The Pervert's Guide To Ideology Review (3.5 stars)

rating: 3.5

Seven years after their first collaboration The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, filmmaker Fiennes and Slovene philosopher/cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek team up once more to straddle the line between documentary and film essay with a skilful, smart but rather scattershot dissection of how cinema shapes our sociopolitical worldview. As before, Fiennes steps behind the camera and into the shadows to allow Žižek - a man whose thick Eastern European accent and apparent tics have invited eccentric but endearing comparison to that of a mad professor; a reputation he must surely relish- free rein to highlight the raft of hidden messages and life lessons we all probably missed. He begins with a well-known and relatively unchallenging example: John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi satire They Live, a film he considers to be ''one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left''. In it, drifter John Nada (played by 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of sunglasses that alert him (and only him) to the news of an alien invasion. Upon wearing the shades, he sees that billboard advertisements that were once emblazoned with expensive sports cars and luxury holidays now bear such stark messages as 'OBEY' and 'MARRY AND REPRODUCE'. And lo, the consumerist conspiracy is revealed. Žižek doesn't claim to be the first to point out that, of course, it could be that everyone else can see these signs; they're just choosing not to look, but he does make an effective and emphatic starting point. With our learned guide, will we too be able to open our eyes for the first time, peel away the glossy façade of our favourite films and feast upon the truth buried deep within? Well, yes and no. Žižek is, as always, an engaging host; imposing but never imperious, playful but never patronising. As was the case in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, his deadpan delivery and seemingly unscripted narration create a sense of spontaneity, an impression of both intimacy and immediacy. But it is Žižek's absurd humour, comfort in juggling all aspects of pop culture and complete inability to take himself too seriously that truly keeps the audience on his side. He 'recreates' the films in discussion by not only dressing up as the central characters but also in replicating as closely as possible the iconography of the scene; hence standing in the alleyway from They Live, sitting in the mother superior's office for The Sound of Music and, dressed in an army jacket, lying supine on Travis Bickle's campbed - with the same scattered magazines almost perfectly arranged - for his analysis of Taxi Driver.Here he suggests that the protagonists of both The Searchers and 'The' Taxi Driver ( Žižek has an odd habit of adding a definite article to films that don't need it) are wrong to rescue their respective damsels in distress from exploitation and child prostitution, as, put simply, they do not wish to be rescued. This, argues Žižek, is US foreign policy in a nutshell. An easy laugh, you might think, but a sobering thought nonetheless. Equally perplexing is the portrayal of leaders in propaganda films. While Hitler maintains his impenetrable public image so carefully crafted in films such as Triumph of the Will, it is certainly surprising to see Stalin cast as a matchmaker, of sorts, in The Fall of Berlin: reuniting the female worker and the male soldier torn apart by war - despite them standing only a few feet from each other in an otherwise crowded celebration scene. As Žižek wryly notes, ''If Stalin gives you love advice, it has to succeed''. Sitting on a barracks toilet, Žižek mentions that Full Metal Jacket and The Dark Knight both share a character named Joker but, disappointingly, this is never explored in greater depth. Instead, he draws parallels between the ritual humiliation of US Army cadets portrayed in Kubrick's war classic and the real-life scandal in Abu Ghraib, before noting that ''he truly disturbing thing about The Dark Knight is that it elevates a lie into a general social principle'' with Commissioner Gordon, Harvey Dent and Batman all bending the truth, and in an almost domino effect, so that order can be maintained in Gotham. Žižek sees the pairing of Jack and Rose in Titanic in somewhat less romantic terms; as well as scoffing at the scene in which Rose cries ''I will never let go!'' to a dying Jack, before doing precisely that.

But while The Pervert's Guide to Cinema was unrestrained by an overriding theme, leaving Žižek to zip from say, an Oedipal reading of The Birds to a psychoanalytical study of the Marx Brothers' working dynamic, here we're never quite sure whether he has fully closed one critique before he opens another. For example, he argues that the recent London riots were a product of an increasingly capitalistic society, yet later suggests that the perpetrators- those caught on CCTV running away with hoods over their heads and flatscreen TVs in their hands- are simply echoing the excuses of the street gangs of West Side Story ("Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, you gotta understand/It's just our bringin' up-ke that gets us out of hand''). Somewhat tellingly, our host never offers his definition of 'ideology'; choosing instead to dissect around two dozen or so film clips, occasionally out of context . But then perhaps this is the point. In illustrating just how Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy', a song almost unequivocally considered nowadays to be a hymn to humanity, has been adopted by a great number of political organisations - ranging from Nazi Germany to the European Union- Žižek suggests that the definition, like the song, is very much open to interpretation. Indeed, the ''universal adaptability of this well-known melody'' allows us to smoothly turn our attention to its inclusion in A Clockwork Orange, with Žižek addressing us, but of course, from the Korovo Milk Bar. While he thankfully abstains from nailing himself to a cross, his Christian reading of Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ proves to be an uncharacteristic weak link: both overlong and deliberately provocative. And a digression on the desert orgy scene in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point doesn't quite make its intentions clear: despite the film being a cynical denunciation of the Sixties 'hippy' spirit, the scene in question could be misconstrued, Žižek grumbles, to endorse 'free love' and nudity and so would therefore most likely appear in the trailer. And why not? Every movie trailer is, first and foremost, a marketing tool. Many an audience member has been misled this way and Zabriskie Point is certainly neither the first nor the last film to employ such tricks. If tricks they are. Running in at over two hours, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology is careful not to outstay its welcome. As with all good film theory, it invites you to look upon old favourites with new eyes, seek out a few hidden gems (I wouldn't be surprised if John Frankenheimer's 1966 sci-fi Seconds enjoys a spike in sales later this year) and, above all, keep the conversation going. While less focused than its predecessor, it is nevertheless an enjoyable and eccentric film brought to life by its affable, inimitable host. Who else could rattle on about Rammstein, Kinder Eggs and Coca Cola (a product advertised, after all, as 'the real thing', but as Žižek reminds us, goes from ''sublime to s**t'' as its temperature rises) with such critical - and comical- insight ?