentioned earlier. Acts differ from fantasy because they situates one outside the Other’s law, and for this reason it is appropriate to consider acts to be transgressive. ⁹⁵ The act does not articulate a demand—it is not a cry to the Other. The new subject follows the ethic of psychoanalysis formulated by Lacan as “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire.” Giving ground relative to one’s desire involves failing to accept the impossibility of ever accomplishing it. An ethical subject gives up its fantasy of accomplishing desire and its investment in public recognition, facing its existence alone and fully responsible. ⁹⁶

Films that are part of the Romanian New Wave present the desiring subject with no hope or direction of action and no means of channeling desire. These films are frustrating to watch as they deny both the promise of pleasure and the promise of a solution to pain. What film critics see as specific to the Romanian New Wave is its focus on the current state of social problems without solutions, its ethical concerns, its predisposition for the absurd, humor and self-reflexivity, and its enthusiasm to tell their stories about political and economic confusion in Romania. ⁹⁷ Cynicism is a poignant aspect of these films in which the cinematic narratives refuse to offer a solution to accomplishing desire, instead they make obvious the impossibility of ever accomplishing it, exposing the lack of the capitalist ideology, standing in these narratives for the Other. In Maria, ⁹⁸ Look Forward in Anger, ⁹⁹ and The Conjugal Bed ¹⁰⁰ the newly installed capitalist order is depicted as violently molding lives and identities. Instead of focusing on what capitalism designates as objects of desire, commodities, and prestige, for example, these films focus on the suffering the system itself produces.

In this regard, the Romanian films remind one of Italian neorealism’s emphasis on the oppressive societal conditions and depiction of desiring subjects, not as isolated individuals but as subjects implicated in the concrete struggles of their historical moment. Also similar to Italian neorealism, the Romanian New Wave develops cinematic narratives in which desire continues without fantasmatic resolution. ¹⁰¹ When the cinematic narratives chose to focus on capitalism’s objects of desire, they do so in order to expose their illusionary nature. As discussed earlier, this situation is specific to West ¹⁰² which makes a point of showing the emptiness and impotence of the West as a symbol for capitalism’s glamour and ability of accomplishing desire.

Read in this manner, the cynicism present in postrevolution films show that the lack created by the social dislocation does not cause desire for a new discursive articulation, but instead of being covered with a new fantasy formation, the lack is encircled again and again within the films analyzed. The traces of trauma are preserved and exposed. Lingering over the lack of the social order and refraining from covering it with a new fantasy scenario could be seen as an attempt to maintain and expose the traces of real. In this sense, the films produced after the revolution could be characterized as emancipatory.

A second interpretation of the change that this article underlines challenges the reading just offered by questioning the analyzed films’ emancipatory aspect. Bringing in the Romanian context, the discussion of cynical fantasy formations in connection to society’s transformation from one of prohibition to one of enjoyment, found in McGowan ¹⁰³ and Özselçuk and Madra, ¹⁰⁴ leads one to see the insistence of the Romanian films to expose the lack of the social order as a new fantasy formation aimed at capturing desire. The social transformation mentioned has at its core a focus on enjoyment or on a command to enjoy as opposed to society’s earlier focus on demanding that its members give up their individual enjoyment for the sake of the community. In this transformation, private enjoyment becomes of paramount importance while the importance of the social order as a whole seems to recede. In the society of enjoyment, the private enjoyment that threatened the stability of the society of prohibition becomes a stabilizing force and even acquires the status of a duty. ¹⁰⁵ In the Romanian context, a similar fantasy dynamic is encountered. The communist ideology, that demanded its members to sacrifice private enjoyment for the betterment of the socialist state and society, is replaced with a capitalist ideology that commands enjoyment. Furthermore, the revolution brings about the replacement of the symbolic father, referred to also as the name of the father, the one demanding the sacrifice of private enjoyment, with an obscene, selfish father. ¹⁰⁶

The films reflect this transformation as after the revolution the fatherly figures occupying the place of the Other in films change in important ways when compared to those seen during communism. The Other loses its righteous attribute, it becomes the corrupt Other, the selfish Other that enjoys and gains power drawn out of pain inflicted on the subject, overly enjoying its position of power. ¹⁰⁷ For example, instead of the righteous, caring foreman demanding and appreciating sacrifice in the name of the socialist state, as encountered in Ana and the Thief, ¹⁰⁸ in the postrevolution films the position of the Other is occupied by corrupt investors, as, for example, in Maria ¹⁰⁹ and Look Forward In Anger, ¹¹⁰ who are pursuing their private enjoyment at the expense of community’s well-being. These aspects contribute to the cynical aspects of the new Romanian fantasy formations.

