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The Pervert's Guide To Cinema - a Movie Review & Whoo-Hoo a new President
[An aside that has zip to do with the post below but I feel the need to state regardless: Am currently watching my tape of the inaugration. I saw the speech live at work during lunch in the Cheif of Procurement & Logistics, at LIRR, Office on a flat 42 inch screen with a smattering of five or six people, white, black, male, and female. I had tears in my eyes - because I never believed I'd see this day in my lifetime. It gives me hope and makes me incredibly proud to be American and to be human. That may sound overly sentimental, but there it is. Also, the speech, while not great, was the best inaugral speech I've heard live in my lifetime - and I thought Regan and Clinton were good speakers. I am proud that I voted for Obama not once but twice this year - once in the primary, and once in the general election. Just heard Diane Sawyer state while introducing Aertha Franklin singing My Country Tis of Thee, that in his "I have a Dream" Speech - Martin Luther King said "there will come a day in which all of gods children will sing my country tis of thee" - that day is today. Whether you voted for Obama or not, you can't deny that today freedom rang really loudly.]
"> The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
List of Films dicussed go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pervert's_Guide_to_Cinema
YouTube Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sFqfbrsZbw
THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as presenter and guide is the charismatic Slavoj Zizek, acclaimed philosopher and psychoanalyst. With his engaging and passionate approach to thinking, Zizek delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves. Whether he is untangling the famously baffling films of David Lynch, or overturning everything you thought you knew about Hitchcock, Zizek illuminates the screen with his passion, intellect, and unfailing sense of humour. THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA cuts its cloth from the very world of the movies it discusses; by shooting at original locations and from replica sets it creates the uncanny illusion that Zizek is speaking from 'within' the films themselves. Together the three parts construct a compelling dialectic of ideas. Described by The Times in London as 'the woman helming this Freudian inquest,' director Sophie Fiennes' collaboration with Slavoj Zizek illustrates the immediacy with which film and television can communicate complex ideas. Says Zizek: 'My big obsession is to make things clear. I can really explain a line of thought if I can somehow illustrate it in a scene from a film. THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA is really about what psychoanalysis can tell us about cinema.'
--Written by P Guide Ltd.
Wales and I went to see The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, described above, at The IFC Theater last night - which is housed in the old Waverly Art House in the Village on Sixth Avenue and West 4th Street, next to the subway.
The IFC theater is perhaps the most comfortable theater I've been in. Cushioned arm-chairs with acres of leg room. We found good seats in the middle of the row, next to two guys we'd been chatting with in the lobby. I'd found the film through one of the film goer's meetup groups I'd joined on Meetgroups.com.
The film clocks in at about 2 hours and 35 minutes. It felt like three hours. Long film. And somewhat intense. With a narrator who has a very thick eastern european accent and speaks passionately in a staccato voice.
That said? It did fulfill my weird craving for a psychoanalytical discussion of cinema and media - which I kept, rather unsuccessfully, trying to do with people online. Although, I think it was a bit much for Wales. After Part II, she asked what time it was and when she discovered there was another hour to go, she muttered - "I'm dying here, dying."
The film was too long. Repetitive in places. And reminded me why I did not get a graduate degree in film or media criticism, and did not become a philosopher or psychologist. It is also reminded me of why I despise Freud and much prefer Jung. The psychoanalysis is Fruedian, with a capital F. Unlike Freud, Jung was not an absolutist, and questioned things, was more curious and open. Frued tends to be more absolute and unquestioning in his analysis - often ignoring the flaws in his generalizations and assumptions.
But.
It was a fascinating film and Zizek had some interesting ideas regarding the language of cinema.
Last night I wrote down what I remembered from the film. Here they are. These are my impressions of what was said and what I got from it. They are not necessarily my views, nor do I agree with everything that was disclosed by Zizek - who focused solely on films and filmmakers who supported his theories, ignoring those that did not. His presentation was at times manipulative and persuasive, but once you realized that the focus was so narrow, you began to question his theories.
