Moravia’s Contempt

In an article in the TLS about Alberto Moravia (“In the beginning was boredom,” 9/25/15) Ian Thomson writes, “As a novelist, Moravia was concerned with psychologically abnormal, unhappy, diseased, thwarted or unpleasant people (amongst them, perhaps himself). His books are psychodramas masquerading as novels.” Here for example is Molteni, the screenwriter protagonist of Contempt (later made into a Godard movie starring Bridget Bardot and Michel Piccoli) writing about himself: “I realized that a man who is despised neither can nor ought to find peace as long as the contempt endures. He may say like the sinners at the Last Judgment: ‘Mountains, fall on us, and hills, cover us; but contempt follows him even into the remotest hiding-place, for it has entered into his spirit and he bears it about with him wherever he may go.” It might be asked, why write about such self-hatred and hopelessness? Why make a career dealing with outcasts who suffer from boredom and bottomless anxiety? Thomson quotes, Moravia about one of his other characters, “the feckless Michele of Gli Indifferenti" thusly, “For him, faith, sincerity, a sense of the tragic no longer existed; everything, seen through the veil of boredom, appeared pitiful.” Thomson goes on to cite another novel The Two of Us which deals with “a man’s unhappy relationship with his penis.” Why deal with talented people like Molteni, who throw everything away? Why deal with those who squander their gifts? Wouldn’t it be more meaningful to write about a truly unfortunate character felled by poverty or the elements of nature than someone who is merely aimless or listless, someone like Hamlet who maintains a thoroughly negative view of the value of human life—someone, in short, who has seen the abyss? This also is reminiscent of the question that some out of towners ask when they see a Pollock for the first time. Why? Here is what Molteni writes when he comes home to find his wife Emilia has finally left for good, “all was in disorder, but it was an empty, blank disorder; no clothes, no shoes, no toilet articles, nothing but open, or half-open, empty drawers, gaping wardrobes with bare dangling coat hangers, vacant chairs.” When you’re not able to be happy, you can at least write about it—something which is comprised of its own pleasures, rewards and yes even the happiness of being able to write such a perfect description of dispossession.

Goodbye to Language: Brecht in 3-D

There’s Godard’s much talked about dog Roxy who has more than a cameo in Goodbye to Language and there’s the subversive use of 3-D. In a kind of cinematic guerilla warfare, this highest level of perspectival illusion is usurped throughout the film. But Godard either mistitled his movie or is so caught up in the Babel myth that infuses it (at one point it’s remarked that everyone will need interpreters) that he misses his own point. From the beginning of the film everyone is reading. They’re reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. The skewed 3-D is mirrored by the overlays of constant and wonderful aphorism (particularly relating to Hitler): “Everything Hitler said he accomplished,” “Machiavelli, Richelieu, Bismarck, Hitler did not invent anything.” “society accepts murder to solve unemployment,” “inner experience is now forbidden by society in general,” “the dog is the only creature who loves you more than itself.” Zero and infinity, adieu and dieux. “Kamera," we are informed, is the Russian  for prison. Monet is quoted and Shelley and Byron make cameo appearances at the end of the film. Truffaut Fahrenheit 451 was a futuristic tale based on a Ray Bradbury novel about the burning of books. But Goodbye to Language is no Kristallnacht. And while Godard may romanticize the closeness of Roxy’s relationship with reality, we cannot be assured that the dog shares his master’s continuing and exuberant delight in the female body. Godard has always exuded Courbet’s love for wanton displays of femininity (in specific the mons pubis which has become a near extinct species of beaver in our pedophiliac Brazilian wax culture). A better title for Goodbye to Language would be Goodbye to Reality. The film’s begins by declaring “those lacking in imagination take refuge in reality” and it’s really Brecht in 3-D with Verfremndungseffekt acting as a didactic tool. If Bergman was the great metaphysician of modern art house cinema than Godard is its epistemologist. Le gai savoir was based on Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile: Or On Education. His subject is, in fact, language, consciousness and history on both an ontogenic and phylogenic basis. In Goodbye to Language the arguing couple of Contempt (played here by Heloise Godet and Kamel Abdeli) return for an encore. Microcosm and macrocosm—his couple’s utterances and nudity have both theological and semiological significance (“nature” and “metaphor” are recurring titles for sequences). At the end, Godard credits his actors along with a list of great thinkers, who he is wont to quote. His screen does go black and his soundtrack silent, but is his movie a swan song for language? Hardly. Andre Malraux wrote his Anti-Memoirs. He couldn’t have made this masterful anti-masterpiece without it.