Can I Have a Flake, and Chocolate Sauce with That?
Academics. They
miss so much. And forget the rest of us. Infatuated with
other people’s theories, they lose themselves inside vast
abstractions; the only things they seem keen to write about. Big kids with ice cream.
Another adaptation from a popular novel, in which Godard
fragments the narrative fiction in order to raise questions which throw the
romantic aspirations of the protagonists into perspective. The debt to Hollywood is evident in the
use of the gangster film convention of the couple in retreat from a hostile
society, but the film uses various formal strategies to question that
notion. Its protagonists are
doomed, by the conflict between their inner desires and the violence and
corruption of society, to destruction. Godard uses CinemaScope and colour to emphasise the
seductive nature of their dream of an idyllic paradise. Social reality constantly interrupts
the idyll, however, and the protagonists are driven back into society, which
finally kills them. In spite of
Godard’s evident ambiguity towards politics at this stage, the film looks
forward to the explicitly political concerns of later work.
The film’s central theme is that of the escape of the
young couple away from civilisation.
The film also illustrates Godard’s strategy of fragmenting the
narrative, juxtaposing written texts with film image. Godard has often been accused of a puritanical distrust of
the seductive potential of the cinematic image: here, Scope and colour
emphasise the lush beauty of the fantasy island, while written texts constantly
intrude to ‘jog’ the spectator out of the fiction in the direction of politics.
The film’s basic romanticism
is conservative in many respects: for example, in the representations of
Marianne as instinctual and Ferdinand as ‘the thinker’, and in the anarchism of
Ferdinand’s final gesture of self-destruction: the only alternative, it would
seem, to utopianism. (The Cinema
Book, edited by Pam Cook &
Mieke Bernink)
My
interpretation is markedly different.
This one seems, at least to me, not only superficial but blinkered: it
misses the very nature of the work itself. Like writing about Joyce’s Ulysses but unaware that its form is its main character –
most of the meaning is in the language.
As I read this passage I wondered if the nature of
traditional politics, of what it means, has changed, at least for the
academics. I believe this is so:
it is now a portmanteau word which covers every aspect of life. This explains its ubiquitous use, particularly
in film studies,i although it
creates much confusion, especially for the laymen, because it suggests there is a moral value to everything we do.
Politics historically depended on a vision of the world, which included
some ideas on how best to organise it; influenced by notions of good and bad
this vision was intimately connected with one’s perceptions of society, which
arose largely, but not totally, from the experiences of daily living. Believed to be extremely important it
was nevertheless a world separated from the rest of life: from family, often
work, and certainly books and music.
To give a trivial, but all too common, example: most families tended to
confine political talk to a few exchanges before or after dinner, to avoid
unpleasantness and familial schism – two men with radically different views
akin to two bucks rutting after a female.
Politicians, activists and shop stewards were a species
apart…
Over the last twenty years managerial technocrats have taken
over politics, which has become a profession like any other – visions and moral
values are now simply advertising material used to secure office. I doubt the professor has this kind of
politics in mind. Rather, it is
the older style, where the participants were defined within an ideological
spectrum, which included substantive ideas and real beliefs. This style has now left the political
tarns of Westminster and the conference hall, and has, at least according to
the academics, flooded the social realm – today we are all politicians! Even going to the bathroom can become an act of politics: a Labour bath very different from a Tory shower... I go too far of course. But let's go further... A radical Leftist if you choose a 99; the flake a gesture of Trotskyite defiance at corporate efficiency; while the Revolutionary Workers
Party will always demand the chocolate sauce. I let you decipher the metaphors...
This is not to say that there are no (conventional) politics
in this film, only that they play a minor role. To concentrate on them is to therefore seriously
misrepresent the movie. The critic
might be right, and Pierrot le Fou may
well point to the politics of Godard’s later work, but such comments confuse
rather than elucidate; since the nature of politics itself changed between 1965
and 1968; shifting from a counter-cultural bohemianism to extreme revolutionary
Marxism, later descending into the cults of Chairman Mao.ii Such nuances are easily lost amongst
such large abstractions.
