Don’t Look Up

The film, Don’t Look Up, is a most interesting film not only for how it relates science to political economy, but also in that images of wildlife—Nature, as it were—are interspersed throughout the movie, and it is Nature, rather than our circumscribed, petty, and yet economically successful species, that continues on after a large comet hits Earth and our species is wiped out. In fact, that impact-event in the movie cancels out the one that really happened 66 million years ago by returning dinosaurs to dominance. The last scene in the movie shows some of the political and economic elite waking up in their spaceship and landing on Earth more than 200,000 years in the future only to be eaten by dinosaurs that look "cute." two of those stupid people had been in charge both in the White House and in business before the comet hits, whereas the two principal astronomer-scientists who warn of the coming comet are repeatedly relegated and dismissed by the political and economic elite until the president realizes how she can use them politically—albeit just until the political winds turn again and comet-denial is more useful politically to the president. Does this sound familiar?

For a species to have reached such plenty economically as ordinary people could live better than medieval kings had in Europe and yet be so petty and reckless, essentially squandering what the species had built up, with indifference even to an upcoming cataclysmic event, is what the astronomer-protagonist in the film is left marveling at just before his life, along with those of friends and family sitting around his dinner table, is instantly ended. “We really tried,” he says. I suspect that climate-activists may be saying the same thing regarding the abject refusal of enough of our species and its power-brokers to take combatting carbon-emissions seriously enough.

“Most social life seems a conspiracy to discourage us from thinking” about “what, if anything, can we do about death—now, while we are still alive?”[1] Even so, “there is a rare type [of person] for whom death is present every moment, putting his grim question mark to every aspect of life, and that person cannot rest without some answers.”[2] So it is that in the Katha Upanishad, Nachiketa beseeches Yama, the king of death, to answer his burning question on whether there is an afterlife. “When a person dies, there arises this doubt: ‘He still exists,’ say some; ‘he does not,’ say others. I want you to teach me the truth. This is my third” wish.[3] Although the answer is beyond the reach of human cognition and perception, Yama reveals that the essence of a person, one’s essential self, or atman, survives the death of the body. Nachiketa’s undaunted urge to know the truth anyway points back to how much thoughts of death are part of life. That Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is based on the assumption that the instinct for self-preservation is primary in human beings is yet another indication of how important it is to us to put off our own death for as long as possible.

So it is a “red flag” in the film, an indictment on human nature, that so very few people are thinking about the prospect of their own death even though the two scientists and then even the U.S. president have announced on television that a comet is hurling through space, heading directly at Earth in what is known as an extinction event. Initially, two television hosts dismiss the two astronomers who had calculated that the comet would hit Earth and be of such magnitude that our species would go extinct; those journalists are more interested in the romantic life of a young singer. Not even the U.S. President, or her chief of staff, are much interested, at least until after the midterms, for their party could lose control of both chambers of Congress. It is only when the political calculation changes that the White House decides to make a public announcement. This prudence is short-lived, however, as the president calls for the space shuttle to abort its mission to bomb the comet into a new trajectory that would miss the planet. An Elon-Musk-type, new-age CEO of a cell-phone company has so much influence on the president, no doubt from having made donations to her campaign, that she heeds his direction to abort the in-progress space-shuttle mission to bomb the comet to divert it from hitting Earth, and instead send risky, untested drilling machines to land on the comet in order to blow it into pieces, which would then presumably fall harmlessly to the Pacific Ocean to be harvested by the U.S. navy so tech companies using computer chips could profit wildly. The CEO is a businessman, even though he angrily rebuffs the astronomy professor for pointing out, “You are a businessman,” who thus has absolutely no formal education in astrophysics and spacecraft technology upon which to make the judgment to abort the mission that would probably have diverted the comet. Instead, his idea is to send untested drillers to land on the comet to dig holes in which to place bombs so the comet would blow up into profitable chunks. The astronomy professor is correct when he calls out the cell-phone techie, but the president sides with the latter nonetheless.

