I was enthralled by the many vignette-style scenes in the movie. Two of these stood out to me: the man in the jail cell and the man driving his car and projecting his voice through a megaphone. The man in the jail cell is ranting about the people who he believes are responsible for his incarceration, but the interesting part of him is that he’s not just an angry man, but his actual skin is red, reflecting his anger at the world. His skin remains red the entire scene, which means to me that his anger was irrational and dogmatically implanted into his brain.

The other character that drove his car around the city shouting about the state of society was, quite frankly, awesome. After I left the screening I went home and immediately looked up that scene on YouTube just to watch it again. This guy seems to be reading a prepared speech, but it turns into a passionate tirade condemning humans and the government, possibly as an homage to Nietzsche’s ideas. His face throughout the scene changes immensely, from the red that signifies anger during the darker moments of the monologue to a pale blue when disgusted with American consumerism and laziness. The irony of this scene lies in the fact that he is driving around, so that no one person heard his entire speech. Was this the point the writer was trying to make with this scene?

Due the way the film is shot in vignettes and with so many unexplained characters, it is difficult at first to figure out a coherent story plot. One way to look at this film is to see it simply as a collage of memories of the main character right before he dies. In the film, one of the characters say that when someone dies, his brain activity is still active for another six to twelve minutes, allowing him to think but not move. However, those six minutes in reality would seem like a couple of hours to the thinker. This would explain why the main character could not wake up from his “dreams” no matter how hard he tried. And the film, as a result, is shot from the dying person’s perspective. Furthermore, it is about him reflecting back on his life as a thinker and coming to terms with what he has learned in life.

Besides the style of film being very interesting, its dialogues and background music also contributes greatly to the overall dream-like quality of the film. As we discussed in class, the dialogue seemed very poetic and well rehearsed. It is not like the colloquial language that one would usually use when being interviewed. Also, the alliteration of some of the phrase seemed to attribute greatly to the power of those dialogues. Another aspect of the film that was very unique was the background music. The tango-like style made the film seem more lighthearted and happy.

What makes Waking Life even more interesting is the fact that it reviews almost every philosophical topic we have covered in class this semester. In terms of happiness, the driver of the sailboat vehicle said we should do as much as we can with the “colors” we are given.  When the main character encounters the professor talking about existentialism, he says that existentialism isn’t about despair like how most people talk about it as, but rather about celebrating being alive. By holding ourselves responsible to our own actions, we can feel a sense of control and power in our lives. Perception, dreams, and reality are discussed throughout this entire film with the main character trying to escape his dreams and the cartoonish depictions of everything. Individuality is dealt with when the guy, who later sets himself on fire with gasoline, talks about how individuality is constantly suppressed by media.

By the way, I thought it was really cool that you can watch the ENTIRE film again on YouTube:

When discussing The Matrix, Zizek proposes that there is a third pill that shows “not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in the illusion itself.”  I like the idea that there is a truth in symbolic images.  Consequently, film is an illusion to show us reality.  This reminds me of the line from V for Vendetta that says, “Artists use lies to tell the truth.”

So many ideas were addressed to show how movies reflect our consciousness, that it is hard to address all of them in one blog post.  However, several parts stand out to me because they were interesting.  One of those interesting parts is when Zizek divided the house in Psycho and the Marx Brothers into the id, ego, and superego.  Psycho is one of my favorite movies, but I had never thought to notice that Norman Bates is himself on the ground floor, his mother’s morals on the upper floor, and the mother’s actual body on in the cellar.  It also makes sense, with ego being the part that interacts with reality, that Norman is only in touch with reality, with being himself rather than his mother, on the ground floor.  It is also interesting that Bates is caught trying to murder Marion’s sister in the cellar.  I also thought the divisions of the Marx Brothers into the id, ego, and superego were thought provoking.  Harpo’s silence now takes a different tone, knowing that he is the silent, instinct driven, id.

