There’s a sign that greats visitors to Jean-Luc Godard’s technocratic dystopia that reads: “Welcome to Alphaville: Science, Logic, Security, Prudence.” Each term is one half of a binary system – we all recognize that, but if we don’t articulate it at the beginning of a discussion of Alphaville, we’re in danger of missing the larger themes of the film. The opposite of “science” is “nature,” the opposite of “logic” is “irrationality,” the opposite of “security” is “fear” or “vulnerability,” and the opposite of “prudence” is, of course, “Charlie Sheen.” That might seem like a grammar school exercise in antonyms, and perhaps it is, but the purpose of it is to speak to the popularity of the Structuralist school of criticism that peaked in France at around the time (mid-‘60’s) of Alphaville’s creation and release.

The most interesting thing about a fascinating film is the fact that it not only serves as a succinct and elucidative text on the main tenants of Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss’s defining thoughts on Structuralism in 1962, but that it seems to predict the ultimate collapse of that system before the Post-structuralist revolution of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. I’m probably talking cross-eyed badger spit to the majority of you folks out there and, I’ll admit, I only understand all this claptrap when I revisit my old textbooks armed with a pot of coffee and a healthy sense of masochism, but let’s try to clarify some of the pillars of both Structuralism (upon which Alphaville is based) and Post-Structuralism (which Alphaville predicts).

Structuralism

Structuralism basically states that the idea of authorship is cancelled out because text is the function of a system. It is literally a scientific quantification of language into patterns, sets – the result of some inhuman machination and not the product of any kind of human intervention. Get hip to what I’m saying here as it’s entirely foreign to how we’re taught to think of language in our touchy-feely, “you, too, can be a writer, society” – all of that poetry diagramming stuff that Robin Williams had his pupils rip out of the textbooks in the rah-rah Dead Poets’ Society - that’s a bit of the ol’ structuralism.

Structuralism is, in fact, the scientific, decidedly unromantic extrapolation of what Jung would call the “collective unconscious” – we are all part of a pool of pre-determined signs and signifiers – that any piece of writing, or any signifying system, has no origin, and that authors merely inhabit pre-existing structures that enable them to make any particular sentence or series of sentences (story). Everything that we speak and everything that we write is just an illumination of what has already been written.

Structuralism, then, is the anti-historical art. It doesn’t care about forms and trends in literature, it doesn’t care about artists, intentionality (“intentionality” doesn’t exist in Structuralism!), and it flicks its Gallic nose at the notion of cultural evolution. Let’s break it down into three main determinants:

1. language = reality (a particularly interesting idea that has been tested often in anthropological tests involving colored pieces of yarn. . . but let’s talk about that another time, hmm?). In other words, we are only able to think using language, therefore our very perceptions of reality are dependant on the framework of language.

2. language’s meaning comes from the sets of oppositions extant in the system that governs the individual

3. language = identity and identity = center of the system that governs. In other words, I may cry “I am Mangiotto!” into the void, but the only meaning that those words have is conferred by language, and the only meaning that language has is (see #2) from the sets of oppositions extant in the system that governs me.

Try to think of it as the word “table” and the table that your computer is sitting on. What relationship does the word have to the desk? None. The word “table” no more describes your desk as your name describes your personality. The word only means what it means because everyone in your system agrees that it’s what it means. That’s why “table” doesn’t mean anything in Chinese – but Dzuo Dze, does.

Poststructuralism

So, having established that your identity is reliant on the structure of your linguistic system – what happens when someone comes to the party and says “welp, I see how you’ve structured things so that your identity is based on a binary algebraic definition of self – that is, dark can only be defined in the system as the absence of light, short is the absence of height, table is the absence of not-table – and so forth. Your system, as I see it, is a binary one. If ‘table’ has no meaning, really, then the only thing in your language that can describe a ‘table’ is the phrase ‘not-table’”

This is where you, the newly minted Structuralist, nods your head. You seem to vaguely recall a moment in David Cronenberg’s The Fly where Seth Brundle’s computer helpfully informs him that the strange DNA spliced to his gene is “not-Brundle”. . . This sounds familiar, you think. Continue.

