The Pervert's Guide To Ideology (15)
Directed by Sophie Fiennes
Four stars

It's plain to see that Slavoj Zizek loves playing the role of lefty court jester.

He was raised in Yugoslavia before Nato smashed the socialist state and that still rankles, since whatever that country's deficiencies he considers carrion capitalism far worse.

To realise those and other musings, he's joined forces with British filmmaker Sophie Fiennes to produce The Pervert's Guide To Ideology - a sequel to The Pervert's Guide To The Cinema (2006).

This enables him to dress up and recreate scenes from his favourite films to point out that cinematic products don't always do what they say on the tin.

Beginning with clips of John Carpenter's They Live, he uses it's anti-capitalist theme to illustrate the fact that most mainstream media reinforces ruling ideology.

But, having pointed out that its major fight scene is a metaphor for the difficulties in trying to get people to face reality, he rather misses Carpenter's conclusion that there's always a resistance - "They tell 'em that we're all communists" - ready to develop a socialist consciousness into a vehicle for a credible political alternative.

Every interpretative reading, be it of an advertising slogan or great music, depends on context. Coke "ain't the real thing" when it's warm and Beethoven's Ode To Joy has been used as an anthem by right and left, Zizek contends, and the nazis even adopted the clothing of the left to present themselves as socialists.

The audience "unconsciously" collude, rebelling only when things get unbearable, signified by riots like those in London a few years ago.

According to Zizek, Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver sees himself as victim and avenger, so he shoots the objects of his desire and then himself and the whole vigilante genre allows for lying politicians like Bush and Blair to do what they like.

Full Metal Jacket demonstrates that humiliating people leads to Abu Ghraib.

Pondering apocalypse movies, Zizek contends that the audiences seem to consider Armageddon more preferable to "making modest changes to capitalism."

When it comes to films from the former socialist states, Zizek claims that they present an "historicist" proposition - excusing individual crimes for the sake of the greater good.

So if you can't topple Stalin with criticism, you point up the foibles of working-class people governed by bureaucrats, as in Milos Foreman's The Firemen's Ball.

Yet he criticises "so-called supporters" of the 1968 Prague Spring, since they would have ended up exactly where they are now even if the Soviets hadn't intervened.

Zizek's basic thesis of the "Big Other" - divine design or secular master plan - isn't possible, since there are no gods nor infallible leaders.

Yet people hedge their bets. Zizek's reading of Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ, is that the crucifixion symbolises the death of God and that Jesus's message is "love" and building "emancipatory communities."

More contentiously, Zizek claims that real atheism can only be realised through Christianity, via the rejection of the "Big Other" - in this case, God.

He proffers the notion that spontaneous actions like the Occupy movement are the way forward, stressing that we have to "change our dreams."

Yet while employing Marx and Freud to analyse the subject of ideological institutions, he suggests - like Robert De Niro in Brazil - that you have to put a spanner in the works.

In the end this is the same idealist ideology proferred by the Possibilists and, if it's not allied to a credible social programme, the dream will never be realised.