Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Breathless
(1960), is according to many film scholars difficult to classify in terms
of genre. Relative to uncovering the philosophy espoused in the film,
genre-classification looks superficial at best. The film becomes a crime story early
on as soon as Michel shots a policeman for no apparent reason, and Godard seems
more interested in highlighting the film noir stylistic features, such as when
Michel repeatedly mimics Humphrey Bogart in running a thumb across lips and
perhaps even incessantly smoking, than in constructing a gripping crime-story.
Godard deviates from the crime genre as most of the middle of the film is
centered on Michel and his love interest, Patricia before fusing the romance
with the crime plot. I contend that the “hole” in the middle of the film is
actually full of Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism, which is based on human
subjectivity and the choices that are made out of it (and no other basis).
The film’s large middle section
is not an enigma, even though the narrative is more or less suspended, and
neither is Patricia. She represents the problem of twentieth-century modernity as
described and explained by existentialism in that she is too weak to make a
choice regarding whether to accept Michel’s romantic overtures to be a couple.
She has only her own subjectivity on which base her choice, but the weight of
the choice is too much for her as she struggles in fear. In contract, Michel
steps up to the proverbial baseball home base and definitively choses her. In
terms of Sartre’s philosophy, Michel is strong and Patricia is weak. This is
not to say that Michel is immune from her weakness. Nietzsche, after all,
explains why the strong can be beguiled by the weak and thus made vulnerable in
spite of being stronger.
Patricia is the femme fatale precisely because her subjective take on whether she is free—the most important value, according to Sartre—is so mixed up or boggled in her mind that she winds up sacrificing Michel so as to be able know her own subjectivity enough not to be afraid (of it?) and to make a definitive choice regarding them becoming a couple. Her subjectivity is hardly strong enough to be the basis on which she can make a definitive choice. Pathetically, she backs her awareness of whether she has feelings for him out of her decision to turn him into the police. I must not be in love with you because I just decided to report you to the police. I submit that falling in love with someone can be likened to catching the flu rather than being slightly hungry. When a person has fallen for someone or has come down with the flu, one's experience is itself so impacted that it is rather obvious that one is down for the count, even allowing for some lag time in which the person is under the illusion that life will go on as usual. It's not like, Oh, I think I may be hungry.
Patricia’s
subjectivity is hardly strong enough to be the basis on which she can make a
definitive choice because she is so unaware of her own consciousness of
herself, and yet according to existentialism, such consciousness is the only
possible basis on which a human being can make choices, and, in acting on them,
invent oneself ex nihilo. “The problem is that I don’t even
know,” she tells Michel concerning what is wrong. This alone can furnish her
with existential fear, or angst. “I’m not unhappy,” she tells Michel, “but I’m
afraid.” In perhaps the best line in the film—a line that suggests that Godard
has split the crime narrative in the film in two in order to open the middle up
for philosophy—she says, “I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or
if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.” She doesn’t even know if she is happy or
unhappy! It is thus not possible for her, at least while in that condition of
such limited self-awareness, to be authentic in herself and towards Michel. It
is no wonder that he is frustrated with her state.
Heidegger would say that Michel
is authentic. “Do you think of dying sometimes?” he asks Patricia. “I do,” he
continues. “All the time.” He is not afraid to face the truth that he, like the
rest of us, will eventually die. In what can be taken as a premonition, Michel
blurts out, “I’m tired. I’m going to die.” In what can be taken as an
indication that she has not faced the fact that she too will die one day,
Patricia tells him, “You’re crazy.” He is actually well-grounded, and thus
authentic, according to Heidegger. To avoid the realization—to hide from
it—that death is inevitable is to lead an inauthentic life. In answer to
Patricia’s question during an interview at an airport, a novelist says his
greatest ambition in life is, “To become immortal, and then to die.” Of course,
to be immortal is to not be able to die, so the answer just shows that the
writer is evading his own realization. It is no wonder he is a sexist.
Michel is actually a stronger
person than Patricia. He even tells her, “I’m more advanced than you.” Why? He
has come to terms with his existence as finite, and this thus no longer afraid
(as he was when he shot the policeman). As such, he can make an interesting
choice that seems absurd or counterintuitive. Patricia reads Michel a line from
William Faulkner, a novelist: “Between grief and nothing, I will take nothing.”
