This the fourth of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating novel and engaging readings of films that often depart from critical orthodoxy in productive ways, just as does Serres’s thought itself. I post the lectures here in their original form, reflecting the conventions and register of spoken delivery. My hope is that they can be a stimulation to scholars of film studies and scholars of Serres’s thought alike.
This final lecture in the series could be subtitled “When director and film tell different stories”. Before we are in a position to tease out what those different stories are, and how we can understand the difference in terms of the thought of Michel Serres, I want to situate this remarkable film in terms of its generic peculiarity.
For a film in the genre of science fiction, Alphaville is conspicuously rooted in the here and now. It is not about the future but the present. Shot on location in 1965 Paris, the film makes very little attempt to disguise its recognizable Parisian décor. Far from a symptom of carelessness, this is a deliberate choice, as J G Ballard explains: “For the first time in science fiction film, Godard makes the point that in the media landscape of the present day the fantasies of science fiction are as ‘real’ as an office block, an airport or a presidential campaign.”[1]
Furthermore, it is not that Paris is Alphaville, but rather the exact opposite: Alphaville is Paris.[2] The distinction is an important one: it is not that Paris is being imaginatively used as the landscape for a society and a reality that lies beyond its present, but rather the film is seeking to make visible what is already the case about Paris, that it is already Alphaville. The insistence on Alphaville being ‘here’ rather than ‘elsewhere’ is emphasized through conspicuous use of the périphérique motorway and in shots such as this one, clearly featuring recognizable logos and shop-fronts:
Alphaville is no utopia, and nor is it a dystopia if we understand that term as the a mirror image of unworldly utopias. It is, at the time of its release, here and now.
We must remember as well that the film does not frame its plot as futuristic. Lemmy Caution is not from the present day visiting the future; he is from twenty years ago visiting the present day, as Godard insists:
The character of Lemmy Caution, for example, is a comical inversion of the ‘visitor from another time,’ as Godard admitted: ‘I didn’t imagine society in twenty years from now, as [H.G.] Wells did. On the contrary, I’m telling the story of a man from twenty years ago who discovers the world today and can’t believe it.’[3]
Finally, Alphaville is a real place, in São Paulo, Brazil, as Chris Darke explains:
Seven and a half miles from the heart of Sao Paulo there is a gated community that houses 30,000 of the city’s richest and most security-conscious residents, many of whom travel by helicopter to work among the 17 million other inhabitants of the world’s third largest city. According to The Washington Post, At night, on “TV Alphaville”, residents can view their maids going home for the evening, when all exiting employees are patted down and searched in front of a live video feed.’ In his account of ‘a walled city where the privileged live behind electrified fences patrolled by a private army of 1,100’, the Post’s correspondent failed to discover which keen ironist had named the development after the film by Jean-Luc Godard. Nor, I suppose, would it have been much appreciated had the reporter, as he flew low over the teeming favelas, the prisons and choked highways, casually asked his host, a CEO and Alphaville resident, ‘You do realise you’re living in a movie, don’t you?’[4]
The reference here is not only to Godard’s film, of course, but through it to Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World, in which “alphas” are at the pinnacle of the novel’s rigid caste system, undertaking intellectual work considered above those less favoured by the vagaries of birth, relegated to the netherworld of Alphaville’s “Outlands”.
Cultural references which can only refer to our time and world proliferate in the film, for example in evoking the hard-bitten US detective Tick Tracy, placing the film in the cultural landscape of the mid-twentieth century. Add to this that there is only one special effect in the film, the colour inversion when the Alpha 60 machine is malfunctioning at the film’s climax, and we build a picture of a film that departs significantly from science fiction orthodoxy.
I will now present Godard’s own account of the film, before suggesting an alternative and, I will argue, more adequate reading.
