The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – a documentary by Sophie Fiennes and scripted and presented by Slavoj Žižek (I’m not going to bother with giving any background on Slavoj as I assume most of you have at least some passing familiarity with him, and if not, go here) – is a theoretical exploration into cinema, its tactics, its reason, its phantasmal structures. Zizek’s rapid-fire, gesticulating, oftentimes deadpan hilarious (and oftentimes unintentionally so), generally Freudian and Lacanian analysis of cinema are alternated with clips from Zizek’s analytical objects, with Slavoj often on the original sets themselves, enmeshed within those virtual structures.
The documentary is divided in to three parts – appropriately separated by Rorschach inkblots.
In the first Zizek performs a pretty straightforward – and occasionally brilliant – psychoanalysis of a variety of films, many of which he returns to in the other sections of the doc. The Matrix (where Zizek wishes there was a third pill, one that allows one to see the reality in illusion itself), The Birds (the birds as raw incestuous energy), Duck Soup (Groucho as superego, Chico as ego and Harpo as the “utterly corrupt and innocent” id), The Exorcist, Alien, The Great Dictator, Blue Velvet, Vertigo and a quartet of films dealing with “the nightmare of autonomous partial objects” – Mulholland Drive, Dr. Strangelove, Fight Club and Dead at Night – are all entertainingly analyzed.
The role of fantasy in sexual relationships is the focus of part two (curiously enough, for some reason at the pub where I am scribbling this the waitresses are all dressed like schoolgirls in short skirt outfits, either a coincidence in the Jungian sense of the term, with a correspondence between the exterior and interior worlds, a cosmic confirmation that I am on the right path, or else just some stupid back to university theme night). While Zizek does some decent unearthings of The Matrix, Solaris, Persona, Blue and The Piano Teacher, most interesting in this section is his take on Lynch, specifically the dual films Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, so when you get asked yet again what the fuck Lynch’s films are about, send them over here.
Zizek takes a detour into Gnosticism in the third and final part, in which he uses a Gnostic interpretation of cinema to explain non-cinematic existence. “Cinema tells us how reality constitutes itself.” Alien, Dogville and Star Wars are operated to pry apart the false opposition between fantasy and the real, the false primacy of the real over the virtual. “Our fundamental delusion is not to take fictions too seriously, ours is not to take fictions seriously enough.”
Then he brings it back home with a Freudian analysis of Lynch’s movies, with their obscene and ridiculous father figures who are paradoxically the ethical focus of his films.
A fascinating and brilliant take on the cinema, bound to enrich your viewing, Freudian or not.
and oh yeah, while researching this review I came across
this quote from an interview with Zizek about The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema:
‘I was in New York and there were these signs, “Don’t buy pirated movies, you are supporting terrorism and communism” blah blah blah. So I thought, from now on, I will only buy pirate DVDs. Maybe the spontaneous communism of the medium will finally triumph.’
So in that spirit, I give you this link.
