The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias

Twenty years after “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” and fourteen after “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” (shown at 14 Films in 2013), the Slovenian philosophy star Slavoj Žižek returns in front of Sophie Fiennes’s camera to ask a seemingly hopeless question: can we still imagine a better future at all? To answer it, Žižek once again slips right into the images of film history. He sits in the jungle of “Apocalypse Now”, or lies in the bathtub of Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia”. The philosopher uses this cheerful film-hopping to search, between Hollywood, Hegel and the abysses of the present, for the hidden longings of our time.

In “The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias”, philosophy becomes a great cinematic pleasure: comic, overwrought and full of wild intellectual somersaults. Žižek dismantles the beautiful promises of progress and freedom, leaping from “Blade Runner” to daily politics, from disaster movies to the disasters we are already living through ourselves. Director Sophie Fiennes turns these digressions into a rapid montage of thought, in which film quotations suddenly reveal more about our world than any news broadcast. Above all, though, she joins Žižek in defending the right to radical pessimism, for whoever wants to change the world must first learn to endure its state. The film thus celebrates not only a prominent thinker but, above all, uncompromising thought.