It’s not clear whether nothing refers to not having any feeling, or not
existing at all. Nevertheless, she asks Michel to choose between grief and
nothing. At first, he demurs, and thus evinces momentary weakness in not being
up to choosing based on his own subjectivity. “Grief is stupid,” he finally blurts
out. “I choose nothing. Its no better, but grief is a compromise. You have to
go for all or nothing. I know that now.” You have to go all in, rather than
make half-baked choices. It is ironic that in being strong enough to choose
based on his own subjectivity alone, his choice is for nothing rather than to
feel something. It takes incredible strength of will to choose nothing rather
than something. Perhaps it is in a human being having come to the realization
that someday death will deprive oneself of existing (and out of this, an
essence) that one’s choice can be nothing (i.e., either not feeling anything,
or not existing) rather an uncomfortable emotion without freaking out.
In contrast, Patricia does not go “all in”
because she demurs on making a definitive choice until the end of the film, and
even then, she backs into her choice by choosing indirectly by calling the
police to report Michel. Until then, in not choosing, she is nothing because,
according to Sartre, we are nothing but the choices (plans) that we make. It
follows that Michel is in love with nothing, and yet he goes all in anyway.
Put another way, it is not clear that he can be in love with her when she is
virtually cut off from her own subjectivity. If she doesn’t know whom she is,
and what she feels, and if she is incapable of making emotional choices, how
can he love her? How could he trust her?
Well, this is perhaps his fatal flaw, at least in regard to the
femme fatale. Even a more advanced, or stronger person is vulnerable.
This is clear both to Hobbes and Nietzsche. Hence the latter recommends that
the strong maintain a pathos of distance from the weak, lest the sickness, or
bad odor, of the latter infect the stronger. Michel misses the “red flags” in
Patricia’s indecision and her underlying emotional instability (e.g., her not
knowing whether she is happy or unhappy), and thus misses the opportunity to
walk out on her to protect himself from her possibly turning him into the police
for the murder. I submit that being in
love is an existential space in which a person’s perception of one’s freedom
drastically narrows.
Patricia is dangerous to Michel
because even though she knows that she is free to take or leave (or turn in) Michel,
she has not come to the realization that she is indeed free. This is
qualitatively different than having a sense of a de facto narrowing of
freedom. She doesn’t know if her lack of freedom is causing her unhappiness, or
whether her unhappiness is responsible for her lack of freedom. Jean-Paul
Sartre would tell her, of course you’re free, for “there is no
explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other
words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.”[1]
Drawing on Nietzsche’s famous yet typically misinterpreted line, “God is dead,”
Sartre concludes as an atheist (whereas Nietzsche had been a theist)
that there are no divine commands to ground ethical decision-making and thus
“legitimate our conduct.”[2]
The only thing a person has upon which to base one’s choices (i.e., plans and
actions) is one’s own subjectivity. We are “condemned to be free,” Sartre
writes, because the only basis of our choices, and our very essence, is our
subjectivity.[3] We
can’t get divine decrees from a god who is dead.
Lest we succumb to Patricia’s
paralysis of indecision, Sartre wants to assure us that his existentialist
philosophy is optimistic, for it “leaves to [mankind] a possibility of choice”
because we can invent ourselves through our choices without being tethered to
an external authority or tradition.[4]
More abstractly stated (by Sartre), “there is at least one being in whom
existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any
concept.”[5]
In making choices, we can’t rely on a pre-conceived notion of human nature as
good or bad. Therefore, subjectivity “must be the starting point.”[6]
This spells trouble for characters like Patricia whose subjectivity is elusive,
and yet amazing freedom to characters like Michel for whom subjectivity is like
a rock on which to invent oneself without being tethered to antiquated
crutches.
Drawing on Sartre’s
existentialism, we can go further, underneath or beyond (i.e., transcend) the
movie’s dialogue, to more fully take account of Patricia’s difficulty in
deciding on whether or not to be Michel’s girlfriend. Generally, a person whose
choices are based in one’s subjectivity must surely feel a sense of
responsibility for those choices once taken. We are responsible for what we are
as individuals, and this is in terms of the choices we make. “Thus,
existentialism’s first move is to make every [person] aware of what he is and
to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.”[7] As if this is not enough weight on one’s
shoulders, Sartre goes on to insist that the person is “responsible for all
[people].”[8]
This is quite a leap; whereas it is easy to accept that Patricia feels
responsible for calling the police to report Michel’s whereabouts because her
decision comes from herself—no god has decreed that she do so—that she is
responsible for everyone as a result seems more tenuous to me unless I have
missed dialogue in which she tells Michel that she made the choice not just for
herself, but also to show herself as a normative, or model, type of person for
others to emulate. Absent such dialogue, such a sense of responsibility from
playing a role in the ongoing invention of our species is either absent in her
case, in which she falls short of illustrating Sartre’s philosophy, or she is
unconscious yet moved by the role-model responsibility.