1: The Director’s Story
How does Godard present this science fiction in the present? The story told about science and technology in the film is an old story, one of the oldest stories of all. It begins with the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, in his Republic. Plato is seeking to imagine an ideal state, an ideal community, and one of the ways he thinks we can achieve an ideal community is by expelling all the poets. He begins by arguing that:
there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; of which there are many proofs, such as the saying of “the yelping hound howling at her lord,” or of one “mighty in the vain talk of fools,” and “the mob of sages circumventing Zeus,” and the “subtle thinkers who are beggars after all”; and there are innumerable other signs of ancient enmity between them.[5]
On what grounds, though, should the poets be expelled from the Republic? It is because of their “unnecessary pleasures”:
Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and appetites I conceive to be unlawful; every one appears to have them, but in some persons they are controlled by the laws and by reason, and the better desires prevail over them-either they are wholly banished or they become few and weak; while in the case of others they are stronger, and there are more of them.[6]
The poets are not under the control of reason, but give undue and socially dangerous credence to their pleasures and appetites, upsetting the regular, machinic functioning of a well-ordered society. So Socrates positively rhapsodizes about the poets being hounded out of town:
SOCRATES: Of the many excellences which I perceive in the order of our State, there is none which upon reflection pleases me better than the rule about poetry.
GLAUCON: To what do you refer?
S: To the rejection of imitative poetry, which certainly ought not to be received; as I see far more clearly now that the parts of the soul have been distinguished.
G: What do you mean?
S: Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated to the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe—but I do not mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.[7]
Poetry is removed from reality; it is an imitation that withdraws from the real world.
Alphaville rejects the conclusion that Socrates draws about poetry, but is shares the structure of his thinking, namely that there is a zero sum game between “imitative” poetry and technological rationality. For both Socrates and Alphaville, the further the domain of technology advances the more poetry, myth and the arts are squeezed to the margins.
We can think of this way of looking at things as a “poetic asceticism”: poetry must shrink itself further and further as technology expands.[8]
This idea of a zero sum game between technology and poetry is reflected in the working title of the film: Tarzan vs IBM, in its pitting of myth against technology, art against science, enchantment against disenchantment, and in its geographical separation of the technologically controlled Alphaville from the “outlands” (“pays extérieurs”), representing a technologically primitive banlieue housing a scientifically underprivileged underclass.
The ideology of technology as controlling, precise, ordered and soulless is presented to us early in the film (@2.38), with the mantra “science, logic, security, prudence” and the formal, geometric, logo of the Alpha 60 supercomputer:
Just like the film’s very familiar Parisian setting, the Alpha 60 is not a figment of imaginative science fiction, but based on machines already in production at the time of the film’s release in 1965, as Andrew Utterson explains:
The fictional Alpha 60, for example, has revealing roots in the historical world. Most explicitly, this machine was modeled on the Gamma 60, first announced by the Compagnie des Machines Bull in 1958. The Gamma 60 was seen as a largescale processor to rival US imports—such as IBM’s 705, RCA’s 301, and Remington Rand’s UNIVAC 1—from established competitors. In total, twenty units were manufactured. Customers included Électricité de France—whose headquarters and facilities feature in Godard’s film as the central complex that houses the computer network’s core—and the SNCF national railways.[9]
The Bull Gamma 60 (1958)[10]
And lest we think that computers that occupy a whole room are a relic of the past, let us remember that this bears a striking visual resemblance to cutting-edge technology of our own time, as the following spot the difference exercise between Google’s data centre in South Carolina and the Alpha 60 illustrates:
The dichotomy between art and science is reinforced throughout the film. @3.35 Lemmy is told menacingly that “you must register”; @9.20 Alpha 60 talks to Lemmy in ways that echo George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; we are told (@24.58) that people have become slaves of possibilities. @25.30 we learn that there were artists and novelists in ancient society, but “Aujourd’hui, plus rien” (“today, no longer”)—Plato would be ecstatic. There is the formulaic, robotic friendliness of Natasha in her first encounter with Lemmy, replying to the archetypal human inquiry “how are you?” with the formulaic, excessively polite “je vais très bien merci je vous en prie” (“I am very well thank you you’re welcome”). A technician testifies (@54.17) that “We know nothing. We record, calculate and draw conclusions”, and @55.00 he doth protest too much with the reassurance that “Il ne faut pas avoir peur de la logique” (“You must not fear logic”). Finally, as we move to the film’s climax we have a casual reference to “previously, in the age of ideas…” (@1.29.05).
