#25: Alphaville
Hey babes,
Did you miss me? I missed you.
I read a thing the other day that said you don’t have to be out running errands, working, “doing stuff” to say you’re too busy to hang out or commit to plans. You can be “busy” spending time alone, watching a movie, napping, etc. So…I was busy last week…
But I’m back! And I am here to share a movie review but ALSO to tell you that although buying from small local businesses should be a priority this year, you should also know you can buy 25 feet of cedar garland from Costco for $25 and you don’t even need a membership card, baybeeeee. AKA I am experimenting with indoor greenery as a treatment for depression. Let the holiday season commence!
#25: Alphaville
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Country: France
Year: 1965
Runtime: 99 minutes
Language: French
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
There have been some movies so far that have been just straight up difficult to write about (This is Spinal Tap and Salo come to mind, for two wildly different reasons), and I am going to add Alphaville to this list. Usually I find knowing I must write about a movie enhances my viewing experience: I pay closer attention. But sometimes the viewing experience itself requires so much energy to not only follow but to enjoy (I find myself often overwhelmed by how much I enjoy something...do you??) that writing about it is like juggling and saying the alphabet backwards at the same time, two things I’m already pretty bad at. Alphaville was overwhelming in this way, both for its bizarre plot and heavy, poignant message. I left this film with not a ton of interest in the plot, but a desire to rewatch it to absorb the beautiful message. I hope you get even a fraction of that below!
The film begins with scenes from a city with a voiceover of a man who says “Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication.” The person’s voice was unique so we looked it up and apparently they used an actor who did not have a larynx and spoke with an artificial voice box.
The movie immediately has a noir vibe: it is filmed in black and white and has that music that sounds black and white and mysterious. You know what I’m talking about.
A man in a trench coat and fedora arrives at a hotel in a place called Alphaville. He checks in under the name Ivan Johnson and says he is a journalist. I can tell you right now this man is not a journalist, he is a secret agent, and his name is not Ivan Johnson, but Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine). He won’t let any of the staff touch his briefcase and is 100% the most sus person. He enters his hotel room and immediately starts knocking on all of the walls.
A woman on staff escorts him to his room, fluffs his pillows, and tells him she will leave tranquilizers on his sink. I am super confused about her role until she takes off her dress and in her underwear, turns on the jukebox in the room and offers to take a bath with him. It turns out that in Alphaville, there are women called Seductresses and she is one of those. Lemmy doesn’t really want her there, though. And then...as she’s in the bath, a guy in a trench coat shows up and attacks Lemmy. Lemmy shoots him, slaps the Seductress, tells her “all things weird are normal in this whore of a city” and then takes her picture as she sits against a wall. So. Here we are.
From a little speaker, Lemmy gets messages from the guy from the voiceover from the beginning narration. He tells him that Miss Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina) is on her way up to see him. As he waits, he pulls out two photos of two men with writing on the backs: Professor Leonard von Braun, the creator of Alphaville, who the inscription says he must kill or capture and Henri Dickson, a missing agent he must find. It turns out Lemmy is also a secret agent and these are his two missions.
Natacha shows up in a very enviable, very French outfit, smoking. They make weird small talk and we learn Lemmy is from a place called The Outlands. She invites him to a gala and he says he will meet her after he meets a friend.
We paused the movie just so I could say “I don’t know what’s going on at all” and Josh said, “I think she’s a state-issued honey pot,” and I said “Okay” and stared blankly until he pushed play again.
Natacha and Lemmy take the same car and have more awkward, tense small talk. It turns out she is Professor von Braun’s daughter (the guy Lemmy has been sent to capture or kill) and Lemmy asks her to set up a meeting, although she says she has never met him.
He gets out of the car at a building where he goes to “telecommunicate,” which is basically to use a phone booth of some kind. The front desk lady asks him “galaxy or local?” which was the first time I realized we were not on Earth. “Local,” he says, and enters a booth with lots of buttons on the wall. But he never makes a call because a man even more sus than him is creeping around his booth. Lemmy stabs him to death.
As he leaves, he sees a photo of Professor von Braun on the wall.
