The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

You should have seen the face of the sweet young thing at the ticketing office when she asked me what I wanted to watch, and I said "The pervert's guide". Only later did I notice that the billboards had unobtrusively referred to the film as "Cinema". Well.

Anyway, The Pervert's Guide is an intriguing look at cinema and what it tells us about ourselves. Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, basically gives a two and a half hours lecture on cinema, with clips from some of the most highly-regarded films in history. He says, "Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire — it tells you how to desire."

I don't have the brain right now (as the scarecrow says in "The Wizard of Oz") to put my random thoughts into paragraphs, so here they are in point form.

- Zizek talks about our need for fantasy so that we can negotiate reality. In Blue, the female protagonist escapes reality into fantasy when she couldn't cope with her dead husband having had a mistress, but later escaped fantasy back into reality, and it was with this sense of the fantasy that she could cope in the real world. In Eyes Wide Shut, the male protangonist finds himself struggling and failing to catch up with his girlfriend's fantasy about her having an affair, and so he creates his own, but he finds himself at an impasse in the fantastical world as well.

- The use of a window, glass, a crack in the door as a double metaphor of the character looking into his fantasy world (cp Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock), and viewers watching a film.

- Fantasy is a bit like religion, I think. Everyone needs a meta-narrative of some sorts to be sane. But those are just my thoughts, not Zizek's.

- I don't think I will ever want to watch any of David Lynch's films... Zizek mentions that the extermination of the paternal figure is a key element in Lynch's films. I think to a certain extent that is true, in the sense that everybody wants autonomy, but in "normal families". this is expressed as a shift in the balance of power, rather than the desire to kill our fathers.

- Zizek also talked about the birds being "raw incestuous power" in The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock. Erm. Okaay.

- Watching a movie is like watching a toilet bowl. You flush your excrement into the "netherworld" and never see it again, but watching a movie is the opposite of that — you stare into yourself, wondering what will come up.

- Sex requires fantasy. It isn't just about bodies; it is about your idea of who you want, what you want. Males and females have different fantasies. The male is always baffled by the mystery of the subjective woman and wants her to fit neatly into his fantasy. Women's eroticism is in the re-telling of the act — the narrative.

- The power of music. In The Dictator (Charlie Chaplin), the same music is used after the speech by the dictator, and the peace-loving speech of the barber. The response from the people is the same: wild cheering. So, does the content matter?

- The belief in illusion. In some films, the director actually appears at the beginning to say that it is fictional (for example Frankenstein), but viewers are still affected despite knowing that it is not real.

- I wonder what that says about our current obsession over reality tv?

For a more coherent idea of what The Pervert's Guide is about, read this page.