This grim view of technology in the film’s dialogue is reflected in its architecture. In all these ways, Alphaville is working hard to frame technology in a maximally dystopian way, as Chris Darke explains:
By 1965 the modern city, its interiors and outskirts had come to be associated with the particular aesthetic characteristics of obsessive geometry and standardising design, and with these aesthetic marks of the modern came accompanying judgements concerning alienation, isolation and automation.[11]
The rectilinear architecture reflects the suffocating, inflexible precision of Natasha’s clipped and polite discourse on her first meeting with Lemmy.
Furthermore, the significance of the identification of computing technology with menace holds particular resonance for a mid-twentieth century context, as Darke once more indicates:
And how much did Godard know about the ‘strategic alliance’ between International Business Machines (IBM) and the Nazis in the extermination of the Jews? In the light of such details, Natasha von Braun’s own collar of numbers is almost too close to the bone. In 1964 the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, himself an émigré from Nazi Germany, published one of the key texts of social criticism in the 1960s, One-Dimensional Man. In its conclusion, he wrote the following:
Auschwitz continues to haunt, not the memory but the accomplishments of man – the space flights; the rockets and missiles, the labyrinthine basement under the Snack Bar; the pretty electronic plants, clean, hygienic and with flower beds; the poison gas which is not really harmful to people; the secrecy in which we all participate.[12]
There are not-so-subtle totalitarian political overtones to Alpha 60’s control of society, and the film’s exploration of the idea of “becoming a number” resonates not only with technological anonymity but with Nazi evil. The language of the “race supérieur” (“superior race”, @1.22.14) reinforces the already evident comparison.
In Alpha 60’s techno-fascist dichotomy of (perfect) machine and (fallible) human, it is clear who holds the upper hand, as the supercomputer explains in no uncertain terms to Lemmy: “Ordinary men are unworthy of the position they occupy in the world. An analysis of their past draws one automatically to this conclusion. Therefore, they must be destroyed, which is to say, transformed” (@59.33). This lapidary judgment is, of course, delivered in Alpha 60’s powerful voice: inhuman, emotionless and yet with a hint of exhaustion and illness, a not-yet-human croaking rather than a super-human command of pitch and vocal range.
Alpha 60’s own restricted vocal range is reflected not only in the monotonous diction of those, like Natasha, under its sway, but in the Orwellian lexical restriction its regime imposes. We learn (@5.55) that Lemmy’s hotel room contains a “Bible” of permitted words; Natasha corrects his open, interrogative “why” to a procedural “because” (@52.56), and @30.30 we learn of the existence of the “Institute of Central Semantics”, a body the function of which is to police the language.
Alpha 60 presides over a regime—or so it appears—of complete artificial control of otherwise natural phenomena, with its buttons for “winter” and “summer” bearing witness to the conspicuous absence of the ambiguity or middle ground of spring and autumn:
Like the binary notation which has only two values, 1 (completely on) and 0 (completely off), Alphaville is a binary society, and this impression of a society governed by stark, inflexible choices is reinforced in the three choices open to its inhabitants: adapt, be sidelined to the Outlands, or be killed. Humans must obey the binary logic, not the other way round.
It comes as little surprise, then, when we learn that in the culture of Alphaville emotion is shunned and controlled. @42.57 we learn that the crime committed by those murdered in the swimming pool was that “they have behaved in an illogical way”, one example of which is a man who wept when his wife died. Early in the film (@6.00) we see the use of tranquilizers to suppress unwelcome emotion, like the anxiety- and anger-reducing, pleasure-increasing drug soma that is freely handed out to all citizens of the World State in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. As for love, “what is that?” asks an innocent Natasha (@13.33).
