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I watched The Pervert's Guide To Ideology last night, the latest Slavoj Žižek film. Very interesting and amusing - I particularly loved his breathless description of They Live's sunglasses in the opening scene, and the tracking of the use of Beethoven's Ode To Joy as being used for all ideologies for all purposes (including a clip from Tokyo Olympiad to show its use as the anthem of the Unified Team of Germany). Though I do think that Žižek missed a trick by not tracking Ode To Joy through to the Die Hard With A Vengeance trailer, which would also have slotted nicely into his theme of terrorism being a kind of enacted fantasy to make the world simpler and more understandable.

I'm still grappling with the idea of 'the big other' that Žižek describes, though the clips from Brief Encounter and Last Temptation of Christ helped a lot to put across the idea! I guess I'm still someone who hasn't gotten to the point of embracing the arbitrariness of life quite yet, and still try to create things in the hope that someone cares enough to listen. Though I wonder whether Žižek feels if the creation of fantasy/ideology is not just something that obfuscates but can actually be a necessary construct in order to aid understanding and provide purpose and motivation in the individual (as with religion). With the problems coming when the construct becomes too powerful and imposes itself as an unviolable 'truth'?

Anyway I would be fascinated also to know Žižek's thoughts on World War Z, especially since it contains the element of the family standing in (and the hero 'feeding off' in the using and discarding of various groups of characters for information during the course of the film) for the masses as points of identification, something that Žižek tracked through The Fall of Berlin and Titanic in the film itself.

And throughout Žižek's Coca-Cola analogy, I really kept wishing that either he or the filmmakers had been aware of that Chemical Brothers music video, which perfectly encapsulates the argument that he was making during that entire section of his film!

I was pretty disappointed by the Pervert's Guide to Ideology, sad to say. So much of the forward momentum and glut of ideas that made the Pervert's Guide to Cinema so vibrant is missing here. This film is far too long and unfocused, and the length of clips utilized frequently outweighs the commentary afforded to them. I think here and there Zizek drops some great parallels-- his comments comparing Titanic and the Fall of Berlin are fascinating and well-pointed, for instance. But I found myself a little perplexed at the inclusion of TV footage and current events as he worked up an argument for public action that came from a different film than the one this seemed to be. The inability to arrive on what purpose or function this film serves is evident within the span of the scope as presented and lack of clarity as to its purpose. But then again, Zizek's comments are typically loaded and dense and on a second viewing I could fall totally in love with his arguments. I just don't know when I'll muster up the courage to sit through it again!

I would sadly have to agree - while I really enjoyed the journey (and if I'm honest, the film clips in particular!) it does peter out somewhat towards the end and I kept thinking of all the little things that could have been added to the argument to make it more effective, such as that Chemical Brothers video. And is Žižek really suggesting that he is somehow outside of ideology, or positing a purer kind of existence outside of ideology, when he is in a film that is so in thrall to other films that it goes to the trouble of painstakingly recreating sets for him to stand and pose on, replacing the original actors?

I did not mind too much the footage of the London riots, single mums in John Major's Britain (to suggest the need for a scapegoat to rally the crowds against), the Norwegian shootings or 9/11. The London riots were probably the most effective in the suggestion that a general lack of ideology leads to a capitalist, materialistic ideology pouring in to fill the void of indefinable need of certain groups as if by default of there being anything better available. However I often couldn't escape the nagging feeling that they were a reflex grasp for certain 'real world' events to try and move away from being so tied to discussion of ideology through cinema. Events that might be chosen for their topicality and shorthand familiarity to an audience, but which also suggest that the filmmakers have little knowledge of world events apart from certain big headline ones.

While watching I was also left wondering whether the film might better play to someone else other than myself, i.e. someone who has never seen any of the films discussed in detail and who isn't already of the opinion that every film is 'political' in its own way (even when they are created to have a calculated lack of the same) - someone who is getting introduced to not only the 'deeper meaning' but the idea that such fascinating and layered films are out there, even ostensibly 'popcorn' entertainment ones such as They Live.

Anyway I think my main issue with the film is that I only heard the word "hegemony" uttered once, and that was towards the very end!

colinr0380 wrote:I would sadly have to agree - while I really enjoyed the journey (and if I'm honest, the film clips in particular!) it does peter out somewhat towards the end and I kept thinking of all the little things that could have been added to the argument to make it more effective, such as that Chemical Brothers video. And is Žižek really suggesting that he is somehow outside of ideology, or positing a purer kind of existence outside of ideology, when he is making in a film that is so in thrall to other films that it goes to the trouble of painstakingly recreating sets for him to stand and pose on, replacing the original actors?

