The documentary “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” carries the thrilling undergraduate buzz of connecting everything in one nutty web of politics, culture, psychoanalysis and philosophy.
The movie (a sequel to the similar “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”) is a series of mini-lectures, mostly on the subtexts of famous Hollywood films, given by the atheist Marxist “dialectical-materialist” philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who speaks with an amusing Eastern European accent and kneads or conjures the air while, for instance, describing the exhausting quality of the implicit demand to enjoy oneself implied in a Coke commercial or the thematic reverberations from “The Searchers” in “Taxi Driver.”
To keep this one-man show visually engaging, director Sophie Fiennes places the professor in sets and costumes from the movies, talking about “Full Metal Jacket” from atop a barracks toilet and “Brief Encounter” from a 1940s British train.
Noam Chomsky has denounced Zizek’s theories as nonsensical, and of course they are. But they’re frequently engaging, entertaining and stimulating. See it with your most pretentious friend and plan on a long post-screening discussion over coffee: It’s sophomore year all over again.