Poetry/literature/love
Within the film, the position of resistance to this totalitarian technological society is—again rather conspicuously—provided by poetry, literature and love. With an almost comic ostentation at times, book covers are presented to the camera less as a nod to the viewer, more as a violent headbutt:
Le Grand Sommeil is a mystery novel in which the hero bucks the trend of a society whose inhabitants act logically out of self-protection and self-interest. Voyage au bout de la nuit is a dystopian novel written in an argotic style that would be frowned on by Alphaville’s Institute of Central Semantics, showing the horrors and absurdity of war in the face of which its hero, Ferdinand Bardamu, finds a mode of resistance in cowardice and a rejection of the glory and heroism of war. Finally, Alphaville repeatedly references Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la douleur. Eluard’s is a poetry of resistance, fittingly kept under the pillow of Caution’s hotel room (@30.00). Darke explains the volume’s significance in the film:
Published in 1926, Capitale de la douleur is associated with Eluard’s period as a fully-fledged member of the surrealist movement […] as Martin demonstrates, drawing on d’Abrigeon’s work, Natasha’s speech is ‘a gigantic collage of several verses from Eluard taken from different poems’. But Eluard’s is a name that carries various associations for Godard; with surrealism and popular love poetry, with the French Resistance and political radicalism. All that surrealism stood for—the creative power of love, the irrational as a liberating force, the ‘marvellous’ discovered in the everyday – is irreducibly hostile to a technocratic society dedicated to the values of ‘logic’, ‘order’ and ‘prudence’.[13]
Given the film’s thematic binarism between technology and poetry, it will come as no surprise to us that poetry and love are presented as vehicles of salvation:
In an essay that explores three ‘lyrical interludes’ in A Bout de souffle, Bande à part and Alphaville, Adrian Martin has described how ‘the lyrical transport provided by a poetic recital does not merely mirror the characters but directly transforms them: from a halting, uncomprehending delivery earlier in the scene, Natasha now magically moves to being a smooth, communicating vessel for verse’.[14]
How seemingly fitting that the film’s final words, then, are “Je vous aime” (“I love you”). And how seemingly satisfying that Alpha 60 should be destroyed through poetry that—rather conveniently for Lemmy—it finds it impossible to compute:
Something which never changes, day or night. The past represents its future, it advances in a straight line, yet it ends by coming full circle.. […] if you find it you will destroy yourself simultaneously because you will become my kin, my brother[15]
And so, in Godard’s own words, we have a counter-position of technology and poetry:
Against the mantra of ‘planning’, he [Godard] counterposed poetry and romanticism: ‘Alphaville is a world without romanticism. The world of the grands ensembles is a world that attempts to eliminate adventure in favour of planning. The duty of the artist is to set traps for the planners.’[16]
Light
We also see this opposition between technology and poetry, between the universal, totalitarian calculation and individual, inimitable emotion reflected in the motif of light in the film. First we have the public, neon, stark, “fully on” universal light of Alphaville:
Then, by contrast, we have the crepuscular, candle-like personal light of Lemmy, most iconically his cigarette lighter:
As Godard comments, Lemmy is a bringer of light:
Lemmy is a character who carries light to people who no longer know what it is’, was how Godard described Constantine’s role. The inhabitants of Alphaville depend on electricity for their survival, but, as Kaja Silverman has observed, ‘ [T]hey have forgotten the sacred origins of light. With his cigarette lighter, Lemmy seeks to reignite their memories. He is Prometheus once again carrying fire from the gods to humanity.’[17]
So it is far from an incidental detail, therefore, when in the first shot we see of Natasha, Lemmy’s first interaction with her is to give her a light. In fact, we hear her question “Got a light?” (@10.18) even before we see her.
