Some more films, eh, while I’m in the mood…. on a roll—better sip from the cup while there’s something in it. Spoilers, of course, or what would be the point?

First off, Alphaville (1965), which reverses the ostensible relationship between humans and machines: the machines run the people. (Which is to say, it accurately predicts the Internet.) Alpha 60, the central computer, literally codes human consciousness by means of a continually updated “Bible,” which turns out to be a dictionary of acceptable words (à la 1984). The criterion for inclusion is “rationality,” with emotional words removed and replaced. It seems that lacking the word for “love” removes the capacity for it. Alpha 60’s voice is electronically degraded and sinister, an articulated croak that sounds more weary to me than evil. Must be exhausting operating all those humans at once! Anybody who defies the semantic order is executed most peculiarly: machine-gunned off a diving board, then finished by lovely knife-wielding female swimmers. (Imagine the job description in THAT Help Wanted ad!) I’m thinking the script wanted sharks, but chicks are cheaper (and très jolies).

The supervillain scientist who created Alpha 60? Professor Von Braun! Named after the Paperclipped Nazi (and father of the German V2 rocket) who delivered America to the Moon (as well as global missile dominance). Godard was clearly based.

Sweetly, Von Braun’s daughter Natacha is introduced to love by Lemmy Caution, visiting from the Outer Planets—our lone noir hero bustling energetically against all this totalitarian oppression—who spirits her out of the city (after killing her father, natch) so that she can finally utter the syllable that will release her soul from its captivity in Daddy’s machine (three syllables, actually: “Je vous aime.”). Natacha is played by Anna Karina, who I now understand was Godard’s wife and muse at the time, which explains so much… can’t blame him in the least, she’s got that, you know… how do you say… Je ne sais quoi. So far, her evocation of Laurie is most pronounced in Vivre sa vie (cf. previous post), but I see flashes of it in these other films. Less so in Alphaville, admittedly. Her character is mostly a robot, under the thumb of Alpha 60.

The film’s so dark, taking place at night, and frenetically confusing, that I always struggle with wakefulness watching it. This was my third attempt and the first one in which I even caught the central thrust of the film: that it’s about an evil computer, etc. My two previous attempts (years ago, folly of youth) didn’t even get me that far! So maybe I am a touch more ready for Godard now….

I have to wonder if HAL from 2001 (1968) is modeled after Alpha 60. Both are embodied by CU’s of a lightbulb, brightening and dimming as it processes and communicates information. Reverse shot with CU on the human interlocutor, emphasizing the gulf in both form and function between a person and a computer. HAL’s voice is smooth and affectless, like a deep state bureaucrat, whereas Alpha 60’s voice is damaged and effortful, Henry Kissinger in French. In both cases, the voice is omnipresent, you almost feel it’s being spoken directly to the mind, bypassing the impurities of physical transmission. If God were to speak to you, would he make the air molecules move? Or would he reach directly into the molecules of your consciousness and move THEM?

You could view Alpha 60 as a metaphor for God, I think: a manmade engine of social control, operated by an elite class to enslave a mass populace through the manipulation of language and culture. How does an individual match up to that? (Well, he doesn’t, obviously, not in real life, anyway.) Lemmy’s solution: be a firecracker and a loose cannon, and fly off the handle unpredictably and therefore uncontrollably. Whatever. Didn’t seem to work for the Beats or the Hippies, did it? Did it work for anybody?

Lemmy Caution is apparently an actual character from French pulp noir films, played by the same actor, Eddie Constantine. Godard really loves smooshing pop culture into his films! He stuffs Kafka and Rimbaud impersonators into Band of Outsiders (1964)… as wanna-be gangsters! They team up with Anna Karina (named Odile after a character from Raymond Queneau, which I know NOT from consulting online oracles but from watching the film: Odile literally buys a copy of the eponymous book from a newsstand and reads from it) to steal money from her uncle. Is he her uncle? I’m a little unclear on the relationship, actually.

