A Narrative of An Ideological Destruction: 
Where Do We Go Now? 
Ayça Tunç Cox and Gamzenur Aygün Izmir Institute of Technology 
aycatunc@iyte.edu.tr gamzenur@iyte.edu.tr  

 

Abstract 
Lebanese filmmaker, actress, and screenwriter Nadine Labaki’s 2011 film Where Do We Go Now? is about the 
ideological manipulation that gradually results in a big conflict among people in a rural Middle Eastern village 
where Muslims and Christians live in a peaceful existence. Labaki is known for her politically engaged 
narratives which refer to the recent political past of Lebanese whilst centralizing strong female figures. Where 
Do We Go Now? is no exception, and thus, reflects the director's general cinematic style and political attitude. 
Labaki invites her audience through the comedy to question ideology which interpellates and thus constructs 
the individual as a subject by revealing the ways ideology creates differences, separation, and conflict among 
people. In this context, this article strives to analyze the film Where Do We Go Now? employing critical 
discourse analysis with references to Althusser's conceptualization of ideology and Subject-subject formation. 
Keywords: Lebanese cinema; Nadine Labaki; Where do we go now?; ideology; female empowerment 

 

 
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       340 

A Narrative of An Ideological Destruction: 

Where Do We Go Now? 

Ayça Tunç Cox and Gamzenur Aygün 

 

Introduction 

 The concept of ideology includes many intersecting and incompatible meanings. Hence is the 

difficulty in terms of making a single, accurate and comprehensive definition. Eagleton (1991) 

underlines this ambiguity by stating that: “the word 'ideology', one might say, is a text, woven of 

a whole tissue of different conceptual strands” (Eagleton, 1991, p.17). Bearing this in mind, the 

concept of "ideology" within the scope of this article is limited to the conjecture of discourse and 

power, based on the theory of the Marxist French philosopher Louis Althusser. Althusser considers 

the concept of ideology as a way of arranging practices that transform human beings from 

individuals to social subjects and that reproduce the lived relations by connecting these subjects to 

the dominant relations of production in the society (Eagleton, p. 41). Slovaj Žižek (1989) presents 

the most basic definition of ideology with reference to Karl Marx's Capital: “Sie wissen das nicht, 

aber sie tun es / They do not know but they do" (Marx, 1867, as cited in Žižek, 1989). This concept, 

being discussed extensively towards the end of the 18th century, has proved to be the main 

component in breaking the “real” in the formation process of social reality. While Louis Althusser 

(1970) treats ideology as an imaginary relationship between individuals and their real conditions 

of existence, he precisely underlines this rupture from reality. The film Where Do We Go Now?, 

directed by Lebanese director and actress Nadine Labaki in 2011, narrating the story of an 

unnamed Arab village co-inhabited by Muslims and Christians, creates a fundamental debate in 

this context. 

 



 

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The Lebanese film industry has gone through different periods of recess and collapse in parallel 

with the Lebanese history of civil wars and colonization. By the end of the 1990s, the Lebanese 

film industry entered a new era which is addressed as the "beginning of the renaissance", and 

Nadine Labaki is considered to be one of the most significant representatives of this period (Khatib, 

2008, p. 21). It is inevitable to detect traces of her childhood in Labaki's films for she grew up 

during the Lebanese civil war. In an interview, she underlines the power of cinema to create a 

change through people: “Sometimes, a line in a film, or a scene, makes you think about yourself, 

about your decisions. By touching your heart, films can offer hope more than politics” (Salem, 

2012; Labaki, 2012). This reminds us of Antonio Gramsci’s famous theorization of “organic 

intellectuals”, whereby he talks about the responsibility every true intellectual should have in terms 

of “their function in directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically 

belong” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 131). Complying with this, Labaki seems to be aware of her class 

affiliation as well as her position as a woman filmmaker, consistently creating narratives that focus 

on female empowerment. Labaki’s breakthrough came with Caramel (2007), which tells the story 

of five Lebanese women working in a Beirut beauty salon. While both Where Do We Go Now? 

and Caramel received lots of awards, Capernaum (2018), which provides a poignant narrative 

about the pressing refugee problem, made her internationally well-known. She generally uses non-

professional actors in her films. It would not be wrong to say that the most important source of 

authenticity in her films is the cultural, ethnic, and political structure of her country, Lebanon. In 

said interview at Cannes, she precisely indicated this source of inspiration by emphasizing that she 

rejected offers from other countries because of fear of losing her authentic language (Labaki, 

2012). 

