The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology is a 2012 British documentary film directed by Sophie Fiennes and written and presented by Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek. It is a sequel to Fiennes's 2006 documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Though the film follows the frameworks of its predecessor, this film's emphasis is on ideology itself. Through psychoanalysis Žižek explores "the mechanisms that shape what we believe and how we behave." Among the films explored are Full Metal Jacket and Taxi Driver. The film was released in the United States by Zeitgeist Films in November 2013. Synopsis Žižek appears transplanted into the scenes of various movies, exploring and exposing how they reinforce prevailing ideologies. As the ideologies undergirding cinematic fantasies are revealed, striking associations emerge: from nuns advising following your desires at The Sound of Music to the political dimensions of Jaws. Taxi Driver, Zabriskie Point, The Searchers, The Dark Knight, John Carpenter's They Live ("one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left"), Titanic, Kinder Surprise eggs, verité news footage, the emptiness of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," and propaganda epics from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia all inform Žižek's psychoanalytic-cinematic argument. List of films discussed in this documentary Triumph of the Will (1935) The Eternal Jew (1940) Brief Encounter (1945) The Fall of Berlin (1950) The Searchers (1956) West Side Story (1961) The Sound of Music (1965) Loves of a Blonde (1965) Seconds (1966) The Firemen's Ball (1967) Oratorio for Prague (1968) If.... (1969) MASH (1970) Zabriskie Point (1970) A Clockwork Orange (1971) Cabaret (1972) Jaws (1975) Taxi Driver (1976) Brazil (1985) Full Metal Jacket (1987) The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) They Live (1988) Titanic (1997) I Am Legend (2007) The Dark Knight (2008) Coca-Cola (commercial)