June 2013 article by Žižek in IJZS Where Ž first mentions Strella.
Guardian Blog on Strella and family values
This is the missing chapter really, of Butler’s Antigone’s Claim
Žižek quotes from Marx
a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labor-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each.
Strella takes perversion to its ridiculously sublime end. Early in the film, Yiorgos traumatically discovers and accepts that the woman he desires is a transvestite. Strella simply tells Yiorgos: “I am a tranny. Do you have a problem with that?”, and they go on kissing. What follows is Yiorgos’s truly traumatic discovery that Strella knowingly seduced his father. His reaction is the same as when Fergus sees Dil’s penis in The Crying Game: disgust, escape in panic, wandering the city unable to cope with what he has discovered. Similarly to The Crying Game, A Woman’s Way depicts trauma being overcome through love; a happy family with a small son emerges.
However, the hero’s discovery that his transvestite lover is his son is not the actualisation of some unconscious fantasy; his disgust is only because he is surprised by an external event. We should resist the temptation to interpret the story as father-son incest.
There is nothing to interpret: the film ends with a completely normal and genuine happiness for the family. As such, it serves as a test for the advocates of Christian family values: embrace this authentic family of Yiorgos, Strella and the adopted child, or shut up about Christianity.
A proper sacred family emerges at the end of the film, a family something like God the father living with Christ – the ultimate gay marriage and parental incest.
The only way to redeem Christian family values is to redefine or reframe the idea of a family to include situations like the one at the end of Strella. In short, Strella is an Ernst Lubitsch film for today, for the “trouble in paradise” when you discover that your gay lover is your son. Even if the family violates all divine prohibitions, they will always find “a small room vacant in the annex” of heaven, as the good-humoured devil says to the hero of Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait.