The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: A Freudian Way to Explore Films

Sigmund Freud

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.