 



 

 

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One important aspect of Labaki’s cinema is the fact that she deliberately deconstructs the female 

figure as represented in mainstream cinema. That is why her films lend themselves well to feminist 

critical perspectives. As opposed to mainstream cinema, where women are usually passive, women 

in Labaki’s films are generally active, combative, and solution-generating subjects (Aşılıoğlu & 

Işık, 2020). Where Do We Go Now? epitomizes such female figures. Despite some controversial 

scenes whereby women appear to internalize the dynamics of a patriarchal society, all in all, the 

film reconstructs the common view on women (Kokko, 2012). For instance, one of the actions 

taken by women to stop the violence in the village is to bring Ukrainian strippers to the village. 

Here the sexual objectification of women’s bodies is seemingly reproduced and reinforced by 

women. Yet, in the wider discursive context of the film, this can be read as they understand and 

play by the rules of patriarchal society. Because they do this only to stop the violence. They reject 

to be “women left in the hands of fate” and instead take an active stance. 

The film revolves around the ideological construction of two religions: Christianity and Islam. 

Nadine Labaki opens the film with a dance choreography. Women in black, who are impossible to 

distinguish from each other, who seem to be almost identical, walk and dance with lament. As they 

finally scatter to the graves they want to visit, they are divided into two lines: one towards the sign 

of the cross, the other towards the crescent. The narrative begins with a statement: “This is the 

story of those who fast, of prayers, of a lonely village surrounded by mines, of two groups whose 

hearts were broken under the hot sun, of blooded hands for a cross or a crescent, of this lonely 

place whose past has chosen peace surrounded by barbed wire and weapons”. Confrontation of 

these ideologies is the pinnacle of the narrative whilst the spatial and temporal references are left 

unclear, meaning there is absolutely no clue as to when and where this story took place. Thus, the 

narrative becomes anonymous as a fable. Owing to the uncertainty of the context, it can easily be 



 

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generalized; it does not matter what religion we are talking about, what matters is the fact that 

material conditions formed around these religions have created the conflict. Labaki explains the 

lack of spatial and temporal signposts in the film as follows; “this war between two faiths is a 

universal theme. It could just as easily be happening between Sunnis and Shiites, between black 

and white, between two parties, two clans, two brothers, two families or two villages…” (Labaki, 

2012). 

Religion is presented in the form of a shapeshifting ideology in the film. While it is initially 

manifested only as a mark of difference, it is transformed into a contradiction, exacerbated by the 

discriminative influence of the media. However, when this contradiction is rejected by women, it 

loses its value and disappears. In this context, the discourse of the film ties in well with Althusser’s 

postulation that “there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects” (Althusser, 1970, p. 

37). The film eventually forces the viewer to ask the quintessential question: “Where do we go 

now?” The spatial design, in particular, reinforces this question as it is the same in the opening and 

closing scenes of the film: In the first scene, women walk divided into two lines based on their 

religious positionings. In the last scene, however, all the villagers are walking towards the 

cemetery together, unable to choose their direction.  

 

Conceptual Framework 

The concept of ideology was first introduced by Destutt de Tracy and colleagues as the formation 

of ideas (-ideo) of theory (-logy) (Althusser, 1970, p. 6). They used it to express the science of 

ideas (ideology) to reveal the sources of conscious thoughts and ideas (Sucu, 2012). Fifty years 

after this, along with the way Marx reconsidered ideology, it has acquired completely different 

meanings and dimensions. The issues of class and class order, which constitute the basis of Marxist 



 

 

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approaches, redefine the domain of ideology, and the ideas of the ruling class are the decisive 

preconditions in said class order. “The camera obscura metaphor” as used by Marx and Friedrich 

Engels emphasizes that ideologies are a system of deceptive ideas or a mystification tool that 

serves class interests (Marx & Engels, 1968, p. 9). By defining ideology as pure illusion, pure 

dream, that is as nothingness, in The German Ideology (1968), they kept all reality outside. In other 

words, ideology for Marx is an imaginary institution that produces individuals’ existence 

materially. Althusser draws attention to the absence of the time dimension in the definition of 

ideology by reading Marx’s account in relation to Freud's discourse regarding "the unconscious 

being eternal" (Althusser, 1970, p. 29). While doing this, Althusser revisits Marx's remark that 

"ideology has no history", and argues that its history is not external to it; rather, it has entirely no 

history (Marx & Engels, 1968, pp. 16-23). In other words, Althusser promotes the idea that 

ideology is not historical and has always existed before and after (Althusser, 1970, p. 29).  

