loved so much — but rather as zany chancers who have the balls and the wits to take the advances of capitalist deregulation as far as they can, to the disadvantage of the naïve and the duped. At those times when attention is actually given to the fate of the disadvantaged, the likely moral of the story is to take the crisis as an opportunity to carve out a more responsible future for self, family and country. That’s what Alberto Toscano has pointed out when he was here in Brussels to talk about the cinematic responses to the ongoing economic turmoil. All the fiction films that he had seen, he said, “testify to a world whose imagination is stripped of collectivity and riven to a narrow horizon of finitude, in which the best one can imagine is more family and less greed, fewer commodities and more stability.”93 The dimension of collective politics, which shadowed earlier figurations of crisis like The Grapes of Wrath, appears to have gone missing. Perhaps that’s what Rancière meant when he mentioned that “something has happened to the real.” “It is not we who no longer tolerate politics,” he wrote, “it is politics which no longer tolerates the remnants of the real of fiction.”94 It is as if today’s cinematic fictions find difficulty in dealing with a social reality that does not allow for deviations and mis-directions, while reality increasingly imposes its consensual law and cynical outlook on fiction. It’s as if the difficulty of finding spaces for antagonism has made it hard for cinematic fictions to find forms that would be able to detach themselves from social objectivity and disrupt the dominant imaginaries of “capitalist realism” and “the age of insecurity.” If something has happened to the real, it might not be because it has disappeared, but because the opinion regimes that define the common sense of the real have made it difficult to dislodge and reconfigure its coordinates, which are constantly being readjusted to make us recognize that there is only what there is, and all else is mere illusion. Everywhere in today’s fictions, you can sense a trouble to find a measure of entanglement between the aesthetic, the narrative and the political. In response, the balance between the imperatives of dramatic fiction, the possibilities of aesthetic freedom, and the topography of the class struggle that was struck in fictions such as The Grapes of Wrath seem to have shifted towards a quest to revive a certain childhood of cinema, when the plot was still subsidiary to the sensations and intensities that could be found in the passion of gestures and reflection of faces. It is not so much a longing for the lost paradise of silent film or for Eisenstein’s language of sensations, as it is a quest for another form of mutism: one that could oppose the deafening silence of a world without
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