Christian G
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2020–2026
6:01 · 427K views · Aug 4, 2014
A short excerpt from The Pervert's Guide to Ideology in which Slavoj Zizek analyzes John Carpenter's They Live. He uses the film's fight scene and sunglasses to explain how ideology works.
HN cites it as a concise, memorable explanation of ideology, often in threads about advertising, propaganda or AI-shaped narratives.
6 comments from Hacker News
Edit: Slavoj Žižek. As always, phenomenal and humble take. "I’m already eating from the trashcan all the time, the name of this trashcan is... ideology" Slavoj Žižek on "They Live" (The Pervert's Guide to Ideology) this video
Yup. As soon as you think you're "non-ideological" at that point you're fully ensconced in ideology, because your beliefs are so invisible to you that you mistake them for reality. Zizek beats this drum a lot. He did a very entertaining documentary on the subject called The Pervert's Guide to Ideology , examining ideology through the lens of various classic films. You can see a fun excerpt here: this video
I like that one too. Slavoj Zizek did a great description of it in "Pervert's Guide to Ideology" this video I didn't understand the reason for the absurdly long fight sequence, but it finally clicked after hearing Zizek talk about it.
Jean Baudrillard would argue we are in an even worse fate: The VR/AR/Mobile/Disneyland world is a presented reality in a way we can dismiss it, while still accepting the world around us as real [0]. The danger is the simple call ("turn it off" or "remove it from your eyes") misses that the reality without the glasses is just as much a fiction. Slavoj Žižek makes the argument as forcefully against Ideology as a concept as well [1]. > Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland: digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. > Certainly. > But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of realit
There is no objective truth because humans are inherently ideological beings and what we consider objective is just a reflection of our ideology. Consider markets - a capitalist's "objective truth" might be that they are the most efficient mechanism of allocating resources, a marxists "objective truth" might be that they are a mechanism for exploiting the working class and making the capitalist class even richer. Here's Zizek, famous ideology expert, describing this mechanism via film analysis: this video