For the uninitiated, Slavoj Žižek is the closest thing academia has to a rock star: a Slovenian philosopher who has spent four decades smuggling Hegel, Lacan and Marx into arguments about Hollywood blockbusters, coffee mugs and toilets. Somewhere along the way, clips of him ranting about ideology, went viral. Some combination of the message and the shambolic messenger — with Žižek’s disheveled hair, nervous ticks, and rapidfire delivery instantly meme-able — turned him into an unlikely social media star.
But when I reach him on Zoom, Slavoj Žižek is hot and bothered. “Let’s get this over with quickly,” he says as we start our call. “There’s a storm outside, in deep heat, it’s horrible.”
One mention of movies, though, and he’s off to the races.
“Have you seen the newSpider-Man?” he says, unprompted. “It’s such a hit. Two billion dollars or what at the box office. I watched it. I don’t despise a priori blockbusters. But I just don’t understand the appeal. It’s the same with Taylor Swift. Why is she so popular? I try to listen to her, but I don’t know what’s happening there.”
Unlike, by contrast, Olivia Wilde.
“If I were to choose my favorite movie in the last year, it would beThe Invite,” Žižek opines, “That andThe Dramawith Zendaya. Because they display clearly the danger of total openness. I see nothing liberating in being fully yourself. Look deep into anyone, you or me, and you will see we are all full of shit, dark and obscene desires… We are entering a shameless era. I think the left should rediscover shame and moral restraint.”
Not that restraint is Žižek’s forte.
“Feminists will kill me for this, but I find Olivia Wilde also sexually attractive,” he continues, again apropos of nothing. “InHouse, of course, she was young. Then, in her mid-years, she was so-so, but now in her early 40s, she rediscovered her beauty.”
We are supposed to be talking aboutThe Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, the third documentary from Sophie Fiennes — afterThe Pervert’s Guide to Cinema(2006) andThe Pervert’s Guide to Ideology(2012) — that seeks to filter Žižek’s thinking, the ideas that have made him the Internet’s favorite Marxist philosopher and leftie provocateur, through the lens of cinema.
Slavoj Žižek reenacts a scene from Lars von Trier’s ‘Melancholia’ in Sophie Fiennes’ ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias’
Keeper Pictures
But like the Žižek holding forth in Fiennes’ documentaries, our Zoom call is full of digressive asides and provocative leaps of logic. He jumps back and forth from politics — the “liberal fascism” of Donald Trump, the dangers of cancel culture — to economics (“capitalism is just decaying, and what is emerging is definitely worse”) to, of course, cinema.
Žižek’s ideas are not simple. InThe Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, he says, he’s exploring “not the old Marxist or anti-Marxist [idea] of communism as a utopia, an imagined perfect world, that it will never work,” but how modern capitalist society, which “is self-replicating, justifying itself through [the ideologies] of competition, open society, market economy,” makes it difficult “to imagine an actual utopia.”
Confused? That just means you’re paying attention. Fiennes is not interested in dumbing anything down. But, as with her previousPervert’s Guides, she effectively uses films to visualize the philosophy. Horror movies that show incoherent, dangerous mobs of “working class” zombies and “upper class” vampires, with their refined taste and manners, busy sucking society dry. The “squashed bird” scene from Christopher Nolan’sThe Prestige symbolic of the discarded casualties behind every one of capitalism’s magical new inventions.
In her new documentary, Fiennes again stages Žižek in re-creations of scenes from the films and TV series being discussed, dropping the philosopher into the cinematic frame, so to speak. He lies in a bathtub in a wedding dress, like Kirsten Dunst, to discusses Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic drama Melancholia (2011). Debates the dystopian vision of Hulu’s A Handmaid’s Tale, lying flat on his back on a bed, draped in a red robe.
Slavoj Žižek in Sophie Fiennes’ ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias’
Keeper Pictures
Žižek’s hot takes and critical interpretations, on cinema and philosophy, are often counter-intuitive and seemingly contradictory. The Matrix, he says in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, is best understood not through its surface plot, that we are trapped inside an artificial reality and need to wake up, but as an examination of humanity’s need for such fantasies that reality, as we see it, cannot be the real world.
The hidden message behind James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2006), he opines in The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, is not a triumphant one of the masses rebelling against an authoritarian state. Rather the film’s subtext suggest a darker premise: that the fascists need the rebels and the rebels need the fascists to justify each other’s existence.
“Our duty is to see things the way they are. And here, cinema helps us,” says Žižek in the first trailer for The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias (see below). “Because I think that the role of Hollywood, or cinema in general, was always to bring out the utopian presuppositions, which we don’t perceive in our ordinary, daily lives. If aliens were to visit our earth, and by chance, ask me, ‘explain us what humanity is about.’ I would not tell them ‘go around and look’ I would tell them ‘look these movies and you will understand us.”
Hollywood will not save us from the oncoming “economic, environmental, technological” catastrophe, says Žižek, but it can provide “a purely symbolic space, where, in peace, we can wait the end of the world.
He references the final scene in Melancholia, where the protagonists await the apocalypse protected by a just shelter of sticks. “That’s what’s needed, not the billionaires flying to Mars or building bunkers. That’s what you find at the movies.”
The Pervert’s Guide to Utopiasis produced by Keeper Pictures, P Guide, SPOK Films, The Film Kitchen, and Mattima Films. It has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 7. Shani Hinto is handling world sales.