Abstract

This paper examines Boorman’s much-maligned sci-fi extravaganza, Zardoz, from a psychoanalytical perspective, drawing largely on Freud, Lacan, and Christian Metz. As well as engaging with the film as an exercise in the psychoanalytic approach to film, the paper situates that reading of Zardoz within broader film studies discourses and considers why the discipline of Film Theory so rarely engages with so-called ‘bad cinema’. This, in turn, presents the argument that all filmic texts, irrespective of their apparent qualitative properties, are usefully amenable to theoretical approaches and understanding and can potentially offer insights beyond anything to which the films themselves apparently make claim.