Mark's Pages

September 6, 2004:

"I've been such a fool, Vassili.

"Man will always be Man. There is no New Man.

"We tried so hard to create a society that was equal: where there'd be nothing to envy your neighbor.

"But there's always something to envy. A smile. A friendship. Something you don't have and want to appropriate.

"In this world - even the Soviet world - there will always be rich and poor. Rich in gifts, poor in gifts. Rich in love, poor in love.

"I want to help you, Vassili. But I can only do one last thing. Something useful for a change."

Thus the death of the Commissar, whose suicide is as much a surrender to an alien narrative as an act of despair over lost love.

Alien narrative: "Man will always be Man." The linchpin and touchstone of all bourgeois ideology. "Human nature". Empty concept, silent phrase, filled as such with the fullness of the obvious, that is, with the dominant narrative, precisely.

When film Commies die, they die like relapsed Catholics, confessing at the end not so much their sins as their deafness, returning not so much to the fold as to the dominant narrative.