The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012)
Directed by Sophie Fiennes
A journey into the labyrinthine heart of ideology, which shapes and justifies both collective and personal beliefs and practices: with an infectious zeal and voracious appetite for popular culture, Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek analyzes several of the most important films in the history of cinema to explain how cinematic narrative helps to reinforce prevailing ethics and political ideas.
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By perching Zizek atop a toilet in the latrine from Full Metal Jacket , or having him lie on a shabby bed like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver , she creates a sense of personal identification between the lecturer and the lecture.
Director Sophie Fiennes deftly inserts Žižek into such classics as Jaws and Taxi Driver, the better to make his points.
There he is in one scene, in the Mother Abbess’s office in The Sound of Music; and there he is in the next, lying on Travis Bickle’s crummy mattress in Taxi Driver.
For example, he compared John Ford’s “The Searchers” to Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” on the basis of self-appointed heroes trying to rescue a young woman from monsters whose company they might actually prefer, whether they are Comanches or pimps.
He performs — with harangues, halting delivery and a deadeyed stare — in sumptuously designed and shot sets that evoke “The Sound of Music,” “Taxi Driver,” “Jaws” and other golden oldies of critical interpretation.
Later Zizek lies in Travis Bickle’s ratty bed, explaining how Taxi Driver communicates the American anger toward Vietnam, and sits in a marine corps lavatory in his undershirt, arguing that Full Metal Jacket inspired the Abu Ghraib torture photographs.
He doesn’t bring any revelatory insight to John Carpenter’s They Live, which leads off the new film, and in fact makes a crucial oversight: Žižek fails to name the film’s star, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, much less offer an exegesis of the rich ideological theater of professional wrestling.
Engaging a wide array of film references, blending high and low culture (as he often does in his writings), The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology opens with an examination of John Carpenter’s They Live (a film whose lead finds a pair of sunglasses that present a pure ideological truth).
Zizek's goal is to fulfill a role similar to the first film he discusses, They Live: Like the sunglasses in that picture, he's interested in revealing the inherent systems of thought we unwittingly buy into.
Dressed in the ragged army jacket of Travis Bickle, he examines Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver while lying on the makeshift cot synonymous with the anti-hero’s apartment; for the film’s engaging opening sequence, he riffs on John Carpenter’s cult favourite They Live ('Hollywood’s forgotten left-wing masterpiece") in an alleyway next to a dumpster, the very setting for the film’s iconic fight between 'Rowdy’ Roddy Piper and Keith David.
The main difference is that where Guide To Cinema covered a range of topics, Guide To Ideology zeroes in on the rigidity of personal belief, as revealed in films as diverse as The Sound Of Music , The Dark Knight , and Jaws .
He performs — with harangues, halting delivery and a deadeyed stare — in sumptuously designed and shot sets that evoke “The Sound of Music,” “Taxi Driver,” “Jaws” and other golden oldies of critical interpretation.
What can The Sound of Music, Zabriskie Point, Seconds, The Dark Knight or Full Metal Jacket teach us about the structures and institutions that determine our lives in ways that so often go on unnoticed?
By perching Zizek atop a toilet in the latrine from Full Metal Jacket , or having him lie on a shabby bed like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver , she creates a sense of personal identification between the lecturer and the lecture.
Later Zizek lies in Travis Bickle’s ratty bed, explaining how Taxi Driver communicates the American anger toward Vietnam, and sits in a marine corps lavatory in his undershirt, arguing that Full Metal Jacket inspired the Abu Ghraib torture photographs.
What can The Sound of Music, Zabriskie Point, Seconds, The Dark Knight or Full Metal Jacket teach us about the structures and institutions that determine our lives in ways that so often go on unnoticed?
To keep this one-man show visually engaging, director Sophie Fiennes places the professor in sets and costumes from the movies, talking about “Full Metal Jacket” from atop a barracks toilet and “Brief Encounter” from a 1940s British train.