Death drive is fascinating.  I don’t know much about this, so I had to look it up, but it reminds me of l’appel du vide, or “the call of the void.”  There is an inherent desire for self-destruction.  Zizek explains “In order to attack the enemy, you first have to beat the shit out of yourself. To get rid in yourself, of that which in yourself attaches you to the leader, to the conditions of slavery.”  This sounds like something Tyler Durden would say.  I never realized Tyler was a Freudian.

One of the greatest assets to film is the use of perspective.  People can be put into the shoes of another character, creating a new realm of possibilities and emotions.  Zizek brings up the perspective in Psycho where we see Arbogast being killed from the perspective of the killer.  Zizek explains, “We don’t know who he is, but because we are forced to assume the murderer’s position, in a way we don’t know who we are.”  Hitchcock was very good at using this technique.  Zizek also presents a scene from The Birds where we see the town from the perspective of the birds as they prepare to attack.

            The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema was incredibly interesting and thought provoking.  However, it was quite a heavy work to take in all at once without a background in psychoanalysis.  I found the idea that films can represent our reality and help us understand ourselves to be very true.  A video blogger I watch on YouTube said in one of his videos “Movies are awesome because they are able to express what so many of us cannot say ourselves.  We feel intense emotions and think complex thoughts, but we often can’t convey them without a little outside help.”  I think Zizek would agree with that sentiment.

*Fun fact: I was watching the credits and I noticed that Brian Eno did the music. That makes this film even cooler.

Zizek describes film as the ultimate means of communication, of evoking feelings, superior to that of literature and songs. This is because the latter mediums are limited in scope, one to our understanding of what we are reading the second through what we hear. But film, he describes it as the superior of all the forms by simulating all the senses, creating the illusion that we are in the film. As Zizek put it, by making us a witness to the event, but an even better witness than we can make in real life, because in film, we are no longer limited to the physical constraints of our body, we are shown views that a cannot be seen in real life.

The film best describe this feeling is The Conversation, in it, the private investigator witnesses the crime through mediums that simulate being in the situation. The mediums simulate what goes on in our minds. The view of the crime through a crack in the balcony is described as how we see out of the crack that is our eyes. The recording of another room is placing our ears in another location through technology. This is what film allows us to do, to project our senses into another location, one we normally cannot exist in.

In the first part of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Zizek showed elements in film that evoke our feelings, although we don’t understand it, what we are shown in film, what we hear strikes a chord in our mind, the complex layers, the unknown black box. The first film clip shown form the film Possessed, shows the film viewers’ feelings through the point of view of the female character, in film we are told our desires without being actually told. The film opens a portal to our mind and sends feelings and thoughts without us knowing what has happened after the fact.

This is the reason Zizek describe Hitchcock’s view of a perfect form of film, a box that directly sends feelings, desires to our brains. This is because film’s transfer of thoughts is superior to literature and music, by giving a more perfect transfer, it still require input, from our sense of sight and hearing, to be fully deciphered in our mind. The next step is to eliminate even those steps, for technology to find a way to tell us what to feel, to dig through our mind without a medium. A perfect transfer of thought, a direct portal to the mind. 

Violence, blood, psychos and supernatural existences are the typical features of horror movies. Consider the scene in Alien Resurrection in which the girl sees a creature just like her but has monstrous body parts and the scene in Lost Highway in which a person was shot in the head and human guts fall out, they are all evidences of films presenting disturbing images and ideas to haunt us. Films are powerful in a way that they are able to tear apart things that we are so familiar with, break them into tiny pieces, show us every beautiful or ugly detail of them and then make new combinations to turn them into things that we don’t necessarily recognize. This is why we are always emotionally affected by films, because they are telling new stories about things that are familiar to us. Horror films features terrifying combinations, and happy-ending films the reverse.