Thus we are introduced to Natasha as we were to Lemmy, through the lighting of a cigarette. In classical Hollywood cinema the simple gesture of a man lighting a woman’s cigarette comes charged with the suggestive spark of smouldering intensity and sexual intimacy. Here, the exchange, while carrying some sexual connotations, symbolises the start of Natasha’s awakening from the narcotic slumber of life in Alphaville. As she raises the cigarette to her lips to accept the light from Lemmy, Natasha stands in the darkened doorway of his room and moves slightly towards the left of the frame which is bisected, half in darkness, half in light. She moves away from darkness towards the light and this movement will come to define her journey throughout the film.[18]
Lemmy’s first action after killing Von Braun (@1.30.00) is to light a cigarette, a gesture reminiscent of the symbolism (and, as we shall shortly see, the internal contradictions) of Edward Bernays’ famous rebranding of cigarettes as liberating “torches of freedom”.[19]
The gesture of lighting up also resonates with that other iconic bringer of light against totalitarian neon brightness, Nietzsche’s madman in The Gay Science who lights “a lantern in the bright morning hours” and stands in the market place proclaiming “I seek God” and “we have killed him”.[20] For both the madman and Alphaville, having one’s own light is an act of resistance to the prevailing universal orthodoxy, and in both cases we witness that orthodoxy on the verge of collapse. In fact, the parallels with the madman do not stop there. He is only considered “mad” because he sees through the transparent vacuity of the threadbare “sanity” of the prevailing system, just as Lemmy is only considered dangerous because he refuses to adapt to Alpha 60’s prevailing norms. Finally, the trope of madness is present in surrealist poetry, and in modernist literature more broadly, as a strategic resistance to the tyranny of an iron-clad logic that crushes the human in its inexorable advance.
Godard’s reading of the film as pitting technology and poetry against each other is reflected in its early reception in a 1965 edition of Le Nouvel Observateur with the sensationalist title “Les robots sont déjà là” (“The robots are already here”):
Across a double-page spread, a couple of scientists from the Centre of General Semantics – Professor Kauffman, a mathematician and Dr Jacques Sauvan, a developer of computers and ‘thinking’ machines – offered their observations on Godard’s dystopian fable. Remarking that Alpha 60 was modelled on the recently developed Bull computer Gamma 60, they agreed that the film’s idea of a ‘schism between the technocrats and the people’ was accurate and that this extended into the world of politics. ‘What isn’t fictitious is that citizens are no longer considered as electors but as consumers,’ observed Professor Kauffman:
Having transformed the voter into a consumer, the technocrat then ‘places’ a government in power as they would a washing powder in a supermarket, by calculating demand. This transformation is a collective crime the consequences of which cannot be calculated. Another aspect of the film’s vision rang true: the scientists agreed that ‘the impoverishment of language and the simplification of syntax are real’ and that they considered this as inevitably accompanying the ‘robotization’ of humanity.[21]
Since this early reception, the critical consensus has been to fall in line behind Godard’s framing of the film as presenting a dichotomous split between technology and poetry.
2: Problems with the director’s story
As we have seen in the three films we have already considered in this series, this reading struggles to do justice to some important features of the film, both in terms of its own contradictions and of its critique of technology. Here is a thumbnail summary of the problems:
- Maintaining a dichotomy between technology and poetry does nothing to challenge the imperium of technology; it just makes poetry ascetically retreat in the face of its advance.
- Similarly, the special effect of negative colours is just a straight swap and does nothing to critique the structure of dichotomy between the film’s own binary structure of technology and poetry.
- That a film which is supposed to be critiquing the binary society of Alphaville—with its summer and winter buttons, its lack of nuance and ambiguity—should do so on the basis of an absolute, binary dichotomy between technology and poetry is problematic.
- The swimming pool execution scene does not fit the understanding of the culture of Alphaville as logical and disenchanted; it is unnecessarily ostentatious and aesthetic.
- The medium of film itself relies on vast technical and technological apparatus to tell its poetic story, so in Godard’s reading it has to be parasitic on that which it rejects.
- Poetry can in fact reinforce the stranglehold of technology by making it liveable, a little Éluard here and there to sugar the pill and help us to adapt, to convince us that we are part of the resistance to technology while we quietly adapt to that same technology.