Interesting dynamics between Odile and her amorous litterateurs: she seems to find Arthur more exciting, accepting his proffered cigarettes immediately after rejecting Franz’s, which if these guys are their namesake authors, I totally get. Rimbaud’s far more exciting! But this fellow in the film is really more akin to the sleazy, post-poetic, gunrunning Rimbaud, version 2.0, not the ecstatic adolescent synesthete we all adore. He even pours liquor in her Coke while she’s not looking. Blech!

Franz eventually manages to turn Odile’s attention on him by turning his own attention… on us! He gives us one of those patented Godard 4th-wall breaking monologues, in which he professes his love of Jack London and tells a story about an Indian in Alaska who’s banished from the tribe for being a liar, so he goes out on his own and sees the civilized world, finally returns home to his village and describes the trains and the airplanes and the massive buildings the size of mountains… and the tribe banishes him again for being an even worse liar. Somehow, this story seems to break some of Odile’s ice, enough at least that she ends up with him in the end, whereas our favorite poetic gunrunner ends up dead in a ridiculously staged, completely unserious shootout.

There are a couple of what I would term “orgasmic” scenes, in one of which the trio vigorously dances for several uninterrupted minutes in a café, and in the other of which the trio runs through the Louvre “in record time.” I think 9 minutes 43 seconds? Beating the previous record-holder (an American, of course, who else would run through the Louvre without looking at the paintings and congratulate himself for his speed?) by 2 seconds. I can’t help but see these scenes as threesomes. Everything was in code back then. Nowadays, these would have been explicit sex scenes. Am I wrong?

Wow, I had more to say on these movies than anticipated…. There really is something to writing thoughts out, isn’t there? They multiply and reinforce each other. So easy to forget all that fun stuff, even for someone who’s soi-disant “a writer.” I couldn’t even watch a movie for three straight months, frankly, much less write about it. I just sat in a chair. I’m still sitting in that chair, of course, but at least I can distract my mind to some degree for the time being. Trying to keep trying….

[ I’ll be spoiling the films I write about here, so don’t read further if you haven’t yet seen ’em. ]

Been trying to take in more film. I used to be very film-oriented, not so much in recent years. I know the things I see will spill out of my consciousness with the swiftness of tears from crocodiles; perhaps a few notes are in order? Giving it a shot, anyway. We’ll catch up with a few here and see what happens.

I saw Crimes of the Future (2022) a few weeks ago, Cronenberg’s vaunted body horror renaissance. Tragically boring. Not even a provocative concept. We’ll evolve to eat plastic? Who gives a fuck? Surgery as performance art? Okay, whatever. The performances have a certain oddness, but feel mostly unmotivated and unfulfilling. Oddness for its own sake. The only character that thrives onscreen belongs to Kristen Stewart: she at least seems turned on by what’s happening, an engaged inhabitant of her world. Everyone else is phoning it in, they might as well be zonked on a couch in some opium den. This movie would have been much better with Kristen Stewart at the center and with some kind of conflict or narrative to drive it forward. The concepts alone are unstimulating, certainly not worth marinating in without relief from dramatic elements. I peeked around online; the reviews seem to be muted but respectfully positive, but I didn’t find anybody who found an interesting idea in it, so I daresay I’ll probably not give it another chance. [LATER] I suppose I’ll put a pin in this film. Having recently attended a literary event that turned out to be mostly devoted to the philosophy of Cronenberg, I feel I may too lightly have dismissed a work by someone so clearly advanced and plugged-in…. If I return to it, however, it will probably be after some extended marination in his earlier filmography.

I also saw Men (2022). Garbage. I’ll let the crocodile weep it out, I don’t care to remember it. I take that back, I’d like to remember at least the scene wherein our protagonista encounters a musical tunnel in the countryside. [LATER] Actually, I also very much enjoyed the extended weirdness of the multiple birth sequence at the end, just can’t stand the final product of all that… emergence.

