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Slavoj To Love | The irrepressible Slavoj Zizek holds forth amidst a garbage dump in Examined Life.

EXAMINED LIFE
Directed by Astra Taylor. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Sat-Mon, Apr 18-20.
***1/2

Documentaries about philosophy are in many ways an exercise in accessibility. By getting philosophers to appear onscreen and condense ideas that already exist as 500-page tomes into tidy, pullquote-ready anecdotes, you’re basically admitting that the field as it stands has some major PR problems. But as the Platonic epigraph in Astra Taylor’s new film Examined Life says, the unexamined life is not worth living — so if the goal is to get the wheels of self-reflection going in as many people as possible, you could do a lot worse than a film as accessible and uniformly pleasant as this one.

The Winnipeg-born Taylor’s approach is at once elegantly simple and kind of gimmicky: she takes contemporary philosophers to places that either resonate in some way with their work (Peter Singer discusses financial ethics and First World insulation while wandering down New York’s Fifth Avenue) or are in some way meaningful to them personally (the post-Marxist Michael Hardt takes Taylor on a rowboat ride in Central Park), and from there just lets them talk. Aside from one awkward early encounter with an insufferably self-righteous Avital Ronnell, Taylor keeps herself largely off-camera, silent.

This hands-off method might partially explain why the topics under discussion differ so wildly from one another, though Taylor admits to Ronnell up front that her goal is breadth, not depth; the latter takes only semi-ironic offence when Taylor tells her each philosopher has only 10 minutes to get their ideas across. (Sometimes Examined Life feels more like an anthology than a cohesive feature film, and indeed Taylor has edited just such a companion collection, to be released under the same name in June.)

Still, it’s hard to fault the argument from accessibility when it generates so many nice springboards into the underlying questions surrounding today’s big issues. You have queer theorist Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor (Astra’s sister) on what it means for someone in a wheelchair to “take a walk”; the thundering Marxist-Lacanian Slavoj Zizek, at a garbage dump, on how we ought to conceptualize nature and ecology; and Kwame Anthony Appiah on the true meaning of cosmopolitan. The small segments function like a philosophical gateway drug, or least trailers for the respective books — “If you liked this, you’ll love The Sublime Object of Ideology!”

And even if you’ve already made up your mind about some of these thinkers, seeing and hearing them just might convince you to give them a second chance. For example, I remember much of Butler’s writing to be cold and obtuse, yet here she’s nothing but courteous, eloquent, and even kind of funny. And while Zizek is a hilarious and captivating presence in any medium (he’s also the subject of Taylor’s previous film, Zizek!, which I adore), you might want to have his animated lisp in your head before tackling his intimidating body of work.

Then there’s Cornel West, riding in the back seat of Taylor’s car through Manhattan in a suit and afro, and burning through references and ideas so quickly it’s like he’s trying to beat an imaginary clock. His rapid-fire commentary bookends the film, and he does a nice job in the opening scene of setting up the importance of philosophy as an interrogator of the conflicts inherent to the human condition: desire in the face of death, dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and democracy in the face of power.

I’ve never read any of West’s work before, but that’s about to change.