The singular defining characteristic of science-fiction is not so much subject matter as setting. All science-fiction stories share the same setting, which is “not our time and place.” They may play out their narratives on alien planets or in the interstellar void, or they may take place on Earth yet begin in the near or distant future, or they may unfold in a parallel here and now, except with a different past producing a skewed history and an unrecognizable present. Even very modest and small-scale science-fiction stories must incorporate some non-native element, and because the tradition of the genre is to examine the repercussions of changes to the system, even a small change will have ripple effects which generate an entirely new world.
The higher aim of creating and depicting a new world is not so much to provide an outlet for escapism (although that is a huge part of it, and it may be a lower aim but is still a perfectly valid one) as to make thought-provoking observations about the real world we all inhabit. Whiz-bang sci-fi composed primarily or entirely of elements from the author’s purest imagination, your Flash Gordons and Star Wars and whatnot, tilt the balance toward a lot of escapism and just a smidge of commentary on the human condition. More restrained sci-fi composed of extrapolations of present trends tilt the balance the other way, in works like 2001:A Space Odyssey (yay! I can reference that now!) and in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.
Alphaville is a movie from 1965 with a sci-fi premise but is shot like a film noir, with no post-production visual effects or characters in monster make-up or any of the usual trappings of the genre. But it is without question science fiction, depicting a cityscape where all important social decisions are made by an intelligent computer, logical behavior of the citizenry is mandatory and achieved through a combination of emotion-suppressing drugs and capital punishment for showing human feeling, and war is on the horizon between the urban center and the Outlands. The plot, such as it is, concerns a secret agent named Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine, who looks like a Jack Kirby drawing come to life, and not the handsome hero style but the deliberately lumpy and ugly style) who enters Alphaville posing as a journalist, ostensibly on a mission to destroy the supercomputer Alpha 60. He achieves his goal, but more importantly he rescues a young woman named Natacha by getting her out of the city and breaking through to her emotions.
I’m a sucker for these kinds of tales, by which I mean extrapolation-based sci-fi which are so old that we can now pretty definitively say that the author’s predictions were off-base. It is fascinating to me, though, to think of Godard in the mid-60’s, skeptical about the dawn of the computer age, thinking along the same lines the Rolling Stones would be when they recorded Mother’s Little Helper a short time later, and feeling the irresistible urge to tell a cautionary (check that protagonist’s name again) tale about the direction in which society seemed to be headed. Actually, someone probably could have remade Alphaville in the early 90’s, during the rise of Ritalin and the opening of the Internet, and struck a lot of the same chords. But I’d like to think that in the past almost 50 years we’ve backed away from the precipice at least somewhat.
What struck me as particularly illuminating was the opportunity to look at a culture other than my own through the dystopian lens. I admit that in some ways I am less well-traveled and open-minded than I would ideally like to be. That is, after all, part of the whole justification for me doing something like the 1001 Movie Blog Club, in order to broaden my horizons with more foreign films and older works and whatnot. I probably have some retrograde notions about the national character of people from, say, France. The denizens of Alphaville (particularly the recurring character-type of the “seductress third class”) come across as so bored and cold and aloof they are practically somnambulant, and the provincial part of my brain insisted on asking “Wait, is this supposed to be a bleak possible future? I thought that was basically how French people usually acted.” But, again, that’s the beauty of science fiction, its ability to conduct the audience to another reality, hold it up for examination and judge its components as worthy or wasteful. And that in turn can trigger new reflection on similar things in the real world which we tend to take for granted with no judgment at all. And sometimes that means a French director can, intentionally or not, take down a stereotype about his countrymen by putting it in a new context that leaves no question as to how undesirable a general indifference to life truly is.
And speaking of indifference to life, I’ve already namechecked 2001 but I really do have to mention the inevitable juxtaposition of Alpha 60 against HAL in my mind. Alphaville too faces the challenge of making an immobile collection of circuits and a distinctive voice into an on-screen character. Actually, Godard gets around the mobility issue in a few scenes by having Caution interviewed directly by Alpha 60, as boom mics on armatures move back and forth around his head, like robotic tentacles. Vocally, Alpha 60 is the exact opposite of serene, reassuring HAL; apparently the line readings were done by an older gentleman with a mechanical larynx, and sound appropriately abominable and vile (which I mean as a compliment, with all due respect to the cancer-surviving actor). The nightmarish descent of HAL from obedient instrument to manipulative killer is part of the point, which is why HAL has to start out so bland; Alpha 60 is clearly the villain of the piece from the get-go, and Godard makes no effort to hide it.
As intriguing as it is to watch decades-old sci-fi-noir from a French New Wave master, with its pleasantly disorienting double-removed setting (a science fiction world extrapolated from a country I’ve never been to in a time before I was born), I wouldn’t say Alphaville is a great film. It’s certainly good, and worthwhile (for me, at any rate) both for its illumination of world cinema and its appeal to my originality-in-genre-craving brain, and pretty much entirely unlike 98% of what I usually seek out on my own. But that is a highly specific combination of factors, all of which would make me hesitant to recommend Alphaville to anyone else who wasn’t coming at it from the same place as me. But then again, sci-fi shows again and again that the place where you are and a place where you are not may not be so different after all.
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