Regarding just how pathetic the president, her immature chief of staff, and the techie businessman are, at the end of the movie, the professor turns down the president’s offer to join her, the businessman and other elite personalities on a spacecraft that returns to Earth when it is again habitable. You enjoy your (obnoxious) chief of staff; I’m all set here, he tells the finally contrite president by phone. Faced with an imminent extinction event, the level-headed astronomer makes the judgment that it is better to die with friends and family then go on living with superficial comet-deniers for whom already having a lot of power and wealth, respectively, is not enough, and other people are to be used in line with power-aggrandizement and higher profits.

Science fiction is an excellent genre for bringing up contemporary controversies without setting off alarm-bells and thus having one’s message blocked by the opposition. The allusions to President Trump and Hilary Clinton, and the tech titan Elon Musk are hardly subtle. That the film was released in 2021 means that the relationship between the president and the techie CEO are not based on the later relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk. Instead, the president character is, I submit, based on Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The president in the film is engaged in “comet-denial” as a political slogan similar to how Trump was engaged in climate-change-denial during his first term, is a woman like Hilary Clinton in subsuming everything, even the destruction of the species, under political calculation, and easily forgetting to save her chief of staff in the end, perhaps as the Clintons left Brent Forster in their wake before Bill Clinton was president. The political-calculating, selfish president in the film is herself an indictment on American democracy, for presumably she was elected. At a certain point in the film, people need only look up to see the comet for themselves to realize that the U.S. president was lying. The comet in the movie, like climate change in our world, is real, and it is the political and economic elite that in both the film and real life drop the ball, even though the respective stakes are both huge. Of course, in both cases, the American people are to blame too.

It is strange, in watching the movie, how indifferent people generally are to even the possibility that they could die in a bit over six months. Even after Ivy League experts ironically favored by the White House confirm the calculations of the astronomy professor, the president decides to play political games rather than take the first possible opportunity to divert the comet. Then she decides to do the bidding of her techie billionaire donor and “turn lemons into lemonade” by recklessly (in terms of rocket technology) helping him to profit from the comet once it has been pulverized and felled to the ground. Lemonade cannot be made if the lemons are handled recklessly rather than rendered usable. Just before dies, the astronomy professor remarks on the species to his friends and family, “We had everything.” The implication is: and yet we blew it, because some powerful people in business and government wanted more. Even though the techie billionaire had developed a very advanced and financially lucrative cell phone, it is as if that man perceived himself as not having enough, and thus as needing more.

The desire for more is a good definition of greed. Even given declining marginal utility, there seems to be no base limit of wealth that is enough in terms of a person not risking even everything to profit more.  A rational person might realize that pushing the comet out of the way of Earth should be priority number 1, and that NASA and other space agencies around the world should be entrusted with that task, or else all current wealth could be lost, as you can’t spend it when you’re dead. It is as some powerful people in the business and political American elites dismissed even the 99.97% chance that the comet would smack into the Earth because greed and power-aggrandizement are instinctual urges that lie by distorting both cognition and perception. We “modern” humans may be so used to being so narrowly self-interested in accumulating money and power that we regard the indifference shown in the film to a catastrophic event to be surreal or even as too incredulous to even be believed in a film!

Even though the movie ramps up the explosive and sudden climax to keep viewers titillated in movie theatres, the same dynamic of indifference and denial applies as our species stews unabatedly in a hotter and hotter climate that one day may be very difficult or even impossible for our species to continue to live on Earth. This prospect having become realistic when the film was made, and definitely in June, 2025, when both parts of the E.U. and U.S. suffered from long heat-waves, should be enough to make resisting coal and other business interests and their captured politicians by making climate a high political and economic priority, but alas, too many people are like the people in the movie, who are taken in by the comet-deniers and profiteers, as if the masses of people were consisting of Nietzsche’s herd animals that are oblivious as they are being taken to the slaughter house. Presuming that we could just move to Mars or the Moon, and that we could even profit by doing so is the sort of thinking that does not work out in the movie, so the lesson is that it is reckless for us to deny climate-change and postpone cuts in fossil-fuel emissions under the assumption that we will be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat just in time when the time comes to pay the bill as species. To be sure, whereas the comet hitting Earth is a sudden event, the baleful effects of climate-change are gradual, yet accumulating, and thus human nature is less well-equipped to take immediate action rather than putting it off. Even so, the denial for partisan advantage and the proclivity of managers in companies to compartmentalize at the expense even potentially of the survival of the species even within a few generations are the same. Perhaps Nietzsche was correct in claiming that ideas are really instinctual urges, and reasoning is the tussling of contending urges—the most powerful of which reaches consciousness. Rather than being a check on passions, reason is itself a manifestation of instincts. The lesson of the film is that there is no guarantee that the instinctual urge that dominates others is in line with self-preservation and even the medium-term (and even short-term) survival of the species.

