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J. HOBERMAN ON SOPHIE FIENNES'S PERVERT'S GUIDE TO IDEOLOGY
WHEN ANALYZING MOVIES, Slavoj Zizek generally employs the term ideology in the vulgar Marxist sense of a comforting falsehood and uses pervert to mean one who is a counterintuitive thinker. What, then, is the ideology underlying The Pervert's Guide to Ideology- the second film essay that British filmmaker Sophie Fiennes has made in collaboration with the voluble and prolific Slovenian philosopher-and how is it twisted?
The Guide begins by sampling John Carpenter's 1988 They Live, a movie that posited the Reagan Revolution as a virus from outer space. (Zizek calls the film "one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left" but doesn't make the link to his old favorite The Matrix [1999].) In one scene, a willfully obtuse homeless guy forages for dinner in a Dumpster: "The name of this trash can is Ideology," Zizek explains. Got it!
The most baroque of (erstwhile) Marxist Freudians, having substituted the gnarlier Hegel and Lacan for Karl and Sigmund, Zizek typically draws out in his writings sharply defined contradictions, only to resolve them in a mist of categories imported from Georg and Jacques. Zizek's sense of ideology as not imposed but spontaneous, desired, perhaps necessary, and even a form of fun, drenches Jacques Ellul's venerable notion of "sociological propaganda" with a secret sauce: chef Lacan's objet petit a-that is to say, Zizek's own...