The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

Fidel Castro is a huge fan of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). To him, the shark symbolises the ruthless capitalism that threatens ordinary Americans. This is an example of the ideologically-charged interpretation that the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the follow-up to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which was screened to great success at IFFR in 2006.
Using highly detailed sets re-created from such films as The Sound of Music and Taxi Driver, Žižek analyses famous and lesser-known film scenes. Psychoanalytical terms are used to review many ideologies: capitalism, fascism, communism, religion. Alongside the ‘revealing’ analyses of film scenes, Žižek also scrutinises Coca Cola, the Kinder Eggs, Starbucks and Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (the finale of his Ninth Symphony). Žižek demonstrates that ideological perspectives genuinely affect everything.