The Pervert's Guide to Cinema: Confronting Reality in Fiction

If you've ever had to deal with the frustration of been told by anyone that you think too deeply about films, then the philosopher/psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek will help you feel right at home in the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art
It doesn't give you what you desire
It tells you how to desire

Directed by Sophie Fiennes, sister of Ralph and Joseph, this doc is a masterful tour de force of filmmaking and analysis. Instead of a staid talking head accompanied by film clips, Fiennes and Žižek play with the medium of cinema as Žižek visits actual sites where the films he analyzes were filmed, or he hams up roles in mock sets of the films he speaks about (the Blue Velvet flower watering scene is particularly hilarious.) This gives the documentary a playful homagic feel and also lends a certain cinematic relevance to the subject matter as we ingest the heady material.

From the start of the film, with a thick Slovenian accent, nearly incomprehensible at times, Žižek delivers idea after idea in what initially feels like a bombarding mess of tangents. Within the first fifteen minutes alone he brings together six films from all different eras and genres (The Possessed '31, The Matrix '99, Psycho '60, The Birds '63, Duck Soup '33, and The Exorcist '73) and ties in ideas of desire, the conception of reality, the Ego/Id/Superego triad, among others. It feels somewhat like a psychoanalytic primer or review as the film gets going, but as we move deeper and deeper into it, those initial threads branch out and then tie together to make the experience quite a head trip.

It's only in cinema that we get to confront
that crucial dimension which we are
not ready to confront in our reality

Žižek brings in a staggering abundance of films that any cinefile will drool over and take much pleasure in the multiple connections that are made across the board. In particular he pays a lot of attention to films by Lynch, Tarkovsky, and Hitchcock. For anyone missing those old post-secondary film studies classes, this is a great condensed 2 1/2 hour course that you could study any of the multiple aspects of what Žižek is talking about. I'd like to imagine that I could pontificate on the material, but it's so dense and expansive that I suggest you watch it yourself. I can't recommend it highly enough.
And guess what? You can watch it here.