Slavoj Zizek may not exactly be overexposed in movies, but he's come closer to it than any other Slovenian film theorist, Lacanian philosopher, and sometime presidential candidate I can think of. (The Guardian once called him "the Elvis of philosophy", ignoring Elvis's famous statement that he thought that Lacan was "about as funny as a turd in a punchbowl.") A couple of fall festival seasons back, the bearded, bearish Zizek could be seen pontificating about such subjects as Hitchcock and David Lynch, The Exorcist and The Matrix, in Sophie Fiennes's two-and-a-half-hour The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, which was at least the third film documentary built around his gruff-accented rumblings, and which was widely acclaimed as his definitive star turn. The movie has yet to be distributed here in theaters or on DVD, but you can watch a fifty-minute chunk of it on a DVD that comes with "The 2008 Film Issue" of The Believer. In a brief accompanying tribute, Jason McBride describes Zizek's approach in this film essay as "dialectical materialism for the multiplex." I don't know what that means, but it sure is catchy.
Earlier film directors (including Alfonso Cuaron, who included Zizek among the list of all-star bigbrains who appeared in The Possibility of Hope, the documentary short that was included as a bonus on the Children of Men DVD, which also included a Zizek commentary track) have been content to stick a camera in front of Zizek and watch him spout. Finnes, trying to supply some cinematic fireworks to match the stream of words pouring out of her star, provides him with settings drawn from the film clips that are intercut with his monologue; we see him sitting in a chair in Norman Bates's basement, sitting across from Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus and demanding, "I vant a third pill!", steering the boat taking Tippi Hedren to Rod Taylor's island home in The Birds (the title of which Zizek pronounces as "The Burks"), and in Dorothy Vallens's apartment in Blue Velvet, passively observing her mating ritual with Frank Booth. (Disappointingly, he and Frank don't pass the inhaler back and forth.) At first it seems like a cute gimmick, but it begins to feel like the logical next step in Zizek's approach. He loves movies, but he also has mixed feelings about their hold on them, the way they invade and impose themselves on his dream life. Spinning theories about where these images come from and how they work is his way of fighting back and reclaiming some territory within his own inner space; Fiennes makes it possible for him to escape the lecture room and take the fight to his subject's home turf. In addition to the DVD (and the already-notorious Werner Herzog-Errol Morris conversation), there are a few other things in the magazine that aim to get at the movies' assaults on our dreams, and our conscious minds' efforts to stand their ground, that might do Zizek proud. Notable among them are the tribute to the late Leonard Schrader's vast collection of lobby cards,, and Devin McKinney's persuasive argument, which bows to neither purists nor James Stewart partisans, that Henry Fonda should have played Scottie in Vertigo.
