The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

Slavoj Zizek:
I think this is what liberation means. In order to attack the enemy, you first have to beat the sh*t out of yourself. To get rid, in yourself, of that which in yourself attaches you to the leader, to the conditions of slavery, and so on and so on.

Slavoj Zizek:
When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre, looking at the screen... You remember, at the very beginning, before the picture is on, it's a black, dark screen, and then light thrown on. Are we basically not staring into a toilet bowl and waiting for things to reappear out of the toilet? And is the entire magic of a spectacle shown on the screen not a kind of deceptive lure, trying to conceal the fact that we are basically watching sh*t, as it were?

Slavoj Zizek:
In sexuality, it's never only me and my partner, or more partners, whatever you are doing. It's always... There has to be always some fantasmatic element. There has to be some third imagined element which makes it possible for me, which enables me, to engage in sexuality. If I may be a little bit impertinent and relate to and unfortunate experience, probably known to most of us, how it happens that while one is engages in sexual activity, all of a sudden one feels stupid. One loses contact with it. As if, 'My God, what am I doing here, doing these stupid repetitive movements?' And so on and so on. Nothing changes in reality, in these strange moments where I, as it were, disconnect. It's just that I lose the fantasmatic support.

Slavoj Zizek:
What the film truly is about, it's focal point, it's not the hero, it's of course the enigma of feminine desire. [on Lost Highway]

Slavoj Zizek:
My relationship towards tulips is inherently Lynchian. I think they are disgusting. Just imagine. Aren't these some kind of, how do you call it, vagina dentata, dental vaginas threatening to swallow you? I think that flowers are something inherently disgusting. I mean, are people aware what a horrible thing these flowers are? I mean, basically it's an open invitation to all insects and bees, "Come and screw me," you know? I think that flowers should be forbidden to children.

Slavoj Zizek:
We men, at least in our standard phallogocentric mode of sexuality, even when we are doing it with the real women, we are effectively doing it with our fantasy. Woman is reduced to a masturbatory prop. Woman arouses us in so far as she enters our fantasy frame. With women, it's different. The true enjoyment is not in doing it but in telling about it afterwards. Of course, women do enjoy sex immediately, but I hope I'm permitted as a man to propose a daring hypothesis, that maybe, while they are doing it, they already enact or incorporate this minimal narrative distance, so that they are already observing themselves and narrativising it.

Slavoj Zizek:
Pornography is, and it is, a deeply conservative genre. It's not a genre where everything is permitted. It's a genre based on a fundamental prohibition. We cross one threshold, you can see everything, close ups and so on, but the price you pay for it is that the narrative with justifies sexual activity should not be taken seriously. The screenwriters for pornography cannot be so stupid. You know, these vulgar narratives of a housewife alone at home, a plumber comes, fixes the hole, then the housewife turns to him, 'Sorry, but I have another hold to be fixed. Can you do it?' or whatever. Obviously there is some kind of a censorship here. You have either an emotionally engaging film, but then you should stop just before showing it all, sexual act, or you can see it all but you are now allowed then to be emotionally seriously engaged. So that's the tragedy of pornography.

Slavoj Zizek:
All modern films are ultimately films about the possibility or impossibility to make a film.

Slavoj Zizek:
With von Trier, it's not only the problem of belief in the sense of, do people generally still believe today the place of religion today, and so on. It's also reflectively or allegorically the question of belief in cinema itself. How to make today people still believe in the magic of cinema?

Slavoj Zizek:
The mystery is that even if we know that it's only staged, that it's a fiction, it still fascinates us. That's the fundamental magic of film. You witness a certain seductive scene, then you are shown that it's just a fake, stage machinery behind, but you are still fascinated by it. Illusion persists. There is something real in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it.

Slavoj Zizek:
And that's the paradox of cinema, the paradox of belief. We don't simply believe or do not believe. We always believe in a kind of conditional mode. I know very well it's a fake but, nonetheless, I let myself be emotionally effected.

Slavoj Zizek:
The best way to imagine what Mystery Man is, is to imagine somebody who doesn't want anything from us. That's the true horror of this Mystery Man. Not any evil, demoniac intentions and so on. Just the fact that when he is in front of you, he, as it were, sees through you. [on Lost Highway]

Slavoj Zizek:
Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It's, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough. You think it's just a game? It's reality. It's more real than it appears to you. For example, people who play video games, they adopt a screen persona of a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is, in reality I'm a weak person, so in order to supplement my real life weakness, I adopt the false image of a strong, sexually promiscuous person, and so on and so on. So this would be the na?ve reading... But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self. In the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life, because of social constraints and so on, I'm not able to enact it. So that, precisely because I think it's only a game, it's only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthful. I can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self.

Slavoj Zizek:
What's the archetypal comic situation of Chaplin's films? It's being mistaken for somebody or functioning as a disturbing spot, as a disturbing stain. He distorts the vision. Or people don't even note him, take note of him, so he wants to be noted. Or, if they perceive him, he's misperceived, identified for what he's not.

Slavoj Zizek:
All too often, when we love somebody, we don't accept him or her as what the person effectively is. We accept him or her insofar as this person fits the co-ordinates of our fantasy. We misidentify, wrongly identify him or her, which is why, when we discover that we were wrong, love can quickly turn into violence. There is nothing more dangerous, more lethal for the loved person than to be loved, as it were, for not what he or she is, but for fitting the ideal.

Slavoj Zizek:
The beloved falls out of the frame of the idealized co-ordinates, finally there exposed in his psychological nakedness. "Here I am, as what I really am."

[last lines]

Slavoj Zizek:
In order to understand today's world, we need cinema, literally. It's only in cinema that we get that crucial dimension which we are not ready to confront in our reality. If you are looking for what is in reality more real that reality itself, look into the cinematic fiction.

[first lines]

Slavoj Zizek:
Cinema is the art of appearances, it tells us something about reality itself. It tells us something about how reality constitutes itself.

Slavoj Zizek:
I know it's a fake, but nonetheless I allow myself to be emotionally affected.

Slavoj Zizek:
We know very well some things, but we don't really believe in them. So although we know they will happen, we are no less surprised when they happen.

Slavoj Zizek:
The truly horrible thing is to be involved.

Slavoj Zizek:
You set a limit, you put a certain zone of limit, and though things remain exactly the way they were, it's perceived as another place. Precisely as the place onto which you can project your beliefs, your fears, things from your inner space.