This Thanksgiving, you’ll be with your kids, your in-laws, or the creeps in your Rotary Club, having a safe, boring day off work and wondering what went wrong with your life, Meanwhile, I’ll be enjoying the life-threatening levels of freedom that come with being a socially awkward divorcee with a vasectomy and a shoebox apartment in Venice Beach. Specifically, I’ll be getting balls deep into a K hole while watching The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. 

While you fail to pacify your screeching kids and pretend you give a shit about the big game, I’ll wallow in absolute decadence as I scarf down every mind-altering substance on the premises, order a burrito, stagger a few blocks down the street to pick it up, and, not for the first time, listen to Žižek riff on A Clockwork Orange, which is even more exciting than listening to the same Beastie Boys song dozens of times in a row. 

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is a 2012 documentary film starring the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a rock-star lecturer whose creative and stimulating analysis, joyously disheveled appearance, legendary physical and verbal tics, sly sense of humor, and air of unstoppable self-confidence scream “this guy fucks.” The doc shows scenes from a range of Hollywood films with a layer of commentary from Žižek hitting on his big theme of ideology. Ideology is the dirty aquarium water we swim in, the framework of “unknown knowns” that forms our experience of the world in ways in which we are not often directly cognizant. Between the clips, it also showcases Žižek’s talent for surrealist sketch comedy.

This year, I will watch this film alone in my apartment while eating handfuls of Sativa-heavy cannabis products and “albino penis envy” psychedelic mushrooms. I will rail ketamine until my scrotum explodes. I will put to rest all the leftover prescription pills I have in my medicine cabinet and scattered promotional tote bags, along with the nootropics and kratom I ordered online as my marriage was going to shit. I will supplement this with 2C-B, MDMA, phenibut, Klonopin, Chloraseptic, and hot sauce with a gratuitous BDSM-themed cartoon on the label. I may have some DMT vapes and toad venom on hand in case things get wild.

In Žižek’s riff on John Carpenter’s dystopian LA horror classic They Live, which tees up the documentary, he remarks on our extreme, violent psychological resistance to looking straight into the sun of ideology. He interprets an interminable fight scene as a purification ritual through which we are forced into the painful experience of understanding how much we are at the mercy of bullshit and circumstance. “Freedom hurts,” Žižek says.

Me, I’m not afraid of my freedom. I have plenty of hard drugs to help the medicine go down.

Žižek can communicate with remarkable clarity, but he’s more entertaining when he’s all over the place. He examines the not-too-subtle kink themes in the horny-nun classic The Sound of Music (and the passive-aggressive, masochistic cynicism at the heart of modern Catholicism more generally), the flexibility of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as a versatile propagandistic jock jam for warring tribes that want to murder each other, the artistry of Rammstein, and other bits of insight porn such as:

– We tend to feel guilty not for enjoying our lives to excess, but for failing to enjoy them as much as we think we should

– Desire must be self-perpetuating, as it would be unbearable for most of us to reach a point at which desire becomes irrelevant

– “Enjoyment becomes a kind of weird, perverted duty”

– “Fantasies are the central stuff our ideologies are made of”

This stuff is plenty interesting on its own, but it’s absolutely fascinating when you’re so high your brain is oozing out through your earholes.

2012 still feels like my backyard, but it’s a century ago in internet years. The Pervert’s Guide is now old enough to cast a long shadow over the extremely online version of western leftism that emerged during the Bernie Sanders campaigns. The most innovative left-leaning YouTubers—ContraPoints, Folding Ideas, and others—are clearly influenced by the style of The Pervert’s Guide. Žižek’s characteristic mix of socialist politics and Lacanian psychoanalytic riffing are the lingua franca of left-aligned Gen Z TikTok, which isn’t a coincidence or a surprise. To reiterate, this guy fucks. And even though I’ve already seen it many times, I’m going to enjoy the hell out of this film, even if it requires huffing airbrush propellant, which I haven’t done since the last time I saw my high school friend who is dead now.

This is what I’ve done for myself, and what my life has become. While you’re tending to your social and familial obligations, steaming your milk, and going to sleep at a reasonable hour, I’m doing whatever the hell I want. I ain’t mad atcha. I’m not spending my Thanksgiving this way to provoke your envy or otherwise piss you off, although that’s not going to stop me. It’s all love here. I’m doing this for both of us. Because you need a hero, and the best part of the hero’s journey is watching the comedy stylings of Slavoj Žižek during hour six of a four-day mescaline binge. 

Want to join me? Too bad. You’re not invited. Enjoy your stuffing, cranberry sauce, and quality time with the people who love you, loser.

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