At 150 minutes, in three parts, "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" (catchy title, no?) is probably the fastest-moving, most shamelessly enjoyable film I've seen in Toronto so far this year. There is no story, and only one character -- but what a character he is. He's Slavoj Zizek (more precisely, Žižek), Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, and he comes across as a delightfully unhinged Freudian maniac, the sort of heavily-accented mad doctor who might narrate an Ed Wood movie. But, believe it or not, he's the real thing. (I Googled him to be absolutely sure, and now I can't wait to read more of, and about, him.)
And what he does as narrator of this film (directed by Sophie Fiennes, sister of actors Ralph and Joseph) is talk -- and talk and talk and talk -- about movies. He's terrific at it, too. Turns out the good doctor is quite the cinephiliac (with a strong Freudian/Lacanian bent, natch), and in what feels almost like a two-and-a-half-hour free-association, he lets his brilliant and facile mind wander through many of the greatest films ever made -- with a heavy concentration on Hitchcock (emphasis on "Psycho," "Vertigo" and "The Birds"), David Lynch ("Lost Highway," "Blue Velvet," "Mulholland Drive," "Wild at Heart") and Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris," "Stalker"). One image, one idea, flows into the next, which makes for an intoxicating strain of film criticism.
This isn't quite the first film of this sort ("A Journey Through American Cinema with Martin Scorsese" springs to mind) -- but there ought to be more. The genre of movies about movies -- in-depth appreciations and evaluations of films that go beyond clip reels like "That's Entertainment!" into something deeper and, well, more entertaining -- is something I hope will blossom over the next few years. It's something I've been thinking about a lot: Film criticism needs to expand beyond mere words, and make better use of other media, including the web and film/video itself, where the images themselves can be seen while they are analyzed.
"Pervert's Guide" begins with a series of Rorschach ink blots, and the movie itself is a lot like those patterns. You may reject some of Zizek's theories or readings, but he's always playing around with fascinating ideas. Are Groucho, Chico and Harpo the Superego, Ego, and Id? Well, to some extent, but that's too neat a formula. And Zizek is flat-out wrong when he describes Harpo as both innocent and evil. Harpo is neither, and Zizek oughtta know better -- he's the Id (much more clearly than Grouch or Chico fit the roles he assigns them), and the Id is amoral, pure appetite, beyond good and evil.
But that's just a quibble. Zizek's central thesis, the way I see it, is that the forces that created the world of "reality" -- God, evolution, however you choose to conceive them -- have left it unfinished and in less than optimal working condition. (No argument from me there.) The world is broken and incomplete (and unstable, forever changing), and fantasy (in every sense of the word) is necessary to complete our experience of reality.
That's where the cinema comes in, as the form that most closely resembles and reflects our own (sub-)consciousness. We are limited in our exposure to reality (through our senses and our brains and our emotions) -- there's no such thing as direct contact with "reality" -- and so, the movies provide the necessary "phantasmic space" (or a similar marvelous phrase Zizek uses) in the place of the abyss. Or something like that.
This is the basic model Zizek employs to discuss expressions of desire, sexuality, horror, consciousness and myriad other concepts in film. As he says: "In sexuality, it's never only me and my partner. There is always some third, imagined element which makes it possible for me to engage in sexuality." He applies this principle splendidly to the erotic memory described (but never seen) in Ingmar Bergman's "Persona"; the written sexual fantasy that is enacted, and thus becomes a nightmare, in Michael Haneke's "The Piano Teacher" (Haneke's most disturbing film in my opinion -- much more so than the dry intellectual exercise of "Funny Games"); and to the pathetic and banal sexual imagination of Tom Cruise's character in Stanley Kubrick's yet-to-be-rediscovered masterpiece, "Eyes Wide Shut." (Yes, the orgy scene is supposed to be that dull and ridiculous; that scene is the core of the film, and the key to what it's about.)
Zizek offers a perfect short-hand description of what's going on in "Eyes Wide Shut," when he says that after Nicole Kidman impregnates Cruise's character with her fantasy, he spends the rest of the movie trying to "catch up." (Zizek doesn't go much further, but I will: The movie begins with Kidman in the bathroom mirror. They're getting ready to go out and she asks him how she looks. He says she's "beautiful" -- but he doesn't even look at her. He no longer sees her at all; she's just a projection of his own idea of his "wife." That's why she let's him have it later when he smugly says he doesn't feel jealous or threatened when another man finds her attractive because he knows her. And he doesn't know the first thing about her....)
