Subversive Saturday: The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) - NP Approved

Cast: Slavoj Zizek
Director: Sophie Fiennes
Country: UK | Ireland
Genre: Documentary
Official Site: Here

Editor’s Notes: The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology opens in Toronto on Friday, December 13th. The following review is a continuation of Matthew Blevins’ Subversive Saturday series.

In a brilliant follow up to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (a film that broke down the semiotics of films by masters ranging from Chaplin to Tarkovsky), Slavoj Žižek returns and once again uses film to dissect the very nature of our desires and the limitations of pure objective thinking, weaving through canonical and subversive cinema like a manic cinephile and using it a tool to enrapture and engage. The philosopher and psychoanalyst uses cinema to craft a fascinating philosophical discourse and carefully constructed argument that simultaneously reinforces the importance of dreams while contextualizing historical events through cinema as it reinforces the importance of a “Big Order” even when it attempts to subvert it. By using the language of cinema to carry out his philosophical discourse, he enraptures us through own shared fixation of the artistic medium that manifests our collective dreams, however hollow or disingenuous they may be. We are presented with fascinating interpretations of films that range from Jan Nemec and Milos Forman, to more contemporary mainstream films of filmmakers like James Cameron and Christian Nolan, but the philosophical discourse is what is rapturous despite its dizzying breathlessness through a wonderfully diverse array of films.

In a brilliant follow up to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek returns and once again uses film to dissect the very nature of our desires and the limitations of pure objective thinking, weaving through canonical and subversive cinema like a manic cinephile and using it a tool to enrapture and engage.

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology teaches its lessons through tiny moments of revelation that act as mile markers along a long and winding dissertation on the theory that our reality is constructed by the intangible and unwritten rules that serve a non-existent “Big Order”, and that a true awakening will never occur until we expand the parameters of our dreams beyond the confines of our objective reality. A Kinder Surprise (chocolate egg with a toy inside) reveals the intangibility of the true value of a commodity, as the moment the chocolate shell is removed so is transitory value of the object. The fleeting nature of the moment does not remove from the overall value of the experience. Even if the transience of the item’s form necessitates stripping the item of its value, that moment had value that cannot be diminished even if it lacks corporeality. The next mile marker forces us to contend with our shared fixation with our own demise as post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend interplay with the rotting corpses of 737s in the desert and the wreckage of the Titanic to remind us of the inevitability of decay while positing the possibility that those tingling moments that occur when we are faced with artifacts of impermanence are immensely valuable. It is only in that moment that we can truly feel the inevitable decay of all things and the even more frightening possibility of a perpetual rebuilding of the human race and its transient societies. Each new revelation guides us to the next philosophical signpost with a head full of new (or reinforced or better articulated) ideas until we are brought to the abrupt conclusion that reinforces the fact that we are all ultimately alone but simultaneously connected through our shared imposition of virtual oppressive forces.

Slavoj Žižek engages in an enrapturing dissertation on the nature of reality and the theory of ideology using the medium of film to show us our own twisted fascinations, while remaining an enthusiastic participant in those fixations as only a cinephile could have the necessary framework to use the art of cinema as a tool of discourse.

Even films that subvert these forces serve them as they expose the superficiality of our collective dreams and the self-immolation that ideology manipulates us into engaging in. Revolutionary cinema of Vertov and Eisenstein acts as a reflection of the unattainability of dreams as any ideology begins to lose its power as soon as it wins and it must stare into its own frivolity, the struggle being the true intangible commodity before ultimately exposing the cheap toy at the center of its ideological Kinder Egg. Hollywood films from the New Left operate under the assumption that service to the Big Order is a necessary evil, as The Dark Knight is exposed for its terrifying undercurrents of the necessary evils that keep a society glued together and the importance in believing in the “Noble lies” of politicians. But just because a political system offers nothing but empty, sometimes pleasant lies does not remove from its ability to alter our perception of reality, and our perception crafts the shape of the reality that we ultimately forge. A fascinating and inescapable paradox that allows the occasional lunatic to coerce enough people to believe in his bastardized version of reality that creates the “inconvenient” necessity to eliminate its opposition.

Slavoj Žižek engages in an enrapturing dissertation on the nature of reality and the theory of ideology using the medium of film to show us our own twisted fascinations, while remaining an enthusiastic participant in those fixations as only a cinephile could have the necessary framework to use the art of cinema as a tool of discourse. Cinema may seem like an illogical or unfit obsession for a philosopher and psychoanalyst, but he shows that like any historical event or firsthand experience, those moments that we engage with cinema can have true merit despite their transitory value. He is able to use his personal collection of transitory commodities to captivate an admittedly small crowd of people and convey his philosophical points. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is probably going to remain largely unseen, but it provides an invaluable lesson in the importance of those transitory moments, despite their appearance of disservice to any greater good and I sincerely hope that cinephiles and armchair philosophers everywhere will tumble through its manic discourse.

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Matthew Blevins

Director of Home Entertainment & Sr. Staff Film Critic

Behind me you see the empty bookshelves that my obsession with film has caused. Film teaches me most of the important concepts of life, such as cynicism, beauty, ugliness, subversion of societal norms, and what it is to be a tortured member of humanity. My passion for the medium is an important part of who I am as I stumble through existence in a desperate and frantic search for objective truths.

Latest posts by Matthew Blevins (see all)

• TIFF’s Spirited Away: The Films of Studio Ghibli Review: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) - December 15, 2013
• Subversive Saturday: The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) - NP Approved - December 14, 2013
• Cult Pics and Trash Flicks: The Upper Footage (2013) - December 12, 2013