The great pop-cultural critic and postmodern Marxist is back, in a film directed by Sophie Fiennes, with more entertaining and semi-serious provocations and deconstructive insights, notionally into the idea of “utopias”, as they appear in the movies and TV, having already done “cinema” and “ideology”.
I was incidentally hoping for a Slavoj Žižek aria about how unexpectedly great and profoundly important threequels are. This is of course delivered emphatically in that amazing voice, now as universally recognised as Werner Herzog’s. Is it too late for a cameo on The Simpsons?
Žižek’s trademarked and now slightly overworked way with a paradox is again in evidence. (He says that “A communist should be a convinced pessimist …” and actually describes himself as a communist though lays off the bet in his tongue-in-cheek way by saying that this he knows “this sounds crazy”.
He isn’t above being a bit paradoxical himself – at one point praising The Rapture (1991) as showing the apocalypse as the literal real thing and not some lame metaphor, and then praising Last Year At Marienbad (1961) for disclosing the truth of a post-apocalyptic state of endless return.
He gets big laughs with his traditional gag of recreating movie and TV settings with himself inserted in them. Žižek appears in shadow in a jungle hut like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now (1979), lying back in red garb submitting to conjugal violence like Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaid’s Tale (2017) and reclining in the bath like Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia (2011) – but on this last point, considering how mischievously alert Žižek is to discourses of power, I was surprised he didn’t point out that it was at a press conference for Melancholia that director Lars von Trier expressed his sympathy with Hitler. Perhaps he thought that not mentioning it was the paradoxical thing to do.
He gets his biggest laugh at the very beginning, however, by noting that his documentary will discuss films’ endings and so delivers a warning about spoilers – if these upset you, he says, “leave the cinema now: no one will miss you”.
So what and where are these utopias of his? Žižek concedes that they do not appear to be much in evidence here, but advances many subtle and nuanced arguments, from Freudian, Marxist and Hegelian perspectives, to suggest that there is a kind of utopian thinking in repressive power structures, in art as in life, which pre-empt and absorb rebellious thinking to bolster themselves and in which rebellion itself becomes unconsciously complicit in power. He has an intriguing comment on Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) in which he locates the “perversion” of enjoying submission to control with Dielman’s evident orgasm in the film’s final reel. (A feminist critic might have taken Žižek aside and gently explained the possibility that Dielman was faking it.)
Yet for all his ingenuity, Žižek disappointingly doesn’t address the simple issue that utopias aren’t cool. It’s all about dystopia, ironised, embittered, preferably post-apocalyptic. Unlike Sir Thomas More, our film-makers, TV writers, novelists do not find utopias interesting. (Oddly there is no mention of Sir Thomas More at all.) It is only through paradox that Žižek seems able to approach the idea of “utopia”.
But he is always entertaining, riffing inexhaustibly and even, after a tiny break, actually carrying on over the final credits. Perhaps, like Kirsten Dunst in the bath, you should just lie back and luxuriate in it.
• The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias screened at the Venice film festival
