“The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”

Depending on whom you ask, Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek is either a serious dissident or a revolutionary troll. He’s been called everything from “the Elvis of Cultural Theory” to “the most dangerous philosopher in the West,” and it’s a duality for which he is both lionized and lambasted.  Thankfully, it’s also a contradiction he exploits with more self-deprecation and candor than any other public intellectual today.

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, which premieres Friday at the Milwaukee Film Festival, is the latest in a long line of documentary films to feature the philosopher doing his shtick: basically, utilizing an element of popular culture to illuminate Marxist or psychoanalytic theory.  The film is a follow-up to 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, in which Žižek interprets Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds as the staging of the “explosive outburst of the maternal super-ego” and the birds themselves as “raw incestuous energy.”

If that sounds too literary, don’t despair. It is for me, and I studied literature in college. But you definitely don’t have to be in grad school to get something valuable from Pervert’s Guide. Some of Žižek’s language can be a tad elusive, his reasoning elliptical and side-winding, and like anything academic, it presupposes a certain knowledge and vocabulary. But watching Žižek speak, you can actually see him struggling to be understandable; you get the sense he’s academic trying to be entertaining rather than the other way around.

Much to director Sophie Fiennes’ credit, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology doesn’t tether Žižek to film, allowing him instead to expand his hermeneutical prowess to objects such as the Kinder Surprise Egg (aka the ultimate commodity), music (Beethoven and Rammstein) and ultra contemporary events like Occupy Wall Street and the Greek Austerity Riots of 2011. His accounts of the latter two feel specifically salient, as they address, perhaps more soberly and un-nostalgically than any leftist intellectual to date, the world as it’s come to be in the brief time following the global revolutionary wave of 2010-11.

Ultimately, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is much directed towards those who participated in those protests and who have, in recent years, felt that enthusiasm slip away. I remember being at the Riverwest Public House just as the Scott Walker recall effort was just underway and Occupy Riverwest seemed to be winding down. There were a few protesters left, huddling around the teepee that had been erected in the occupied green space between Bremen and Fratney Street. It was cold outside, and everything was looking pretty bleak. I remember one of the protesters, an older man, walking past me west up Locust Street,  leaving the group presumably forever, as he said no one in particular, “It’s not worth it. Nobody’s doing anything. It’s just a few guys in a teepee getting drunk and watching porn.”

I thought of that guy a lot while watching this film, especially at the end in this post-credits tag that inserts Žižek into that final part of Titanic where Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are both freezing to death in the ocean. Disappearing beneath the surface, Žižek has these words of encouragement: “I might be freezing to death, but you cannot get rid of me. All the ice in the world can never kill a true idea.”

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology plays Friday, October 4th at 4:30 p.m. at Fox Bay Cinema, Saturday, October 5th at 10:00 p.m. at the Downer Theatre, and Wednesday, October 9th at 4:00 p.m. at the Oriental Theater. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the door or online.