Anything else in the theater? Oh yeah, The Northman (2022). Very enjoyable. Big Screen emanations from both Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy. There’s a kind of lust you feel for a movie star who’s putting out certain charismatic emanations, not sexual but existential, as if they could inhabit your body, or vice versa. Whereas Nicole Kidman just looks bizarre, I was kind of shocked; she’s not aging gracefully, shall we say. (I haven’t seen her in years, maybe it’s simply the contrast with my memories from the 90s. She used to emanate strongly to me, not so much in this one!) The story is apparently the original version of Hamlet, without all the self-doubt and PSYCHOLOGY ’n shit. Just single-minded bloody revenge. To be or not to be? Pshaw! More like, do you feel lucky, punk? And then you climb Yggdrasil to Valhalla, it’s all good. Robert Eggers has had a good run, three movies so far, all terrific, the others being The Witch and The Lighthouse. Logan enjoyed those, I’m sure he would have loved this. He wasn’t much for arthouse fare, but if it contained the entertaining elements, he was game. Entertainment’s entertainment, after all. (Fun fact: the cowriter of this movie (I discovered when it came up in the credits) is Sjon, a fella from Iceland whose novel From the Mouth of the Whale I excerpted in Gone Lawn several lifetimes ago, back when I was a little more, hmm, “active,” you might phrase it, in the literary scene.)

They have a bunch of French New Wave films up on Criterion right now. Seems like a good opportunity to catch some films I’m ashamed to say I haven’t seen. Last night, for example, I watched Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962). Punched me right in the gut. For one thing, Anna Karina in this role reminded me of Laurie in so many ways, it was unnerving. I hadn’t noticed that in other movies of hers that I’ve seen, so I’ll have to pay attention next time! There are some incredible scenes in this film. Karina’s character is an aimless girl who vaguely wants to be an actress but falls into prostitution instead. Works for a pimp who’s playing pinball when they first meet, and guess what, she essentially becomes his pinball for the rest of the movie, careening from john to john, her trajectory pretty much predetermined by some kind of social / moral physics. At the moment when she attempts to direct her own fate (leave the pimp), she’s rubbed out like a pencil mark. She might as well have never lived. And yet, the scenes! If she hadn’t lived, we wouldn’t have these incredible scenes from her life! Par example, she watches Dreyer’s Joan of Arc in a movie theater, and Godard simply cuts her into the scene, as if she were Joan! Or at least, with Joan. The part where they tell her she’s going to burn at the stake… you see Joan’s tears, then Karina’s tears! If there’d been a camera, you’d have seen my tears, too! And there’s a scene later that is so Laurie-like. The pimp takes her into some dive where he confers with a, uh, business colleague, and she wanders around, out of place, ignored, but wanting to be seen, plays the jukebox, improvises a dance, makes herself the center of attention, attends to the attention she’s receiving, swells into significance by proxy of being seen, yet there’s nothing inside, she’s all surface and triumphant for it. She’s a character with a void inside that she calls freedom, that she uses to justify herself—her decisions or lack of them—but she’s yearning for meaning… martyrdom maybe, like Joan? Impulses and emotions flit in and out of her expressions, across the icy shimmer of her eyeballs, her bodily movements instinctual and feline. This is the first Godard I’ve seen that grabbed me so completely. I liked Breathless well enough, I guess, but other than that one, I had never been able to connect much to a Godard. This one, however, just shattered me. My understanding is: Godard varies wildly, so it could be this will be the only one that floors me like this, but at least it’s possible now. And maybe I just need to revisit the other Godards I’ve seen. It’s been years. Could be I wasn’t ready, and now I am? I really grokked the weird edits and off-kilter timing of the music, for example. The camera was simply looking around the way a person would, indeed the way Karina herself would. And the music jumps in and out the way your attention does. You’re lost in thought and the sounds of the world fade, and some other soundtrack replaces them, but then you snap back and the music falls off, the world returns, you’re back in it, you don’t even know why….

I had some others in mind, but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe another night, if the moxy moves me.