Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are at least two ways in which a text may be inscribed with ideology. One is by raising a non-problem to the level of a true problem. Racism, for example, displaces discontent with the system of economic exploitation onto the figure of the 'intruder' (such as 'illegal immigrants') who is perceived as 'disrupting' the system. The other is the ahistorical presentation of a problem. Here, I am referring to History in the Marxian sense, i.e., historical materialism. Ironically, Jacob Tierney's The Trotsky (2009) is guilty of both kinds of ideological distortion: it raises a non-problem, or a false problem, to the level of a true problem, while at the same time ahistorically representing the latter. Although this film appears to side with the Left in its overt allegiance to Marxism (via Trotsky), it is, I claim, a most conservative rendering of Marxian politics, one that verges on parody. The film tells the story of Leon Bronstein (Trotsky's given name at birth was Lev Bronstein), a seventeen-year-old Montreal high school student who believes that he is the reincarnation of the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army. Leon is determined to relive the life of Trotsky by battling against 'fascists'. In the opening scene of the film, Leon is shown leading a strike at his father's garment factory, where he has organized the workers into a 'union'. He has convinced the workers that they need to go on strike in order to assert their rights as a workers against the warehouse owner, Leon's father, David. Frustrated with Leon, David takes it upon himself to learn about the life of Trotsky, his son's hero. He soon discovers that, unlike his son Leon, who attends a prestigious boarding school, Trotsky actually attended a public school. As punishment for his acts, David decides to send Leon to a west-end Montreal high school. At his new high school, Leon quickly notices a lack of student organization in the face of the administrative 'fascist' controlling the school, i.e., the school principal. Leon is then determined to organize the students into a union, thus proving that the younger generation is not apathetic, but merely bored--a recurrent theme throughout the film. Although the film presents Leon as a noble hero, there are some questionable elements in the film, at least from a Marxian perspective. Most apparent is the aforementioned elevation of a non-problem into a real problem--that is, the organization of students into a in order to battle against the 'fascist' school administrators. Leon's effort to organize the students into a is not so troublesome. What is problematic is the Autotelic nature of this organization. Leon's political project is rather loosely based on an ideal of union for union's sake, whereby 'union' seems to occupy the position of a transcendental signified, in Derridean terms, that informs The Trotsky's political ontology. A close reading of this film indicates that Leon's entire problem with authority centres on an Oedipal conflict. His antagonistic approach to authority is a mere displacement of his disdain for paternal authority. At the same time, Leon maintains a certain perverse attachment to the paternal authority, which he displaces onto authority in general. Leon's struggle with authority generates a certain form of enjoyment (what the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, referred to as puissance) that he is not ready to give up because it preserves a perverse pleasure. Initially, the Oedipal narrative takes the classic form of the male child's contempt for his father. At the beginning of the film, Leon appears to be more interested in challenging his father's authority than in starting a revolution. This is confirmed by Leon's recurring nightmare, perhaps the most creative scene in the entire film. The nightmare sequence references the famous Odessa steps sequence from Sergei Eisensteln's Battleship Potemkin (1925), one of the most referenced scenes in the entire history of cinema (parodied, for example, in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987)). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".