2006 psychoanalytical film study
Rating: 16/20
Plot: Slavoj Zizek, self-described pervert and a psychoanalyst/philosopher, walks us through readings of various popular films.
Slavoj Zizek, the titular pervert, will be one of my favorite discoveries of the year. Larry guided me to this series in three chapters, and I loved every minute of it although I did have to watch the 2 1/2 hour thing in two installments. My groin couldn't take it in one sitting. Zizek's got an Eastern European accent (born in Yugoslavia), the kind that would make me want to listen to anything he had to say anyway, but it helps that he's genuinely interesting. The great thing about this is that he takes a lot of movies I already really love--City Lights, Alien, The Conversation, Vertigo, Psycho, Duck Soup, etc.--and makes the think about them completely differently and somehow appreciate them even more. I learned so much from this. For example, did you realize that the Marx Brothers, just like the three stories of the Bates house in Psycho, represent the three levels of the psyche--the id, ego, and superego. Harpo, of course, represents the id. Or did you know that Joseph Stalin loved musicals? And where else are you going to find a psychoanalysis of a Pluto cartoon where the poor dog has ended up in hell with all the cats he's previously molested? Or hear a guy talk about how the audience for a film is sitting at the edge of a toilet bowl and that the films are the excrement? Or hear Alfred Hitchcock read a dirty limerick about an eel? Zizek is as hilarious as he is insightful. I got a kick out of his description of pornography ("There's another hole to be filled or whatever. . .") and just hearing him say the word "plumber" and his rant against flowers as something that should be forbidden for children because they're open invitations to insects to screw them. Of course, the guy also inserts himself into scenes from famous movies, taking over for Jimmy in Vertigo, steering a motorboat toward the shore from The Birds, sitting in Norman Bates' basement, or, most humorously, reacting when that little girl in The Exorcist starts cursing. It's all so captivating, the sort of intellectualism made palatable by Zizek's charisma. It's kind of like movie criticism for dummies, in a way, but I'm fine with that because I'm kind of a dummy. I can't even remember if Solaris was the "id machine" or the "libido machine" after all. I'm really not sure I'm smart enough for the movie. But I sure did enjoy it, and along the way, discovered that the birds are incestuous energy, that we ourselves are the aliens controlling our bodies, that the word is only half-created by a complete idiot (what Alien: Resurrection is apparently about), that you have to first beat the shit out of yourself before you can attack the enemy, that Chaplin was the first to fully understand that the human voice is an intruder, that Star Wars is really all about becoming a father, that we have a name for fantasy realized and that is nightmare, that "dreams are for those who are not strong enough to endure reality," and that "reality is for those who are not strong enough to endure dreams." A great look at a handful of movies for intellectual cinephiles or even faux-intellectual cinephiles like me, and Slavoj Zizek is one of my new favorite people.
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