Zizek even takes a brief step into my particular area of fascination and expertise: plumbing in the cinema, and uses techniques similar to ones I've envisioned for exploring the subject (by placing himself into interiors and exteriors from the films). He cites the motel toilet scene in "The Conversation" as a metaphor for our experience of reality. When we flush, we know the excrement (or in that case, blood) doesn't really disappear, leaving a clean white bowl "Sanitized for Your Protection." It has to go somewhere. And our nightmare (defined by him more or less as fantasy made real) is that the awful stuff we've put down there could (and will, eventually) come back up. He compares Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) staring into the toilet bowl to the existential act of looking into the void -- and to the act of watching a movie screen, as the excrement is served back up. Ah, what a marvelous image for the magic of the movies!
For those who want to read more about Zizek and how his ideas relate to the movies (his newest book is called "The Parallax View," after the terrific 1974 Alan Pakula thriller starring Warren Beatty), I recommend starting off with the Wikipedia article, which includes this:
The fetish is the embodiment of a lie that enables us to endure an unbearable truth (Slavoj Žižek 2000). This is the Real itself (in the Lacanian sense), an isolated object (the Lacanian objet petit a) whose fascinating and meaningful presence guarantees the structural real, the social order. This real enables one to gain a distance from everyday reality: one introduces an object that has no place inside it, that cannot be named or otherwise symbolized -- the photo collage of the beloved in the film "The Truman Show," for example. What Žižek means is that every symbolic structure must contain an element that embodies the moment of its impossibility, around which it is organized. This is both impossible and real (in its effect) at the same time. The symptom on the other hand is the return of the repressed truth in a different form.And to think, just the other day, I was describing the device of narrative itself as the MacGuffin! That's what I love about films, and film festivals, and this film in particular -- somehow or another, everything connects and reconnects in your memory and imagination.Žižek explains this objet petit a—the MacGuffin—in the following way: "MacGuffin is objet petit a pure and simple: the lack, the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc." (Love thy symptom as thyself).
After seeing "Pervert's Guide" (by myself), I met some friends for a fantastic Ethiopian feast at a nearby restaurant. Every movie we talked about reminded me of something Zizek had said -- or that he had triggered in my own head -- in "The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema." I couldn't shut up about it, even when I disagreed with Zizek (or, OK, maybe especially then). I think that's one measure of a good movie. And I'm sure I'll be reminded of more from this movie as I see more movies in the festival...
P.S. OK, one last thing from the Wikipedia article about Zizek's notion of "The Real," much of which he also discusses in "Pervert's Guide":
Here the Real is a rather enigmatic term, and it is not to be equated with reality. For our reality is symbolically constructed; the real, however, is a hard kernel, the trauma that cannot be symbolized i.e. expressed in words. The real has no positive existence; it exists only as barred. "Place the cover on top of the ark and put in the ark the Testimony that I will give you." (Exodus 25:21)If you find that a bit dry, believe me, Zizek in "Pervert's Guide" is not -- especially when watering his Lynchian tulips ("Flowers are not suitable for children"), and launching into a Herzogian fit of disgust over obscenity of these vile eruptions of nature: "It's an open invitation to all the insects: 'Please come and screw me!'"Not everything in reality can be unmasked as fiction; only the many things - indeterminate points - that have to do with social antagonism, life, death, and sexuality. These we have to endure if we are to symbolize them. The real is not a sort of reality behind reality, but rather the void or empty places that render reality incomplete and inconsistent. It is the screen of the phantasm, the very screen itself that distorts our perception of reality. "And he made a screen for the door of the Tent, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, the work of the embroiderer;" The triad of the symbolic/imaginary/real reproduces itself within each individual part of the subdivision. There are also three modalities of the real:
The symbolic real: the signifier reduced to a meaningless formula (as in quantum physics, which like every science grasps at the real but only produces barely comprehensible concepts)Psychoanalysis teaches that (postmodern) reality is precisely not to be seen as just a narrative, but rather that the client must recognize, endure, and fictionalize the hard kernel of the real in his own fiction.The real real: a horrific thing, that which conveys the sense of horror in horror films
The imaginary real: an unfathomable something that permeates things as a trace of the sublime. This form of the real becomes perceptible in the film "The Full Monty," for instance, in the fact that in stripping the unemployed protagonists disrobe completely; in other words, through this extra gesture of voluntary degradation something else, of the order of the sublime, becomes visible.