Using films such as The Birds, a 1931 film entitled Posessed, and The Matrix - Zizek shows how cinema defines the boundaries of our reality and desire. In Posessed, he shows a country girl looking through the windows of a train and for the first time seeing a different world as one might watching a movie - and in that world, being seduced by images - telling her she should want these images, when before she saw them they never entered her head. She did not dream of being inside the train, dancing, having servants wait upon her, drinking cocktails - until she looks through the windows of the train - much like watching a movie. Her desires are thusly taught to her - she was not born with them.
Freud, Zizek tells us, was not interested in the libido or why we had sex with who we had it with or the type of sex - but rather what we are thinking during it. Cinema, Zizek states, functions as a means to establish the fantasy inside our heads - to inform it. And it is through the language of cinema that we attempt to understand the alien voice residing inside our animal bodies - the voice he defines as the super-ego, the critical voice, the rational one. The monster - is it the body or this alien voice? He used the films - the Exorcist and Alien, as well as Alien Resurrection - to demonstrate this point.
A particularly striking image is from Alien Resurrection (the Alien film written by Joss Whedon) - in which the clone of Ripley is confronted with prior failed cloned versions of herself - each one more twisted and monsterous than the next - part alien/part human. Demonstrating, in Zizek's view, the relationship between the monsterous and the divine. The human and the alien voice.
I'm not sure I agree with this and it went on way too long. Got very repetitive and gave me the entire plot synopsis complete with footage of the original film "Solaris" not the George Clooney remake. So much so, that I'm equally intriqued and repulsed by the film.
In the film - Solaris - Zizek states that the protagonist, a male psychologist, travels to a ship circling a planet that causes your deepest desires and fantasies to come true, along with your nightmares. It gives what is inside your mind substance. For the protagonist - this is his dead wife who hung herself. He is not so much grieving her loss but consumed by guilt because he desired her absence, and she may have killed herself to achieve that. In the film, he can't get rid of her ghost - who keeps killing herself in different ways - when he finally obliterates her. He is free. Reunited with his father.
Another film utilized is Vertigo - where Scottie, the detective played by Jimmy Stewart, becomes obsessed by Kim Novak's mysterious Madeline - a woman he is hired to follow, and witnesses her death - but it is not her death he sees but the woman she was hired to play.
He rediscovers her - but not as Madeline. In love with Madeline, he forces her to recreat that role. She becomes insubstantial to him, an engima, a reflection of his desires and insubstantial outside of that.
By making her insubstantial - Zizek states shifting to Blue Velvet and Lost Highway - two David Lynch films - he becomes powerful. There's a scene in Lost Highway between the hero and his wife, who are having sex. But he is unable to perform and she pats his back, which he considers patronizing, condescending. In a fit of frustration he kills her - then enters a fantasy realm, where his wife who had been a brunette, is now a blond, beautiful, into him sexually, yet he can't have her - she's the beautiful sex object. And in Blue Velvet - Laura Dern - another beautiful blond is depicted as innocent, an enigma, the hero makes an advance but has no idea how she will reacte, she reactes differently each time.
Then in a transistion to female fantasy, Zizek uses the film Eyes Wide Shut - to show the interrelationship between male and female desire. The female fantasy - Zizek states is ahead of and more involved than the male's. The male fantasy is rather boring, predictable in comparison. The female fantasy holds a level of eroticism that is not seen in the male fantasy. It is also a story that she tells herself with layers.
In Eyes' Wide Shut - Nicole Kidman tells her husband Tom Cruise a sexual fantasy - which haunts him. He spends the entire film trying to catch up with her fantasy, to reach it and be equal to it in his own experience. So he goes to this elaborate orgy - which is boring and somewhat silly and predictable, not inventive. Just naked bodies, no emotion, no faces, not erotic. He fails miserably. When they reunite, she remains at a level above him.
The film is not this organized. He throws ideas at you willy nilly at times. And often repeats himself. He also over-uses Hitchcock and Lynch - who are both well-known Fruedian film makers. And only one of Coppola's - "The Conversation" - which is also typically Fruedian, especially the toilet bowl scene - which I remember analyzing in an undergrad cinema studies course.
