The latest documentary from Slavoj Zizek, one of the most
influential and well-known philosophers today, is the best thing he's put out,
including his previous documentaries (Zizek!,
A Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Examined Lives) and his books (too many to
list). Fans of his have long known that his particular intellectual energy
works best when absorbed through a YouTube safari, clicking from clip to
semi-related clip, and A Pervert's Guide
to Ideology channels that energy into a sporadically cohesive 140 minute
epic. The film jumps around from films universally recognized for their
influence, like The Sound of Music, Jaws,
and Titanic, to overlooked
masterpieces from the early days of Hollywood like Seconds and Brief Encounter. Each
film's significance is summarized neatly and engagingly, and contributes a key
element to the schematic of how ideology pervades all of our lives. The film's goal
is to show the importance of learning how to dream better, more practicable
dreams, and to demonstrate how ideology gets in the way of effective, useful
dreaming. This is what ideology is--a perversion of incorporating dreams into
effective social action.
The filmmakers, led by director Sophie Fiennes, are well
aware of the risk of the film turning into a bloated lecture, and wisely
include a generous number of sight gags, where Zizek incorporates himself into
the settings of many of the classic films he's analyzing. Some of the analyses
are more persuasive and provocative than others, usually when Zizek's
enthusiasm for a film noticeably kicks up as it does for The Sound of Music and Titanic--it's
evident that he had a lot to say about them for a number of years, while his
analyses of The Dark Knight and I Am Legend seem somewhat tacked on. The analysis of Titanic is especially rollicking, as it is so roundly mocked for
its facile portrayal of Leonardo DiCaprio's lower class vitality as a resource
to be leeched by the frustrated patrician Kate Winslet.
Despite the various sight gags, including a memorable scene
where Zizek drinks a Coke while walking in the desert before expounding on it
as the perfect commodity, as the film motors past the two hour mark with no
signs of slowing down, it becomes clear how serious his intentions are. The
films Zizek analyzes reach two dozen, and each is harvested fairly thoroughly
for a component contributing to the wider picture of contemporary ideological
control being built. It is exhilarating as the pieces pile up, and satisfyingly
comprehensive, while never being boring because each film contributes something
that at least seems essential to his theory.
Anyone familiar with Zizek knows he is aware of how absurd
Lacanian and Marxist theories seem to most people, and so he often goes to
pains to describe the modesty and relevance of the ideas. Zizek always tries to
emphasize that underneath the verbal acrobatics and irreverent humor is a
modest, sane appeal being made. This is very much the case here, as he ends the
film by asking us to reflect on how it is that we seem so obsessed with
imagining the alien/zombie/asteroid apocalypse, but are so radically afraid of
imagining something as modest as a shift in our economic relations. It's clear
that what stops us from taking this seemingly basic step towards improvement is
ideology itself, which we have to come to grips with in all of its nuanced
forms if we want to take meaningful steps in a positive social direction. A Pervert's Guide to Ideology is an
important contribution towards understanding ideology well enough to begin that
elusive yet simple process.
