DVD & Blu-ray review: The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (15)

DVD channel 4 (136mins)

Slavoj Zizek, much like Jonathan Meades, evokes your favourite university lecturer: he’s peculiar, provocative, knowledgeable and, most crucially, funny. Not many academics would start their dissection of Hollywood and Western ideology with John Carpenter’s hoary horror They Live, which he describes as a “masterpiece”.

Other films under his skewed microscope are The Sound of Music (“Climb Every Mountain” is, apparently, “an embarrassing display of desire”), Taxi Driver (where Zizek holds court from Travis Bickle’s bed) and, best of all, his hatchet job on Titanic. His conclusion to it all seems to be “freedom hurts”.