“So if on the one hand your reality is based on binary systems – and, on the other hand, you suggest that language is meaningless outside of a system – then the positivity of the table is just as important as the positivity of the not-table.”

This is where you, if you’re anything like me, cock your head like a dog hearing a new sound. Try not to drool.

“Therefore,” says the Poststructuralist, “if there are no boundaries between the opposing pairs, then there is no distinction in the definition – and if there is no distinction in the definition, your reality is based on assumptions – your system is revealed as meaningless chaos.”

At this point, you’re either reminded of the way that Douglas Adams kills God in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or you’ve tossed your five-pound volume of Derrida across the room like a sensible monkey and gone off in search of food. Give it another chance, Derrida was essentially saying that all thought is necessarily inscribed in language, and that language itself is fraught with paradoxes. He’s saying that you’re basing your reality on a thin and shifting (and slippery) sheet of ice. Here are three key points to Deconstructionalism:

1. language = systems and cultures, and systems and cultures have a center (the center is that thing that created the system in the first place)

2. the center is a binary opposition: light/dark, happy/sad, up/down, good/evil

3. each binary opposite is actually a part of its pair: light = lack of dark, happy = lack of sad, up = lack of down, good = lack of Charlie Sheen - and if each binary opposite is actually a part of its pair, than the significance of one partner over the other is defeated.

Derrida suggests that everything – history, political science, cosmology – all are a species of word candy. A lovely miasma of noises and poetry that, if there is a free interplay of significance in binary oppositions – don’t even make any sense. Needless to say, Deconstructionalism (aka Poststructuralism, aka de-sedimentation), has often been questioned for its motivations. It’s the critical equivalent of someone walking in and saying – “feh, what’s the point?” and, in so doing, disproving himself.

Ha! Irony.

Alphaville

Which brings us back to Jean-Luc Godard’s remarkably complex 1965 nouvelle vague film Alphaville (let us take a moment here to congratulate those of you that either soldiered through or judiciously skimmed ahead to a promising-looking heading). Alphaville is the best way to get some of the main tenants of Structuralism without having to read Levi-Strauss. Alphaville is, seen in this way, a community service.

It is a film that owes as much to Raymond Chandler as Joseph Conrad as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle which itself, of course, owed a great deal to the reality-testing of the Structuralists – a stunning hybrid of science fiction and the hard-boiled noir with a little of the Dante quest tossed in (note that the Seductress model 3 is named “Beatrice”). In tracing the elements that resemble a Godard film, however, I fall into a rather cunning trap set by the miserable old coot. See, if Godard is a Structuralist – and Godard is a Structuralist – then he doesn’t believe in genre distinctions.

As you watch Alphaville, take note of all of the names of the characters – the references to a “Dr. Nosferatu,” a pair of assistants named “Heckyl and Jeckyl,” the w-hore “Beatrice,” on and on. It is a pop-cultural miasma of words that – say it with me – signify nothing. Uh huh, you got me, Jean-Luc, warp factor three. Attempts to place Alphaville in any kind of genre other than “Structuralist” or even “Deconstructuralist” are not only doomed to failure – but possibly naďve. Don’t take it badly, though, if you were to ever ask me to describe Alphaville, I’d say that it was a mad blend of Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick – it’s the only way, really, to describe it in any way that makes any kind of sense.

Blame the system by which we are governed. Isn’t this fun?

the low down

Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine: Zentropa) is a private investigator/secret agent/journalist from the Outlands who has come to the totalitarian Alphaville on a three-pronged mission. He is to discover the fate of his predecessor Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), he is to destroy the creator of the computer that rules Alphaville, and he is to destroy Alpha-60, the computer itself.

Along the way, he is offered the services of a series of “Seductress, Third Class” w-hores, and a guide (spy?) in the form of the lovely Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina: Man on Horseback - Karina was married to Godard from 1961-67). When the unthinkable happens and Caution begins to fall in love with the autumaton-like Vonbraun, will he risk his mission to save her from Alphaville?

Structuralism. . . again

Once you have the key of Structuralism, a great many doors are opened to enjoyment in regards to Alphaville. Nearly every line of dialogue is set up as an opposition – that binary that we talked about way back when. Vonbraun, in answering questions, will nod her head while saying “no” – or shake her head “no” when saying “yes.” Give it a try – it’s harder than it seems.

