Alphaville - Jean-Luc Godard

 ALPHAVILLE - JEAN-LUC GODARD

I've seen the film and now I've read the book but I'm still at a loss as to what Alphaville is actually about. The film was scripted and directed by Jean-Luc Godard so it was never going to be run-of-the-mill and based on his oeuvre was always going to be stylish - which it is, but almost to the point of distraction. Perhaps that's the point?

Set some time in the future, Alphaville is the name of a city where society is run by a gigantic super-computer called Alpha 60, where life is based on pure logic and technocracy. All emotion has been eradicated and all words pertaining to emotions are no longer in use. Bibles have been replaced by dictionaries that are continuously being updated not with new words but with words being deleted. Language, in fact, seems to no longer have any meaning and words just go round in circles as illustrated by when receptionists for example, instead of saying "You're welcome" say "I'm very well, thank you, not at all."

According to Alpha 60 via its piped broadcasts 'The present is the form of all life, and there are no means by which this can be avoided. Time is a circle which is endlessly revolving. Everything has been said. Nothing existed here before us. No one. We are absolutely alone here. We are unique, dreadfully unique. The meaning of words and of expressions is no longer grasped. One isolated word or an isolated detail in a drawing can be understood but the comprehension of the whole escapes us.'

Which sounds rather similar to how our present day Facebook and social media is.

Into this dystopia enters Lemmy Caution, a sort of secret agent/gumshoe detective posing as a newspaper journalist whose mission - like Willard's in Apocalypse Now regarding Colonel Kurtz - is to terminate with extreme prejudice the architect of Alpha 60, Professor von Braun. After much chasing around and thwarting of assassination attempts upon his own life, Caution succeeds in his mission and kills von Braun and destroys Alpha 60, escaping Alphaville with von Braun's daughter (in the film played by Anna Karina) who, emerging from her oppressed mind-state tells Caution she loves him. 

And that's it.

It's to be presumed Alphaville as in the city is a metaphor for totalitarianism though whether it's aimed at the Russian or the Western model is down to the reader/viewer to decide? What is clear, however, is that if anything Alphaville as in the story and the film is an exercise in Pop Art and is essentially a Lichtenstein-style comic strip captured on celluloid. If viewed this way and read this way then it starts to make some kind of sense. Though what it's actually about is still somewhat open to question.

John Serpico