He arrives at the Red Star Hotel looking for Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), the other agent from The Outlands who went missing in Alphaville, who Lemmy is trying to rescue. Henri arrives in the lobby and he does not recognize Lemmy at first and doesn’t seem to be doing WELL. He’s stumbling around, looking ill and confused. As they walk up to Henri’s room, the front desk guy asks Henri when he’s going to kill himself. Henri tells Lemmy he can’t adapt to this place, so he is encouraged by the permanent residents to kill himself. Lemmy asks him what happens to those who can’t adapt or don’t kill themselves. He says they are executed.
We learn that Alphaville is a dystopian society where music, art, poetry, love, or feelings of any kind are outlawed and anyone acting in any way that is considered illogical is killed. Alphaville is also ruled by a sentient computer being called Alpha 60, who is the voice from the voiceovers we hear throughout the film. Alpha 60, created by von Braun, is in control of everything, and militantly committed to logic.
At one point, Lemmy asks Henri “Why?” and Henri says “What does why mean? I forgot.” In Alphaville, no one asks “why.” Instead, they just say “because.”
While Lemmy hides behind a cabinet, Henri and a Seductress rub all over each other in a bed. Lemmy emerges when Henri starts to die, though. Before he dies, he points to a book under his pillow for Lemmy to take. It is a book of poems by Paul Eluard called Capital of Pain.
Lemmy takes a cab to meet up with Natacha. She is in a building, in a room, with a few other people watching slides of drawings and random words while Alpha 60 talks. This was the part where I just wanted to sit and absorb all of this because a lot of it felt very profound and juicy and I wanted to soak in it a little bit. But then I thought of you, my sweet friend, and I transcribed it all instead, because why the hell else am I here.
Alpha 60 says, among many things:
“The present is the form of all life.”
“Time is like a circle which turns endlessly. The descending arc is the past, the arc that climbs is the future.”
“Everything has been said, provided words do not change their meanings and meanings, their words.”
“Is it not obvious that someone who customarily lives in a state of suffering requires a different sort of religion from a person habitually in a state of well being?”
“Before us, nothing existed here. No one. We are totally alone here. We are unique, dreadfully unique. The meaning of words and of expressions is no longer grasped. An isolated word or a detail of a design can be understood. But the meaning of the whole escapes. Once we know the number one we believe that we know the number two because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.”
“The acts of men carried over from past centuries will gradually destroy them logically. I, Alpha 60, am merely the logical means of this destruction.”
They leave and Lemmy says, “I couldn't understand a word he was saying.”
“It is simple,” Natacha says, “We learnt this evening that death and life are found within the same circle.” Gah! My little existentialist heart was so delighted by all of this.
Natacha and Lemmy take a cab to the gala.
Alpha 60 says, “The essence of the so-called capitalist world or the communist world is not an evil volition to subject their people by the power of indoctrination or the power of infancy but simply the natural ambition of any organization to plan all its actions.”
Fun fact!: much of Alpha 60’s lines are from the work of Jorge Luis Borges, which is why it is so good!
Turns out the “gala” is actually just a huge swimming pool room (? what the fuck is that called??) where armed guards are shooting people off the diving board. Lemmy learns that these people have been condemned to execution for being illogical in some way. Von Braun and lots of other important -looking people are there.
Lemmy gets von Braun (Howard Vernon) alone in an elevator.
He asks to speak to him privately, quietly, but von Braun declines. Lemmy is beaten up in the elevator by some of von Braun’s men and taken into an interrogation room with lots of microphones where Alpha 60 asks him questions. If you’d rather watch this scene in full, you may here:
What do you love above all? Lemmy replies, “Gold and women.”
What is the privilege of the dead? “To die no more.”
Do you know what illuminates the night? “Poetry.”
What is your religion? “I believe in the inspirations of conscience.”
Do you make any distinction between the mysterious principles of knowledge and those of love? “In my opinion, in love there is no mystery”
Alpha 60 tells him, “You are hiding certain things, but I do not know yet what they are. For the time being, you are free.”
He is taken into another room with a guy in a white lab coat. We learn that Professor von Braun was exiled from The Outlands because of his invention, Alpha 60, which has 1.4 billion nerve centers.
It turns out Alpha 60 could not decipher many of Lemmy’s answers, which signifies an above average intelligence. They want to recruit him to help them identify the weak points in The Outlands so they can attack it.
Three men in lab coats then take him to the “Central Interrogation Station,” which is just a room full of large recorders and computers. This is where Alpha 60 works out problems of “crime suppression, air travel schedules, war strategy….issues too complex for human intelligence.” I feel like this is a major dig at humans in general because we have really fucked up all of that, yeah?
