The girl can’t help it (5/11/07)
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Sympathy For The Devil. [Jean-Luc Godard, 1968.]
Rough sledding even for the most dedicated Godard fan: a series of cartoonlike Marxist parables, interleaved with footage of the Rolling Stones in the studio recording — well, you guessed it. The song, naturally, is repeated so many times that one might become heartily sick of it, were there not so much else here to induce nausea: mindnumbing revolutionary tirades, read aloud in that inimitable speech-at-the-Party-Congress style that made it imperative for two generations of fellow-travelers to develop the ability to fix waxen expressions of attention upon their countenances while sleeping in their seats with their eyes wide open; the ritual spraypainting of moronic slogans about the urban landscape; black guys in berets machinegunning white women in a junkyard [admittedly still funny, but only because rap video has rendered the militant pose even more ludicrous]; and a sort of spy-novel voiceover which purports to describe the exploits of an assortment of characters — Nixon, Franco, Princess Grace — plucked at random from the headlines of the day. — Godard does add a bit of porno-novel narration which serves to spice things up considerably, but inevitably you feel you ought to inform him that this is just the kind of shit that would have had him sent down into the countryside for re-education [or worse.] — Meanwhile the Stones, sex and drugs momentarily forgotten, studiously ignore the cameras and — sober, chainsmoking, bent over their guitars — labor unceasingly to perfect their opus.
The moral, obviously, is Darwinian: you look at this and see instantly that the Stones look like mature professionals; the revolutionaries, like witless amateurs. And this tells you everything you need to know about why rock and roll survived, and The Revolution did not.
____________Photographs of my girlfriend naked (3/25/07)
