For starters, Slavoj Žižek is the closest thing academia has to a rock star: a Slovenian philosopher who spent four decades smuggling Hegel, Lacan and Marx into arguments over Hollywood blockbusters, coffee cups and toilets. Somewhere along the way, clips of him ranting about the ideology went viral. The combination of messenger and chaotic messenger — with Žižek’s tousled hair, nervous ticks, and instantaneous rapid-fire shooting — made him an unlikely social media star.
But when I reached him via Zoom, Slavoj Žižek was hot and bothered. “Let’s get this over with quickly,” he says as we begin our call. “There’s a storm outside, in such intense heat, it’s terrible.”
However, he mentioned a movie, and it was off to the races.
“Have you seen the new one? Spider-Man?” he says, without warning. “It’s a hit. Two billion dollars or what at the box office. I watched it. I don’t disdain pre-made blockbusters. But I don’t understand the appeal. It’s the same with Taylor Swift. Why is it so popular? “I’m trying to listen to it, but I don’t know what’s going on there.”
By contrast, Olivia Wilde.
“If I had to pick my favorite movie of the past year, it would be this Invitation“This and,” says Žižek Drama With Zendaya. Because it clearly shows the danger of complete openness. I don’t see anything liberating about being completely yourself. Look deeply at any person, you or me, and you will see that we are all full of filth and dark and obscene desires. We are entering into an age of shame. “I think the left has to rediscover shame and moral restraint.”
Not that restraint is Žižek’s forte.
“Feminists will kill me for this, but I find Olivia Wilde sexually attractive too,” he continues, again saying nothing. “in houseOf course it was small. Then, in her middle age, she was, but now in her early 40s, she has rediscovered her beauty.
We’re supposed to talk about it The Pervert’s Guide to UtopiaSophie Fiennes’s third documentary – After The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) – seeks to filter Žižek’s thinking, and the ideas that made him the internet’s favorite Marxist philosopher and left-wing agitator, through the lens of cinema.
Slavoj Žižek reenacts a scene from Lars von Trier’s “Melancholy” in Sophie Fiennes’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Utopia.”
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But, as with Žižek in Fiennes’s documentaries, our Zoom call is full of discursive comments and provocative leaps of logic. He jumps back and forth from politics—Donald Trump’s “liberal fascism,” the dangers of cancel culture—to economics (“Capitalism is in decline, and what is emerging is certainly worse”), to cinema, of course.
Žižek’s ideas are not simple. in The Pervert’s Guide to UtopiaHe says he explores not “the old Marxist or anti-Marxist idea that communism is a utopia, or an imagined ideal world, that will never succeed,” but how modern capitalist society, which “self-reproduces, justifies itself through (ideologies of) competition, open society, and market economy,” makes it difficult “to imagine an actual utopia.”
confused? It just means you’re paying attention. Vince isn’t interested in dropping anything. But, as with its predecessor Pervert evidenceShe uses films effectively to visualize philosophy. Horror films that show incoherent, dangerous hordes of “working-class” zombies and “upper-class” vampires, with their refined tastes and morals, busy bleeding society dry. The “Crushed Bird” scene from Christopher Nolan’s film Prestige A symbol of the neglected victims behind every new magical invention of capitalism.
In her new documentary, Fiennes once again presents Žižek in recreating scenes from the films and TV series discussed, dropping the philosopher into the cinematic frame, so to speak. He lies in a bathtub in a wedding dress, like Kirsten Dunst, to discuss Lars von Trier’s harrowing drama. sadness (2011). Discusses the dystopian vision of Hollow The Handmaid’s TaleLying on his back on the bed, wearing a red robe.
Slavoj Žižek in Sophie Fiennes’s film “The Pervert’s Guide to Utopia”
Pictures of a guard
Žižek’s heated opinions and critical interpretations of cinema and philosophy are often counterintuitive and seemingly contradictory. Matrixsays V The Pervert’s Guide to CinemaIt is best understood not through its superficial plot, i.e. we are trapped inside an artificial reality and need to wake up, but by examining humanity’s need for such illusions that reality, as we see it, cannot be the real world.
The hidden message behind James McTeague’s message V for revenge (2006), see in The Pervert’s Guide to Utopianot a victor from the masses rebelling against the authoritarian state. The film’s subtext suggests an even darker premise: that fascists need rebels and rebels need fascists to justify each other’s existence.
“Our duty is to see things as they are. This is where cinema helps us,” says Žižek in the first trailer for his film. The Pervert’s Guide to Utopia (see below). “Because I believe that the role of Hollywood, or cinema in general, has always been to highlight utopian assumptions, which we do not realize in our ordinary daily lives. If, by chance, aliens visit our Earth, ask me: “Explain to us what humanity is.” I will not tell them: Go and look. I will tell them: Look at these films and you will understand us.
Žižek says Hollywood won’t save us from the coming “economic, environmental and technological” catastrophe, but it can provide “a purely symbolic space where we can, in peace, wait out the end of the world.”
Refers to the last scene in sadnesswhere heroes await the end of the world protected by a fair shelter of sticks. “This is what is needed, not billionaires traveling to Mars or building bunkers. This is what you find in the movies.”
The Pervert’s Guide to Utopia Produced by Keeper Pictures, P Guide, SPOK Films, The Film Kitchen and Matima Films. It will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 7. Shani Hinto leads global sales.
