Page - 128 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

128 siting futurity aestheticizing “rubble into ruin” (High 2015, 151). As Apel warns, “[w]e must recognize that the implicit warning against imperial hubris and the burden of grief imparted by the images are in conflict with the impulse to find beauty in the ruins. Yet these contradictory narratives coexist — the beautiful and the terri- ble — indeed, one mediates the other, beauty making the terri- ble bearable” and thus assuaging the anxiety motoring disaster capitalism (Apel 2015, 2). Imperial hubris and grief are the cornerstones upon which The Grand Budapest Hotel’s plot is erected. The terrible loss of the hotel’s imperial splendor, which is desecrated first by the Na- zis and then by the Communists, as well as the deaths of both M. Gustave and lobby boy Zero’s beloved Agata, are redeemed by being turned first into the tragic beauty of the novel that serves to frame the narrative and then into the farcical beauty of the film. In seeking to understand the attraction of ruin images, “how this imagery engages the anxiety of decline and […] what cultural and political work it does (ibid., 10), Apel ascertains that “within the context of real economic precarity, sublimatic depictions of urban abandonment assuage anxiety by exotifying and safely situating ruins elsewhere on the map” (Steacy 2016, 254). That this corresponds to the workings of pornography proper is something hoogland underscores. Pornography is, as she reminds us, “always at a distance, always mediated. […] The essence of porn, in other words, is the pleasure derived from observing something that is not actually there, from an encoun- ter with a two-dimensional (nowadays usually a screen) surface, a visual reality without any real-life or social depth, an image or imaginary realm without the presence of the real” (hoogland 2014, 115–16; italics in original). Ruin porn similarly acts to di- chotomize between present and absent, in its case, between the “out-of-towners — tourists of sorts” (Tange 2015, 9), who, after the “experience” of having visited a ruined place, “enjoy the lux- ury of going home to someplace stable, orderly, and altogether more pleasant” (McLemee 2015) and those who have to live with having been present for the experience as well as with the circu- lation of potentially embarrassing and demoralizing images of