Slavoj Zizek may not exactly be overexposed in movies, but he's come closer to it than any other Slovenian film theorist, Lacanian philosopher, and sometime presidential candidate I can think of. (The <em>Guardian</em> once called him "the Elvis of philosophy", ignoring Elvis's famous statement that he thought that Lacan was "about as funny as a turd in a punchbowl.") A couple of fall festival seasons back, the bearded, bearish Zizek could be seen pontificating about such subjects as Hitchcock and David Lynch, The Exorcist and The Matrix, in Sophie Fiennes's two-and-a-half-hour The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, which was at least the third film documentary built around his gruff-accented rumblings, and which was widely acclaimed as his definitive star turn. The movie has yet to be distributed here in theaters or on DVD, but you can watch a fifty-minute chunk of it on a DVD that comes with "The 2008 Film Issue" of The Believer. In a brief accompanying tribute, Jason McBride describes Zizek's approach in this film essay as "dialectical materialism for the multiplex." I don't know what that means, but it sure is catchy.
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