“Ovo Je Srbija”: The Horror of the National Thing in A Serbian Film

Abstract

In this article, the authors discuss the recent horror film A Serbian Film (2010) as a representation of the catastrophic nature of Serbian society in the Milosevic era. The authors start their analysis by talking about the construction of the Serbian ethno-nation under Milosevic, arguing that it emerged as a kind of reaction-formation to the collapse of Soviet-led communism in the Eastern bloc in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Their argument is that Milosevic constructed a new idea of Serbia based on a utopian theory of the ethnically homogenous nation to try to oppose the social, political and economic chaos produced by the end of communism and the related collapse of the ethnically mixed Yugoslav state. Following this work, the authors analyse the detail of Milosevic’s state and, in particular, the criminalization of Serbian society in the 1990s, and attempt to show how A Serbian Film dramatizes these conditions in a horror story about sexual violence and state-sponsored sadism. Throughout the article, the authors employ Freudian–Lacanian theory to argue that what A Serbian Film illustrates is the horror of the Serbian real and the terrible consequences of the state-sponsored collapse of normal civilization into an ultraviolent, hypersexualized, criminalized state of nature. In this respect, the authors suggest that the message of A Serbian Film has relevance beyond the case of Serbia, because even though the social and political context of Milosevic’s Serbia is essential to understanding its historical significance, the authors’ view is that it also speaks about the universal human condition of the death drive explored by Freud in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and the potential contained in every society to descend into barbarity and sadistic violence.