The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) 80% 6★

Zizek: 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.

Zizek: But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, 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… too filled in with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality. We have to fictionalize it.

Zizek: Desire is a wound of reality.

– There was a young lady of Ongar Who had an affair with a conger. They said, „How does it feel To sleep with an eel?” "Well, she said, just like a man, only longer."

Zizek: The ultimate abyss is not a physical abyss, but the abyss of the depth of another person. It's what philosophers describe as the night of the world. Like when you see another person, into his or her eyes, you see the abyss. That's the true spiral which is drawing us in.

Zizek: My relationship towards tulips is inherently Lynchian. I think they are disgusting. Just imagine. Aren't these some kind of, how do you call it, vagina dentata, dental vaginas threatening to swallow you? I think that the flowers are something inherently disgusting. I mean, are people aware what a horrible thing these flowers are? I mean, basically it's an open invitation to all the insects and bees, „Come and screw me”, you know? I mean, it's…I think that flowers should be forbidden to children.

Zizek: If anything, anxiety at the vocal level is silence. It's silence. It's a silent scream.

Zizek: There are no specifically fake emotions, because, as Freud puts it, literally, „The only emotion which doesn't deceive is anxiety. All other emotions are fake.”

Zizek: It's not as classical metaphysics thinks. We are too terrified to accept the fact that we are mortal beings, we would like to be immortal. No, the truly horrible thing is to be immortal. Immortality's the true nightmare, not death.

Zizek: 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.