A literal example of films tearing things apart will be The Conversation. When the detective goes into the bathroom, he stares at every single item in the room, all of which are things that we use on a daily basis. However, they all look so strange to the audience at the very moment. Soon after, the detective starts to break things apart. The film gives us, the audience, the unnatural desire to uninstall everything and to see every crack to find evidence of a murder spot. Finally, when he reaches to the toilet, unexpected things happen: blood floods out from the toilet when he flushes it. It is weird to put them together but, it is true that toilet and blood are two of the most intimate things to us. Yet the scene that blood is out flowing from the toilet is so strange and horrifying as if we have never seen any blood such red or a toilet in a bathroom.

If we extend the things that films break down from tangible objects to intangible emotions, films actually do take out desires and emotions and directly present them to us. They capture all our possible desires and they just throw it onto the screen. Unlike daily reactions in which people tend to polish their goals and wishes, films show us the bare desire. They show us how ugly we are when we are greedy, and how beautiful we can be when we are fighting for our possessions. If is to put these in Freud’s term, films are forcing us to face our id, ego and superego. Pleasant films actually are assuring us that regardless how dramatic the three parts of our mind interacts, our ego is, and will always be, able to balance the other two. Horror films, however, crashes that sweet dream of ours and says to us that “this is how horrible your id and superego can be, but sorry, your ego can never balance the two.” Horror films are not only horrible because of the disturbing scenes, but because of the fact that we recognize the disturbs but are incapable of making any changes. In a sense, we are scared because we are mad at ourselves.

This emotional tension can be explained by Freud’s idea of id, ego and super ego. Id is our primary desire and drive as human beings; ego is the realistic principles that please id’s drives; and super ego is the perfection that shapes different personalities. As we are expected to be normal and proper members of the society despite our inborn cruelty and animal natures that Nietzsche suggests, we have to use ego to suppress these bad drives in the id. Therefore, these drives, good or bad, are only satisfied in our imagination and dream. As a result, film is a way to visualize those stories that we have in our minds, thus creating temporary satisfaction to audience while they are watching films. For example, I can get a sense of satisfaction when I see things that are impossible in my life through watching film. My drives are temporarily satisfied in this emotional tension, which is created by the film although I am clear that what I see is just illusion. In the film The Possessed, the girl watches the windows of a train as if she is an audience at the cinema watching different scenes. Her desire to that luxuriant life is satisfied temporarily by imaging herself into the scenes.

However, what can we get out of film besides the satisfaction while watching film? What makes film so fascinating? As Zizek suggests in his film, “The art of cinema consists in arousing desire, to play with desire. But, at the same time, keeping it at a safe distance, domesticating it, rendering it palpable.” The significance of a film to audience is how the viewers transform the temporary impulse into long-term memory through the process of thinking. For example, films that project thoughts and inner life would evoke my thoughts or change my view, thus have lasting power on me. Therefore, films do not tell people what to desire, but teach people how to desire by presenting the images and stories to make people think. Different people can thus get different inspirations from a same film. That is why people love to watch and discuss film.

As Zizek concludes at the end of the film Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: “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 than reality itself, look into the cinematic fiction.” We need cinema as a media not only to let our suppressed drives out, but also to confront our deep thoughts.