The female fantasy sequence starts with a reference to a foreign film known as The Piano Teacher - in this film - a single woman that Zizek describes as a spinster, who knows little about sex or sexual desire - becomes attracted to her younger male piano student - who is in his 20s. She goes to a peep show and sits to watch pornography not to be turned on but to understand what it is she is supposed to want or do in a sexual situation. To come up with her fantasy. [There's some truth to that theory - I know I did that in college - read Nancy Friday's Forbidden Flowers, picked up Playgirl mags - partly to figure out what my fantasies were and how best to address my own internal urges. And from what I've read online and off, I've noticed other women do the same. This theory also adds weight to Zizek's view that cinema tells us what to desire or what is desirable.] When the Piano Teacher tells her student her fantasy reveals it to him - he does something horrific with the information, when he makes love to her - he insists on reinacting the fantasy she has him read. And by doing so, he destroys her fantasy, destroys the eroticism. She can never use it again.
For women, Zizek states - desire is more mental than physical - it is what is said. He shows two scenes to demonstrate this point - one scene from Jane Campion's In the Cut - where Mark Ruffalo tells Meg Ryan's writer what he is willing to do with her but that he will never beat her. He'll be her fantasy, but won't abuse or hurt her. And a scene from David Lynch's Wild at Heart - where Pete, the bad guy, teases and tortures poor Laura Dern - telling her that he will leave once she admits her desire for him to fuck her. "Say Fuck Me, and I will leave. You know you want to." He says this, while he strokes her thigh and crotch. When she finally does give in, he leaves with a smile and maybe later - leaving her devasted, the loser - it is Zizek states worse than a physical rape - it is a mental one.
Using the film "Blue" - Zizek asks what if when we look in someone else's eyes we do not see a soul, but an abyss? Blue = the cinematographer focues on the woman's eye - showing in it in the opening sequence a reflection of a man - who may represent her world. Her reality. He is telling her that her husband and child have died. She has, we learn, devoted her life to them. They make up her reality. They are her reality. Then she discovers that her husband had a mistress and a child by her. That he was planning on leaving her. That she was inconsequential to him. This disintergrates her reality, it breaks apart, and she sinks into the abyss. Over the course of the film, she reconstructs herself and her reality, falls in love with someone else, constructs a new life, until at the very end - we focus on her eye and see reflected a naked woman inside - herself.
Reality, Zizek states, often will merge into fantasy. When it merges or is pulled apart, much as Neo taking the red pill, falls down the rabbit hole and reality is forever changed - it becomes the realm of nightmares. It causes, he states, a disintergration of self. In the film Stalker - the stalkers are like tour guides who bring high-paying guests to the zone which holds mystical alien remains that they can take as treasure hunters would. In one such aera of the zone - your fantasies or innermost desires are made real, it takes what is inside your mind and makes it real. Men who go inside it go insane.
He states that people will often escape into fantasy to realize themselves. Who find their true selves. Often in fantasy they are freer, liberated, because this is who they really are.
Much like Neo in the Matrix is liberated. Or in video games - those who love to play the sadist, the masochist, the theif, the murderer - etc - this may be who they are. They may be this violent person. And the video game allows them to realize it.
Finally, there's a bit on how the father must die for us to become fully ourselves - as a theme in cinema. He says the most frightening thing in the world is the immortal father. And uses the closing scene of the Revenge of the Sith - Star Wars Chapter III - where Anakin is made into the immortal Darth Vader - or the father who doesn't want to ever die, no matter what. The monster father. As the mother dies giving birth. Immortality - Zizek states - is the nightmare not mortality. It is what we dread. [I've seen this theme a lot in media - from vampires to Battle Star Galatica. Regarding vampires, Zizek has a whole bit on the death drive object that continues on long after death - but he does not refer to vampires so much as undead objects such as the red shoes in the Moira Shearer film, and a ventrilogist dummy in the 1945 Michael Redgrave film Dead of Night - where a ventrilogist is insanely jealous of his dummy, murders his dummy, when he comes to himself in the hospital and finally is able to speak - it is in the twisted high voice of the dummy. This syncs into a discussion of fighting with ourself - or our inner alien self - or drive. In the Fight Club - Edward Norton fights himself in the persona of Brad Pitt, and in Dr. Strangelove - or How I learned to Love the Bomb - Strangelove's fist tries to strangle him.