What seems more interesting is the way politics is treated in the film. Godard’s crude caricature of America
suggesting that he finds political discourse hopelessly stupid and inane. It is the form, or the style, of its
presentation that seems to interest him more than its content, of which there
is very little. iii
Politics is not society! But the writer’s equation of the two suggests an underlying
assumption and value judgement: the social world is evil. Here is the common cold of the
intellectuals: épater la bourgeoisie. Thus, almost inevitably, there is the
assertion that society is responsible for the lovers’ fall: they are “doomed…
by [its] violence and corruption”.
This is true, but not exactly in the way this writer believes. Quite the opposite! But before I explain, a slight
digression. Society will never be
suitable for dreamers and utopians, because it will never submit to their
fantasies; it is too messy and uncontrollable for that. But is this so a bad thing? Should a community be organised to
satisfy only the wishes of the most profound of egoists? We should run it for Narcissus, you
say. Really? OK. It’s a point of view.
But before you blast me with your scorn, take a long look at Calvin’s
Geneva;iv it may puncture your self-assurance.
Think about it. And think
about it again. Hippies, and all
those who worship at the altar of their own freedom, are, when you think about
it properly, actually Puritans in their hearts.v Only happy when their ideas run things…vi
So, yes, on a superficial level, society kills Marianne and
Ferdinand, as it kills us all – by sapping our individual spirits. However, is this really the theme of
this film? As you know, I have a
completely different view: Pierrot le Fou
is about two characters living their life as if it were a work of fiction; the
gangster motif the source of nearly all the violence here. How does this writer miss that? But
they do, and thus they completely reverse the meaning of the movie!
You are lost?
OK. To make myself very
clear: it is art that kills these two lovers, and not their society. If they had stayed out fiction, hadn’t
jumped in between the pages of their favourite paperbacks, they would have
survived the film intact: in real life we rarely meet terrorists and murderers,
and are therefore reasonably safe from torture and death by unnatural
causes. Only in such a
self-referential film can so many adventures occur; ordinary life transformed into a popular novel with
all its attendant dangers.vii Full of
art this movie overflows with cinematic texture, so that the final deaths
symbolise and embody all of these following things: the end of a love affair,
the last sentence of a book, and the requirements of a commercial film – it
must have an explosive finale.
Could anything be clearer?
Godard even winks at us in some scenes… remember Ferdinand in the car
with Marianne turning to talk to the camera?
If you are absorbed in politics the answer is probably not:
for an activist the power struggle is the only reality that exists. But these are academics, you say. Even worse. They have a new religion to worship, construct and
elucidate.viii
And so the writer, musing on their new metaphysics, misses
the obvious: these characters are living in a make believe world of their own
choosing. Ferdinand’s suicide is
the most fantastic way to go.
Wouldn’t you do that if you
could? Always knowing that once
you put the book down there will be another one to pick up… or a film to go and
see… where you can be… an American ambassador, in a high class brothel,
watching a beautiful prostitute dance Salome; her lack of talent compensated by
her lovely figure and inviting nakedness, barely covered by a transparent pink
scarf…ix
Let’s dream on!
And on and on… until the wife calls us back to the party; and we’re
offered a job in marketing; at the executive director level, of course. A life of big bucks and bores; where
the only books you buy are for the kids at Christmas.
Did you notice how the writer mixes up society with
civilisation? They believe they
are the same thing. This is not so
obvious. Once upon a time we
talked of a civilised society, which
implied a difference between them.x Art and literature not only
representatives of the former, but instruments that could help tame a world
seen as crude, raw and unsophisticated.xi Although the writer’s somewhat loose
use of the term creates an interesting paradox: they might be right but for the
wrong reason. For it is true,
civilisation actually does kill Ferdinand and Marianne: books and films, in
short art, eventually did do the evil deed. Not quite, I think, what they had in mind!
Such ideas are too frivolous for university study. So let’s go back to the more serious
stuff. What notion are these
“formal strategies…question[ing]”?
To me this sounds like an academic formula: a generalisation used to
cover up a lack of insight into particulars. If all the techniques that Godard uses in the film are
undermining the gangster theme, and thus the conventional idea of the rebel,
why is this writer still so keen to concentrate on the conflict between the
individual and society? Doesn’t
the use of such irony suggest the director is poking self-reflexive fun at this
cliché? Shouldn’t the professor at
least be alert to the probability that Godard is not taking these traditional
tropes seriously? That the
gangsters are really just sophisticated kids mucking around… for art’s sake.
