The Fifth Element

Love Is the Stupidest Answer: The Fifth Element and the Ideology of the Obvious

I. The Supreme Being Wears Bandages

There is a particular kind of film that tells you everything about its era precisely by trying to say nothing about it at all. Luc Besson's The Fifth Element is such a film. Released in 1997—that golden interregnum between the Cold War and the War on Terror, when Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis still had the warm glow of plausibility—it presents a twenty-third century so oversaturated with color, noise, and consumer spectacle that it functions less as a prediction of the future than as a fever dream of the perpetual present. Flying taxis stack up in aerial traffic. Advertisements colonize every surface. A radio host who is essentially pure libido given a microphone presides over a culture that cannot stop consuming itself. This is not the future. This is 1997 on methamphetamine.

And at the center of this world: Leeloo, the Supreme Being. The Fifth Element. Played by Milla Jovovich with a childlike opacity that the film mistakes for profundity, she is literally manufactured—reconstructed in a laboratory from a fragment of ancient genetic material. She emerges from the apparatus naked, bewildered, speaking a language no one understands, and almost immediately wrapped in a costume composed of what can only be described as strategic medical tape. She is, in the most transparent way imaginable, the male fantasy object given narrative justification. She is perfect. She is alien. She is helpless. She must be saved and, in turn, must save us all. But only if a man kisses her first.

Here we encounter our first properly Žižekian operation. The question is not "Is Leeloo a sexist construction?"—that much is so obvious it barely merits stating. The more interesting question is: what ideological work does her perfection perform? Žižek, drawing on Lacan, insists that fantasy does not function as an escape from reality. Fantasy is the frame through which we experience reality as coherent. Leeloo is the fantasmatic screen onto which the film projects its deepest need: the need for a figure who is outside ideology, outside the corrupt systems of capital and military power, and who can therefore redeem them from without. She learns the entirety of human history in an afternoon via the internet, and what she discovers—war, genocide, the whole catalogue of atrocity—nearly paralyzes her. She is devastated by what we have long since normalized. Her purity is the measure of our degradation.

But this is precisely the trick. By locating moral authority in a being who is not one of us—who is genetically, ontologically other—the film relieves the audience of the burden of actual ethical confrontation. We do not need to reckon with the violence of our history. We need only to watch a beautiful alien woman weep about it, and then kiss her so she can activate the ancient stones. The gesture of apparent moral seriousness is itself the mechanism of evasion.

II. Zorg, or, The Capitalist Who Tells the Truth

Every ideological system requires what Žižek calls an obscene supplement—a figure who speaks the disavowed truth of the system out loud, thereby paradoxically sustaining the system's ability to continue denying that truth. In The Fifth Element, this figure is Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, played by Gary Oldman with a Southern accent and a plastic skullcap that makes him look like a malevolent egg.

Zorg is the film's villain, a weapons manufacturer and industrialist who collaborates with the cosmic forces of pure destruction. But what makes him ideologically interesting is his one moment of explicit philosophizing. When a priest challenges him, Zorg delivers a small monologue about the productive nature of destruction—how chaos creates opportunity, how a glass that breaks generates employment for the people who must clean it, manufacture a replacement, deliver it. It is, in miniature, a perfect distillation of what Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" and what every Silicon Valley keynote speaker calls "disruption."

The film frames this speech as villainy. Zorg is wrong; he serves evil; he will be punished. But notice the structural irony: the entire world of the film—the teeming, hyper-commercialized, militarized, spectacle-driven New York of 2263—is the world Zorg's logic built. He is not an aberration within the system. He is the system. The film needs him to be a villain so that the system itself can remain innocent. This is ideology at its most efficient: you sacrifice the individual capitalist in order to save capitalism. Zorg dies. The flying taxis keep flying. McDonald's, one assumes, endures.

What Žižek would note here is the enjoyment embedded in Zorg's villainy. Oldman plays the role with such baroque relish, and Besson shoots his scenes with such kinetic pleasure, that Zorg becomes the most watchable figure in the film. We enjoy him more than we enjoy the bland decency of Bruce Willis's Korben Dallas. This is not a failure of the film—it is its secret confession. We know the system is monstrous. We enjoy it anyway. Zorg is the character who gives us permission to feel that enjoyment without having to own it, because we can always say: but he's the bad guy.

