Minh Thu Ma (Alice)Professor David Houston English 101February 10, 2015An Outline of The Perverts Guide to Ideology by Slavoj ZizekNarrator: *First movie discussed: Jaws (1975)In Steven Spielbergs Jaws, a shark starts to attack people on the beach. What does this attack mean? What does the shark stand for? There are different, mutually exclusive answers to these questions. On one hand, some critics claim that obviously the shark stands for the foreign threat to ordinary Americans. The shark is a metaphor for either natural disaster, storms, or immigrants threatening United States citizens and so on. On the other hand, its interesting to know that Fidel Castro who loves the film once said that for him, it was obvious that Jaws is a left-ish, Marx-ish () that the shark is a metaphor for () the capital exploiting ordinary Americans. So, which is the right answer?I claim none of them and at the same time, all of them. Ordinary Americans as ordinary people in all countries have a multitude of fears. We fear of kinds of things. We fear maybe immigrants or people whom we perceive to be lower than ourselves attacking us () we fear people raping our children, we fear natural disasters (), we fear corrupted politicians, we fear big companies who can do with us whatever they want. The function of the shark is to unite all these fears so that we can in a way trade all these fears for one fear alone. In this way, our experience for reality gets much simpler. Why am I mentioning this? Because isnt it that the most extreme case of ideology may be, in the history of humanity, () work precisely in the same way?Imagine an ordinary German citizen in the late twenties and early thirties. His situation () is in the exact same way of a small child. Hes totally perplexed; social, authorities, symbolical, () all is telling him that: You are a German worker, banker () whatever. What does society want from him? Why is everything going wrong? The way he perceives the situation is that newspaper lie to him; he lost his work because of inflation (). What is the meaning of this all? *Second movie discussed: Triumph of The Wind (1935)The original Fascist dream is () to have a cake and to eat it. Fascism in its most elementary a conservative revolution (); a revolution that reinforces a traditional, hierarchy society; a society that is modern, efficient, but at the same time, controlled by hierarchic values. Now the Fascists have a problem (): social conflicts. Social instability is the way capitalism functions. So how to solve this problem? Simple; you need to generate an ideological narrative which explains how things went wrong in the society () as a reside of a foreign intruder. The way to restore the health of our social body is to eliminate the Jews. It is the same operation as the shark in Jaws; in multitude of fears () you replace the confusion with one clear figure: the Jews, and everything becomes clear. *The analogy is then extended to England, where the figure are the unemployed, single mothers. Imagine the ideology is a filter, a frame, so that if you look at the same ordinary reality through the frame, everything changes () the frame opens suspicion. *Third movie discussed: The Eternal Jew (1940); different images of very different Jewish individuals, or types. In racism, the others are the enemies () who try to steal from our ways of life.

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