The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
Director: Sophie Fiennes
Year Released: 2012
Rating: 2.5
Everybody's favorite hulking, loquacious Slovenian Marxist, Slavoj Žižek, explains, using films such as The Sound of Music, Full Metal Jacket, The Last Temptation of Christ and Jaws, what ideology is, how it affects our lives (he believes John Carpenter's They Live is an important movie about how we are 'forced' to see the 'truth' of things) and what we can do about the future (revolution, anyone?). Maybe Chomsky is right and Žižek is a charlatan - who uses "big, complicated words that may be fun for intellectuals to throw around to each other but most of it, I think, is gibberish to tell you the honest truth" - but I've always found unflappable Žižek to be amusing, observant (if rightfully skewed) and periodically brilliant. Some of his explanations/interpretations of the films are fairly 'out there' (though not as nearly as absurd as those in Rodney Ascher's Room 237), but his passion for his own ideas (and cinema itself) is unmistakably unique ... though at two-plus hours, many will find his endless explanations and psychoanalytic theories to be downright exhausting.
