According to self-proclaimed «moderate conservative communist» Slavoj Žižek, a good communist is a great pessimist. Capping a trilogy two decades in the making, Žižek now beautifully brings that point home with The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, which world premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Twenty years have passed since he first stepped in front of Sophie Fiennes’ camera with The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, taking viewers on a pop-intellectual joyride as he slid into painstakingly recreated sets of iconic media artefacts to dissect cinema’s outlook on the world from within. Utopias now plays like a grand reunion and a bittersweet farewell.
This time, Žižek swaps the Lacanian psycho-sexuality of the first entry and the hardcore Marxist dialectics of its successor, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), for a more free-flowing diagnosis of the human condition. Its intellectual scope and unexpected emotional generosity arguably make this latest collaboration with Fiennes his most astute voyage through film history yet — the crowning achievement of an anthropological undertaking that packages the full spectrum of Lacanian, Hegelian and Marxist critical theory in easily digestible film essays, intended to be enjoyed by the masses.
Spoiler alert
Who else but Žižek can elicit such delight while pointing out to an audience how doomed we truly are? Honouring his appeal to our pessimism, he hands his viewers a spoiler alert at the beginning of Utopias, stating that «this film is about the end of the world.» Naturally, it requires citing the endings of many famous movies, prompting him to say that «if it ruins your pleasure, then you are free to leave.» Here we can enjoy the first bit of Žižekian ironic subterfuge peppered throughout the film: listening to how the doomsday prophet simultaneously spoils his favourite films and our trust in liberal democracy is exactly where the pleasure resides.
In true Hegelian fashion, the film’s title turns out to be another double entendre: presented as a documentary about utopias, Žižek and Fiennes instead offer a critical dissection of the dystopian characteristics shaping the fabric of our socio-political climate. This intellectual sleight of hand is his key rhetorical strategy of dialectical reversal, deployed many times across a 133-minute opus that cites fifteen cinema classics, interspersed with snippets of archival material that range from Gaza war footage and television appearances of Trump and Putin to Instagram posts of Kylie Jenner’s The Handmaid’s Tale-themed birthday party. Whenever utopia seems within arm’s reach, Žižek suggests through this varied palette, dystopia draws even nearer.
To break the binary thinking of good versus evil — or for that matter, utopia versus dystopia — Žižek departs from the heart of darkness via Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Situating himself in the miniature dictatorship Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz has carved out for himself in the Cambodian jungle, our guide flips the Enlightenment notion that evil stems from ignorance on its head, declaring that the American despot is fully aware of his own evil. Ever vertiginous in his associative leaps — famously compensated for by a compulsive use of his signature «and so on, and so forths» — he requires you to accept the sudden jump to the conclusion that Coppola’s haunted war epic doesn’t even render the jungle as Joseph Conrad’s source of all evil. Rather, the extreme evil lurking in this tropical arena makes visible that the real heart of darkness resides at the brutal core of our own civilisation, one that, according to Žižek, is built on the same despotic principles as Kurtz, albeit carefully concealed by society’s governing factors.
«Whenever somebody proclaims we have freedom and so on, look for the squashed bird.»
The squashed bird
Here, the central thesis of Žižek’s cinematic project becomes fully fleshed out, as he explains that cinema strips bare the misguided utopian presuppositions society has laid as a veil over our eyes. You might as well picture his violently political deconstructions as him ripping apart the human flesh of a Terminator to reveal a hard-wired, stone-cold machine of destruction and repression. «If aliens were to visit our earth,» Žižek emphasises, «and by chance, ask me: ‘Could you explain to us what humanity is about?’ I would tell them to look at this and this movie, and you will understand us.»