In order to understand the relation between ideology and reality, a general picture of the 

relation the subject establishes with reality must be drawn. The reason for using “the subject” 

instead of the individual here stems from Althusser's statement that "individuals are already-always 

subjects" and ideology forms the generation of this subject through interpellation (Althusser, 1970, 

p. 41). In searching for an answer to the question “how ideology actually functions”, Althusser 

(1970) takes the Christian ideology as an example and examines how this ideology works on and 

through masses. In the Christian ideology, this interpellation takes place through God's appeal to 

the individual, which is constantly voiced in the practices, rituals, and ceremonies of religious 

ideology. Through this appeal, individual gains an identity. In this way, s/he accepts the conditions 

in which s/he exists, the geography in which they live, and their economic class through their 

identity. They also submit as a (free) subject, to be judged as good or “perverse” over the practices 



 

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of ideology. The most important phenomenon that occurs in this example is the presence of the 

“central Other Subject”. The absolute condition for ideology to mobilize the masses is the 

existence of an "Other Subject", that is, God (Althusser, 1970, p. 44). Althusser (1970) explains 

this distinction as Subject (capital S) and subject. Another distinction that should be emphasized 

at this point is the distinction between Ideology and ideologies. God's being the central Subject is 

valid for the Christian ideology (religious ideologies). However, the need for Ideology for Other 

Subject in subject generation is valid for all ideologies. The name of Subject changes, but its 

position and function do not change. This is a structural requirement of ideology. 

The subject's relation to the real conditions of existence must be illusory. While Marx treats 

this relationship as alienation from the material condition of the individual, Althusser understands 

people’s relationship to the conditions of existence as represented for them, not as the real 

conditions of existence (Althusser, 1970, pp. 30-33). And ideology is defined at this moment of 

representation. That is to say, ideology functions as a mirror that reflects reality by distorting the 

subject's relationship with reality. This imaginary relational representation also has a material 

existence. Material existence is at this point grounded in the practices of the ideological apparatus. 

Althusser exemplifies this practice as follows: 

If he believes in God, he goes to Church to attend Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does 
penance (once it was material in the ordinary sense of the term) and naturally repents, 
and so on. If he believes in Duty, he will have the corresponding attitudes, inscribed 
in ritual practices according to the correct principles. If he believes in Justice, he will 
submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are 
violated, sign petitions, take part in a demonstration, etc. (Althusser, 1970, p. 34) 

Ideological state apparatuses are the most important parts of Althusser's theorization. He develops 

the explanation of the Marxist term “state apparatuses” by dividing it into two. He conceptualizes 

“state apparatus” as “repressive” and separates it from the ideological state apparatus. The main 



 

 

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difference between the two arises from how they function. While violence is the premise of the 

repressive apparatus, the ideological state apparatus functions through ideology. Examples of these 

apparatuses are the religious ISA (the system of the different churches), the educational ISA, the 

family ISA, the legal ISA, the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties), 

the trade-union ISA, the communications ISA (press, radio, and television, etc.) and the cultural 

ISA (Althusser, 1970, p. 14).  

 

Methodology 

Critical Discourse Analysis has been employed as the analysis framework here. “Critical Discourse 

Analysis (CDA) emerged from the school of critical linguistics (Kress & Hodge, 1979; Fowler et 

al., 1979) which drew upon Halliday’s (1978, 1985) systemic functional linguistics and theories 

of ideologies (Fairclough, 1993; Rogers, 2003)” (Jahedi et al., 2014, p. 28). Today, as rightly put 

by Una Dirks (2006), “CDA has become an umbrella term for widely recognized approaches to 

the study of oral or written texts”. There have been three main approaches commonly mentioned 

in the literature regarding CDA: “Fairclough’s critical approach, Wodak’s discourse-historical 

approach, and Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach” (Jahedi et al., 2014, p. 28). All in all, 

regardless of which particular approach is taken, at the heart of it is the fact that it considers 

language and representation in relation to social context and the concomitant power relations. In 

other words, “[CDA] offers routes into the study of meanings, a way of investigating the back-

and-forth dialogues which constitute social action, along with the patterns of signification and 

representation which constitute culture” (Wetherell et al., 2001). This also ties in very well with 

