Cinema is the ultimate pervert art,” says Slajov Zizek in his
introduction to the film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. “It
doesn’t give you what you desire. It tells you how to desire.”
Such is the thesis statement to his film, a lucid, provocative
examination of the intersection between psychology and film. Zizek is
credited as a philosopher and psychoanalyst. He’s clearly of the
Freudian school.
The Pervert’s Guide is separated into three sections. Part
one examines human desire. Part two takes on sexuality and the
differences between men and women as Zizek corrects popular wisdom:
Freud didn’t say that everything was a metaphor for sex but rather
asked, What are we thinking about when we’re having sex? Zizek’s
judgment of pornography as emotionally conservative is also compelling.
Part three is on the art of appearances and the power of belief.
Zizek is an engaging tour guide through the subconscious of cinema.
With a thick Eastern European accent and occasional pitch-black humor,
Zizek is the perfect combination of 18th-century philosophical giant
and unflinchingly modern pop-culture junkie.
He wades into many classic films and puts conventional readings of
them on their heads — and it usually makes total sense.
The Birds: an “Oedipal imbroglio full of raw, incestuous
energy.” The Marx Brothers: Groucho’s the superego, Chico the ego, and
Harpo the id. The Great Dictator: the alien nature of the human
voice, as understood by the silent screen star Charlie Chaplin (the
advent of sound in film “gives us the complex Oedipal universe”).
Zizek ties together in bravura fashion The Great Dictator,
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and The Exorcist and, with
another string, The Red Shoes, Alice in Wonderland,
Fight Club, Dr. Strangelove, and Mulholland
Dr.
Brilliantly, director Sophie Fiennes puts Zizek literally into the
films he’s dissecting. Zizek studies The Conversation from a
hotel room where it was filmed. He sits on a set made to look like a
fruit cellar to discuss Psycho. He stands on the infinite white
background of The Matrix to examine the fantastical
possibilities of the mind.
The point to all of this isn’t what does Vertigo tell us
about Hitchcock, it’s what does Vertigo tell us about ourselves?
Zizek isn’t interested in examining the films to mine the psyche of the
directors but to use films as a mirror to understanding his own
humanity.
The end effect doesn’t just leave a desire to rewatch these films or
to apply the theory to films he doesn’t examine but to consider his
ideas in the context of our own lives through the lens of cinema. If
great cinema has, as Zizek argues, domesticated human desires, how can
our lives be more fully understood from the safe vantage point of a
movie theater? Movies have long been thought to be therapeutic, but
maybe not for the reasons we counted upon. Escapist fare may be due for
redefinition.
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
Thursday, April 30th, 7:30 p.m., and Saturday,
May 2nd, 2 p.m.