Perhaps the most telling scene derives from The Prestige (2006), in Žižek’s eyes, Christopher Nolan’s best film to date. We’re at the point where he wants us to question utopian constructs such as freedom and democracy that the liberal West propped up for us. When you are promised such sedative niceties, Žižek argues by citing a moment in which a magician makes a canary disappear and reappear again, you should wonder: «where is the squashed bird?» Rationally speaking, the illusionist’s performance in The Prestige is a mere trick of misdirection: to make the bird disappear, you have to squash it. The shattered nerves of an audience worried about the fate of this vanished bird can then be calmed by making them believe that a near-identical variant of said bird is alive and well, while the corpse of the squashed canary is carefully binned. Our utopian ideals of liberal democracy exist thanks to the very same logic, as someone or something beyond our sight is always paying the price for our presumed ease of mind. So, Žižek sagely advises us, «whenever somebody proclaims we have freedom and so on, look for the squashed bird.»
A case in point is Congo’s contemporary heart of darkness, where the dehumanising toil of exploited miners provides our information economy with its required resources to power our digital devices. Another ironic reversal: it’s these devices — themselves emblematic of globalised exploitation — that are now used to counter the dominant narratives Western legacy media harness to soften the blow of Israel’s genocidal campaign. In Palestinians’ insistent smartphone recordings of Israel’s crimes against humanity, a cautiously optimistic Žižek sees a new battle being waged in the semi-private/semi-public spheres of the internet. Jarring footage of Gaza’s destruction then smash-cuts to Greta Thunberg’s famous address at the UN Climate Action Summit, where the young climate activist fittingly labels the establishment’s justification for its inertia in the face of the climate calamity as «fairy tales of eternal economic growth.» At this point Žižek doesn’t even have to bring the point home that our planet’s ecology is another squashed bird, cynically thrown in the bin to keep up the utopian illusion of global progress — all of that is immediately understood.
Sacrifice and melancholy
Žižek being Žižek, one can expect many more rhetorical detours before we reach the finish line. Some of them — like a Lacanian rendering of Donald Trump as an authoritarian who rejects symbolic castration — are more productive than others, such as a Marxist reading of the class disparity between aristocratic vampires and proletarian zombies. Nonetheless, the gradual unravelling of our oppression in the face of misguided utopian strivings gathers such momentum that the moment when Žižek addresses our own frustrated coping mechanisms hits an existential sweet spot. Vividly exploring the late films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the communist scholar systematically explains how we essentially try to pay off our karmic debt with self-inflicted arbitrary suffering. The engulfing flames at the end of The Sacrifice (1986) help explain why we tend to hurt ourselves: somewhere deep down, we can rationally imagine that our very existence implies the suffering of someone else. Žižek is usually at his best when he evokes our libidinal enjoyment of repression, which he does here with such emotional urgency that it reveals how the philosopher has grown from academic meme-ster to age-worn sage of our darkening days.
So what to make of all this? If we are so doomed that even our favourite films predict the end of the world as such, how do we emancipate ourselves from an ideological misery that, as he perfectly argued in his previous film, can never truly be escaped? Part of it resides in deriving power from our wallowing, turning melancholia into its own virtuous strength. It leads Žižek to the hot take that Lars von Trier’s depressive sci-fi masterpiece Melancholia (2011) is one of the most earnest expressions of the human condition, a film in which a heavily depressed woman played by Kirsten Dunst merrily embraces the total destruction of Earth, whereas her friends and family collapse into stifled despair.
Apparently, utopia can be reached, but only when impending doom grows near. It’s in these specific conditions that every instrument of political repression ceases to exist — if only for the briefest of moments. In what is perhaps the grandest Žižekian reversal of them all, our film guide concludes his cinematic excursion by proclaiming that Melancholia’s dour finale is actually the happiest ending imaginable, as only radical pessimists can witness the world’s collapse with the clarity of the light of day. Injecting a final note of ironic hopefulness into his pessimistic worldview, Žižek closes his remarkable trilogy with this lasting message: «We are fighting not just for our future, but also for our past. And the fight is open, I think. The only way to win is to begin with a strong dose of pessimism.»