Sartre maintains that how other
people regard a person is important to how that person views one’s own
subjectivity. So how one presents oneself—what sort of person one is—is
important. The “absolute character of free involvement” enables everyone to
realize oneself “in realizing a type of mankind.”[9]
In choosing whether to accept Michel as her boyfriend or leave him, Sartre
would insist that she has a sense that she is choosing what type of woman she
wants other people to see in her. She and Michel have had sex. He very much
wants to have sex with her again; in fact, he seems obsessed with several parts
of her body at more than one point in the film. She surely realizes that having
sex again if they are a couple reflects on her as a type of woman. Sartre would
go further in contending that that being that type of person (for others to see
as such) and not another type (sex without being his girlfriend) plays a role
in the realization of mankind of a certain type.
According to Sartre, “(I)n
creating the [person] that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts
which does not at the same time create an image of [mankind] as we think [it]
ought to be. To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the
value of what we choose. As a result, my action has involved all humanity. . .
. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a
certain image of [mankind] of my own choosing. [The person] who involves
himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but
also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as
himself, cannot help escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility.”[10]
Each choice contains normative content in that a value is being created or
invented that in turn reflects how our species should be. It is as if each
choice of each person is reflected in everyone else and in the whole, and,
furthermore, that these are reflected, as in a gaze, back on the respective
choosers and thus informing their respective subjectivities. In short, an
individual person’s choice, even in whether to accept someone as one’s
boyfriend or girlfriend, carries with it a profound sense of responsibility
even if the person is not aware of it. Patricia seems not to be aware of it,
even in terms of what sort of woman she would be morally.
Perhaps the species-formation
“macro” aspect of the responsibility lies in what Jung calls the collective
unconscious. Even just economically, Adam Smith held that in a competitive
market, both buyers and sellers are fixated on their own respective
self-interests and are thus oblivious to the unintended “macro,” or common
good. Even as inventors of values from clean slates as Sartre contends, we
don’t see how the typical choices we make even in a day play a role in the type
of humanity that we collectively are inventing. Whether mankind is good or bad
is not preordained, and thus can only be the product of individuals making
plans and acting, for these in turn are essentially what we are, which
presupposes only our existence.
In conclusion, I contend that Godard suspends the movie, at least as a crime narrative, to present us with two distinct paths open to each of us as envisioned by existentialism. Michel is not afraid to choose, even though his decision to accept Patricia as his girlfriend (and wife?) is based on nothing but his own subjective opinion, which he must know is biased because he knows he is in love with her. Yet he does not waver once he had made the choice. This character provides modernity with a solution to the problem of the death of God. In contrast, Patricia unwittingly succumbs to the crisis of modernity in essentially being lost without external supports like religion or a moralist state. She is thus unable (or unwilling) to reach down into her subjectivity and pull out an answer. She doesn’t even know whether she is happy, and she does not realize her freedom. She can invent values, and thus the type of person that she presents to the world and can even impact the sort of species that humanity is becoming, but all of this eludes her. She is not an enigma; rather, she is a casualty of modernity’s casting away the past—the good as well as the bad. She is explainable as a character in terms of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. If we have nothing but ourselves to fall back on in inventing ourselves from nothing, and knowing that the world is watching and may copy (or reject) us, making choices may scare the hell out of some people, while others, perhaps a few, may have the determination and guts to go forward boldly into that night of nothingness, which is ultimately death anyway. At the end of the movie, Michel pays the price of Patricia’s unmoored subjectivity and her resulting fear and unhappiness. He is not afraid even of death, and in fact he may bring it on by running away from the police. That his death is his choice may be reflected in the fact that he closes his own eyes. Yet even so, he is stronger than Patricia, and he, not she, can be taken as a role model playing a role in the type of humanity that our species should be.
[2] Ibid., p. 13. Sartre may be misinterpreting Nietzsche here, for he was no atheist. Rather, his claim was that in admitted vengeance into a being of perfect goodness, that concept of God is discredited. This is not to say that the divine itself does not exist (i.e., the living God). Sartre might reply, however, that without a viable idea of God, we have nothing to fall back on.
[3] Ibid, quoted material.
[4] Ibid, p. 12.
[5] Ibid., p. 15.
[6] Ibid., p. 13.
[7] Ibid., p. 16.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., p. 41.
[10] Ibid, pp. 17-18
