I love you: welcome to Alphaville
Exploring the battle to hold on to our individuality and ability to fall in love in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 dystopian tale
Welcome to Alphaville
A city of silence, of logic, safety and prudence
The grey home of IBM versus Tarzan
Orwell’s Newspeak and thoughtcrimes
A metropolis of empty shells and cause and effect
Where man is numbered, not named
And time is a circle endlessly described
Their bible: a dictionary without words
Their god: A chain-smoking HAL preaching:
Do not love. Do not cry. Do not speak of poetry
Ask not why, answer only because
Or meet your maker in their swimming pools
One never understands anything
Choose to fight logic with the marginal man
Photograph the everyday and advance
in a straight line towards love
Save those who weep
There is no mystery in it
What transforms darkness into light?
Poetry: I love you
Tarzan versus IBM
Released in 1965, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville is primarily a pessimistic foreshadowing of machines growing effect on the world. Although appearing to be concerned with a futuristic society, Alphaville was actually concerned less about what the world could look like tomorrow, but what the world was like today.
Alphaville is Paris in 1965 and was shot using real locations, primarily at night. The film uses this version of Paris as a warning and a siren call, highlighting how the France of that era could fall into a isolationist state – a country with imperialist ambitions and censorship, where even language becomes under strict control.
A supercomputer Alpha 60 is in complete control of the city. A computer that can digest facts, but is unable to make sense of poetry or art.
Alpha 6o is a symbolic father to Stanley Kubrick’s own supercomputer creation HAL, which uses rationality, organisation and logic to remove originality, expressive thought and any emotional unknowns.
Godard uses Alpha 60 to show society’s dependence on technology. The influence of machinery in Alphaville drains its inhabitants of life and individuality.
Looking across the ocean for the root of this evil, Godard seemingly blames America for the influx of computers and mass-produced technology. This can be traced right back to the film’s original title, Tarzan versus IBM, which pulls together two polarising American ideologies – the wild, feral man versus cold, cash-centric technology.
Echoing the world of the German expressionist epic science-fiction Metropolis and borrowing classic film noir tropes, Godard suggests the dominant hegemony wants to continue making robots out of their workforce in order to keep the bigger machine running and to protect the rulers interests.
In order for this to happen, Alphaville’s population is banned from using emotions; there can be no love. A form of ‘word bible’ exists, a dictionary of sorts, that loses words on a regular basis. Expression of thought shrinks more each day.
Alphaville reveals shades of a fascist past – from the tattooed numbers worn by the population, to the name of the designer of the central brain for the supercomputer, Professor von Braun, a strong echo of Wernher von Braun, a leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Germany and a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States.
The film poses the question that an unthinking allegiance to science and religion means humankind can no longer be trusted to take their destiny in their own hands. In this sense, Alpha 60 become a mecha god for the people, transforming everyone by relieving them of their burden of existence.
Instead of allowing us to think for ourselves, Alphaville gives power to a super-being that proclaims to offer perfection and paradise. However, for this peace to happen, Alpha 60 believes one final war has to occur.
The outsider from the outer-lands
Godard’s bleak vision may have seemed on first viewing as one of a distant future, but under the 18th President of France, Charles de Gaulle, the country was already fighting a losing battle.
De Gaulle’s aim was to reunite the people and give them back their identity. But through the rise of capitalism, individuals now themselves became a measure of rising consumption and started to behave more and more like machines in order to obtain more and more. Therefore, the message spread in Alphaville of widespread dehumanisation and total state control was a mimesis of reality, and not just a predication of a far away future.
Alpha 60 wants to conspire against nature and in doing so transform human life into a pseudo metal form.
Only one man fights to stay as an individual, secret agent Lemmy Caution, played by Eddie Constantine, an American actor who spent his time working in Europe. As an outsider from the outer-lands, it is through Caution’s struggles where we explore the falseness of this artificial world and hark back to a more naïve, honest world.
Through Caution, the message becomes clear: we need to become a master of technology in order to survive it, but we cannot become engulfed and all-consumed with it, to the extent we become part of it.
The anti-hero is a marginal man with no family, political or social ties. He is Tarzan. Caution actively violates the conventions of Alphaville and prefers to “believe in the immediate inspirations of my conscience”. He clings to his briefcase, refuses to fall under the charms of a seductress and fights with a hotel detective for breaking rules. Upon being interviewed, Caution deliberately tries to upset Alpha 60 by lying and posing a riddle, knowing full well the machine could not process such form of poetry.
Although Caution is offered the chance to join the technological elite, he declines because he does not want a physical and mental existence created and dictated by technology. He is able to do this, because he still believes in love, which ultimately gives meaning and purpose to his life.
I love you
In his fight, Caution enlists the assistance of Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina), a programmer of Alpha 60 and daughter of Professor von Braun. As a citizen of the city, Natacha says she does not know the meaning of love or conscience. But this does not stop Caution falling in love with her, and through this love he introduces emotion and unpredictability back into Natacha’s life and into the city. Caution encourages Natacha to discover new words in order to hurt Alpha 60.
And so, Caution continues to fight back using technology of his own. His own weapons include his Ford Galaxie car and radio. His use of a gun and camera demonstrate his own steadfast hold of his individual expression. However, his greatest weapon always remain his words. Caution eventually incapacitates Alpha 60 by telling it a riddle it could not comprehend.
Natacha grows to realise that it is her own understanding of herself as an individual with desires that can save her.
The film ends with her line: “Je vous aime” [“I love you”].
Alpha 60 is destroyed.
Through Alphaville, Godard attempts to show that the underlying nature and experience of the human condition is the correct path for us to follow, rather than to place a blind faith in religion, politics, technology or science.
This film seems to be an appeal to fight for liberty and freedom in a society where increasingly the individual becomes superseded by machine and money.
Has our world really moved on much since 1965?
