The Pervert's Guide to Ideology  

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The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012) is a British documentary film directed by Sophie Fiennes and written and presented by Slovene philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek. It is a sequel to Fiennes's 2006 documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Though the film follows the frameworks of its predecessor, this time the emphasis is more on ideology itself. Through psychoanalysis Zizek explores "the mechanisms that shape what we believe and how we behave". Among the films that are explored are Full Metal Jacket, Taxi Driver etc. The film is being released in the United States by Zeitgeist Films starting November, 2013.

Synopsis

With infectious zeal and a voracious appetite for popular culture, Žižek literally goes inside some truly epochal movies, all the better to explore and expose how they reinforce prevailing ideologies. As the ideology that undergirds our cinematic fantasies is revealed, striking associations emerge: what hidden Catholic teachings lurk at the heart of The Sound of Music? What are the fascist political dimensions of Jaws? Taxi Driver, Zabriskie Point, The Searchers, The Dark Knight, John Carpenter’s They Live (“one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left”), Titanic, Kinder Chocolate Eggs, verité news footage, Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" and propaganda epics from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia all inform Žižek’s stimulating, provocative and often hilarious psychoanalytic-cinematic rant.

List of films discussed in this documentary

• Triumph of the Will (1935)
• The Eternal Jew (1940)
• Brief Encounter (1945)
• The Fall of Berlin (1950)
• The Searchers (1956)
• West Side Story (1961)
• The Sound of Music (1965)
• Loves of a Blonde (1965)
• Seconds (1966)
• The Firemen's Ball (1967)
• Oratorio for Prague (1968)
• If.... (1969)
• MASH (1970)
• Zabriskie Point (1970)
• Cabaret (1972)
• A Clockwork Orange (1971)
• Jaws (1975)
• Taxi Driver (1976)
• Brazil (1985)
• Full Metal Jacket (1987)
• The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
• They Live (1988)
• Titanic (1997)
• I Am Legend (2007)
• The Dark Knight (2008)

Also included is some news footage of the 2011 Norway attacks and 2011 England riots.

Awards

• 2012: Toronto International Film Festival, Official Selection

Reception

"Though its ideas are indeed heady and high-flown, they are presented in a way that's consistently engaging and accessible. And the bearded, bulky, Slovenia-born Zizek comes across as a born raconteur and explainer, the kind of professor whose courses are deservedly his department's most popular. You don't have to share his materialist philosophy to find his analyses of culture and movies witty, insightful and usefully thought-provoking." -Godfrey Cheshire, RogerEbert.com

"What remains? You will get a lot of answers to questions you never knew you had." -Anne-Katrin Titze, Eye for Film

"Intellectual rock star Slavoj Žižek dishes out another action-packed lesson in film history and Marxist dialectics with The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, a riveting and often hilarious demonstration of the Slovenian philosopher’s uncanny ability to turn movies inside out and accepted notions on their head." -Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

"Zizek’s romp through pop culture feels like a strange dream, with a mad professor re-enacting our favourite movie moments through the eyes of a therapist. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is invigorating, zany, completely memorable and often hilarious. Zizek goes from praising Coca-Cola to analyzing what the shark attacks really mean in Jaws." -Matthew Hays, Rover Arts Review

See also

• The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
• Žižek!
• The Reality of the Virtual
• Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst!
• Examined Life
• Marx Reloaded