I don't how familiar you are with him outside these films, but yes he does consider himself 'vanguard'. He is an idiot.

colin wrote:Though I wonder whether Žižek feels it the creation of fantasy/ideology is not just something that obfuscates but can actually be a necessary construct in order to aid understanding and provide purpose and motivation in the individual (as with religion).

The creation of ideology is just one more example of the activity whose primal instance is the creation of myth, an activity that extends through all disciplines from science to rhetoric to art to politics to philosophy, ect. I think if you're looking for an examination of the above, you're going to want someone like Hans Blumenberg more than Slavoj Zizek. Zizek's radical political agendas tend to limit his focus. Especially since, as knives says, he places himself outside of this very process.

colin wrote:The London riots were probably the most effective in the suggestion that a general lack of ideology leads to a capitalist, materialistic ideology pouring in to fill the void of indefinable need of certain groups as if by default of there being anything better available.

A general perceived absence of order opens the way for any system that promises order to fill the void. I don't know if there is anything in this or any other particular ideology that makes it the de facto void filler. This process is in fact how Zizek's beloved Freudianism gained ascendency: through offering secular intellectuals of the early twentieth century who were troubled by the lack of order and purpose implied by secularism, well, a kind of secular myth, a series of metaphors and narratives that explain certain frightening and elusive avenues of reality--in this case the mind.

This process might even be cyclical, an excess of order inviting chaos which in turn invites an excess of a different kind of order, and so on.

I'm afraid this is yet another subject that I know little about, but I would love to learn more on the subject (so I guess I'm square in Žižek's target audience!). Sausage, is there a particular Blumenberg book that would be most recommended? Something like The Legitimacy of the Modern Age or Work On Myth?

Mr Sausage wrote:This process might even be cyclical, an excess of order inviting chaos which in turn invites an excess of a different kind of order, and so on.

Sounds very like a two party political system! Or international relations! Symbiotic and feeding off of each other rather than purely condemnatory. If there were no wars to fight, what would be the purpose of the international arms trade and individual armed forces, and how would they be funded! Perhaps the US and USSR had it right all those decades ago in funnelling those mutually destructive competitive ideological energies into something slightly less deadly, like the space programme.

Work on Myth is his magnum opus (and around 800 dense pages). Legitimacy of the Modern Age is one of his earlier seminal books and a good place to go first. This article is a good primer on the man and his ideas, so I would recommend reading it first before working your way through his books, which are large and very dense.

Northrop Frye's The Educated Imagination is a short, accessible primer to the way myth originates in metaphor and continues to dominate our conceptual and imaginative works. I highly recommend it if the topic interests you at all (and at only 100 pages, it's easier to take up than Blumenberg).

colin wrote:Sounds very like a two party political system! Or international relations! Symbiotic and feeding off of each other rather than purely condemnatory. If there were no wars to fight, what would be the purpose of the international arms trade and individual armed forces, and how would they be funded! Perhaps the US and USSR had it right all those decades ago in funnelling those mutually destructive competitive ideological energies into something slightly less deadly, like the space programme.

The idea of a universe that forever swings between love and unity and chaos and destruction in an endless cycle is an ancient idea, famously promulgated by the pre-socratic philosopher Empedocles. This idea runs through guys like Giambattista Vico, who thought history ran in a cycle from superstition through reason through imagination and back again (or, politically, from anarchy to monarchy to democracy and back again). Yeats would take this up as part of his cosmology, in which the universe is caught in revolving, anti-thetical gyres that took it through a series of myths and counter-myths (if the virgin birth is the central myth of the primary gyre, the rape of Leda by Zeus-as-swan is the central myth of the anti-thetical gyre we now inhabit). He used this to explain, among other things, the growing chaos of the twentieth century, especially the increasing violence and instability in Ireland that culminated in the Civil War.

One of the interesting elements that Bela Tarr dropped from Werckmeister Harmonies (without loss, it must be said) is the political dimension of Krasnahorkai's vision of chaos and order colliding. In his novel, The Melancholy of Resistance, the apocalyptic chaos that engulfs the town is skillfully manipulated by the burgeoning fascist, Mrs. Eszter, to establish a new form of order out of the rubble of the old one. One order just supplants another, although we are free to imagine that an irrational, incomprehensible chaos is waiting to engulf that order, too, since, like Werckmeister's harmonies themselves, all forms of human order are arbitrary and can't sustain close scrutiny.

Mr Sausage wrote: This article is a good primer on the man and his ideas, so I would recommend reading it first before working your way through his books, which are large and very dense.

And bonus points for the Sun Ra reference in the title ...