How weary we get carrying these heavy reference books – Oxford
Guide to Film Studies, The
Oxford History of World Cinema, An
Introduction to Film Studies 2nd edition.
Crippled by a bent back and short of breath we have energy enough only
to mouth the conventional pieties: all those questioning of standard
assumptions we read about so much in the academic press. Too busy putting question marks on the
computer screen we forget to look at the film itself; and see how it plays with
the conventions of its own cinematic tradition to create art of the most
entertaining kind. Godard is
having a laugh! And so should
we. The professors, however, and
we know and accept this, are paid to be boring – to themselves and others -,
and they do a very good job at it too.
Politics is a dangerous game for amateurs. Art equally so for the professionals;
as Godard knows only too well. And
academics? Too often they seem to
be poor amateurs in both realms, and thus very easily manipulated and misled;
for they don’t have the “touch” or the “instinct” to be much good in areas
where your require more than simple intellect.xii
Perhaps, and this is to stretch a point, the great director
is satirising them. These lost
souls wandering around the labyrinths of their own ideological fantasies;
blowing up the world with phrases from Karl Marx and Louis Althusser. A revolution rising up from the
clutter of their university desks; creating the gun smoke and tear gas that
invests the apartment, and obscures the TV screen…
[i] A number of upcoming posts will be deal with this
subject.
There
is an interesting review article by David Hawkes that actually suggests that
cultural studies (of which film studies seems to form part) are mostly agitprop.
“Gramsci
argued that revolutionaries should turn their attention to the cultural sphere:
the arts, the academies and the press.
By working to undermine the hegemony of bourgeois culture while
simultaneously developing a proletarian alternative, they would engage in a
‘war of position’ designed to prepare the ideological ground for the total
expropriation of capital once political circumstances permitted.
“The
post-war Left took up this project with enthusiasm… The academic discipline of Cultural Studies emerged as the
most self-consciously radical of their projects. It challenged the conventional divisions of the humanities,
insisting on ‘inter-disciplinarity’, and defining itself by its methods rather
than its objects of interpretation.
Yet more disturbing, it undermined the traditional canon of works,
proclaiming that popular culture, minority cultures and the cultures of
non-Western societies were as deserving of scholarly attention as Michelangelo,
Mozart or Milton.
“In
cultural terms the project was a huge success. Western culture was completely transformed…. All that was solid melted into air, all
that was sacred was profaned, and Cultural Studies provided both commentary and
highly effective encouragement to this process… Yet the Left’s rise to cultural
power was accompanied by its descent into economic and political
impotence.” (TLS 17&24/2012)
This
reads like a parody, but I think it is intended as straight description.
It
feels so bizarre because so much emphasis is placed on the cultural Left for
the displacement and devaluing of high art. And yet, as I have argued elsewhere (Dropout Boogie), this landslip in value is due to the nature of
monopoly capitalism of which these cultural Leftists are foot soldiers and
lowly bureaucrats. That is why
their ‘project’ has not revolutionised the country. Hawkes argues that it is ‘facile’ to be think that “Cultural
Studies are no threat to capitalism’.
I agree, for it misses how much they are a part of it! It also ignores how much these
‘radicals’ are conditioned by the university system to which they belong: their
concern with “method” shared by many other disciplines, including the completely
apolitical Oxford School of Linguistic Analysis, dominant in Britain in the
1950s (I have a forthcoming piece on this particular topic).
I
intuit that Hawkes’ description is accurate, at least for the first generation
of cultural terrorists; the later ones would exhibit the ideological exhaustion
of most movements, to become essentially apolitical (that’s right! – politics
by now a rather empty abstraction) and careerist. What Hawkes doesn’t tell us is that this view of Gramsci is
almost certainly incorrect. Being a creative thinker, and more subtle than his
followers, he wasn’t subject to their simple and hopelessly reductive
thinking. According to JG
Merquior:
“As
much as Lukács or Bloch, he cut a highly sophisticated figure, a friend of
revolution who was no foe to high-brow culture and modernist trends in art or
literature. His lifelong concern
with political education was also… a matter of lifting politics to an
elevated cultural level, an
enlightened, universal humanism.”