Lemmy returns to his hotel and realizes that he only has one choice: he must kill von Braun to free all of the people of Alphaville.
Back at the hotel, he is escorted to his room by another Seductress whom he dismisses quickly.
Natacha is hiding in his room and he discovers that she is tattooed with a number like the rest of the women. This is never really explained but DO NOT LIKE.
As they eat breakfast, at Lemmy’s request, she reads Capital of Pain out loud, the book of poetry he got from Henri Dickson’s room. She says she doesn’t understand any of it. She looks for the word “conscience” in the “bible” kept in the side table drawer to see if it is in there. It is not. Lemmy discovers it is not a bible, but a dictionary. Natacha says every day words are removed from the dictionary. Words like weeping, autumn light, and tenderness.
She tells Lemmy when she’s with him she feels afraid. She says she’s afraid because she knows the word “conscience” without ever having seen it or read it. Lemmy pieces together that this is because she was not born in Alphaville like she thinks, but in Nueva York in The Outlands. She begins to remember. She remembers poetry and how her dad was kicked out of Nueva York in ‘64. She says she remembers sensuality but not love. “What is love?” she asks him.
As Lemmy prepares he and Natacha’s escape from Alphaville, two agents show up and take Lemmy in for another interrogation with Alpha 60.
Alpha 60 calls Lemmy out for lying about his name (remember he said his name was Ivan Johnson) and says Lemmy is a menace to Alphaville, which is extremely true.
Alpha 60 says he is working for the ultimate good and that Lemmy should be executed. Lemmy busts through the wall to escape, killing 3 or 4 guards on his way out.
As he’s leaving, Natacha is being violently dragged into the building by some guy.
Lemmy forces a police officer with a gun to drive him to von Braun's house, then kills him once he gets there. He arrives at his house which is attached to a factory with lots of people in lab coats, including von Braun. He gets caught, but he has a gun soooooo he bullies his way through. Von Braun lets him into a control room of sorts. Lemmy tells von Braun he’s going back to The Outlands and invites him to go with him. Von Braun says they're on the cusp of a discovery so great the US and Russian atomic control will look like a joke. He also tells Lemmy he is a strange guy who would’ve done fine in the Age of Ideas but now he is worthless, basically.
Lemmy shoots and kills him.
He escapes and steals a car as Alpha 60 continues to wax philosophical in a voice over:
“The present is terrifying because it is irreversible.”
“Time is a river which carries me along. But I am time. It’s a tiger, tearing me apart, but I am the tiger.”
“It is our misfortune that the world is reality and it is my misfortune that I am myself, Alpha 60.”
Hahaha so what if Alpha 60’s self-destruction is less a literal mechanical implosion and more an existential post-college self-loathing self-destruction where it, for the first time, realizes how much it truly hates itself?
So, it turns out that Lemmy has fallen in love with Natacha and his love has fucked up the whole vibe of Alphaville and everyone is falling APART. Lemmy returns to the interrogation room, rescues Natacha who is acting very weird, clinging to the walls, looking disoriented and stumbling, much like Henri was. Many people have died, laying in the halls and lobby as they leave the building. I think because Alpha 60 has been destroyed??
As they hop in his Ford Galaxie, Natacha and Lemmy drive across space to get back to The Outlands. Natacha recovers as they get further away from Alphaville.
Natacha realizes that her own insistence on individuality is what destroyed Alpha 60 and why she didn’t die with the others.
She says, “I don’t know what to say. They're words I don't know. They weren’t taught to me. Help me.”
She slowly speaks: “I. Love. You.”
FIN
This movie really tickled a part of me that loves dystopias and the people who seek to escape them, which I think is the same part of me that loves existentialism (I wrote a terrible piece of existential fiction for my senior thesis in college) and this movie plays with both really beautifully. I think it poses some interesting questions about the relationship between art and logic (can they co-exist?), the difference between truth and logic, and how, often, poetry offers more truth than logic. It is a supremely bizarre movie in ways that I couldn’t capture here. Guess you gotta go see for yourself!
Next up is The Long Good Friday, which is a gangster film with Dame Helen Mirren, which is all I need to know. See you there!
XOXO,
Steph