Slavoj Žižek on Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias: Venice world premiere on Sept. 7

Slavoj Žižek spoke on Zoom about his role in Sophie Fiennes’ documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, which interrogates utopian thought, capitalism and cinema.

Žižek frames the film not as an exploration of classical Marxist utopia but as an examination of why contemporary capitalist societies—what he calls self-replicating through ideologies of competition and open markets—make imagining an actual utopia difficult. In the interview he also addressed topics including “liberal fascism,” cancel culture and the decay of capitalism.

Fiennes continues the Pervert’s Guide format by staging Žižek within reconstructed film and TV scenes. The documentary places him in cinematic tableaux—he appears in a bathtub in a wedding dress to discuss Melancholia and lies draped in a red robe to discuss A Handmaid’s Tale—using filmic images to visualize philosophical points, such as cinematic depictions of class and social violence.

Producer credits listed in the report are Keeper Pictures, P Guide, SPOK Films, The Film Kitchen and Mattima Films. The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 7; Shani Hinto is handling world sales.

In the conversation Žižek also offered views on recent popular culture: he referenced Spider-Man and Taylor Swift as phenomena he finds puzzling, named The Invite and The Drama (with Zendaya) as his preferred recent films for illustrating the dangers of total openness, and made a personal remark about Olivia Wilde’s appearance in her early 40s.

Žižek argues Hollywood cannot save humanity from impending economic, environmental and technological catastrophe but can provide “a purely symbolic space” in which to confront utopian presumptions; in the film trailer he says, “Our duty is to see things the way they are. And here, cinema helps us.”