Althusser’s theorizations because it is argued that “Althusser’s (1971) Marxist theory of ideology 



 

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has influenced critical discourse analysis which views ideologies not as a nebulous realm of ideas 

but as tied to material practices embedded in social institutions (how teaching is organized in 

classrooms, for instance)” (Jahedi et al., 2014, p. 28).  

This article appropriates the basic principles of CDA as clarified by Norman Fairclough and 

Ruth Wodak (1997): 

CDA sees discourse – language use in speech and writing – as a form of social practice. 
Describing discourse as social practice implies a dialectical relationship between a 
particular discursive event and the situation(s), institution(s) and social structure(s), 
which frame it: The discursive event is shaped by them, but it also shapes them. That 
is, discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned... Discursive 
practices may have major ideological effects – that is, they can help produce and 
reproduce unequal power relations between (for instance) social classes, women and 
men, and ethnic/cultural majorities and minorities through the ways in which they 
represent things and position people. (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, p. 258) 

Accordingly, employing critical discourse analysis, this article strives to analyze the film Where 

Do We Go Now? with specific reference to the concepts of “illusion” and “allusion”, which 

Althusser employs to define the relationship between ideology and reality (Althusser, 1970, p. 30). 

First, the concept of ideology, its generation, and its distinctive position in terms of distorted reality 

will be analyzed. In this specific context, the ways ideology creates reality will be explored. Since 

the breaking point of the narrative occurs when the village interacts with the outside environment 

via media, Althusser's discussion of ideological state apparatuses proves to be a useful conceptual 

framework for the analysis.  In addition, Althusser's “subject/Subject” formulation will be guiding 

for the interpretation. 

Analysis of the Film 

The fable style of narrative in Where Do We Go Now? exhibits a structure that overlaps with the 

idea of the eternality of ideology. The classic "once upon a time" discourse of fairy tale narration 



 

 

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is embedded in the film via various methods. The film begins with the voice of a poetic narrator 

in which the surrounding of the village is framed. Here, in fact, the feature of (fairy)tales to give 

anonymity to time, place, and individuals (characters/subjects of the film) has been skillfully 

incorporated into to narrative. It is very difficult to fit the film into a time frame, even if you are 

familiar with the history of the Lebanese civil war. Because throughout the story, no specific 

historical event the audience can refer to is mentioned. To this end, the geographical location of 

the village also offers an advantage. The choice of a place that is isolated from its surroundings 

and has a very weak connection with the outside world facilitates the sense of isolation in time. 

The color scheme and texture of the costumes also leave the audience clueless in terms of time. In 

the interview given by Nadine Labaki at the Cannes Film Festival, she consciously emphasizes 

that she did not want to set the story in a precise period, hence is such choice of clothing (Labaki, 

2012). Another element of the fairy-tale narrative is the dance choreographies throughout the film 

and the accompanying poetic music composed by the musician and the filmmaker’s husband 

Khaled Mouzanar. 

In the hypothetical geography of the film, Muslims and Christians live together and sustain 

peaceful neighborly relations. The spatial configuration of the film reinforces this serene co-

habitation. The location of the church and the mosque side by side underlines the possibility of 

tranquil existence between the seemingly different religious establishments. Before the peace in 

the village broke down, Muslims and Christians only differ in their practices. Apart from the 

mosque and the church where the practices are performed, there are no other places where they 

were separated spatially. While the Christian village people pray at the church on Sunday rituals, 

the Muslims go to the mosque accompanied by the azan. Labaki frames children from both faiths 

playing ball in the square that is located in front of the mosque and the church. Also, people who 



 

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leave the church and the mosque meet in the square. Based on the peaceful environment shown in 

the earlier scenes of the film, one can easily argue that the ideology of religion is a process of 

creating an illusion for the people of the village through practices that differ only at an individual 

scale. This isolation of the film's hypothetical geography is in fact an obstacle to the ideology of 

religion in terms of creating a division. Adopting Althusser's terminology, ideology has not yet 

turned into an ideological apparatus at this point in the film. The fact that the bridge which connects 

the village to surrounding villages was destructed from the beginning can be considered as a 

structural metaphor underlining the village’s disconnection from the outside world.  