Zizek psychoanalyzes the Charlie Chaplin film - "City Lights". This is an analysis, by the way, that I've seen in quite a few essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I think it is clearer and tracks better here. As an aside, if you want to know if your analysis is correct - see if it tracks all the way through the story. If it falls apart at any point, then it probably doesn't. And no, you don't get to blame the story-teller for your analysis falling apart, that's a flaw in your analysis not the story - it's not their job to support your view of reality or your philosophy. Their job is to tell the story. It's yours to figure it out.
Zizek does that here - tracks his analysis throughout the film City Lights. City Lights is about a little tramp (Chaplin) who becomes fascinated by a blind flower girl, who thinks he is a millionaire. He plays along and steals money to help her regain her sight. While she's getting her sight restored, he get's caught, and serves time. Afterwards he tracks her down and finds her in a flower shop. She sees him and realizes who he is and that he is not who she thought.
Here, we are in dangerous territory, Zizek tells us. Often in love relationships - we do not see the individual we have fallen for as they really are - but as we wish them to be. We project our fantasy on to them. When we discover they are not who we thought they were, the love will often disintergrate, we become distraught, and they discover that we did not love them but a fantasy image we projected onto them. That's when things get violent and dangerous.
City Lights ends as the two parties discover that what they thought was true is not. And that their reality is a lie. It does not tell us how they reacte to the information. It leaves us hanging.
Zizek states through the language of cinema we can see what our desires are, what each of us is thinking, figure out how to handle the alien voice inside, and determine the boundaries between fantasy and reality. It is through cinema, Zizek argues, that we become aware and know ourselves - particularly in these modern times, where things have become increasingly complicated.
One additional point of interest - Hitchcock apparently loved to manipulate the emotions of his audience and found new ways to do it in each of his films through images and music.
His dream was that sometime in the future - the human brain would be hot-wired to a device and all a director had to do was push buttons to obtain the emotional response he desired.
[Hitchcock was one twisted individual - who had serious problems with women. So does Zizek in my opinion. Actually so did Freud.]
Interesting film. I recommend with one caveat - rent it, don't buy or go see in a theater. You may want to fast-forward.
"> The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
List of Films dicussed go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pervert's_Guide_to_Cinema
YouTube Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sFqfbrsZbw
THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as presenter and guide is the charismatic Slavoj Zizek, acclaimed philosopher and psychoanalyst. With his engaging and passionate approach to thinking, Zizek delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves. Whether he is untangling the famously baffling films of David Lynch, or overturning everything you thought you knew about Hitchcock, Zizek illuminates the screen with his passion, intellect, and unfailing sense of humour. THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA cuts its cloth from the very world of the movies it discusses; by shooting at original locations and from replica sets it creates the uncanny illusion that Zizek is speaking from 'within' the films themselves. Together the three parts construct a compelling dialectic of ideas. Described by The Times in London as 'the woman helming this Freudian inquest,' director Sophie Fiennes' collaboration with Slavoj Zizek illustrates the immediacy with which film and television can communicate complex ideas. Says Zizek: 'My big obsession is to make things clear. I can really explain a line of thought if I can somehow illustrate it in a scene from a film. THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA is really about what psychoanalysis can tell us about cinema.'
--Written by P Guide Ltd.
Wales and I went to see The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, described above, at The IFC Theater last night - which is housed in the old Waverly Art House in the Village on Sixth Avenue and West 4th Street, next to the subway.
The IFC theater is perhaps the most comfortable theater I've been in. Cushioned arm-chairs with acres of leg room. We found good seats in the middle of the row, next to two guys we'd been chatting with in the lobby. I'd found the film through one of the film goer's meetup groups I'd joined on Meetgroups.com.
