Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville: Musings

I've never given much thought to Lemmy Caution, the whimsical private eye at the center of Godard's science-fiction satire. I just thought him cool. A wickedly funny, entirely tongue-in-cheek, character. What his relationship with the film's larger themes was, exactly, I didn't know and, frankly, didn't care. As far as I was concerned, the entertainment value to be derived from Eddy Constantine's gumshoe was utterly detached from the socio-political messages implied by the rest of the narrative. I did not believe there to be a link between the two "sides" of the film - its Noir aspects and its prevalent mood of dystopia.

But I was wrong...

The world, or city-state, of Alphaville is ruled by an omnipresent computer, titled Alpha 60. It is the antagonist of human emotion. Poetry, love, sentiment; these are unknown variables to it, as well as to the automatons under its dominion. This computer, this machine, is the epitome of everything cold and controlled. When it is destroyed, the denizens that once depended on its orders, cling to the walls, unable to think, and act, for themselves. The computer knows nothing of free-will. It knows nothing of spontaneity.

Caution, then, is the perfect adversary for such a dispassionate mass of wires. He, as a B-movie detective, is a Romantic figure. He is a complete movie-character; both a character within a movie, and a character inspired by other movies. He could not exist was it not for the detectives of the American post-war cinema. As thus, he is indelibly connected with film and, so, with art. His very origin can be traced back to celluloid. Godard doesn't stop there though; Caution is further fused with all things artistic. He loves poetry, yearns for love, and snaps pictures of random events. Caution is literally a camera-operator. This triples the stakes; he is a character in a movie, of the movies, and a creator of new photographic frames. He is the surrogate film director within the text of the film itself.

So, the confrontation is between the remote technology of "Alpha 60" and the creativity of Lemmy Caution. Each is opposed to the other. The movie, then, is making a double claim about the negative effects of the authoritarian computer. It not only saps the personality, the very identity, out of humans. It not only makes them subservient, unable to think for themselves, and ignorant of their own personality. The computer is also the enemy of imagination and art, emotion and ingenuity, passion and joy, sensation and love.

This is not to say that the film negates the usefulness of technology; notice that Lemmy - and by extension, Godard - uses a camera, which is itself a piece of technology. The difference is that Lemmy controls his camera, makes it focus on what he desires, while Alpha 60 controls the humans living under its jurisdiction. The problem, then, is not technology, but rather, the lack of control over it. In order for the computer to serve our own empowerment, it needs to capitulate under human dominance. If the balance of power turns the other way around, as it does in Alphaville, then we are doomed. We, as inventors and builders, must maintain a state of supremacy over our own creations.