The accent is brave, hardly penetrable. Captions are really necessary. But the title of the movie says it all: it IS Slovenian humor at an abstract, high-brow level. The host mitigates the Freudian legacy as he perverts - in a decreasing order - (1) Marx (2) Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School at large (3) Lacan. His universalizing framework comes from Lacanian psychoanalysis, although he is as 'revealing' as Lacan. The greatest apparent influence on Zizek seems to be that of Roland Barthes's 'Mythologies'. As if he were kinda Roland The Hip Semiologist, Zizek analyzes everything from the perspective of the 'myth,' revealing at every opportunity a new approach, criticizing our surrounding, culturally globalized habitat, and insinuating what might be its intrinsic authenticity. The film is essentially an illustrated conference in the style of other mass culture analysts such as Jacob Bronowski, John Berger, Robert Hughes, Kenneth Clark. Zizek is not interested in the respective ideology of the filmmakers he quotes. He uses fragments of films as illustrative of real life processes and their 'myths', not specifically Nazism or Communism, but rather the way we all shape our lives and the universal themes that connect our 'mythological' subconscious needs.
