THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA written and presented by Slavok Žižek (Directed by Sophie Fiennes, 2006)
The title of this enlightening three-part documentary is eye-catching but likely to be misleading.
A pervert is someone whose sexual behaviour is considered abnormal or unacceptable but this film is not a guide for those seeking gratification from soft or hardcore porn in modern movies.
The unconventional Slovenian philosopher & psychoanalyst examines how the function of cinema is to mediate between our ‘illicit’ drives and our socially conditioned actions.
In Freudian terms, this is the internal struggle between the id and the super-ego. Žižek states provocatively that “we need the truth of a fiction to express what we really are” or, more ambiguously, “desire is a wound of reality”.
Watching movies, he argues, is not merely an escapist pastime but an essential means by which to show how reality is constructed.
At times he is shamelessly androcentric as when he states that “we men” need fantasy to stimulate the libido or when arguing that female fantasies are a threat to ‘our’ male sexuality.
Even if you are inclined to resist such viewpoints, there’s no denying that the well-chosen clips convincingly support his viewpoint.
His main go-to directors are Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, both of whom openly take pleasure in exploring the dark, nightmarish worlds that lurk beneath the bright surface of apparently ‘polite’ society. They are aware that moviegoers are by turns repulsed and fascinated by the transgressive acts of violence, murder and sexual desire they depict.
The ‘peeping tom’ actions of Jeffrey in Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ is a prime example of how we are manipulated into sharing the voyeuristic gaze. Sandy, his squeaky clean girlfriend, is prompted to comment “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert”. Surprisingly, Žižek doesn’t use this specific clip or cite this line, although he identifies this movie as illustrative of many of the points he makes.
He also selects scenes from by ‘art’ directors like Tarkovsky, Bergman and Kieślowski as well as the sci-fi blockbusters Matrix, Star Wars and Alien. Even seemingly innocuous films such as The Wizard Of Oz and Red Shoes are presented as proof of how fantasy serves to relieve our anxieties and/or domesticate our desires.
As well as being a treat for cinephiles, this film shows that, by being drawn into the staged lives depicted on-screen, fictions come to seem more real than reality itself.