The film clocks in at about 2 hours and 35 minutes. It felt like three hours. Long film. And somewhat intense. With a narrator who has a very thick eastern european accent and speaks passionately in a staccato voice.
That said? It did fulfill my weird craving for a psychoanalytical discussion of cinema and media - which I kept, rather unsuccessfully, trying to do with people online. Although, I think it was a bit much for Wales. After Part II, she asked what time it was and when she discovered there was another hour to go, she muttered - "I'm dying here, dying."
The film was too long. Repetitive in places. And reminded me why I did not get a graduate degree in film or media criticism, and did not become a philosopher or psychologist. It is also reminded me of why I despise Freud and much prefer Jung. The psychoanalysis is Fruedian, with a capital F. Unlike Freud, Jung was not an absolutist, and questioned things, was more curious and open. Frued tends to be more absolute and unquestioning in his analysis - often ignoring the flaws in his generalizations and assumptions.
But.
It was a fascinating film and Zizek had some interesting ideas regarding the language of cinema.
Last night I wrote down what I remembered from the film. Here they are. These are my impressions of what was said and what I got from it. They are not necessarily my views, nor do I agree with everything that was disclosed by Zizek - who focused solely on films and filmmakers who supported his theories, ignoring those that did not. His presentation was at times manipulative and persuasive, but once you realized that the focus was so narrow, you began to question his theories.
Using films such as The Birds, a 1931 film entitled Posessed, and The Matrix - Zizek shows how cinema defines the boundaries of our reality and desire. In Posessed, he shows a country girl looking through the windows of a train and for the first time seeing a different world as one might watching a movie - and in that world, being seduced by images - telling her she should want these images, when before she saw them they never entered her head. She did not dream of being inside the train, dancing, having servants wait upon her, drinking cocktails - until she looks through the windows of the train - much like watching a movie. Her desires are thusly taught to her - she was not born with them.
Freud, Zizek tells us, was not interested in the libido or why we had sex with who we had it with or the type of sex - but rather what we are thinking during it. Cinema, Zizek states, functions as a means to establish the fantasy inside our heads - to inform it. And it is through the language of cinema that we attempt to understand the alien voice residing inside our animal bodies - the voice he defines as the super-ego, the critical voice, the rational one. The monster - is it the body or this alien voice? He used the films - the Exorcist and Alien, as well as Alien Resurrection - to demonstrate this point.
A particularly striking image is from Alien Resurrection (the Alien film written by Joss Whedon) - in which the clone of Ripley is confronted with prior failed cloned versions of herself - each one more twisted and monsterous than the next - part alien/part human. Demonstrating, in Zizek's view, the relationship between the monsterous and the divine. The human and the alien voice.
I'm not sure I agree with this and it went on way too long. Got very repetitive and gave me the entire plot synopsis complete with footage of the original film "Solaris" not the George Clooney remake. So much so, that I'm equally intriqued and repulsed by the film.
In the film - Solaris - Zizek states that the protagonist, a male psychologist, travels to a ship circling a planet that causes your deepest desires and fantasies to come true, along with your nightmares. It gives what is inside your mind substance. For the protagonist - this is his dead wife who hung herself. He is not so much grieving her loss but consumed by guilt because he desired her absence, and she may have killed herself to achieve that. In the film, he can't get rid of her ghost - who keeps killing herself in different ways - when he finally obliterates her. He is free. Reunited with his father.
Another film utilized is Vertigo - where Scottie, the detective played by Jimmy Stewart, becomes obsessed by Kim Novak's mysterious Madeline - a woman he is hired to follow, and witnesses her death - but it is not her death he sees but the woman she was hired to play.
He rediscovers her - but not as Madeline. In love with Madeline, he forces her to recreat that role. She becomes insubstantial to him, an engima, a reflection of his desires and insubstantial outside of that.
