http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/oct/16/slavoj-zizek-perverts-guide-ideology?newsfeed=true
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"We all accept liberal democratic capitalism, even during this current pan-European disaster," Žižek says. "We timidly ask, 'Oh, can we have a few more rights for minorities? A little more healthcare?' But nobody questions the frame. And that is the real triumph of ideology."
Cinema remains the vehicle, though. The last few days have seen reconstructions of Full Metal Jacket, Taxi Driver, Stalinist propaganda piece The Fall of Berlin, cult sci-fi movie They Live – and The Sound of Music, in which the star skewers commodity fetishism while dressed in a cassock. But whatever the costume, whatever the scenario, the constant is Žižek, his analysis and context for all this delivered at a breakneck pace, spilling out in a torrent of lisps, mispronunciations and frantic hand gestures. This is the same cartoonish, brilliant Žižek who has reached vast audiences with his writing (more than 50 books) and his live shows. Žižek, clearly, is not your average Slovenian philosophy professor.
As Fiennes watches our scene replayed on a monitor, Žižek shambles up, still in his pyjamas. "Sophie, we must have time today for me to re-enter the tank." I notice, off in a corner, a high-sided water tank. It was used yesterday to recreate Titanic, with Žižek in a lifeboat. The water has acquired a scum overnight, but Žižek is adamant: "Today I must be in the water."
Fiennes, tall and unflappable, explains that her star has decided the movie must have an underwater finale. "He's desperate for it to be a proper film with a proper happy ending," she smiles. "He's just not sure what it is yet."
Satisfied there will be time to take a dip, Žižek resumes the monologue he keeps up when in company. To be around him is to be privy to a gregarious, open-ended address on, well, take your pick: Shostakovich, cloud computing, industrial rock band Rammstein, Malian cotton production, Icelandic crime fiction, the 1,200-page opus on Hegel he's just finished writing, all punctuated by a supply of dirty jokes involving married couples in the former Yugoslavia.
"I have two questions for you," he says to me. "Do you ever receive bribes from film producers to favourably review their films, and did you ever interview the American actress Liv Tyler?" As anyone who's read Žižek's madly interwoven works of theory will know, film is his prism: rare is the argument he can't illustrate with a reference to Hitchcock. But then it may be the perfect art form for a thinker who treasures contradiction, a medium of simple surfaces and hidden depths that can be both trashy and transcendental.
A recent visit to
Unsurprisingly, Žižek's soliloquies to camera, while based on passages from his books, leap off in all directions. But today the clock is ticking. Apart from Seconds and Titanic, the schedule also requires a re-creation of The Dark Knight, with Žižek addressing Batman in a
With his gaze fixed on a stand-in caped crusader, he begins: "In psychoanalytic treatment, it is crucial the analyst and his patient are not confronted face to face – because psychoanalysis knows the face is a lie." Then he's off, citing George Bush's notorious glimpse of Putin's "soul" and critiquing The Omen, before dissecting the use of white lies among colleagues.
The connections keep coming. He reviews the brutal logic of the Iraq war, the silence of economists before the financial collapse – and then glides back to Christopher Nolan's movie. "The gravest implication about The Dark Knight is that it elevates the lie into the principle of society, as if for society to operate at all, there has to be a lie, as if to tell the truth must automatically mean chaos –" At this point, Batman stumbles forward. There will have to be another take.
Žižek smiles resignedly. At 15 he wanted to direct films; at no point did he long to be an actor. Despite his geniality, he insists he's no natural performer. "Never in my life did I dance, and never did I sing. It is too obscene for me psychologically. Even in private, I am unable. And yet here I am, singing and dancing."
Leftwing multiple orgasms
Fiennes compares Žižek's thought process to a musician unable to stop playing. The film-maker has documented many mercurial subjects: dancer Michael Clark, artist Anselm Kiefer, fellow director Lars von Trier. But with Žižek, beneath his near-constant teasing, there's clearly mutual respect. He's the star, but the film is hers: before shooting, she combs his work for possible scenarios; afterwards, she edits hours of footage; in between, she wrangles him. "It's always collaborative. He needs to know I won't bully him. Making The Pervert's Guide to Cinema was a huge controlled experiment, and so is this."
At 62, Žižek does tire. But even as he takes a rest, he stares at the water tank. You might think the demise of global capitalism would have already given this Marxist his perfect closing scene, He says not: "I am a communist, but I am not an idiot. What to me is tragic in all these events – that give old-fashioned leftists multiple orgasms – is where is any concrete principle of reorganisation? What is new? Because that is what is needed. But I do not see it. Liberal democratic capitalism is approaching its limit, and in its place we need large, coordinated social actions. Otherwise the future will resemble one of my favourite films, Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Not the old fascism, but a fascism of buffoons. I am not a catastrophist, but also I am not a Marxist who thinks history is on our side. No!"
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