Whatever one wants to call it: Film, Mockumentary, or Performance Art – I’m Still Here is a sublime bend through a hyper-realized culture of American celebrity. Joaquin Phoenix plays a fictionalized version of himself, transforming his suave celebrity image into “JP” – a man who is mentally unstable, overweight, and a drug abuser pursuing a career in Hip Hop.

Directed by Phoenix’s close friend and Brother-in-law, Casey Affleck, I’m Still Here tracks Phoenix’s “retirement” from acting and shows his struggle, and eventual failure, of becoming a rapper.  Phoenix’s “breakdown” is artfully fabricated; viewers see that uncomfortably tacit interview with David Letterman, a disinterested meeting with Ben Stiller, and painfully awkward conversations with Sean Combs.  As the film transgresses, Phoenix’s appearance grows more unkempt: a expanding and unsightly belly, crazy hair, unwashed clothes and…

And wait a minute….

OMG! Phoenix looks like…. SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK?!?!

But JP’s rambling tirades, the monologues….

OMG! He’s acting like… ŽIŽEK?!?!

But then all the critics are asking just what is real… Wait a minute… is Affleck/ Phoenix/ JP “interrogating the real…?”

OMG! I’m Still Here is philosophizing like… ŽIŽEK?!?!

I’m Still Here is an improvisation on the real, and according to Affleck – it is a fake. The film is a warp on reality – and as a New York Times critic puts it, the film offers viewers not a single “wink” to confirm the absurd.  There are plenty of scenes with drugs, nudity, hookers, and sex – that all indicate Phoenix truly became JP, taking the blows (sexually and mentally) of a celebrity losing control.  Phoenix takes method acting to the extreme, leaving reviewers wondering how far JP pushes himself to the limits of fact versus fiction.

However, it is this dialectic tension of fantasy and reality that drives the films narrative (and yes, can make it very Žižek-ian).  There is an inherent doubling against the real and surreal, which I’m Still Here delicately refers to.  On the one hand we have Phoenix, and on the other we have JP: each are intertwined in a definitional matrix against the other.  In psychoanalytical terms, Phoenix is the ego, JP the body.  Like Jacques Lacan’s analysis of the mirror stage, Phoenix’s subjective state ontologically struggles with the physical crisis represented in JP.

We see Phoenix in his hotel room gaping at his performance on Letterman, and later we see Phoenix’s remorse as he watches Ben Stiller and Natalie Portman mock him at the Oscars.  In another scene, Phoenix is reading reports of himself from the web, and he appears shocked as he realizes he has lost all credibility (or cultural capital as Pierre Bourdieu would put it), and instead slipped into becoming a national joke.

These are scenes that show Phoenix watching himself, or rather Phoenix, as JP, but really as Phoenix watching JP (yes, this character mirroring is a bit of a mind fuck). There is Phoenix as the real Joaquin, and JP as the apparition or the fantasy.   Like the Lacanian mirror, JP and Phoenix contract into each other. I’m Still Here pulls on this dynamic of identity formation, using the role of celebrity in popular culture as the fantastical device for othering.

In Žižek’s essay, “Connections of the Freudian Field to Philosophy and Popular Culture”, he writes:

“What is the problem with fantasy? I think that the key point, usually overlooked, is the way that Lacan articulated the notion of fantasy which is ‘OK, fantasy stages a desire, but whose desire?’ My point is: not the subject’s desire, not their own desire.  What we encounter is the very core of the fantasy formation is the relationship to the desire of the Other: to the opacity of the Other’s desire. The desire staged in fantasy, in my fantasy, is precisely not my own, not mine but the desire of the Other.  Fantasy is a way for the subject to answer the question of what object they are for the Other, in the eyes of the Other, for the Other’s desire.  That is to say, what does the Other see in them? What role do they play in the Other’s desire (p58)?”

I’m Still Here shadows a peculiar, almost self-fulfilling prophesy of a celebrity fuelled by a desire, fantasy and obsession.  Are we seeing Phoenix consumed by a desire for JP and ultimately a need to repel a fantasy that exists both for and from himself?  Or is the film playing with the megalomaniac, celebrity urgency for status, fame, and fortune? One scene shows JP performing at a Miami nightclub, attacking a heckler in the audience. He screams out to the crowd: “We have a bitch in the audience,” and “I’ve got a million dollars in my fucking bank account, what the fuck have you got?”

By engaging with the heckler in the audience and making remarks about his affluent status (as Bourdieu would claim, his economic capital), JP’s defense ultimately reveals his paranoia over losing his well, cultural capital. As a rapper, JP has no musical cred.  And slowly, Phoenix, as JP, is losing credibility by becoming JP.  Arguably, were JP a child making these remarks on a playground, teachers would dismiss his outrage as the result of low self-esteem.  He is paranoid, vulnerable. But according to Žižek, the paranoia JP experiences would be symptomatic to his identification for the desired Other.  For Žižek, desire is the paranoia – and I’m Still Here slips into a car crash version of self-compulsion, obsession and the paranoid.  Or, the paranoia could be symptomatic of the drugs Phoenix (allegedly, does he really) consumes (one of the hot questions for the press)…

Really, I’m Still Here becomes a semantic and metaphysical trap: unknowing, unsure.

The guessing, the questioning to the process of constructing an image, this desire with knowing, or the fantasies constructed by now knowing, is what I believe to be the whole point of the film.

In Žižek’s documentary, A Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema, Žižek claims that cinema is the ultimate parable art that dictates the terms and conditions for desire.   Again, another doubling emerges: film becomes Phoenix’s mirror, offering retracting images of a media obsessed with, well – images. Every scene is scripted, each reality staged, every identity purposefully constructed is for the sole purpose of the movie.  Affleck’s exercise of constructing an image becomes instead a process for deconstructing an image.   And in this further Žižek-ian twist, I’m Still Here uses film precisely as a catalyst and text for not just JP’s desire, but a media obsessed with a desire for celebrity. Which Phoenix revealed (looking more clean cut and trim) in last week’s interview with Letterman as his and Affleck’s motivation for making the film.

But behind JP we know there is still Joaquin Phoenix, hidden underneath the mumbles of rapping, disheveled beard, and pudgy face: as perhaps the movie’s title “I’m Still Here” indicates.  Of course, there is the argument that the clean-shaven and buff image of Joaquin Phoenix that the media know is as much a construction as JP is.  And the loop of analysis and over thinking goes on…

For a final thought…

Anyways…  if Joaquin Phoenix can transform himself into a man who looks like Žižek, I can’t help wondering what Žižek would look like if he were to transform himself into a man who looks like Joaquin Phoenix…

Žižek, S.  “Connections of the Freudian Field to Philosophy and Popular Culture,” from Interrogating The Real, ed Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, 2005.