Cynical fantasy formations are able to capture the desire of the subject. Even though for a cynic there is no inaccessible object hidden within the Other, the cynic is able to feel secure in his or her knowledge of the Other. ¹¹¹ For example, in Look Forward in Anger, ¹¹² the engineer Stefan Ciugudeanu is convinced he sees clearly in the workings of the Other. He seems to believe he has complete knowledge and understanding about how the newly installed capitalist system cuts through old forms of social organization and empowers corrupt businessmen at the expense of the community. Cynical subjects feel as if they have no investment in the big Other, as if they have distanced themselves from its power, and as if they could see through all strictures and manipulations. ¹¹³ In The Conjugal Bed, ¹¹⁴ the movie theater manager Vasile Potop does not want to continue being a part of what he sees as a cruel and inhuman social order. After he conveys his knowledge about the true workings of the capitalist system in Romania, he takes the decision to set himself on fire in a public space. Through this attempt, Vasile wants to make a statement that he has no investment in the big Other. As Žižek argues, cynical distance is just one way to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideology. ¹¹⁵

In this sense, the knowledge of cynicism is not what Lacan calls “knowledge in the real.” Instead, we encounter a specular image that we take for the real. ¹¹⁶ Ideology continues to control cynic’s behavior, and it becomes even more difficult to break the hold of ideology because the cynic believes that this hold was already broken. In addition, the cynic, unlike the subject encountered during communism, derives not only identity from ideology but also enjoyment as cynicism offers the subject a sense of radicality. ¹¹⁷ In The Conjugal Bed, ¹¹⁸ we could say that Vasile derives enjoyment from his constant challenging and exposing the inhumanity and inconsistency of the capitalist system. Believing he knows exactly how the system works and setting himself outside and against the system indeed creates a sense of freedom from ideology and hence enjoyment. Similarly the narrative in Too Late ¹¹⁹ creates enjoyment through its sense of radicality, as the narrative presents itself as able to expose the hidden, dark secrets of the capitalist system, challenging it and setting itself apart from it. In this sense, the films produced after the revolution capture desire by creating a sense of radicality for the subject, stirred in the process of challenging and exposing the lack of the Other. In this situation, one does not gain distance from the law but reveals one’s investment in it.

As we notice in the films produced after the revolution the new point de capiton and the capitalist family of commonplaces, the market, the capitalist social order, the lure of the West, and the identity of a consumer, are brought to the center of the narrative. While their hold on the subject is denied, they nevertheless represent the focus of the cinematic plot. These films flaunt one’s lack of trust in the Other. For example, in The Conjugal Bed ¹²⁰ even though Vasile presents himself as having no investment in the Other, he decides to set himself on fire in a public place, attracting attention by flaunting his lack of commitment for the capitalist system. Such a show is done for the look of the symbolic authority. It could be said that the new cynical Romanian subject stages his or her distrust in the social order so that the symbolic authority will see it. As such it represents a case of acting out, rather than an authentic act, as it is the acting out that always occurs on a stage. ¹²¹ Focusing on the transformation of the worker hero in films produced in a society undergoing traumatic changes and on the cynicism that pervades postrevolution films, this article explored the possibility of cynicism being an expression of emancipation or instead another fantasy formation aimed at capturing desire and supporting the newly installed capitalist system. Although the Romanian films produced after the revolution make a strong point out of challenging the capitalist system, exposing its lack of humanity and empty promise of accomplishing desire, this article suggested that through their very radicality these films are creating enjoyment, functioning in this sense as fantasy formations that bring to the center of their narrative the capitalist family of commonplaces, reinforcing the very discourse and authority it portrays itself to challenge.