Zizek!

This Zizek guy actually has some perceptive ideas on modern culture when he's critiquing our pathological need to diminish our enjoyment of soda, coffee, beer and other consumer products by accepting diminished aspects of the real thing such as diet, lite, decaffeinated and so on. He's way off base by venerating a mass murderer such as Stalin though and it's awfully telling that the director doesn't even challenge him on this but does express astonishment at the fact that some people when they see his proudly displayed portrait of Stalin in his home walk right out the door - I mean what sad, narrow-minded idiots these people must be for not appreciating the finer ironies of the slaughterer of millions! Despite this fault of Zizeks I kinda liked him, he is whip-smart, not afraid to mix it up with his critics and despite his extreme intellectualism is a lovable schlub. The real problem is the aforementioned director, Astra Taylor, and her slavish adoration of Zizek and her jokey, yet unfunny, interspersing of the film with stock footage accompanied with old-timey piano music to present some of his ideas. Not cool.

I am seeking funds for a movie in which the heroine, Ayn Rand, played by Susan Sarandon, chases Zizek, playing himself, around the universe until he confesses that he's a blithering idiot. The movie ends with Zizek laughing uncontrollably and manufacturing nose picks in the shape of Stalin.

I got introduced to Slavoj Zizek through his under-seen Lacan-style analysis of cinema called the Pervert's Guide to Cinema, and was immediately taken in by his very sharp mind, oddball sense of humor, and dead-on analysis of the nature of cinema and the Freudian psychology. This little documentary by first-time director Astra Taylor basically follows Zizek around, usually without much control visually (her main tactic is to get her in close-up, which isn't smart since he's always animated, if still controlled), but always obtaining what Zizek is all about. He gets a person's mind moving about so many subjects: the super-ego and it's ties to capitalism, the need to associate oneself with ideology and the dangers with that, how to use philosophical ideas meaningfully, and what belief plays a role in politics and psychological interpretations. Not limited to these topics are all on Zizek's mind, and all of his points reveal him as a man with unlimited intelligence, even as his mind goes so fast it becomes something of a task to keep up with him.

Little moments Taylor captures add idiosyncrasies one might not expect from someone as such a Marxist and Lacan-follower (however NOT a Dogmatic Lacan-follower as he says), including showing off his son's toys, and shopping for movies at Kim's Video in New York City, or how he tries to look for a restaurant. But for the most part, Zizek! at it's best- and it's best to look at for its substance, not its style- brings to mind the nature of philosophy for the individual, how politics ends up feeding into the public's consciousness by way of wanting more "enjoyment", or what enjoyment really means. It's almost TOO short, and one who becomes fascinated by Zizek's theories and very straightforward interpretations of subjects that should be more complicated by how he describes them sees that sometimes he gets cut off from what is such a long and amazing description or drawn-out thought. But if one is interested already in the man, it should provide some fun and food-for-thought seeing the man in down-to-earth form for the cameras, and newcomers may or may not take to the man's theories. Like Pervert's Guide, some things will fly over your head, but what sticks makes for some of the most insightful commentary in recent years.

I had never heard of Slavoj Zizek before I saw this film. He is a Slovenian philosophy professor. He has written many books and obviously he wouldn't keep getting published unless people were buying them. He seems to be a Marxist of some sort, and has a photograph of the only dictator arguably worse than Hitler on the wall of his apartment, Joseph Stalin. He seems more concerned with nonpolitical philosophy though, generally speaking.

This film did nothing to make me interested in reading his books or in him. It is a random mishmash of clips of Zizek talking in various places in small soundbites about a wide variety of matters. Insofar as philosophy is concerned, and I consider myself a philosopher, there was nothing of any philosophical interest to me in this film. Much of what he says in this film seemed to me to be either trivial (obviously true) or incoherent.

Perhaps one might enjoy this film if one were at all familiar with his work, but I doubt it--why not just read more of his work rather than waste time watching this hodgepodge of soundbites? But if you aren't familiar with any of his work, like I was, there doesn't seem to be any reason to watch this.

To the reviewers of this film who think that Zizek is a Stalinist because we see a poster of Stalin outside his office...please look up "irony" in a dictionary. Also read this interview: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/? read=interview_zizek It begins with this statement from the interviewer: "you have said that Stalinism is worse than Nazism, despite the grand spectacle of the Holocaust." Not a bad documentary, but not amazing either. Zizek is a strange man. He is seemingly a narcissist and misanthrope at the same time. Ultimately I suppose this is the result of reading so much Lacan and Freud that he constantly over analyses himself.