Zizek is definitely the real thing. His books on film and psychoanalysis are the most interesting and lucid works of critical theory out there. There are lots of starting points, but considering it is Sept. 10, why not begin with "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," his reading of "the Matrix" through the lens of US foreign policy.
It's something I've been thinking about a lot: Film criticism needs to expand beyond mere words, and make better use of other media, including the web and film/video itself, where the images themselves can be seen while they are analyzed.
Hear, hear! I like the steps you've taken in this direction thus far (the Birth/Un Chien Andalou comparison, the Opening Shots Project), but of course we [film writers of all sorts] can go farther. But how, precisely...
Oh, and there's another Zizek movie out there, called Zizek! Looks like it just came out on DVD...
I too would like to see more of these types of films. Some that preceeded it are mere clip compilations, but nearly all are a lot of fun. "Terror in the Aisles," "Decade Under the Influence", "Coming Soon," "It Came From Hollywood", "Hollywood Goes to War," and the "Universal Story" are just a few that come to mind. While these examples aren't exactly dissertations of their subject matter, they can be a great way to discover new films.
The works of Mark Rappaport are fine examples of this criticism/compilation genre. And while it's not quite the same thing, Kevin Brownlow's SO FUNNY IT HURT: BUSTER KEATON & MGM is one of the most remarkable examples I've seen of assembling existing footage to echo the point being made (e.g., describing Keaton's lack of control in his first sound feature while showing the puppet-string dance from FREE AND EASY).
I confess I couldn't make heads or tails of about half of the quotes you cited. Which I don't mean as a dismissal of Zizek; philosophy isn't my strong suit.
This may be slightly off topic with the main film, but "yes, the orgy scene is supposed to be that dull and ridiculous"
Woah Jesus! I don't know what version of Eyes Wide Shut you were watching. Probably the censored American version with poorly computer animated figures to conceal the nudity (which you couldn't possibly see!)...
I thought that whole sequence from him entering the mansion to leaving was incredibly surreal, dark, exciting, hypnotic, terrifying, intriguing, arousing, bizarre, and yeah it's kind of ridiculous, but dull? Dull??? In what way was it dull? I just can't concieve it being described that way.
I don't know what interpretation you have of the film, that to me was one of the best sequences in Kubrick's career. "supposed to be that dull" I guess we all have our own point of view.
JE: I don't mean that the SEQUENCE is dull, but that the rather stilted orgy reflects the Cruise character's stunted and pedestrian erotic imagination. Big difference!
"rather stilted orgy reflects the Cruise character's stunted and pedestrian erotic imagination"
I hardly think hundreds of very attractive naked people having group sex all over a mansion is the product of a stunted and pedestrian imagination.
What constitutes an exciting orgy in your head?
JE: In my head, it would be something less formalized, with a lot more abandon and fun! Like the free-form, group-participation, pansexual, Bacchanalian orgies in "Shortbus" where everybody gives themselves over to pleasure to find their own boundaries. But that doesn't matter. I'll admit I don't find the spectacle of Helmut Newton women with mostly middle-aged men particularly exciting. Not my thing. But I've described how and why I interpret the orgy as essential to my overall reading of the film. What's yours? What do you think "Eyes Wide Shut" is doing with that orgy sequence?
Hi, I think Jim's right. The orgy in the film is intentionally choreographed to that affect. In fact, I remember when the film came out, some people were criticizing the orgy scene as being like the sex in one of those late-night Cinemax softcore porns, in that it was not passionate or naturalistic, but formal, stiff and artifical-looking, like it was overly staged. While dozens of attractive naked people having sex is not exactly dull in and of itself, the way in which they were having sex was. When I first saw it, it didn't occur to me that this was intentional on Kubrick's part. I thought, well maybe the guy isn't good with sex direction! So the purposeful explanation makes more sense.
I always thought I would have to return to "Eyes Wide Shut" because the first time around it didn't click with me, and I saw it twice hoping it would. I pride myself on a quick understanding of things, and perhaps if I remember, I just saw no point in the film. This may inspire me to pick it up again.
I will say though that anyone who speaks highly of Andrei Tarkovsky is tops in my book.