III. The Great Evil, or, The Real Knocks

The cosmic threat in The Fifth Element is, by design, almost completely unintelligible. It is a massive sphere of pure darkness hurtling toward Earth, growing larger with every military strike against it. It has no discernible motive, no face, no demands. It is, in the Lacanian sense, the Real—that which cannot be symbolized, cannot be integrated into the coordinates of our meaning-making apparatus. The generals fire missiles at it, and it feeds on their aggression. The President calls it, with wonderful bureaucratic understatement, "the enemy." But it isn't an enemy. An enemy can be negotiated with, understood, even in some sense respected. This thing is pure negation.

And this is where the film brushes, however clumsily, against something genuinely unsettling. The great evil cannot be defeated by any instrument of the existing order. Not the military. Not technology. Not capital. Not intelligence. Every tool the twenty-third century has developed to manage threats is useless here. What Žižek would recognize is the anxiety this encodes: the creeping suspicion, even at the height of 1990s triumphalism, that the system has no answer to its own fundamental contradictions. That there is something bearing down on us—ecological collapse, the internal contradictions of global capital, take your pick—that cannot be solved by more of the same. The great evil is what the system cannot think.

Which is precisely why the film's answer to it is so instructive.

IV. Love, and So On

When all else fails, the film tells us, there is love. Korben Dallas kisses Leeloo. Leeloo activates the elemental stones. A beam of divine light erupts and neutralizes the great evil. The world is saved. Roll credits.

Let us be very precise about what happens here, ideologically. The film has constructed an elaborate apparatus—a richly detailed future world, a mythology spanning five thousand years, a threat of absolute annihilation—and the answer to all of it is the most banal, prepolitical, Hallmark-card sentiment available: love conquers all. This is not a resolution. It is an evasion of resolution dressed in the costume of profundity.

Žižek has argued repeatedly that ideology functions most powerfully not when it deceives us, but when it tells us a truth in such a way that we don't have to act on it. Everyone knows that love, in the abstract, is good. This knowledge costs nothing. The question the film systematically avoids is: love within what structures? For whom? At whose expense? The twenty-third century of The Fifth Element is a world of radical inequality—Korben Dallas lives in a crumbling micro-apartment while the elite vacation on luxury space cruisers. Is this world saved by love? Or is it merely preserved? The stones activate, the evil dissipates, and everything returns to exactly the way it was. The system reboots. Nothing has changed except that the threat to the system's continuation has been removed.

This is the ideological function of "love" in the film: it is the universal solvent that dissolves all political questions. You don't need redistribution, you don't need justice, you don't need structural transformation—you need a kiss. The film's emotional climax is also its intellectual abdication.

V. The Symptom of 1997

And yet—one must be fair. There is something in The Fifth Element that exceeds its own ideological program, and this is what makes it worth taking seriously rather than simply dismissing. The film's manic energy, its sheer visual and tonal excess, operates at a pitch that consistently threatens to overwhelm its own narrative. Chris Tucker's Ruby Rhod—a figure of such concentrated, shrieking jouissance that he practically vibrates off the screen—is the purest expression of this. He serves no plot function. He contributes nothing to the resolution of the cosmic threat. He is pure surplus enjoyment, the id of the spectacle itself, and in his ungovernable excess, he reveals something the film cannot quite say directly: that the pleasure of the system—the pleasure of consumption, of noise, of relentless stimulation—has become autonomous. It no longer serves any purpose. It simply is.

This is what makes The Fifth Element a genuine symptom of its era rather than merely a product of it. The 1990s were the decade when Western capitalism, having defeated its historical rival, confronted the strange problem of its own purposelessness. If there is no enemy, no alternative, no outside—then what is all this for? Besson's film, for all its dazzling surfaces, has no good answer to this question, and its honest failure to produce one is more revealing than any number of more sober, more intellectually responsible films from the same period.

The fifth element, in the end, is not love. It is the void where a political imagination should be—papered over with spectacle, justified by sentiment, and sustained by the unspoken agreement that we will not look too closely at what holds the whole edifice together. The great evil was never the dark sphere hurtling through space. It was the quiet consensus that this—all of this—is the best we can do.