Enjoyment in the Cinema

Film and mass culture are of interest because they represent aspects of everyday life and the part of the culture from below that makes it possible to understand how people cope with the deadlocks of power and repression and of exploitation. Film theory adds significantly to the theory of ideology, but a Žižekian analysis of cinema, rather than simply adding to film theory, is better suited to the critique of ideology One area where film analysis and the critique of ideology overlap is on the category of enjoyment. For Žižek, enjoyment, or jouissance, is a political problematic that is connected to ideology. By analyzing and interpreting enjoyment in cinema, Žižek adds to our understanding of enjoyment in ideology. A Žižekian analysis of cinema, while paying little attention to the specificity of the filmic medium, does develop a much stronger analysis of the mediation of ideology. This chapter introduces a Žižekian analysis of cinema that focuses on the production of enjoyment in spectatorship and in ideology.