Cinema is the ultimate pervert art; it doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire.
You know, I don't remember Melanie having a beard.
In the wonderfully titled Pervert’s Guide to Cinema Slovenian sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher Slavoj Žižek looks at cinema, represented by a great number of disparate films, through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Divided in three parts, the film uses a kind of stream-of-consciousness structure, flowing from one subject to the next seemingly on Žižek’s whim. Director Fiennes uses the clever conceit of having Žižek appear on the locations or replicas of sets of the films he discusses — when he discusses The Birds he’s in Bodega Bay, when he discusses Psycho he’s in Norman Bates’s cellar, et c. — furthering Žižek idea that cinema at its purest is concerned with elevating reality to the realm of the magical; Žižek makes himself into a character in the films he’s discussing, fictionalising himself. As Žižek says, the choice between the blue pill and the red pill, between fiction and reality, is a false dilemma — fiction is reality.