In the first scenes of the film, Labaki frames children looking for radio signals because the 

mayor of the village wants to bring television to the village people. Ultimately, the signal is found, 

the only television in the village is repaired and placed in the receiving area. The people of the 

village get ready with excitement and meet in the evening. This environment is reflected like a 

feasting place; the people of the village, dressed in their most elegant clothes, take their seats 

located in front of the small television, and a random channel is watched. This collective act alters 

the disconnected position of the village irrevocably. When they meet again the next evening, the 

people of the village become aware of the civil war that broke out between Muslims and Christians 

in their geographical region. Even though said civil war is somewhere far away, it is enough to 

ignite unrest between the villagers. The scene explicates how the communication ISA’s work as 

Althusser depicts them.  

From this moment onwards, the church and the mosque, and concomitantly, their symbols 

the cross and the crescent, take on a new meaning, on a new dimension. Accidental breaking of 

the church cross and goats entering the mosque and staining the carpets initiate a process that leads 

to the men of the village to take up arms against each other. It is clear here that religion, originally 



 

 

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defined only as an ideological distinction, has now turned into an ideological apparatus, and this 

transformation has increased their attachment to the symbols that provide the illusion of their 

affiliation or actual representation. At this point, it can be argued that symbols have begun to distort 

reality. For the women of the village, the process of transformation of ideology into an ideological 

apparatus could not take place because their common destiny and basic motives bring them 

together. Women have lost their husbands, children, and siblings due to the war. This common 

plight prevents ideologies from distorting the reality(ies). At this point, a duality arises in the film. 

It starts with the following sentence: “this story is the story of women left in the hand of fate”. 

Contrary to this statement, throughout the film, we do not witness passive women who have 

surrendered to their fate, but active agents who can choose and shape their own fate (Aşılıoğlu & 

Işık, 2020). Yet, the reason behind the active stance of these women is portrayed as their common 

destiny. 

In order to interpret the attacks at the breaking point of the film better, one should understand 

what these attacks happened against and how they mobilized the subjects. In Althusser's 

conceptualization of ideology, the relation between ideology and the subject is an important 

phenomenon. The film Where Do We Go Now? proves to be a concrete example of how Ideology 

functions in the same way although ideologies are different. While there are two different 

ideologies in the film, just one Ideology exists. As stated above, before the unfolding of the 

ideological conflict in the film, the ideologies of Christianity and Islam merely marked a 

differentiation via the representation of their dissociated symbols and the real conditions of 

existence of the subjects. The second level occurs because of the perceived separation between 

those who believe in these ideologies. Accordingly, the villagers are located on an axis of 

inclusion-exclusion. The subject, as a free subject, creates her/his real representation through its 



 

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ideology. In the first part of the film, where Yvonne (Yvonne Maalouf) describes Sassine 

(Mounzer Baalbaki) as crazy, the line "Sassine doesn't know even whether he is a Christian or a 

Muslim" can be given as an example of superficiality or the constructed nature of the separation 

that takes place in the second stage. The narrative allows us to realize that the ideologies 

fundamentally work in the same way. Because ideologies here are in the shadow of the Ideology 

that exists over a central Subject and the subjects around it. In both ideologies, there is God's appeal 

to individuals through religious rituals. God's house might be in the form of a church, or it might 

be epitomized as a mosque. Similarly, the sound of the call might be the sound of the church bell 

or the sound of the azan. Regardless of the specificities, the position of the Subject and subject(s) 

and the relationship between them do not change.  

One might ask then; what are the conditions of this relationship between the Subject and 

subject that is necessary for the existence of Ideology? And how are subjects around the same 

Subject divided into Christians and Muslims? The existence of the ideology and the subject is 

mutually conditioned. In other words, as Althusser underlines, “there is no ideology except by the 

subject and for subjects” (Althusser, 1970, p. 37). There is a conditioned ontological relationship 

between ideologies and subjects. For subjects to remain as subjects, the central Subject is needed. 

