Jean Luc Godard

After seeing Godard’s “Weekend” at the SIFF theater tonight, I’m now certain that Western civilization is definitely declining. “Weekend” is a movie about a square couple that murder their parents for money; it’s also about the spiritual chaos and emotional bankruptcy of post-capitalist society. Like most of Godard’s films, this one is full of surreal tricks and requires a lot of concentration to watch, and you never get “entertained” and drawn into the story line. When the main characters meet a couple of philosopher weirdos in the woods, the husband says “this film is rotten, all we meet are crazy people”, and after a violent car crash, the wife is pulling herself out of a burning vehicle- we see blood and flaming wreckage, and someone who is burning to death in agony in one of the cars. The wife screams “No! My Hermes handbag!”
In almost every scene, Godard packs in some potent Marxist or existentialist commentary, and even when it appears to be nonsense, he’s making profound statements about Gaullism, the war in Algeria, consumer culture, sex, and imperialism. It’s not just that no contemporary film maker would want to tackle this kind of stuff, it’s that they can’t, and we couldn’t handle it intellectually anyway. It’s as though we’re dumber now, and as a result of being dumber, we’re also more frightened and we can’t watch a movie that threatens to call us stupid. In one scene, after the husband has been murdered by a bunch of beautiful young revolutionary cannibals living in the woods, the wife says, “how horrible,” and one of the guerillas responds that “the horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror.”
It’s as true now as it was then, except worse.