The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

A superb documentary which takes a sample of Zizek's capitalism critique and delivers it in bite-sized chunks complete with film illustrations and a dash of wit.

While less focused than his Pervert's Guide to Cinema, here we see him take the ideas from film and open them out to our social and ideological (obviously) reality. He questions the very nature of ideology (often coming close to utilising the process of deconstruction, something he has rejected previously) and how it filters out reality. The film, one could say, is an attempt to make us aware of our ideological constraints. At times it's hard to know if his point is throwaway witticism or central point, but that is the nature of his writing too.

Zizek does look to the future in a positive way, commenting on how OWS and the Arab Spring are examples of society finally looking beyond neo-capitalism (whose ideology is that there is no other ideology), though it would be good to delve further into these examples. But Zizek is aware that solutions are not easy to come by, and finishes more on a question than an answer.

This is a strong documentary that occasionally lags but for the most part is engaging and provocative.

The pervert's guide to ideology is a thought provoking documentary, but at the same time enjoyable and full of wit.

Ideology is so ingrained in society that it has affected our dreams. If we want to change our reality we need to change our dreams first. That seems to be the main theme of the film. Applying psychoanalytic theory to film interpretation, Slavoj Zizek attempts to uncover the hidden meaning of many Hollywood films.

The first film commented by Zizek is 'They Live' which is about a man who finds a special pair of sunglasses that allows him to see the real, scary and subliminal message behind posters and adverts in magazines, but also the real monstrous face of some of those living around him. This sets the tone for the film. For the next two hours Zizek attempts to uncover the hidden, subliminal and controlling messages of a number of films produced over the last 50 years. His argument is that Hollywood dictates our fantasies, dreams and desires through ideology. Taking this further, Zizek comments that the ultimate engineered fantasy is not 'to take what we want but to want to be desired'.

Desire, is not just a desire for something, but also a 'desire for desire itself'. This is the main way that capitalism works. There is an urge to consume: 'people nowadays are made to feel guilty because they don't enjoy themselves enough', he claims.

For Zizek, there is no 'big other', no guaranteed, inherent meaning. We are alone and we have to live with that. All ideology is constructed for manipulation and control. The Titanic for instance, demonstrates that 'it is OK for the high classes when they are in low vitality to mix temporarily and sexually exploit the lower classes'. Vampires and the undead are also a demonstration of the class struggle, with the blood sucking vampires representing the high classes.

Similarly, the shark in Jaws represents all fears of American people; Americans may fear natural disasters, aliens, immigrants or other, and the shark unifies all those fears. This ideology was adopted by the Nazis who unified the enemy in the face of the Jews, according to Zizek.

Are Zizek's psychoanalytic explanations to films 'real'? This is up to you to decide; however, they sound plausible and are worthwhile for consideration. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, Zizek will change the way you watch films and Hollywood will never be the same again.

The accent is brave, hardly penetrable. Captions are really necessary. But the title of the movie says it all: it IS Slovenian humor at an abstract, high-brow level. The host mitigates the Freudian legacy as he perverts - in a decreasing order - (1) Marx (2) Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School at large (3) Lacan. His universalizing framework comes from Lacanian psychoanalysis, although he is as 'revealing' as Lacan. The greatest apparent influence on Zizek seems to be that of Roland Barthes's 'Mythologies'. As if he were kinda Roland The Hip Semiologist, Zizek analyzes everything from the perspective of the 'myth,' revealing at every opportunity a new approach, criticizing our surrounding, culturally globalized habitat, and insinuating what might be its intrinsic authenticity. The film is essentially an illustrated conference in the style of other mass culture analysts such as Jacob Bronowski, John Berger, Robert Hughes, Kenneth Clark. Zizek is not interested in the respective ideology of the filmmakers he quotes. He uses fragments of films as illustrative of real life processes and their 'myths', not specifically Nazism or Communism, but rather the way we all shape our lives and the universal themes that connect our 'mythological' subconscious needs.

Sophie Fiennes' film, 'The Pervert's Guide To Ideology', is essentially just an illustrated lecture, given by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The illustrations come from the movies, but in the main, Zizek isn't interested in the ideologies of the film makers - rather, he uses selections from the films' content as illustrative of the processes of real life, and the ideology he is interested in is not Nazism, or communism, but rather the way we all frame our own lives, and the universal themes linking our need for and use of such frames. Some of this universalist framework comes from psychoanalysis, although Zizek's Freudian perspective only really manifests itself in occasional unproven assertions that the it is the analytic process that has revealed the truth. Finnes shoots this well, and Zivek is intermittently interesting, but overall, the message is both highbrow and yet strangely unrevalatory; I found it hard to understand what I was meant to take away from this film, or in other words, what the film's own ideological case actually was. It's almost better enjoyed as a simple piece of discursive criticism than a coherent (or, for want of a better word, we might say "ideological") discussion of ideology.

I haven't seen "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema"; now I wonder if I want to. Sophie Fiennes is credited as the director of "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology" but this is Slavoj Zizek's movie; he is never off the screen either in person or just his very annoying voice in broken English, (worse even than Mark Cousins' as he narrates his "The Story of Film"), as he explores the concept of 'ideology' through film, newsreel or music as used in film and since the examples he uses are far from what we might expect in such a highly intellectualized essay as this we are left in something of a void. I mean, is this man, Slavoj Zizek, for real or is Feinnes pulling the wool over our eyes by putting him at the centre of her film?

Of course, things would be a lot different if our guide were someone else; someone speaking fluent English or if Zizek were allowed to speak in his own language but then his torrent of words could never be adequately represented by subtitles. So we must take this film purely on face value. An 'ideological' version of this film wouldn't perhaps be what's up on the screen but perhaps that's the point. Film-buffs will, of course, love the clips even if Zizek's voice-over doesn't always make it easy for us to understand what is being said, (or what point he may actually be making), but there is a certain tongue-in-cheek fun to be had from seeing Zizek place himself 'into' the films or at least into the settings of the films, ("Taxi Driver" one minute, "Triumph of the Will" the next and sitting on the toilet from "Full Metal Jacket" at one point).

I'm sure intellectuals will positively wet themselves in paroxysms of ecstasy at having depth and meaning bestowed on such commercial 'classics' as "Jaws" and "The Sound of Music" and may even have them racing back to view them in a totally different light. Others may run screaming from the cinema and may never want to watch "West Side Story" again. For now I'm sitting on the fence with a foot in both camps, torn by the validity of Zizek's arguments (or the lack of), and the catch- penny, if undeniably entertaining, style in which they are presented.