Slavoj Zizek has now starred in three films--the same number as James Dean. His latest starring role is in Sophie Fiennes' The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. The film's premise is that Zizek pops up in excerpts from Hitchcock and David Lynch films, offering us lectures on the role of fantasy in cinema. Zizek is one of the few major contemporary philosophers who makes the cinema a serious object of study. (Gilles Deleuze is another.) Zizek first rose to prominence as a Lacanian who argued that Jacques Lacan's basic ideas weren't that complicated, and to prove it, Zizek published an introduction to Lacan using Hitchcock entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan...But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. The book was an instant classic among film studies grad students who appreciated his manically flippant style and the audacity of his claim that it was possible to understand the ideas of "Chairman Jacques," as Sheldon Brivic, a Lacanian and a professor of mine, used to refer to him.
Zizek frequently calls himself an entertainer. He's been nicknamed the "Elvis of philosophy"--a name one suspects he gave himself. He has a weakness for toilet jokes--in reference to Hitchcock, of course--and the title of the Fiennes' documentary is typical of his blend of scatological humor and high theory. The cinema is perverted, Zizek claims, because it tells us what to desire but doesn't satisfy that desire. In Fiennes' film Zizek gets to satisfy at least one desire: to enter into a Hitchcock film, to escape voyeuristic immobility, "the intolerable condition of being trapped inside our own body, our own eye." By inserting himself into Vertigo and Rear Window Zizek becomes the blot that Hitchcock's heroes (especially Scottie in Vertigo) encounter. The blot is a "foreign body" creating a disturbance in the real and the social fabric of everyday culture. The blot "estranges and perverts its orderly background, which suddenly becomes filled with uncanny possibilities." In Pervert's Guide to Cinema our blot is a wisecracking, hyperactive Slovenian philosopher upsetting our normal viewing pleasure--and having a great time doing so. What could be more perverse, and more fun to watch?
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