In one sequence from Jonathan Glazer’s film Birth (2004), the enraged and exasperated fiancé of protagonist Anna suddenly attacks a young boy who, contrary to all rational logic, has declared himself to be the reincarnationof Anna’s deceased husband. The sudden and ethereal appearance of the boy, Sean – who shares the dead husband’s name – intrudes upon the scheduled (re)marriage of Anna to her fiancé Joseph, who becomes increasingly intolerant of Anna’s supernatural and transgressive fixation on the 10-year-old Sean. The aforementioned sequence takes place during a musical salon performance celebrating Anna and Joseph’s engagement; having interrupted the performance to strike out at Sean, Joseph rants nonsensically to his shocked guests, “[Sean] doesn’t have any clue of how to make something happen. He’s living in a land where he’s pretending to be something instead of doing the job, and that’s the real problem.” Does this accusation, in all its ambivalence and absurdity, not precisely express the standard attitude towards belief: the infinite delay of the unpleasant, traumatic truth (God does not exist, nobody truly loves me, Sean is not a supernatural reincarnation but rather a manipulative/deluded little boy) in favour of a vaguely ridiculous and indeed properly ‘unbelievable’ disavowal which keeps us from ‘doing the job’ and ‘making something happen’?
Before continuing with this particular interrogation of belief, it is necessary to first address the peculiar improbability of such a reading in relation to Birth as a text. This film is an exemplary artifact of what theorist Slavoj Zizek identifies as (the post-political liberal incarnation of) our current, permissive society which, in its eagerness to promote tolerance, politically demures from judgement and reinscribes so-called ‘transgressive behaviour’ (sexual perversion and openness, cultural subversiveness, and so on) as normal, accepted, and healthy/therapeutic. Given that these formerly censored personal, sexual, and cultural elements currently enjoy some amount of psychic and social forbearance, the proper aim of psychoanalysis in postmodernity involves the analytical recuperation of the repressed or altogether vitiated libidinal matrix of ‘normalcy’, superficiality, and cultural vulgarity which must now be suppressed in order for the subject to appear appropriately enlightened and unashamed/secure.