This last point follows the shape of Slavoj Žižek’s criticism of Buddhism as the perfect ideological supplement of late capitalism:
although “Western Buddhism” presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. […] instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination – one should, instead, “let oneself go,” drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of this accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being:[22]
In the same way, poetry can act as a palliative to technology’s imperium, an anesthetic that makes it bearable.
Moreover, it is not as if Lemmy Caution refuses to avail himself of technological means. He uses the technology (cars, guns, drugs, tobacco, whiskey…) of the technological society, and he also mirrors its means, killing Alpha 60’s protectors just after Alpha 60 said that Lemmy himself was to be killed, and all this while living under the illusion that he is outside the system.
3: Michel Serres on technology and myth
Turning now to the thought of Michel Serres, we find an account of technology and myth that provides us with an alternative reading of the film and avoids some of the tensions and contradictions indicated in the previous section. Rather than understanding the relationship between poetry and technology in terms of the poetic asceticism of Godard, according to which poetry must retreat as technology advances, Serres sees the two in continuity. Modern technology re-plays the same questions and values that have always been explored in myth from the earliest times. Ancient myths, such as those involving sacrifice, are not chased away by technology, but given new, technological expression:
His most vivid example of this continuity is his treatment of the relationship between ancient Corinthian Ball rituals and the tragic explosion shortly after take-off of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986.
For Serres, myth does not retreat before the advance of technology; it occupies or “mythifies” technology.[23] For Serres there is no dichotomy between myth and science. In fact, science is a myth, for “[t]here is no pure myth except the idea of a science that is pure of all myth”[24]
In the opening pages of Statues Serres first describes and then contrasts these two events. We find ourselves first in sixth century BC Carthage, where there stands a colossal hollow iron statue of the god Baal. The interior of the statue is divided into seven chambers, into which are placed precious metals, food and animals. A fire is then lit at the foot of the statue and its contents are burned in its seven iron ovens. As the giant statue is obscured from view by the smoke of the roaring fire below it, assembled crowds worship and praise the god. In a particularly horrific twist, pre-selected first-born children of noble families would be thrown into an empty compartment in the statue by its elaborate mechanical arm, as the crowd shouted “They are not men but oxen”.[25] The rite was subsequently repeated at regular intervals, not this time with human victims but with cows.
We next find ourselves in the Florida peninsula on a particularly cold January afternoon in 1986. At 1:39 EST on January 28, 73 seconds after take-off, the Challenger shuttle bursts into flames above the Atlantic ocean, killing its seven crew members instantly. The launch and explosion are carried live on network news channels, with U.S. schools interrupting normal lessons so that the pupils can witness what was to be the latest triumph of Western technology and ambition. In the aftermath of the disaster, footage was compulsively re-aired on international TV networks.
On Godard’s dichotomous reading, these two phenomena could not be more different: the Baal rituals are an ancient, mythic, based in fiction and superstitious, whereas shuttle technology is modern, based in fact, rational and scientific.
But here are the comparisons that Serres draws between the two phenomena, quoted from Statues:
- Just as much of a crowd, on one side as on the other, forms a great crush at the tragic spectacle and gapes with horror;
- the Ancients and the Moderns designate the heavens as the aim and target of their aspirations or projects, space and the stars;
- the undertaking is expensive, for the Carthaginians as for us, the nation almost bankrupts itself over it;
- both of them divide their group and carefully separate the common man or those watching from the specialists, shut away, specially clothed, designated as priests or technicians of the thing or its representation;
- here the blast-off, there the gigantic pyre;
- here clouds of smoke twisting into coils, there eddies that hide or veil what is happening;
- two ingenious pieces of machinery;
- here death, over there and in the past death;
- the loss of fathers and mothers, the death of children;
- repetitions of the event, formerly like a rite returned at a prescribed time or in the case of a pressing danger, now like on the stage or at the cinema.
- The event, filmed, is shown and reshown as though to assuage an unsatiated hunger in us.
