The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

By Liz Ferguson

http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/2013/03/08/cinematheque-offers-another-chance-to-see-the-perverts-guide-to-ideology-featuring-slavoj-zizek/

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On the web site Truthout.org, Yosef Brody writes:  “(Zizek’s) main thesis is that ideology in its most powerful form is hidden from the view of the person who submits to it. Once it can be clearly perceived it effectively loses its power of social control; obversely, to believe oneself to be non-ideological is actually equivalent to being driven primarily by ideology.”

“No matter which orthodoxy we may live under, Zizek explains, we usually enjoy our ideology, and that is part of its function. Paradoxically, it hurts to step outside of it and examine it critically; by default we tend to resist seeing the world from any angle other than the one fed to us.”

(Hence the presentation of the scene from John Carpenter’s film They Live, in which the hero and his best friend have a knock-down-drag-out fight because the friend is unwilling to try on the truth-revealing sunglasses for even a moment.)

James Wilson, producer of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, told Screen Daily: “The film is undercut by a witty and obscene sense of humour which is his alchemy. He isn’t a mad professor, he is compelling. When he does his analysis he is thinking as he does it. Sophie has an idea of what she wants him to talk about but it is quite ad hoc. He was inspired by things on set sometimes.”

“He is constructing ideas as he talks. He builds to incredible observations which become like a dramatic performance. It’s not pre-planned but has intellectual drama which he ties together in a brilliant way. From the Bible, to Donald Rumsfeld, to the London riots, to A Clockwork Orange, it all comes together like a speech in a great play.”

“This is a film about thinking. The film essay is a really exciting and underexplored form. This should be like a workout for your brain, a mind-gym. This is a film about the excitement of thinking, like the best lecture you ever went to.”

In a Skype interview with Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker Magazine, director Sophie Fiennes said: “Cinema is a great tool to explore ideology, because what [Zizek] calls ideology goes much further than the assumption of ideology as being some sort of explicit text, like a religious or political text that you’re meant to follow. It’s more, as Zizek says in the Taxi Driver sequence, that ideology is how we fill in the gaps where things can’t be explained, where we’re trying to make something feel like it has meaning in our lives. Fantasy obviously connects to dream, [and the film is about] how that holds together the ways in which we reason our place in society. . .”

“It’s all about belief, and so there are crossovers between [cultural theory] and cinema, which is also the art of suspending disbelief and believing in society. . .”

“Ideologies are kind of dreams, even at the most extreme, explicit, crude levels, like Nazism, which is a dream of a cohesive Germany without this disturbing element.”

BTW: Don’t be in a rush to leave before the credits are over, or you’ll miss something funny.

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