Godard, you see, is setting up a totalitarian society that is based entirely on an uber-logical computer binary wisdom (computers, interestingly enough, also function on a binary language) – men behave in one way, women behave in another way – and all of the citizens of Alphaville are hotwired into the mainframe. When Caution defeats Alpha 60 and its hold on its citizenry slackens, note that all the men begin to circle and crab-walk “like ants” – and that all the women begin to try to climb the walls.

Godard, in his way, is pushing the idea that structuralism as a philosophical and critical ideal is mechanical – something that the structuralists, no doubt, would have no trouble with – further, Godard suggests that the entire way of looking at language and reality is one that saps all individuality and romance from people.

Not difficult concepts when applied to a parable of an entire futuropolis ruled by a machine – one, in fact, that has been around in cinema since 1927 and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The main difference is that Godard uses words to describe the futility of assigning only paired binary definitions to those words. You see, Godard wishes to illustrate the damning futility of expression by using expression as the very idioglossic word candy that Derrida (deconstructionalist) suggests is the logical end to structuralism. Godard, almost concurrent with Derrida, has grasped the ultimate soulnessness (and fallacy) of structuralism and predicted, again, seemingly concurrently, the trend toward a poststructuralist humanism.

Poststructuralism

Once Godard has established that Alphaville is going to first set down the parameters of the structuralist utopia and introduced a protagonist (Caution) that will seek to bring down the precepts of the critical theory – he proceeds in the second half of his film to set down the guiding principles of the deconstructionalists (aka poststructuralists. . . etc. . .). To that extent, nearly every minute of the last thirty minutes of the film, beginning with a scene in Caution’s hotel room with Vonbraun – is vitally important and, more than that, exceptionally fascinating for the student of critical thought.

Let’s break it down in some detail:

the bible

Vonbraun is presented with a volume of poetry that Caution has taken from his predecessor Fielding. It is entitled Capital of Pain or Capital of Sorrow depending on the translation (it changes within the Criterion DVD’s subtitles – an unusually poor Criterion presentation, by the way, in terms of bells and whistles) – and it inspires feelings in Vonbraun upon reading words in the poetry that are banned by her society. Again, the inference that Alphaville is a place whose reality is defined by the words that its citizens are allowed to use.(see key point #1 of “Structuralism,” above), and again the poststructuralist suggestion that all words are equally meaningless and that meaning, obliquely, occurs in a vacuum. Vonbraun confesses:

When I’m with you, I’m afraid – I’m afraid because I know that word without ever having seen it or read it – “conscience.”

She continues by searching the room for a bible in which she can find the meaning of the word. As she’s reading the definition (the bible is, of course, a dictionary – in the beginning was the word, after all) – a bellhop enters the room and exchanges her “bible” for a newer edition that excises that word. Listen to this exchange between Caution and Vonbraun:

C. That’s not a bible, it’s a dictionary
V: Every day, words disappear because they are forbidden – they are replaced by new words expressing new ideas. . . some words I was very fond of have disappeared.

After a brief exchange involving what words, in particular, have disappeared, Caution accuses Vonbraun of lying: “Perhaps you don’t know, but you’re lying.” Another binary paradox is established here and in the establishment of that paradox, a major tenant of the deconstructionalist process is satisfied. First establish the definitions in opposition – and then blur the difference between the terms. If you don’t know that you’re lying – you’re telling the truth. Words and concepts are destroyed – all that is left is the nebulous idea of the missing “conscience.”

What Alphaville and Godard are really asking is if love exists without the word for it – the woman denies knowledge of the word but smiles just the same at Caution’s profession of it. What follows this exchange is a series of word fragments (“light that goes light that returns - away away says hate, closer closer says love”) laid over a montage of dichotomous images that visually illustrate the binary – and then visually illustrates the erasing of the binary. Each time Caution reaches across a window pane in silhouette to embrace Vonbraunt, he is acting as a tactile refuting of the coldness of structuralism.

