KING LEAR
Jean-Luc Godard’s latest monkey wrench aimed at the Cinematic Apparatus–that multifaceted, impregnable institution that regulates the production, distribution, exhibition, promotion, consumption, and discussion of movies–goes a lot further than most of its predecessors in creatively obfuscating most of the issues it raises. Admittedly, Hail Mary caused quite a ruckus on its own, but mainly among people who never saw the film. King Lear, which I calculate to be Godard’s 34th feature to date, has the peculiar effect of making everyone connected with it in any shape or form–director, actors, producers, distributors, exhibitors, spectators, critics–look, and presumably feel, rather silly. For better and for worse, it puts us all on the spot; as Roland Barthes once wrote of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, it prevents us from redeeming ourselves.
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So the popular Hollywood-fostered myth that the best film technology equals or guarantees the best art, pernicious enough to begin with, is given the brutal force of law by commerce. The conventional, simplistic uses of Dolby are the only kinds we can hear in theaters; ergo, they must be the best. Conversely, the dazzling contrapuntal sound work of Godard here (and, to a lesser extent, in the two-track Dolby of his Detective) can’t be heard; ergo, it can’t be the best. Consequently, the film’s disruption of the Cinematic Apparatus extends to the local rating system; if its sound track were fully audible, I would give it four stars rather than three.
Like many of Godard’s films, King Lear has a situation and a group of characters rather than a plot, and a series of fresh beginnings rather than a development. “This was after Chernobyl,” intones William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth. “We live in a time in which movies and art do not exist; they have to be reinvented.” Photographs of filmmakers–Cocteau, Bresson, Pasolini, Visconti, Lang, Tati, Welles–are introduced at various points, presumably as aides-memoires. When Godard himself appears in the flesh, as Shakespeare Jr.’s guru, he is called Professor Pluggy, speaking semicoherently out of one side of his mouth, accurately described in the movie’s press book as a “Swiss Rasta Wizard with patch-cord dredlocks.” Portions of Shakespeare’s Lear fitfully recur (as when Lear receives telexes of fealty from Regan and Goneril, while the loving Cordelia pledges only “nothing,” or rather, as the film stubbornly and obsessively repeats it, “no thing”); Pluggy is visited in both a mixing room and a screening room; a copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is bandied about, the novel’s closing passage is quoted, and Edgar (French filmmaker Leos Carax) is assigned a wife named Virginia who “isn’t there”; great works of art (by Gustave Dore and Tex Avery, among others) are quoted, some of them lit by candles; a shoebox model of a screening room is illuminated by a sparkler; another printed title informs us that this is “a film shot in the back”; Woody Allen briefly appears as the Fool, aka “Mr. Alien,” in an editing room where a needle and thread are used to stitch pieces of film together.
For Godard, it’s a legitimate source of pride that he won’t film anything to illustrate a scriptwriter’s point or provide continuity; his disdain for ordinary filmmaking practice becomes a creative challenge, and, in terms of his limited capacities for story telling, a calculated risk. The previous Godard film that King Lear most resembles–the insufferable Wind From the East (1970), prized by many academic armchair radicals for its simplistic and “teachable” theoretical schemata–also confronts narrative from a nonnarrative position, but with some important differences. Even at his most absurdist, as in Lear, Godard has a lot more knowledge at his disposal 16 years later–in knowing how to film nature, appreciate or ponder an actor or a text, light a shot, or simply fill a moment with sound, color, shape, and movement. What he seems to have less of–in the absence of his former cinephilia and Marxism–is a pretext for getting from one of these moments to the next.
In fact, one might argue that the film’s deliberate elusiveness can be traced back to a particular reading of Shakespeare’s Lear–specifically, the refusal of Cordelia to declare her love for her father, a king relinquishing his power, which sets the whole tragedy in motion. Unlike Goneril and Regan, her sisters, who comply with the old man’s demand that they convert whatever love they might claim to have for him into a commodity, a public display of “proof,” Cordelia–who later proves to be his only faithful and loving daughter–can only declare, “Nothing,” which leads him to disinherit her. This “nothing,” which Godard’s film pointedly represents as “no thing,” points to the refusal to become a commodity, to function as an object–a refusal which, as I have tried to show, is basic to the film’s strategies, and relates to more than just a refusal to behave like a normal, “consumable” product. Theoretically and practically, a film that is “no thing” threatens and challenges the functioning of the Cinematic Apparatus itself. Indeed, as Golan himself expresses the dilemma, “Where is this film?” Like Lear, we all wind up disinheriting it, much preferring the comfortable lies of a Goneril or a Regan.
