The Pervert's Guide To Cinema

The problem for us is not,

"Are our desires satisfied or not?"

The problem is,

"How do we know what we desire?"

There is nothing spontaneous,

nothing natural, about human desires.

Our desires are artificial.

We have to be taught to desire.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art.

It doesn't give you what you desire,

it tells you how to desire.

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

Presented by

philosopher and psychoanalyst

Slavoj iek

Oh, I do like you, but it just isn't good enough.

Oh, I forgot.

Your mother asked me up for supper.

Okay. Bring some ice cream with you, will you?

Sure. What kind do you want,

chocolate or vanilla?

- Chocolate.

- Okay.

What we get

in this wonderful clip from Possessed

is commentary on the magic art of cinema

within a movie.

We have an ordinary working-class girl,

living in a drab, small provincial town.

All of a sudden she finds herself

in a situation where reality itself

reproduces the magic cinematic experience.

She approaches the rail,

the train is passing, and it is as if

what in reality is just a person

standing near a slowly passing train

turns into a viewer

observing the magic of the screen.

Have a drink?

Oh, don't go away. Looking in?

Wrong way. Get in and look out.

We get a very real, ordinary scene

onto which the heroine's inner space, as it were,

her fantasy space is projected,

so that, although all reality is simply there,

the train, the girl,

part of reality in her perception

and in our viewer's perception

is, as it were, elevated to the magic level,

becomes the screen of her dreams.

This is cinematic art at its purest.

This is your last chance.

After this there is no turning back.

You take the blue pill, the story ends.

You wake up in your bed

and believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland

and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

But the choice between the blue and the red pill

is not really a choice between illusion and reality.

Of course, the Matrix is a machine for fictions,

but these are fictions

which already structure our reality.

If you take away from our reality

the symbolic fictions that regulate it,

you lose reality itself.

I want a third pill. So what is the third pill?

Definitely not some kind of

transcendental pill which enables a fake,

fast-food religious experience,

but a pill that would enable me

to perceive not the reality behind the illusion

but the reality in illusion itself.

If something gets too traumatic, too violent,

even too filled with enjoyment,

it shatters the coordinates of our reality.

We have to fictionalise it.

The first key to horror films is to say,

"Let's imagine the same story

but without the horror element."

This gives us, I think, the background.

We're in the middle of Bodega Bay,

where the action of Hitchcock's Birds takes place.

Birds is a film about a young, rich, socialite girl

from San Francisco who falls in love with a guy,

goes after him to Bodega Bay,

where she discovers

that he lives with his mother.

Of course, it's none of my business,

but when you bring a girl like that...

- Darling?

- Yes?

I think I can handle Melanie Daniels by myself.

Well, as long as you know what you want, Mitch.

I know exactly what I want.

And then, there is the standard oedipal imbroglio

of incestuous tension between mother and son,

the son split between

his possessive mother and the intrusive girl.

- What's the matter with them?

- What's the matter with all the birds?

- Where do you want this coffee?

- Here on the table, honey.

Hurry up with yours, Mitch.

I'm sure Miss Daniels wants to be on her way.

I think you ought to stay the night, Melanie.

We have an extra room upstairs and everything.

The big question about The Birds,

of course, is the stupid, obvious one,

"Why do the birds attack?"

Mitch...

It is not enough to say that the birds

are part of the natural set-up of reality.

It is rather as if a foreign dimension intrudes

that literally tears apart reality.

We humans are not naturally born into reality.

In order for us to act as normal people

who interact with other people

who live in the space of social reality,

many things should happen.

Like, we should be properly installed

within the symbolic order and so on.

When this, our proper dwelling

within a symbolic space, is disturbed,

reality disintegrates.

So, to propose the psychoanalytic formula,

the violent attacks of the birds

are obviously explosive outbursts

of maternal superego,

of the maternal figure preventing,

trying to prevent sexual relationship.

So the birds are raw, incestuous energy.

What am I doing? I'm sorry, now I got it.

My God, I'm thinking like Melanie.

You know what I'm thinking now?

"I want to f*** Mitch."

That's what she was thinking.

No. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Oh my God, I got this spontaneous

confusion of directions.

Mrs Bates.

We are in the cellar of the mother's house

from Psycho.

What's so interesting is that

the very disposition of mother's house...

Events took place in it at three levels,

first floor, ground floor, basement.

It is as if they reproduce the three levels

of human subjectivity.

Ground floor is ego.

Norman behaves there as a normal son,

whatever remains of his normal ego taking over.

Up there, it's the superego.

Maternal superego, because the dead mother

is basically a figure of superego.

No, Mother. I'm gonna bring something up.

I am sorry, boy,

but you do manage to look ludicrous

when you give me orders.

- Please, Mother.

No, I will not hide in the fruit cellar.

You think I'm fruity, huh?

And down in the cellar, it's the id,

the reservoir of these illicit drives.

So we can then interpret the event

in the middle of the film,

when Norman carries the mother

or, as we learn at the end,

mother's mummy, corpse, skeleton,

from the first floor to the cellar.

You won't do it again. Not ever again.

Now get out.

- I told you to get out, boy.

- I'll carry you, Mother.

It's as if he is transposing her in his own mind

as the psychic agency from superego to id.

Put me down. Put me down.

I can walk on my own...

Of course, the lesson of it is the old lesson

elaborated already by Freud,

that superego and id are deeply connected.

The mother complains first,

as a figure of authority,

"How can you be doing this to me?

Aren't you ashamed?

"This is a fruit cellar." And then,

mother immediately turns into obscenity,

"Do you think I'm fruity?"

Superego is not an ethical agency.

Superego is an obscene agency,

bombarding us with impossible orders,

laughing at us,

when, of course, we cannot ever fulfil its demand.

The more we obey it, the more it makes us guilty.

There is always some aspect

of an obscene madman

in the agency of the superego.

We often find references to psychoanalysis

embodied in the very relations between persons.

For example, the three Marx Brothers,

Groucho, Chico, Harpo.

It's clear that Groucho, the most popular one,

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