“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you
what you desire - it tells you how to desire” - Slavoj Zizek
Upon watching THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA by Zizek, I
realized that movies have a lot to offer for ourselves. It does not only
satisfy the crave for personal entertainment, but it also gives us a holistic
realization of the art that is in cinema.
The film was all about the ideas that are presented in all the
greatest movies ever made. Movies that have the theme of fantasy, reality,
sexuality and desire. Zizek's presentation of the film was in a humorous style,
yet he was able to deliver his intellect and knowledge about films.
It covers and explores the structures that made us sustain
our experience with reality. It also showed some films and how they relate with
history. Zizek taught us that our desires our artificial, therefore we have to
be taught how to desire. Cinema, on the other hand tells us how to desire.
One example that Zizek gave in this film is about the Matrix
scene where Neo was asked to choose between the red and the blue pill. Zizek
says that it isn't a choice between illusion and reality. Matrix is already
filled with fiction--- fictions that structured our reality. Therefore, if you
take away any symbolic fictions, you do not have reality at all. If there would
be a third pill, it would be a pill that would enable us to perceive not the
reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself.
There was a scene where Zizek went to the Location where
Hitchcock's birds attack a young, rich, socialite girl from San Francisco. Now
the question is, why do the birds attack? The answer is not because the birds
are part of the natural set-up of reality, but rather that it intrudes
literally tears apart reality.
As Zizek quoted:
"We humans are
not naturally born into reality. In order for us to act as normal people who
interact with other people who live in the space of social reality, many things
should happen. Like, we should be properly installed within the symbolic order
and so on. When this, our proper dwelling within a symbolic space, is
disturbed, reality disintegrates."
When it comes to sexuality and fantasy, there should be some
third imagined element which will enable us to interact with this pleasure.
Zizek also critiqued the concepts of love, beauty, sex and power that is in the
hidden message behind cinema.
Some of the movies that were included are:
Possed by Clarence Brown
“In order to understand today’s world, we need cinema,
literally. It’s only in cinema that we get that crucial dimension which we are
not ready to confront in our reality. If you are looking for what is in reality
more real than reality itself, look into the cinematic fiction.”-
Zizek
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