School for scandal (9/17/02)
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Soigne ta droite, ou Une place sur la terre. [Keep your right up. Jean-Luc Godard, 1987.]
An Idiot named Prince Myshkin bearing a suspicious resemblance to Jean-Luc Godard is awakened at dawn in Switzerland by a telephone call informing him that he has until sundown to produce a feature film, and, if so, all is forgiven. [Why precisely he needs to be forgiven isn’t made clear, but, then, this is the human condition, that you are much more likely to know that you are guilty than to know what you are guilty of.] Needing no further prompting, like many a naive knight-errant before him he sets off on his adventures, carrying a can of film and a paperback edition of Dostoevsky — and, in the best tradition of Romance, encounters a series of characters, symbols, concepts, types, historical allusions, illustrative quotations, aphoristic oneliners, and rhetorical questions [Godard makes no particular ontological distinction among these] including: the Individual; the Man; the principle that conversation between strangers is impossible; a yellow Ferrari; Wimbledon; Andre Malraux [or what he stood for]; the last words of Goethe [in several versions]; the relation of Art and Commerce; the difference between a novel and a novella; a band in a studio [compare the Rolling Stones in
One Plus One] trying to write a song [at one point this nearly turns into
Rock and Roll High School, but, alas, the inspiration slips from their nerveless fingers]; the existential Angst of those waiting for their boarding passes at the ticket counter and the insensate Kafkaesque indifference of the airline clerk who types furiously at her terminal before them; the Average Frenchman; the Daddy, the Mummy, the Writer; the nature of Angels; the [male] Ant and the [female] Grasshopper [or was it the other way around?]; the Admiral; assorted perpetrators of slapstick who stage a variety of pratfalls; the Countess; a Greek chorus of airline passengers chanting “Hail to thee, ancient Ocean”; their pilot, studying a manual on suicide before taking off [not nearly so funny since the EgyptAir disaster]; the discovery that there are no grownups; the observation that there are so many sobs, for a tune on the guitar; Borges; the failure of May 1968; golf with bimbos; Mickey Mouse; transcendence; an opened window as illustration that Death is the path toward the Light; a little girl with pigtails who has something to do with the transmigration of souls; a hooker with eyes like pearls [she was either Finnish or Dutch]; the repeated assurance that “What happened next is from long ago”; a certain anxiety in re our acquiescence in the detachment of the Earth from the Sun; and the observation that, in nothingness, any creation is a miracle. — This ends, finally, on the beautiful image of the projection of the film itself: light stabbing the darkness in the back; a whispering which supplants the silence. More light, indeed.
Godard somehow kept frustrating my ongoing expectation that he was just about to quote the tennis match from
Blowup, but buried every other quibble beneath an avalanche of allusion. — “Ah, who gave us the sponge to erase the horizon?” [
Zarathustra, if you’re keeping score: the madman who announces God is dead.] — Indeed, who built the shore so near the ancient Ocean? You tell me, Jean-Luc.
____________Rock and roll fantasy (9/9/02)