- They would also start it again a hundred times in the past: then they sacrificed animals, apes, or oxen, substituted for human children, and the crowd would cry with reason: “No, they are not men but oxen.” The animals served as symbols or signs, consequently it could be repeated without end. Likewise we reshow images, which certainly resemble the thing more than symbols or substitutes.
Statues also critiques the attempt to dichotomise myth and technology itself. Today we cleave exact from human sciences, and we prize exact sciences over the human. But if we reject the mythic idol as barbarous, that same gesture of rejection is sacrificial, and when we place society on one side and science on another, we no longer see anything, least of all ourselves. Science is not cold and rational; it is hot and mythical. Having lost the ability to see Baal in Challenger, we have become strangers to ourselves, for in truth there is nothing more mythical than contemporary science. We do not need to go looking outside science for myth and religion: it is the purloined letter right on the desk in front of us.
For Serres, it is fundamentally and dangerously mistaken to assume that myth and technology are opposed to each other. It prevents us from understanding the conditions of our own existence:
Our god is the machine, the technical object, which stresses our mastery of our surroundings, which regulates certain group relations or certain viscous psychological relations, but which suddenly plummets, like a lead weight, into the depths of a formidable anthropology.[26]
Technology for Serres is neither saviour nor nemesis. The generations after Hiroshima know that technology is the best and the worst of things. It is a pharmakon: both poison and cure.
4: A Serresian reading of Alphaville
So how might this way of thinking about the relationship between myth and science inform a fresh—and, I hope, more adequate—reading of Alphaville?
Let us begin with poetry, which Godard seeks to oppose to myth. Surrealist poetry itself makes extensive use of technology, both thematically and in its production. A recent treatment by Lauren van Ardsall argues that Surrealism and technology are intimately intertwined:
The work of art historians Gavin Parkinson (Surrealism, Art and Modern Science- Yale University Press; 2008) and David Lomas (Simulating the Marvelous and Modest Recording Instruments: Science, Surrealism, and Visuality; 2010), among others, has begun to redirect critical attention to an otherwise speculative consideration of the overlap between scientific diagrams and Surrealist discourse. Expanding the notion of the use of ‘instruments’ in Surrealist writing, Parkinson paints a fuller picture of what has been only conjecture or coincidence: the birth of surrealism also coincided with the popular acceptance of the theory of relativity, the beginning of quantum physics, and new visual models to understand these scientific discoveries.
Both Surrealism and the realm of physics faced a similar dilemma: namely, how to visualize that which was previously invisible or inaccessible. Using an appareil enregistreur, or recording device, played an integral part in visualizing ‘invisible’ forces such as electromagnetic fields. In these terms, the portrait of André Breton standing over a microscope on a table next to a piece of paper and pen, equating the role of writing with that of other visualizing instruments, is emblematic of how science and Surrealism simultaneously attempted to render unconscious thought and unseen phenomena visible.[27]
In the photomontage below André Breton, self-appointed pope of the French Surrealists, depicts himself with a microscope, foregrounding the affinity he saw between scientific techniques and his own Surrealist exploration of the unconscious:
André Breton. Autoportrait. L’écriture automatique. Photomontage avec l’actrice Phyllis Haver dans une scène de Chicago, 1927.
If Surrealism seeks to incorporate scientific discoveries, then the science of Alphaville also incorporates the aesthetic and the poetic. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 is aestheticized and incorporated into Alpha 60’s stylised expression, along with symbols that, detached from any immediate instrumental context, serve primarily a poetic, evocative function:
Godard himself admits this proximity of poetry and technology in the film-making process, as Chris Darke explains:
If his subject was cinema and his object modern life in Paris, Godard needed to fuse the two in a new form of cinema, as he admitted in an interview in 1962:
Cinema, Truffaut said, is spectacle – Méliès – and research – Lumière. If I analyse myself today, I see that I have always wanted, basically, to make a research film in the form of a spectacle. The documentary side is: a man in a particular situation. The spectacle comes when one makes this man a gangster or a secret agent.[28]
Here, Godard is rehearsing in his account of cinema something much closer to Serres’s account of science and myth than to his own message in Alphaville: he is incarnating scientific theories in cinema.