By making her insubstantial - Zizek states shifting to Blue Velvet and Lost Highway - two David Lynch films - he becomes powerful. There's a scene in Lost Highway between the hero and his wife, who are having sex. But he is unable to perform and she pats his back, which he considers patronizing, condescending. In a fit of frustration he kills her - then enters a fantasy realm, where his wife who had been a brunette, is now a blond, beautiful, into him sexually, yet he can't have her - she's the beautiful sex object. And in Blue Velvet - Laura Dern - another beautiful blond is depicted as innocent, an enigma, the hero makes an advance but has no idea how she will reacte, she reactes differently each time.
Then in a transistion to female fantasy, Zizek uses the film Eyes Wide Shut - to show the interrelationship between male and female desire. The female fantasy - Zizek states is ahead of and more involved than the male's. The male fantasy is rather boring, predictable in comparison. The female fantasy holds a level of eroticism that is not seen in the male fantasy. It is also a story that she tells herself with layers.
In Eyes' Wide Shut - Nicole Kidman tells her husband Tom Cruise a sexual fantasy - which haunts him. He spends the entire film trying to catch up with her fantasy, to reach it and be equal to it in his own experience. So he goes to this elaborate orgy - which is boring and somewhat silly and predictable, not inventive. Just naked bodies, no emotion, no faces, not erotic. He fails miserably. When they reunite, she remains at a level above him.
The film is not this organized. He throws ideas at you willy nilly at times. And often repeats himself. He also over-uses Hitchcock and Lynch - who are both well-known Fruedian film makers. And only one of Coppola's - "The Conversation" - which is also typically Fruedian, especially the toilet bowl scene - which I remember analyzing in an undergrad cinema studies course.
The female fantasy sequence starts with a reference to a foreign film known as The Piano Teacher - in this film - a single woman that Zizek describes as a spinster, who knows little about sex or sexual desire - becomes attracted to her younger male piano student - who is in his 20s. She goes to a peep show and sits to watch pornography not to be turned on but to understand what it is she is supposed to want or do in a sexual situation. To come up with her fantasy. [There's some truth to that theory - I know I did that in college - read Nancy Friday's Forbidden Flowers, picked up Playgirl mags - partly to figure out what my fantasies were and how best to address my own internal urges. And from what I've read online and off, I've noticed other women do the same. This theory also adds weight to Zizek's view that cinema tells us what to desire or what is desirable.] When the Piano Teacher tells her student her fantasy reveals it to him - he does something horrific with the information, when he makes love to her - he insists on reinacting the fantasy she has him read. And by doing so, he destroys her fantasy, destroys the eroticism. She can never use it again.
For women, Zizek states - desire is more mental than physical - it is what is said. He shows two scenes to demonstrate this point - one scene from Jane Campion's In the Cut - where Mark Ruffalo tells Meg Ryan's writer what he is willing to do with her but that he will never beat her. He'll be her fantasy, but won't abuse or hurt her. And a scene from David Lynch's Wild at Heart - where Pete, the bad guy, teases and tortures poor Laura Dern - telling her that he will leave once she admits her desire for him to fuck her. "Say Fuck Me, and I will leave. You know you want to." He says this, while he strokes her thigh and crotch. When she finally does give in, he leaves with a smile and maybe later - leaving her devasted, the loser - it is Zizek states worse than a physical rape - it is a mental one.
Using the film "Blue" - Zizek asks what if when we look in someone else's eyes we do not see a soul, but an abyss? Blue = the cinematographer focues on the woman's eye - showing in it in the opening sequence a reflection of a man - who may represent her world. Her reality. He is telling her that her husband and child have died. She has, we learn, devoted her life to them. They make up her reality. They are her reality. Then she discovers that her husband had a mistress and a child by her. That he was planning on leaving her. That she was inconsequential to him. This disintergrates her reality, it breaks apart, and she sinks into the abyss. Over the course of the film, she reconstructs herself and her reality, falls in love with someone else, constructs a new life, until at the very end - we focus on her eye and see reflected a naked woman inside - herself.