JE: I learned with Kubrick that he never made the movie I expected -- or that he announced he was going to make. The first time was always a kind of cleansing of expectations. Then I'd think about what I'd seen and go back and see the movie again, and find that what he was doing was always a form of thwarting expectations. "Eyes Wide Shut" went right past a lot of people who claimed it wasn't "realistic" (imagine -- Greenwich Village on a set!), when the source was Schnitzler's "Traumnovella": "Dream Story." Duh! It's an internal narrative. I miss that Kubrick first-time bafflement experience so much...
Michael Haneke. I just saw "Funny Games" recently, and would agree with you. I didn't find it disturbing. I found it incredibly manipulative. On the DVD he talks about the moment when you think there is perhaps a bit of hope for the family after the Wife takes action with the shotgun, at which point Haneke pulls us back into the unreality of the situation. He says that people in the audience clapped when the right hand man was put down, then when he was brought back up they fell uneasily silent. He attributed this to the fact that as a filmmaker he maniupalted them into acknowledging an act of violence as a good thing, so when they were brought out of it, they felt bad about the acknowledgement. To me that's a very narrow view of the affect he accomplished. I admit, I clapped and gave a hearty hell yes in the confines of my own apartment by myself when this occured, but when it unoccured I didn't fall silent because Haneke goaded me into accepting a moment of violence, as far as I'm concerned a violent end to those characters was fitting in fiction or reality - it was deserved. The statement I did feel like he was making, which made me fall silent, was the statement that as a viewer we have no control over the film and we are easily emotionally manipulated by what occurs on the screen in front of us. A powerful statement about film, but hardly a clear enough statement about violence. To me the end of "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" made me question whether violence towards another was justified no matter what they did. The reality of what the child murderer does was horrible, horrible to observe, but it's almost sickening to watch the parents become what he was - very powerful, very effective - both emotionally and with less manipulation. In stead Park does it with brutal honesty, while Heneke hides behind his cleverness. Cache was my favorite film last year though, so my complaints about the filmmaker are minimal, and I look forward to viewing his other films.
The one thing I learnt from Žižek, perhaps more clearly than from anyone, including Freud and Lacan, is that, regardless of therapeutic efficacy, the importance of psycho-analysis is as a mode of reading and analysing culture and cultural artefacts (which can, of course, include subjects).
One of the things that makes Žižek’s analyses so perceptive is that he often observes what he’s commenting on as a linguistic and cultural outsider; he doesn’t have the baggage of culturo-linguistic co-option (Gramsci) and interpellation (Althusser) with which to contend.
This became clear to me when I attended several lectures he gave at the University of Alberta in September, 1996.
In the course of one lecture, he was commenting on the re-appropriation of perjorative terminology by the gay community, and suggested that the Black community might do the same with the word ‘nigger’.
This was at a time when (as gangsta rap had become an increasingly important genre of hip hop) the Black community was in fact doing so in very ambiguous, ambivalent ways. This was pointed out to him, but fact is that the insight would have been much more difficult to arrive at without that alienative cultural and linguistic distantiation.
(I also had the opportunity, with a friend, to spend an hour speaking with Žižek. Because of this, we discovered that he was cancelling the last of the four lectures he was to give in order to fly back to Slovenia to be with his mother, who was dying (of cancer?).
(What was both fascinating and a little bit sad about the incident was that he was trying to make intellectual/theoretical sense of his emotional response to the telephone conversation he’d had with his mother that morning and of his decision to return home to be with her.)
To bring this back to the idea that psycho-analysis’ importance lies in how it allows us to analyse and understand culture and cultural artefacts: I was speaking with an English prof here at the University of Lethbridge a couple days ago and said that Lacan’s conception of jouissance (as opposed to plaisir) is best translated not as ‘enjoyment’ (as opposed to ‘pleasure’), as is most often the case, but, rather, as ‘ecstasy’ (as opposed to ‘rapture’).
Ironically (or not, as the case might be), I watched Mike Nichols’ Closer that evening and realised not just that it was ripe for a (revisionist) Freudo-Lacanian reading but also that it clearly revealed a weakness of Žižek’s unfortunate reductionist tendency to conflate the two distinct aspects of Lacan’s objet petit a into ‘the object/cause of desire’, since the core of the film (the complex relation between Alice and Dan) only makes sense if we distinguish the cause of desire from its object.
But that’s another matter altogether. . . .
I realise this thread is all but abandoned, but I happened to see Eyes Wide Shut again last night and wanted to comment on something that seems to get glossed over in discussions of the film, both here and elsewhere.