(Western
Marxism. My emphasis)
As
we wander through the barren gardens of Hawkes’ paragraphs the most enlightening
revelation, one beautiful fountain amongst the dust and tarmac, is when he reveals his
ignorance of the subject he is supposed to be deconstructing. It suggests the biggest weakness of
Cultural Studies: it has no interest, and therefore no understanding, of art
and its history. To give just one
example: the classic work on non-European aesthetics, Primitivism
in Modern Art by Robert
Goldwater, was first published in 1938!
The work of cultural reallocation was taking place within the subject
itself, and had no need of political activists and ideological professors. Adolescent vandals, one and all, who
like to walk over the immaculate lawns in their Doc Martens, ripping up
the bushes and destroying the flowerbeds… Later comes the litter, the crisp
bags and coke cans… and yet later still… the bulldozers of the big
developers…
[ii] Pointed out by Peter Jenkins, in his Mrs
Thatcher’s Revolution: the Ending of the Socialist Era. Emmett
Grogan also captures something of this change from culture to politics in his
autobiography, Ringolevio. A book,
especially in the first half, that is not to be trusted. My guess is that he wants to hide his
rich, upper middle class origins.
As a result this part of the book is thin and often unbelievable. The latter sections are a 1960s
classic.
[iii] This is the central point that Terry Eagleton makes in
his How
to Read a Poem: students are no
longer taught about the dramatic form of a literary work; the reason why he
wrote the book. It is an important criticism, coming from somebody
from inside the (radical) establishment, for it shows just how little
contemporary literature departments are concerned with aesthetic values.
The
same criticism seems applicable to film studies: writers appear to be unaware
that a subject is less important than its treatment. If it were not, if only content mattered, there would be no
difference between Godard’s Weekend
and propaganda from a Soviet news agency.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are people who do
believe they are the same.
[v] This is wonderfully brought out in G.R. Elton’s England
Under the Tudors, when he is
writing about parliament, and particularly Peter Wentworth. Summarising the work of M.M. Knappen,
he uses his phrase to define them: collectivist individualism.
[vii] It is odd that although our academic recognises this,
they nevertheless treat the entire film literally.
[viii] Dropout Boogie has an extensive discussion on the religious nature of intellectuals:
it is their belief, and in the worse cases, their obsessions, in a limited
number of fixed ideas that produces their religion. They are natural priests.
[ix] I’ll leave you to work out the reference.
[x] Even the great Walter Benjamin, who many of these
‘radical' academics like to quote on the subject, implicitly recognised the
distinction:
“For
without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to
the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to
the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of
civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” (Illuminations. My emphasis)
The
point of this passage is that civilisation is not free of the taint of
exploitation; feudal, commercial, capitalist, whatever….
To
underline this point Benjamin makes a clear distinction between barbarism and
civilisation: not the “cultural treasures” themselves but their “origin” we
must contemplate with horror. The
distinction made between great and small talents and minds emphasising the line
of argument. What Benjamin seems
to be suggesting, at least when we read this thesis within the context of the
rest of his work, is a double vision: we have to look at art both aesthetically
and politically. Many people who later quote him seem to
be blind in one eye: they can only reduce civilisation to the “violence and
corruption [the barbarism] of society”; and therefore seriously misrepresent
his views.
For
a good discussion on Benjamin see JG Merquior’s Western Marxism, where he argues that the Theses on the History of
Philosophy may actually be an
aberration in his thought.
[xi] There are some very good passages on this in I.A.
Richards’ The
Principles of Literary Criticism.
Though a very good book, it now reads like an
antique. Hopefully, like the more
commercial kind, it will rise in value over time.
[xii] An excellent discussion of political instinct can be
found in Norman Finkelstein’s discussion of Gandhi on Democracy
Now! His view
is that most people on the Left have poor political touch, and thus prefer to
espouse unrealistic and impracticable positions to actually doing constructive
work; which often requires compromise and a sense of what is culturally
possible, at any given moment.
I.A.
Richard has similar passages in The Principles of Literary Criticism. Of
course, I’m referring to a general trend, not to all academics. Michael Wood,
for example, is in my view one of the best film critics currently writing – and
far superior to even Pauline Kael.
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