The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (12A.)
Directed By Sophie Fiennes.
Featuring Slavoj Zizek. 136 mins.
In his latest Pervert’s Guide, Slavoj Zizek continues to play with the notion of the philosopher as a clown. He may not be the smartest or most original thinker, but he is the only one to have a really good shtick, which is to throw out wild theories and postulations while sounding as if he Tort He Tore A Puddy Cat and looking like he just escaped from a mental asylum.
Dressed in his favourite light brown safari suit, he waves his arms around constantly but it is as if he is still not fully accustomed to being free of the strait jacket because his arms above the elbow usually remained glued to his side. What a marvellous retro image: he’s a Riverdancing Magnus Pike, with the delivery of Freddie Parrot Face Davies and dressed in cast offs from the wardrobe of UFO’s Commander Ed Straker.
Well it is very easy to mock that which you don’t understand, but the surprise was how much I did follow his arguments. The occasional theory (his deconstruction of Kinder Eggs for example) went over my head but I was fairly sanguine seeing them flutter off into the blue skies, confident it was not too great a lost. I wouldn’t say that his thoughts on how capitalism and totalitarianism perpetuate their ideas through culture were obvious, but they are surely only digging down a layer or two beyond what most people know and accept.
The gimmick is to take apart Hollywood movies and reveal what they are really telling us, but often these interpretations are fairly tenuous. There is a long discussion of what the shark in Jaws represents – is it the devouring forces of capitalism as Castro believes or exterior threats to US freedom. Watching this all I could think was why Jaws? Surely this interpretation applies to just about every horror film ever made. And then Zizek abruptly links it with the Nazi’s anti-semitism which struck me as being in bad taste.
Taste, good and bad, may be a bourgeois construct but it is an issue throughout. The film’s visual ploy is to make it look like Zizek has been inserted into famous films, much like Zelig. At one point the Fuhrer’s plane flying over Germany in Triumph of the Will is shown and we see Zizek shot in black’n’white sitting in a plane seat, as if he was appearing in this notorious piece of Nazi propaganda. From his privileged position on screen, inside famous films, he splutters airy discourses on historical and contemporary misery and often his remarks about, say, the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian 1956 uprising seem high handed and insensitive. It is as if all human suffering was just stimulus for his intellect, material for the act.
Directed By Sophie Fiennes.
Featuring Slavoj Zizek. 136 mins.
In his latest Pervert’s Guide, Slavoj Zizek continues to play with the notion of the philosopher as a clown. He may not be the smartest or most original thinker, but he is the only one to have a really good shtick, which is to throw out wild theories and postulations while sounding as if he Tort He Tore A Puddy Cat and looking like he just escaped from a mental asylum.
Dressed in his favourite light brown safari suit, he waves his arms around constantly but it is as if he is still not fully accustomed to being free of the strait jacket because his arms above the elbow usually remained glued to his side. What a marvellous retro image: he’s a Riverdancing Magnus Pike, with the delivery of Freddie Parrot Face Davies and dressed in cast offs from the wardrobe of UFO’s Commander Ed Straker.
Well it is very easy to mock that which you don’t understand, but the surprise was how much I did follow his arguments. The occasional theory (his deconstruction of Kinder Eggs for example) went over my head but I was fairly sanguine seeing them flutter off into the blue skies, confident it was not too great a lost. I wouldn’t say that his thoughts on how capitalism and totalitarianism perpetuate their ideas through culture were obvious, but they are surely only digging down a layer or two beyond what most people know and accept.
The gimmick is to take apart Hollywood movies and reveal what they are really telling us, but often these interpretations are fairly tenuous. There is a long discussion of what the shark in Jaws represents – is it the devouring forces of capitalism as Castro believes or exterior threats to US freedom. Watching this all I could think was why Jaws? Surely this interpretation applies to just about every horror film ever made. And then Zizek abruptly links it with the Nazi’s anti-semitism which struck me as being in bad taste.
Taste, good and bad, may be a bourgeois construct but it is an issue throughout. The film’s visual ploy is to make it look like Zizek has been inserted into famous films, much like Zelig. At one point the Fuhrer’s plane flying over Germany in Triumph of the Will is shown and we see Zizek shot in black’n’white sitting in a plane seat, as if he was appearing in this notorious piece of Nazi propaganda. From his privileged position on screen, inside famous films, he splutters airy discourses on historical and contemporary misery and often his remarks about, say, the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian 1956 uprising seem high handed and insensitive. It is as if all human suffering was just stimulus for his intellect, material for the act.