Reality, Zizek states, often will merge into fantasy. When it merges or is pulled apart, much as Neo taking the red pill, falls down the rabbit hole and reality is forever changed - it becomes the realm of nightmares. It causes, he states, a disintergration of self. In the film Stalker - the stalkers are like tour guides who bring high-paying guests to the zone which holds mystical alien remains that they can take as treasure hunters would. In one such aera of the zone - your fantasies or innermost desires are made real, it takes what is inside your mind and makes it real. Men who go inside it go insane.
He states that people will often escape into fantasy to realize themselves. Who find their true selves. Often in fantasy they are freer, liberated, because this is who they really are.
Much like Neo in the Matrix is liberated. Or in video games - those who love to play the sadist, the masochist, the theif, the murderer - etc - this may be who they are. They may be this violent person. And the video game allows them to realize it.
Finally, there's a bit on how the father must die for us to become fully ourselves - as a theme in cinema. He says the most frightening thing in the world is the immortal father. And uses the closing scene of the Revenge of the Sith - Star Wars Chapter III - where Anakin is made into the immortal Darth Vader - or the father who doesn't want to ever die, no matter what. The monster father. As the mother dies giving birth. Immortality - Zizek states - is the nightmare not mortality. It is what we dread. [I've seen this theme a lot in media - from vampires to Battle Star Galatica. Regarding vampires, Zizek has a whole bit on the death drive object that continues on long after death - but he does not refer to vampires so much as undead objects such as the red shoes in the Moira Shearer film, and a ventrilogist dummy in the 1945 Michael Redgrave film Dead of Night - where a ventrilogist is insanely jealous of his dummy, murders his dummy, when he comes to himself in the hospital and finally is able to speak - it is in the twisted high voice of the dummy. This syncs into a discussion of fighting with ourself - or our inner alien self - or drive. In the Fight Club - Edward Norton fights himself in the persona of Brad Pitt, and in Dr. Strangelove - or How I learned to Love the Bomb - Strangelove's fist tries to strangle him.
Zizek psychoanalyzes the Charlie Chaplin film - "City Lights". This is an analysis, by the way, that I've seen in quite a few essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I think it is clearer and tracks better here. As an aside, if you want to know if your analysis is correct - see if it tracks all the way through the story. If it falls apart at any point, then it probably doesn't. And no, you don't get to blame the story-teller for your analysis falling apart, that's a flaw in your analysis not the story - it's not their job to support your view of reality or your philosophy. Their job is to tell the story. It's yours to figure it out.
Zizek does that here - tracks his analysis throughout the film City Lights. City Lights is about a little tramp (Chaplin) who becomes fascinated by a blind flower girl, who thinks he is a millionaire. He plays along and steals money to help her regain her sight. While she's getting her sight restored, he get's caught, and serves time. Afterwards he tracks her down and finds her in a flower shop. She sees him and realizes who he is and that he is not who she thought.
Here, we are in dangerous territory, Zizek tells us. Often in love relationships - we do not see the individual we have fallen for as they really are - but as we wish them to be. We project our fantasy on to them. When we discover they are not who we thought they were, the love will often disintergrate, we become distraught, and they discover that we did not love them but a fantasy image we projected onto them. That's when things get violent and dangerous.
City Lights ends as the two parties discover that what they thought was true is not. And that their reality is a lie. It does not tell us how they reacte to the information. It leaves us hanging.
Zizek states through the language of cinema we can see what our desires are, what each of us is thinking, figure out how to handle the alien voice inside, and determine the boundaries between fantasy and reality. It is through cinema, Zizek argues, that we become aware and know ourselves - particularly in these modern times, where things have become increasingly complicated.
One additional point of interest - Hitchcock apparently loved to manipulate the emotions of his audience and found new ways to do it in each of his films through images and music.
His dream was that sometime in the future - the human brain would be hot-wired to a device and all a director had to do was push buttons to obtain the emotional response he desired.
[Hitchcock was one twisted individual - who had serious problems with women. So does Zizek in my opinion. Actually so did Freud.]
Interesting film. I recommend with one caveat - rent it, don't buy or go see in a theater. You may want to fast-forward.