In other words, subject needs God because subject only becomes subject thanks to the 

interpellation of God (Althusser, 1970, p. 44).  The well-known saying "men were made in the 

image of God", which is common in religious ideologies, very well embodies the discourse of the 

subject being tied to the Subject in ideology (Althusser, 1970, p. 44). It also reveals something 

else: If men are the reflection of God on earth, the Subject has now become the subject. That is, 

just as the existence of the subject is tied to the Subject, the existence of the Subject is tied to the 

subject too. In short, it can be said that "Subject also needs subjects" (Althusser, 1970, pp. 44-45).  



 

 

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Aligning with Althusser’s formulation “God as the Subject and the ordinary people as subjects 

who believe in God”, the Subject's need for subjects manifests itself as God's need for prayers. 

However, the cause of the separation of the subjects across various religious ideologies remains 

veiled. It is crucial to analyze the process which Althusser characterizes as "subject but Subject" 

in order to explain this division. "subject but Subject” is God's reflection as men on earth. 

(Althusser, 1970, p. 44). Althusser (1970) illustrates this with “his Son on Earth” in his 

examination of the Christian ideology. By extension, this could be interpreted as prophets in all 

religious ideologies. This separation experienced in the transformation of the Subject into different 

subjects, the symbols of the ideologies, and therefore, their practices. At the breaking point of the 

film, there is an attack on these different symbols. While this attack emerges primarily as an attack 

by Muslim and Christian men on opposite religious symbols, it subsequently performed by women 

against all symbols.  

The first part of the film represents the creation of sacred symbols. While on the Christian 

side, “Virgin Mary” comes up as “subject but Subject” and her sculpture and the trinket as the 

symbols, on the Muslim front, the sacred symbols are the mosque and salaat. The villagers’ attacks 

on these symbols result in conflict among people. The relationship between the holy Virgin Mary 

who is perceived as “subject but Subject” and Takla (Claude Baz Moussawbaa), a Christian 

woman, can be given as a symbolic one revealing the director’s stance in this matter. This 

relationship contains all the diffractions in the narrative. A Muslim man who perceives the goats 

entering the mosque as an attack on the sacred destroys the Virgin Mary trinket. Takla, who brings 

the broken pieces together, kisses the damaged trinket saying, “still very beautiful”. This simple 

act of affection reflects the position of all the women in the village throughout the turmoil. 



 

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Women take an active stance against the increasing tension in the village. This stance includes a 

series of actions to prevent violence. First of all, women stop the radio broadcast, disable the TV 

set, burn the newspapers so that the village men will be cut off from the conflict outside the village. 

It is clear that these actions are aimed at undermining the effects of media, which is one of the 

ideological apparatuses listed by Althusser (1970), because dominant groups with the right to the 

ownership of media institutions in any given society utilize media for ideological manipulation, 

social control and for the reproduction of the hegemonic discourse. Later, they bring a group of 

Ukrainian strippers to the village to enchant the men and to dissipate their occupations, which can 

be seen as the beginning of the contradictions that emerged in the representation of women as 

subjects in their religious ideologies. This is an act that goes against the practices on which the 

Ideology is based. These contradictions, however, eventually become invisible. 

The reason why ideological contradictions in women's practices become increasingly 

invisible is that there is no longer an ideological separation. The event that causes a rupture in the 

story is the death of a Christian child, Nassim (Kevin Abboud). Nassim's lifeless body, who is shot 

during the conflict between Muslims and Christians outside the village, is hidden by his mother, 

Takla, in order not to exacerbate the tension in the village. As a result of this innocent child’s 

death, there is a disruption in the relationship between Takla and the Virgin Mary. This disruption 

symbolizes a rebellion against the Holy Virgin. Via the fascinating tirade, Takla performs in front 

of the statue of the Holy Virgin "... You will never see me here again; do you hear me? I will not 

let you hurt the children anymore”, viewers actually witness the destruction of the central Subject 

by the act of women (Labaki, 2011, 1:07:57). Likewise, in the tirade Amale (Nadine Labaki) 

performs addressing the village men “... You are tired of both God and this village. Is that the point 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Ayça Tunç Cox and Gamzenur Aygün 

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354 

of being a man? ", there is a sense of rebellion against the central Subject, that is, God (Labaki, 

2011, 0:52:54). 