The conversation between Lemmy Caution and Alpha 60 also fits this frame. It is poetic on both sides, with Alpha 60 for example asking “What transforms night into day?” and Caution answering “Poetry”. Caution also quotes Pascal (@48.58), a scientist-philosopher-religious believer: “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”. Pascal also invented a counting machine, a foundation of modern computing technology of which Alpha 60 is, at the time of the film’s production, one of the latest incarnations. Few figures more radically undermine the dichotomy between myth and technology than does Pascal.
I have only had time today to give you a sketch of how we might begin to read this film in a Serresian way. If you want to explore these ideas further, there is much material in the film that you could consider. For example, the “Bible” of acceptable language in the hotel room is more adequately read as an occupation of mythic space by science than as part of a dichotomy between the two. The white-coated technicians of Alpha 60 resemble the priests of an ancient cult, tending the idol and speaking of it in reverent tones. And perhaps there is something to say about Lemmy’s voice which, with its low pitch and rattling timbre, bears affinities to Alpha 60’s. Perhaps the computer’s voice is a parody of Lemmy’s, rather than its antithesis.
One brief final word. Serres shows us that technology is itself a myth, and that it obeys the religious structures of myth. This does not blunt the critique of technology that Godard seeks to make through the film. In fact, it offers a sharper critique because on Godard’s view poetry and myth have nothing to say about technology other than that they are utterly opposed, but a Serresian reading allows us to approach the relationship between myth and technology as an exercise in comparative religion, contesting its own rhetoric that it is pure of myth, and so critiquing the paradigm of the technological society at a deeper level and exposing its well-hidden religiosity.
[1] J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium (HarperCollins, London, 1996) 19.
[2] Chris Darke, “Alphaville is Paris 1965. Or rather, Paris 1965 is Alphaville”, in Light Readings: Film Criticism and Screen Arts (London: Wallflower Press, 2000) 89.
[3] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 27.
[4] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 6-7.
[5] Plato, Republic X, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html.
[6] Plato, Republic IX, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.10.ix.html.
[7] Plato, Republic X, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html.
[8] This use of the aesthetic is drawn from my discussion of “aesthetic atheism” in Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
[9] Andrew Utterson, “Tarzan vs. IBM: Humans and Computers in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville”, Film Criticism 33:1 (2008).
[10] http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/projet/gamma60/gamma_60.htm.
[11] Chris Darke, Light Readings: Film Criticism and Screen Arts (London: Wallflower Press, 2000) 31.
[12] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 77.
[13] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 54.
[14] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 54.
[15] 1.23.00: « C’est quelque chose qui ne varie ni le jour ni la nuit, pour qui le passé représente le futur, qui avance sur une ligne droite et pourtant, à l’arrivée, qui a bouclé la boucle. […] Si vous le trouvez vous vous le détruirez en même temps, car vous serez devenu mon semblable, mon frère. »
[16] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 70.
[17] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 41.
[18] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 43.
[19] For an explanation of the “torches of freedom” motif, see Vanessa Murphree, “Edward Bernays’s 1929 ‘Torches of Freedom’ March: Myths and Historical Significance”, American Journalism 32:3 (2015), 258-281.
[20] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage, 1974 [1882]) § 125, pp.181-82.
[21] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 69.
[22] Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001) 12.
[23] For a more extensive exploration of the relationship between “asceticism” and “occupation”, see Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
[24] Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 162.
[25] Michel Serres, Statues : The Second Book of Foundations (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) 3.
[26] Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 140-1.
[27] Lauren van Ardsall, “Surrealist Cross-Pollinations and Confrontations of Image and Text in
Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Les Malheurs des immortels” www.mhra.org.uk/pdf/wph-9-5.pdf, pp. 47-8.
[28] Chris Darke, Alphaville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 28.
