The great pop-cultural critic and postmodern Marxist is back, with more entertaining and semi-serious provocations and deconstructive insights, notionally into the idea of \u201cutopias\u201d, as they appear in the movies and TV, having already done \u201ccinema\u201d and \u201cideology\u201d.<\/p>\n
I was incidentally hoping for a Slavoj \u017di\u017eek<\/a> aria about how unexpectedly great and profoundly important threequels are. This is of course delivered emphatically in that amazing voice, now as universally recognised as Werner Herzog\u2019s. Is it too late for a cameo on The Simpsons?<\/p>\n \u017di\u017eek\u2019s trademarked and now slightly overworked way with a paradox is again in evidence. (He says that \u201cA communist should be a convinced pessimist \u2026\u201d and actually describes himself as a communist though lays off the bet in his tongue-in-cheek way by saying that this he knows \u201cthis sounds crazy\u201d.<\/p>\n He isn\u2019t above being a bit paradoxical himself \u2013 at one point praising The Rapture (1991) as showing the apocalypse as the literal real thing and not some lame metaphor, and then praising Last Year At Marienbad (1961) for disclosing the truth of a post-apocalyptic state of endless return.<\/p>\n He gets big laughs with his traditional gag of recreating movie and TV settings with himself inserted in them. \u017di\u017eek appears in shadow in a jungle hut like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now (1979), lying back in red garb submitting to conjugal violence like Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale (2017) and reclining in the bath like Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia (2011) \u2013 but on this last point, considering how mischievously alert \u017di\u017eek is to discourses of power, I was surprised he didn\u2019t point out that it was at a press conference for Melancholia that director Lars von Trier expressed his sympathy with Hitler<\/a>. Perhaps he thought that not mentioning it was the paradoxical thing to do.<\/p>\n Luxuriating \u2026 Slavoj \u017di\u017eek in The Pervert\u2019s Guide to Utopias. Photograph: PR<\/p>\n He gets his biggest laugh at the very beginning, however, by noting that his documentary will discuss films\u2019 endings and so delivers a warning about spoilers \u2013 if these upset you, he says, \u201cleave the cinema now: no one will miss you\u201d.<\/p>\n So what and where are these utopias of his? \u017di\u017eek concedes that they do not appear to be much in evidence here, but advances many subtle and nuanced arguments, from Freudian, Marxist and Hegelian perspectives, to suggest that there is a kind of utopian thinking in repressive power structures, in art as in life, which pre-empt and absorb rebellious thinking to bolster themselves and in which rebellion itself becomes unconsciously complicit in power. He has an intriguing comment on Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) in which he locates the \u201cperversion\u201d of enjoying submission to control with Dielman\u2019s evident orgasm in the film\u2019s final reel. (A feminist critic might have taken \u017di\u017eek aside and gently explained the possibility that Dielman was faking it.)<\/p>\n Yet for all his ingenuity, \u017di\u017eek disappointingly doesn\u2019t address the simple issue that utopias aren\u2019t cool. It\u2019s all about dystopia, ironised, embittered, preferably post-apocalyptic. Unlike Sir Thomas More, our film-makers, TV writers, novelists do not find utopias interesting. (Oddly there is no mention of Sir Thomas More at all.) It is only through paradox that \u017di\u017eek seems able to approach the idea of \u201cutopia\u201d.<\/p>\n But he is always entertaining, riffing inexhaustibly and even, after a tiny break, actually carrying on over the final credits. Perhaps, like Kirsten Dunst in the bath, you should just lie back and luxuriate in it.<\/p>\n The Pervert\u2019s Guide to Utopias screened at the Venice film festival<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The great pop-cultural critic and postmodern Marxist is back, with more entertaining and semi-serious provocations and deconstructive insights,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":617454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":["post-617453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}