Žižek speaks of Alice ‘impregnating’ her husband with her phantasy. But phantasy (much like desire itself) is viral, replicating itself and at times destroying its host. (This impregnation points to one of the troubling aspects of Eyes Wide Shut, which is that ‘phantasy’ and ‘reality’ appear to co-exist in the same (narrative) frame or space – ‘phantasy’ is enacted in ‘reality’.)
Harford, in a sense, ‘tries on’ several phantasies: the one involving his patient’s daughter; the one involving the seemingly naïve, innocent prostitute; the somewhat more troubling one involving Milich’s daughter (who is never heard to speak, although she does whisper something into Harford’s ear); and, finally, the orgy.
In all of this, Harford is much more acted upon than an actor/agent: it is Marion’s phantasy that intrudes into his own phantasy space; it is Domino who propositions him; and at Rainbow – as at the orgy – he’s an intruder into another phantasy scenario/tableau that’s being played out. Perhaps more to the point, the process of phantasmatic impregnation ‘dephallicises’ Harford: everything about him suddenly becomes open to question, from his sexuality to his professional status.
Given this dephallicisation, it is perhaps fitting that each phantasy scenario is interrupted in some way – Carl returns home; Alice calls; Milich returns; Harford is found out – such that there is no ‘intimate’ contact within the phantasmatic frame or space.
Harford is unable to ‘traverse the phantasy’, to break through or out of the phantasmatic frame/space; rather the phantasmatic frame/space breaks down (into mis(sed)recognitions?): when he calls Marion the next day, Carl answers; Domino has left, diagnosed as HIV-positive; Milich is shown to be pimping his daughter; and, vis-à-vis the orgy, Nick Nightingale has disappeared, Harford is warned away, and Mandy is dead, apparently of a drug over-dose.
There are two crucial scenes that seem to be elided is discussions of the film.
The first is the scene when Harford returns home after the orgy and Alice recounts her dream to him – a dream that peculiarly parallels the orgy.
The idiotic interposition of computer generated figures in the orgy scene – and Roger Ebert is correct in stating that Eyes Wide Shut ‘is an adult film in every atom of its being [ . . . ] inappropriate for younger viewers’ – robs not just the orgy sequence but also Alice’s account of her dream of much of their power.
The orgy sequence is not only the stilted product(ion) of stunted phantasy, but actually quite funny, as we see the monied élite playing at a faux libertinism rooted in a kind of Boschian, Walpurgisnacht-like pseudo-Satanism (a cultural phantasy of long standing that tries to answer the question of what the oligarchs and plutocrats do outside of their more-or-less public roles in the polis and in the private sphere of the oikos) that would have left de Sade laughing. There’s not a lot of fucking in the sequence; rather, there’s a lot of watching, of gazing at staged tableaux of fucking. There is no jouissance here; just a lot of wankery.
Contrast that with Alice’s dream, which cuts much more closely to the discomfitting heart of her (own) jouissance: she gets off on her desire (her dream/phantasy), but at the same time seems to hate herself for doing so (i.e., for laughing at her husband).
The second is the scene in which Ziegler effectively crushes Harford’s phantasy regarding the fate of Mandy. You can almost see Harford deflate as he is disabused of his conspiratorial notions (which can, à propos of the pregnancy metaphor, be read as a kind of hysterical pregnancy).
The scene is followed by the final of the three night-time encounters between Harford and his wife.
If in the first she impregnated him with her phantasy (in which case, we can see the series of events that culminates in the orgy sequence as a process of Harford ‘becoming large’ with phantasy) and in the second opposes her desire (expressed in her dream) to his conventional phantasies and phantasising, in the third she effectively confronts him with his phantasy, as materialised in the domino-like mask, and shatters the phantasmatic frame.
In the end, Alice does traverse her own phantasy (of being had/possessed by other men), and in the final scene, in the toy store, where she and her husband seem to make their compromise, she’s the one who takes the lead, who has the last word.
And what a word it is. In a more conventional film, one would expect her to say something along the lines of ‘Make love’, but she doesn’t. It would seem that only by fucking his wife that Harford will be able to traverse his phantasy – or, perhaps more to the point, be delivered of the phantasy with which she impregnated him – as well as to deliver her of her own phantasy/phantasmatic desire.
Hey There! This is 'The Guide HQ' - we've set up a website for the Zizek film 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema' heres the address www.thepervertsguide.com