Sigmund Freud is EVERYWHERE. He has influenced lots of sophisticated directors, like David Lynch, and other philosophers and critics like Slavoj Žižek, an important contemporary philosopher. Žižek has a great interest on psychoanalysis and film theory, and thus, an extraordinary film, scripted and presented by himself, came out. The film explores films significant in the film history from a psychoanalytic perspective. I find it an excellent film since I am also interested in Freud. The film has explored many Freudian ideas, including dream, psychosexual development, unconsciousness, id, ego and super-ego, and death drive.
Freud is best known for his dream analysis. Dreams fascinate us by making us wonder who we really are, and what we really want. When we are awake, our consciousness is in control most of the time. We repress the inappropriate desires and feelings deeply into our unconsciousness. They are imprisoned during the conscious state, but sneak out once we are asleep. Instantly, all the unwanted and hidden desires present themselves to us, just like the scene of blood coming out from the toilet in the film the conversation.
Žižek explains this scene in two dimensions. Firstly, he interprets the scene as the very nature of our fear, the fear of facing things we once thought that we have thrown away. To function normally in the society, we will need to repress our desires. Žižek also relates films to this idea of desires being shown nakedly. “Films never give us what we desire, but tell us how to desire.” He mentions this at the beginning of the film. Films show us the hidden desires, unattainable in the real life; at the same time, we have an “alienated space” which makes the film having a dream-like nature as we experience, without taking any responsibility for acting our desires.
The Birds and Blue Velvet are two movies that Žižek mentions a number of times in section one. They both deal with psychosexual development, an important idea held by Freud. In The Birds, the folk of violent and dangerous birds symbolizes the intensity of incestuous tension between the mother and son. In Blue Velvet, the sexually violent man shows his desire for uterus. Both films suggests the Oedipus complex, a Freudian theory which states that a boy desires to sexually possess his mother and kill his father.
In the film Psycho, another freudian idea is introduced. The house in the movie has three floors, which represent the three layers of Freud’s structural model of the psyche—id, ego and super-ego. All the terrible things happen on the basement floor, which Žižek believes to be the “id” floor. The id is the unorganized part of one’s personality which contains his or her basic drives. Our “ego” deals with our “id” well most of the time by pleasing id in realistic ways, but there are still some primary desires that cannot be fulfilled. Films, again, provide us a chance to experience those unattainable desires in real life, and detach ourselves from the “super-ego” temporarily, which opposes the excessive demands of “ego.”
Violence of different degrees and themes is presented in most of the films mentioned in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Why is violence significant to help explore the psychological effect films have on us? It is, possibly the exact interpretation for Freud’s death drive. Some parts of us desire self-destruction and return to the inorganic as the search of pleasure by id will, ultimately, lead us to death. The dancing red shoes, uncontrollable hands, the horrible voice from the possessed body, and the lasting smile are examples of the partial autonomous objects which get rid of the “ego” and the reality, pursuing pleasure and desires “id” wants. It can be potentially dangerous, when films present the desires which we do not even know. Just like a video game, we can be violent and do whatever we want. You may say, it is just a game. People will definitely act differently in the real life. How can we be sure that the monster “id” will always go back to the cage where they were released? The crazy violent birds will never voluntarily fly into the cage which controls them; in the worst case, a hunter may be needed to kill them all.

A great point Zizek made is in reference to the way we perceive reality. He states that no one actually wants to know what reality truly is behind all of these worldly illusions, because reality is just these illusions and nothing more. He laments the lack of a third pill in The Matrix, a pill that would allow one to perceive reality as it is and still exist within the illusion. However, I thought about this long after he stopped talking about it, and I realized that Neo in The Matrix is the embodiment of this third pill because he does perceive the reality of the Matrix as illusion, which is why he is able to bypass arbitrary laws set in place to make the illusion more believable.

The point Zizek made where he asserted that movies tend to alter only one aspect of reality really got me thinking about it. He said that if one takes away all the horror from a horror film, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, what we’re left with is the bare story. But good films have stories that challenge the actors as well as the audience to put themselves into the situation. This gave me a profound new respect for actors, because these people react to these manipulations of reality, but we as the audience react with them; actors guide our emotions with their own, making the audience seem somewhat like sheep following a shepherd. Truly great movies don’t do this though; instead, they force the audience directly into the situation and make them react in novel ways to novel scenarios.

Zizek’s explains that cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It will never give us what we desire, but will only tell us how to desire. What does this mean? If it doesn’t give us what we desire, what does film give us?