All scholarship aside, this scene is among the most striking scenes of love and union ever filmed – compare it to the personality melding between nurse and actress that occurs in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.

smaller images and themes

Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville is one of the more stunning examples of the French New Wave (nouvelle vague) – that movement in French cinema that dared to suggest that the cinema was as malleable and “literal” an art form as the novel. You may see in that a contradiction in the decidedly surreal aspects of Alphaville, but what Godard creates in his film is a critical thesis immortalized in film. Lest you think that Godard is as discursive as I am, consider that his smallest image is also his most eloquent.

Godard repeatedly flashes images of Einstein’s relativity equation to remind that even physics are governed by the idea of a binary (there is no absolute motion – only relative motion between two systems or frames of reference) – and that even Einstein was incapable of producing a workable model of a unified field theory. It is a clever and concise summary of both the groundwork of structuralism – and why structuralism cannot function effectively as a unified cosmology.

Godard, however, was also not above the more obscure reference. Vonbraun is referred to repeatedly as “the sphinx, the sphinx, the sphinx,” in one sequence and, during Caution’s final interrogation by Alpha 60, he warns the computer that he has a riddle (“secret”) the solving of which will result in the computer’s destruction. The Sphinx, of course, figures large in the Oedipus myth as Creon announced he'd give the kingship and Laius' widow (his sister Jocasta) to whoever solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Oedipus, on his way from Delphi (after unknowingly killing his birth father), gave the correct answer and took his father’s place in his mother’s bed.

For this application to work, Caution must now be the Sphinx, not Vonbraun, for it is Caution that poses the riddle the answer to which spells the end of “the King” Oedipus/Alpha 60 (following the Oedipus story – he is the first private investigator in that he endeavors to find the murderer of his predecessor – the answer to his quest is himself, of course, leading to his banishment and shaming). This shift is not a problem (the sphinx as Caution rather Vonbraun) in that the love scene described above suggests a melding of personalities – a shifting of persona.

This is a particularly clever shift as it not only works the Sphinx myth into the film (offering a backhanded pimp slap to the structuralists – of which he is one - for their hubris along the way), but it reminds that there are actually no boundaries between binary oppositions (Caution/Vonbraun, male/female, spy/counterspy), thus satisfying the nascent tenants of deconstructionalism. Caution, in response to Alpha 60’s boasting that it will resolutely solve the puzzle despite Caution’s warning, says “F-uck yourself with your logic.

That’s nifty, in’t it?

conclusions (at last)

The answer to Caution’s riddle is, again (you getting tired of hearing this? It’s almost over), a series of binary oppositions:

Alpha 60: “Time is a river that carries me along, but I am time It’s a tiger, tearing me apart, but I am the tiger It is our misfortune that the world is reality and I – it is my misfortune that I am myself, Alpha 60.”

Consider that the original title for this film was Tarzan versus IBM - two non-significant signs for indeterminate signifiers – and now listen to the long dialogue sequence that closes the film:

Vonbraun: Have I slept for long?
Caution: No. The space of an instant
V: You’re looking at me with an odd face – you’re waiting for me to say something. I don’t know what to say, they’re words that I don’t know.
I wasn’t taught them.
Help me
C: Impossible, princess, you must get there yourself, then you’ll be saved.
If you don’t you’re as lost as the dead of Alphaville.
V: I, ,
you. . .
love. . .

I love you.

Alphaville is Godard’s most accessible film. It is a parable of a technocracy, a clarification of the weakness of structuralism (his own preferred reality template explicating, in part, the film’s melancholy), and a mad mixture of genres that, despite Godard, is astonishing and visually arresting. Watch it once dry, and then watch it again with the tenants of structuralism clutched firmly in hand – I promise you that Alphaville will open up before you like a pliant and enthusiastic lover.

It is gorgeous to look at, rapturous to worry over, and one of the best and most influential science fiction films of all time. Give it a look if you’re prepared to work for your entertainment – there are thousands of movies that don’t take any kind of study and preparation to enjoy. There are only a handful of Alphaville’s. Treasure it and it will teach you something of the theories that informed its time, and the thoughts that fuel ours.

Time is a river that carries it along, but we are time. Use Alphaville as a map for the stranger geographies of that trip – at the end of the journey, Godard tells us that the arbitrariness of being human is an unquantifiable bliss – and an incalculable treasure.

It’s one of my favorite films of all time. It’s well worth a look.




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD