The Pervert's Guide To Cinema
- Year:
- 2006
- 150 min
- 1,957 Views
The problem for us is not,
"Are our desires satisfied or not?"
The problem is,
"How do we know what we desire?"
There is nothing spontaneous,
nothing natural, about human desires.
Our desires are artificial.
We have to be taught to desire.
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art.
It doesn't give you what you desire,
it tells you how to desire.
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
Presented by
philosopher and psychoanalyst
Slavoj iek
Oh, I do like you, but it just isn't good enough.
Oh, I forgot.
Your mother asked me up for supper.
Okay. Bring some ice cream with you, will you?
Sure. What kind do you want,
chocolate or vanilla?
- Chocolate.
- Okay.
What we get
in this wonderful clip from Possessed
is commentary on the magic art of cinema
within a movie.
We have an ordinary working-class girl,
living in a drab, small provincial town.
All of a sudden she finds herself
in a situation where reality itself
reproduces the magic cinematic experience.
She approaches the rail,
the train is passing, and it is as if
what in reality is just a person
standing near a slowly passing train
turns into a viewer
observing the magic of the screen.
Have a drink?
Oh, don't go away. Looking in?
Wrong way. Get in and look out.
We get a very real, ordinary scene
onto which the heroine's inner space, as it were,
her fantasy space is projected,
so that, although all reality is simply there,
the train, the girl,
part of reality in her perception
and in our viewer's perception
is, as it were, elevated to the magic level,
becomes the screen of her dreams.
This is cinematic art at its purest.
This is your last chance.
After this there is no turning back.
You take the blue pill, the story ends.
You wake up in your bed
and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland
and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
But the choice between the blue and the red pill
is not really a choice between illusion and reality.
Of course, the Matrix is a machine for fictions,
but these are fictions
which already structure our reality.
If you take away from our reality
the symbolic fictions that regulate it,
you lose reality itself.
I want a third pill. So what is the third pill?
Definitely not some kind of
transcendental pill which enables a fake,
fast-food religious experience,
but a pill that would enable me
to perceive not the reality behind the illusion
but the reality in illusion itself.
If something gets too traumatic, too violent,
even too filled with enjoyment,
it shatters the coordinates of our reality.
We have to fictionalise it.
The first key to horror films is to say,
"Let's imagine the same story
but without the horror element."
This gives us, I think, the background.
We're in the middle of Bodega Bay,
where the action of Hitchcock's Birds takes place.
Birds is a film about a young, rich, socialite girl
from San Francisco who falls in love with a guy,
where she discovers
that he lives with his mother.
Of course, it's none of my business,
but when you bring a girl like that...
- Darling?
- Yes?
I think I can handle Melanie Daniels by myself.
Well, as long as you know what you want, Mitch.
I know exactly what I want.
And then, there is the standard oedipal imbroglio
of incestuous tension between mother and son,
the son split between
his possessive mother and the intrusive girl.
- What's the matter with them?
- What's the matter with all the birds?
- Where do you want this coffee?
- Here on the table, honey.
Hurry up with yours, Mitch.
I'm sure Miss Daniels wants to be on her way.
I think you ought to stay the night, Melanie.
We have an extra room upstairs and everything.
The big question about The Birds,
of course, is the stupid, obvious one,
"Why do the birds attack?"
Mitch...
It is not enough to say that the birds
are part of the natural set-up of reality.
It is rather as if a foreign dimension intrudes
that literally tears apart reality.
We humans are not naturally born into reality.
In order for us to act as normal people
who interact with other people
who live in the space of social reality,
Like, we should be properly installed
within the symbolic order and so on.
When this, our proper dwelling
within a symbolic space, is disturbed,
reality disintegrates.
So, to propose the psychoanalytic formula,
the violent attacks of the birds
are obviously explosive outbursts
of maternal superego,
of the maternal figure preventing,
trying to prevent sexual relationship.
So the birds are raw, incestuous energy.
What am I doing? I'm sorry, now I got it.
My God, I'm thinking like Melanie.
You know what I'm thinking now?
"I want to f*** Mitch."
That's what she was thinking.
No. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Oh my God, I got this spontaneous
confusion of directions.
Mrs Bates.
We are in the cellar of the mother's house
from Psycho.
What's so interesting is that
the very disposition of mother's house...
Events took place in it at three levels,
first floor, ground floor, basement.
It is as if they reproduce the three levels
of human subjectivity.
Ground floor is ego.
Norman behaves there as a normal son,
whatever remains of his normal ego taking over.
Up there, it's the superego.
Maternal superego, because the dead mother
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