A Perverts Guide to Ideology (2012, Sophie Fiennes) is a two-hour and fifteen minute lecture by the Slovenian philosopher Slivoj Zizek. Zizek is a lumpy-looking academic who speaks with a heavy accent -- he says "fee-lum" for "film." His presentation is not always grammatically correct and Zizek sniffles constantly, periodically groping at his nose. Much of what he says barely makes sense or seems highly questionable to me and the film has no clear structure -- Zizek lurches from idea to idea on the basis of associative logic that I was unable to grasp. Despite these characteristics (or, in part, because of them), the film is undeniably interesting -- it has an eccentric, loopy fascination, due in part to the film clips with which Zizek somewhat haphazardly illustrates his ideas. Zizek appears in mock-ups of the sets featured in the films that demonstrate his arguments. So, we see him in a fragile-looking boat on a dark ocean full of icebergs imitating the scene showing Leonardo DiCaprio's death in Titanic; he sits on a toilet in the barrack's head where the demented marine in Full Metal Jacket kills the drill sergeant and himself; we see Zizek dressed as a priest in the convent in The Sound of Music, lying on Travis Bickle's bed in the squalid set from Taxi Driver and wandering around at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley (where Zizek drinks a Coke and discusses commodity fetishism). Zizek is said to be witty, but there is not much evidence of humor in this film -- he delivers his long lecture in monotone, a deadpan delivery so lifeless and inert that it allow him to say some outrageous things without really giving offense.
A Perverts Guide to Ideology is about ideas and, so, it is probably necessary to explain a little bit about what Zizek says. If the ideas interest you, then, the film is worth seeing. If you dismiss Zizek's speculations, then, there's no point to watching the movie -- the film is only as interesting as Zizek's theories. Zizek defines ideology as a powerful "unconscious" (or "subconscious" -- Zizek's terminology on this point is unclear) perceptual device that structures reality according to certain dominant fantasies. In Europe and America, this device is commodity fetishism and other economic structures necessary to support Capitalism. Ideology is a "lie that preserves the dominant order of things" -- an order that Zizek sometimes asserts is primarily hierarchic is character. Ideology is so engrained in our perceptual apparatus that it can be challenged only at a cost of immense and violent struggle -- a point Zizek illustrates with John Carpenter's film They Live featuring a eight minute fist-fight between Rowdy Roddy Piper, the ex-wrestler, and an antagonist: the object of the fight is compel Piper's antagonist to put on magic glasses that reveal the world as it really is, that is, stripped of ideological preconceptions. Toward the end of the film, Zizek discusses religion and dogmatic universalist political systems, most notably Maoism and Stalinism. Zizek argues that these systems embody a belief in the Big Other, a term derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis. "The Big Other" is a an agency establishing a teleological order -- for religious people, the Big Other is God; for Stalinists, "History" as an inevitable, inescapable process. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the Big Other is a fiction. Zizek notes that the Big Other is the "agency to which we make our secret confessions, the agency to which we are obligated to tell the whole truth." In this context, Zizek discusses, in a moving way, women who were gang-raped during the war in Bosnia-Croatia. After the war, they wanted to tell their stories and thought that society and justice would be the Big Other willing to listen to their horrific memoir -- but no one was interested, no cared to hear their confession for its own sake, and those who did listen only desired to appropriate their experiences for their own political agendas. The women were forced into a realization that is both terrifying and, ultimately, liberating -- there is no Big Other, the concept is a lie. In this context, Zizek reverses the formula allegedly stated by Dostoevsky: "If there is no God, everything is permitted." In light of Stalinism and Islamic fundamentalism, the phrase should be "If there is a God, everything is permitted" since all atrocities are authorized if the end (heaven or universal peace and brotherhood) justifies the means. In this context, Zizek, himself an atheist, makes an argument for the exceptionalism of Christianity -- to get to "true Atheism," Zizek says, "you have to pass through Christianity." Christianity is "hysterical", meaning "anxiety-ridden" because it posits that the Big Other is a human being facing the experience of death -- this is the meaning of Christ's death on the cross: the Big Other, the inscrutable God of Jehovah, is no longer "Other" but takes on human characteristics.
Zizek asserts that the Big Other or Ideology, terms that come to be closely related as the film progresses, operates through libidinal mechanisms. The Big Other offers to give us what we must deeply desire -- although it is the function of ideology to create, enhance, and nurture those desires. In other words, this libidinal economy creates in us the very desires that it, then, offers to satisfy (Zizek's word for this is "enjoyment") or let us "enjoy". Zizek illustrates this with clips from Nazi and Stalinist propaganda demonstrating the mobilization of sexual desire for political purposes -- in the remarkable Soviet epic, The Fall of Berlin, perhaps, the most expensive film ever made, Stalin plays matchmaker and history is a gigantic mechanism for insuring that the hero and leading lady will consummate their love. Capitalist films offer similar libidinal bait -- Zizek provides a lengthy explication of James Cameron's Titanic in which he argues that the iceberg is the fortunate mechanism that keeps the classes, represented by Kate Winslet's upper class girl and Leonardo DiCaprio's poor Irish immigrant from becoming permanently entangled -- Kate Winslet feeds like a vampire off DiCaprio's lower class vitality and, then, casts him away as a pale, exsanguinated corpse in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. In a remarkable segment about the film Cabaret and the German rock band Rammstein, Zizek argues that the ideology can be overcome by adopting the ideological fetishism associated with the Big Other but, then, decoupling it from that ideology -- in other words, Rammstein uses Nazi symbolism in its concerts, but in a purely aesthetic way, that is, detached from any political meaning.
What is the answer to ideology's grip on our perceptions? Zizek argues that first we must recognize that Capitalism is the true revolutionary force in history, a permanently destabilizing, perpetually advancing historical phenomenon. But we must not allow Capitalism or any other Big Other to appropriate and control our dreams. "We are responsible for our dreams and fantasies." Since there is "no train of history on which will simply take a ride", that is, no Big Other, everything depends on us. Enigmatically, Zizek cites Walter Benjamin for the idea that "the true revolution not only redeems the future, it redeems the past, restoring all of the failed revolutions in history." "You must change your dreams," Zizek declares, and asserts this can be done only by exercise of the most extreme violence to our own selves. In the last image in the film, Zizek is shivering in the icy water with Kate Winslet bending over him. He closes his eyes and sinks into the water, but as his body drops out of sight, his white hand reaches out of the sea clenched in a fist.
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