Zizek uses a clip from Possessed where a small town girl is able to look into a moving train and witness the members aboard. It seems to be a luxury train filled with food, dancing and expense. She, like the average audience, sees this lifestyle and all the things that come with it, but just merely seeing them will never get her on the train. The train, the metaphor for a film in Zizek’s mind, has just shown her something she can’t have, but will now desire. Zizek explains early on in the film that desires are learned. We learn them from viewing which is why films are so emotionally impactful on an audience.

Does this make for a painful experience for the audience? People continue to watch films and see the things they can’t have. Does seeing something make it feel more attainable? Do people keep watching films because, at least while they watch, it seems like those things are theirs because they experience them?

Zizek also uses Freud’s theory of id, ego, and super ego in his description of films and their connection to desires. He references specifically the house in Psycho. There are three floors to the house and each floor represents a different layer of behavior and the mind. The super ego is the first floor of the house, the ego the ground floor, and the id is the basement where the true horror happens. But why is it so horrifying? The audience, like anyone else, has their super ego and their ego attempting to correct their behaviors and avoid the id as much as possible. In a horror film, the id is the superior player and the audience is both aware of what will happen and still shocked by it.

Horror films are extremely popular because they let the audience see what happens when a person or situation is controlled by the id. Is this both a release of the audience’s desire to use their own id and a reminder to the ego and super ego of the danger of the id?

For appearances Zizek explains that reality and illusion have very complicated bonds. For Neo in the Matrix he is choosing between a pill for reality and a pill for illusion but Zizek does not like this choice. There should be a reality within the illusion.

If an illusion gives you an experience, does the fact that it isn’t ‘real’ mean that you haven’t experienced it? When you view a film the emotions you are having aren’t because the things on screen are actually happening to you, but you are having the emotions nonetheless. Does this mean that your emotions are less justified? If you cry in the theater, because those things that made you cry never actually happened, does it mean that you were never sad?

Zizek also talks about Mulholland Drive and the scene in Club Silencio. The woman is singing and suddenly falls to the ground but her voice still can be heard. Zizek explains this connection to the “death drive” meaning that something is still alive though disembodied. Her voice is surprising to the audience, before they know it is a playback, because her voice is still alive although her body may not be.

Film is all appearance and what the audience sees. These fantastical types of scenes create a deep emotional response from the audience. We see Betty and Rita react so strongly to the scene that Betty seems to be convulsing. The scene is very powerful, and their reactions to the song guide the actual audience’s reactions. What is so powerful about the “death drive”? What does this scene say about being a member of the audience?

During class on Friday we discussed what it meant for a film to be a work of art and what challenges directors face in trying to make more artful films. To name a few of these challenges: (1) audiences often simply want to be entertained so movies rarely challenge our expectations, which means movies tend to become formulaic and standardized, (2) making and distributing a movie is very expensive so it must appeal to a large audience in order to be profitable, and (3) part of insuring a film’s success is promoting it, which means the director often has to explain the film, reduce it to some themes, etc. which can take away from the experience of it — which we saw David Lynch resist in the short interview (see previous post). We also discussed if new technologies for creating, editing, and distributing independent film projects might change some of these conditions that shape the film industry and allow more creativity.

The clip above is Russian filmmaker and writer Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) discussing this same issue: how can film be an art form if it is so limited by its status as a consumer good? (Tarkovsky is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century and is a staple in any film studies curriculum.)

Text from video:

“Cinema is an unhappy art as it depends on money. Not only because a film is very expensive, but it is also marketed like cigarettes, etc. A film is good if it sells well. But if cinema is art, such a proposition is absurd: it would mean that art is good only if it sells well. Knowing this very well, I don’t complain. I can’t demand special terms for my films, since these terms don’t exist.

The film for the large audience cannot be poetical. Some films have been seen by millions of people, but this happened at the dawn of silent cinema, when each new film attracted people’s curiosity. Now it’s difficult to surprise the spectator and good films are not seen by the masses.”