The destruction of the Subject occurs with the extinction of the subjects. Althusser defines 

the subject as "who submits to a higher authority and is therefore stripped of all freedom except 

that of freely accepting his submission." (Althusser, 1970, p. 46). Departing from this ideological 

subject, women of the village have now freedom to rebel against their painful destiny and thus to 

subvert and deconstruct their conditions. This is how constructed ideological distinctions and the 

resultant conflict disappear in the film. The planned conversion of religion by women is the last 

action taken against male violence. Men wake up to a blurry morning, when the religious symbols 

in their homes and the religious practices (dressing, worship, etc.) of women who were their 

mothers, siblings, or wives changed. The mere deformation of the symbols was enough to confuse 

men, and they are no longer sure about whom and what they are against. The resolution of the 

narrative happens at the moment when the mutually conditioned existential relationship between 

Subject-subject-Ideology was destroyed. With the disappearance of the ideological separation, 

spatial distinctions also become meaningless. The cemetery, which is the space of spatial 

separation based on the ideological separation in the opening scene of the film, is seen once again 

in the last scene whereby the men carry Nassim's lifeless body. But this time, the disappearance of 

spatial segregation stands out through the interpellation of the film: “Where do we go now?”  

 

Concluding Remarks 

Nadine Labaki films, which constitute an important element of Lebanese cinema, have a peculiar 

style. The actors she recruits are generally either amateurs or real people living in the geography 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal A Narrative of An Ideological Destruction: Where Do We Go Now? 

Volume 11.1 (2023)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2023.506 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 
355 

of the given narratives. The authentic style, the active and emancipating roles given to women can 

be listed as common characteristics of her films. The film Where Do We Go Now? showcases these 

qualities, entrenching Labaki’s visual and narrative style. Differentiating from her earlier work 

consisting of the fable style, dance choreographies, and the distinctive soundtrack, Where Do We 

Go Now? instrumentalizes such techniques to create a convenient environment for the film’s 

thematic concerns. The film is bestowed with a sense of omnipresence thanks to the lack of any 

specific spatial or temporal references. This inevitably creates a perception in the minds of the 

audience that such a conflict could take place between any group of people in different geographies 

at different times. The filmmaker simply states that the domination of ideologies over subjects has 

always existed. However, the overthrow of this hegemony can only be achieved by free 

individuals. The key to the collapse of hegemony is hidden in the way(s) subjects turn into free 

individuals, and Labaki sheds light on this transformative path through her powerful female 

characters. 

Employing critical discourse analysis as the core methodological tool, we have discussed 

Where Do We Go Now? with a particular emphasis on Louis Althusser’s conceptualization of 

ideology. How individuals become ideological subjects vis-a-vis an interpellating Subject is 

examined through the transformation of an idyllic village into a conflict zone as seen in the film. 

The analysis has presented the configuration of the religion-belief-subject debate through 

Althusser's formulation of Christian ideology: The peaceful village life at the beginning of the 

film; the transformation of individuals into subjects through daily practices and religious symbols; 

the conflict between Muslim and Christian neighbors in the continuation of the film and so on have 

been examined in relation to the illusory relationship the subjects establish with reality. The film 

underlines the role of ideological state apparatuses in this shift. The significant role the village 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Ayça Tunç Cox and Gamzenur Aygün 

 Volume 11.1 (2023)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2023.506   |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 
356 

women play in the restoration of peace in the village testifies to the empowerment of female 

representation in cinematic narratives.  

All in all, most scholarly articles that examine Nadine Labaki and her films, both in Turkey 

and abroad, appear to present themselves as interventions in the feminist and/or queer film 

theories. This article, therefore, has provided an alternative outlook on her work by centralizing 

the concept of ideology. Its original contribution to the pertinent literature notwithstanding, the 

article has focused on a single film, meaning it has been limited in its scope. Future studies can be 

deepened by increasing the number of films examined. It would be possible to create more 

comprehensive and fruitful discussions by considering the concept of ideology from a wider 

perspective and also by including the director's other films in the analysis. Besides, a comparative 

analysis encompassing other Lebanese filmmakers could too yield interesting results. 

References 

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Dirks, U. (2006). How critical discourse analysis caces the challenge of interpretive explana-

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