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1. Introduction to Katha Upanishad, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).
2. Ibid.
3. Katha Upanishad, 1.1.20, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).

From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza

The uniqueness of the film, From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza (2024), goes well beyond it being a documentary that includes an animated short made by children and a puppet show. Footage of a Palestinian being pulled from the rubble twice—one with the head of his dead friend very close to him and the other with his account that he could see body parts of his parents near him—is nothing short of chilling. Perhaps less so, yet equally stunning, are the close-ups of the legs and arms of children on which their respective parents had written the names so the bodies could be identified after a bombing. That the kids had dreams in which they erased the black ink from their skin because they refused to fathom the eventuality of having to be identified is chilling in a way that goes beyond that which film can show visually. Moving pictures can indeed go beyond the visual in what film is capable of representing and communicating to an audience. The same can be said regarding the potential of film to bring issues not only in ethics, but also in political theory and theology to a mass audience.

The movie is a collection of 22 short films made in Gaza by 22 filmmakers there who wanted to inform the world of the atrocities being committed there by the Israeli government. Interestingly, in none of the short stories is Israel mentioned by name. Only once is there a mention of “the occupier.” This may point to the depth of the hatred once the infliction of suffering and even death has reached a threshold of sorts. In the short story, “Out of Frame,” a woman says, “There is no longer a possibility of peace.” Not even a possibility. This may mean that a significant number of Gaza residents would rather die than make peace with Israel. This could also mean that in over-reacting in punishing a collective so much, rather than just the individuals who had taken hostages on October 7, 2023, the Israeli Netanyahu misjudged out of hatred and thus unwittingly triggered much more hatred against Israel. The prime minister obviously had not consulted with the European philosopher, John Locke, who had written that one rationale for government is that victims cannot be trusted to use fair judgment in acting as judge and jury in sentencing the victimizers.  Indeed, the descendants of victims of another century can themselves become victimizers, and the cycle can indeed intensify rather than dissipate, even for seven generations.

Two other ways in which ethics, political theory and theology can be discerned in the film also relate the two domains. In the short story, “No Signal”—this title itself resonating with the filmmakers’ intent to inform the world of what was really going on in Gaza—someone says that “martyrs” were being dug out of a collapsed building nearby. Throughout the 22 stories in the film, the dead are repeatedly referred to as martyrs. The sheer consistency may mean that the residents of Gaza were viewing the atrocity as being committed by Jews against Muslims, rather than as a secular political conflict between an occupier and the occupied. Mirroring the helplessness of a subjugated people not allowed to have weapons even to defend themselves from rogue (or organized) military commanders, the film reveals a sense of fatalism among all the fatalities. In the story, “Echo,” a woman on a phone says in the midst of bombing, “Get in a house; any house!” The other person replies, “God will protect us.” Well, obviously that was not true, considering the number of fatalities, so the insistence itself may reveal a sense of utter helplessness. Ironically, in his book on the human need for meaning, Victor Frankl provided as support the search for meaning by Jews in Nazi concentration camps in the mid-20^th century. So in the film’s short story, “24 Hours,” the man who had been dug out of debris three times, and had been stuck for hours near the dead bodies of a friend and his parents, could only say, as if in utter futility, “It’s God’s will.” The filmmaker could have gone further on that point—thus showing the potential of film to stimulate viewers to think theologically without being indoctrinated—by bringing in the obvious question of theodicy: how is it that a benevolent deity allows the innocent to suffer? A friend of the man could have said, “If it is Allah’s will, then how could it be said that Allah protects us from evil?” Contrary to the claim made by Israel’s president, I am assuming that not every resident of Gaza was culpable in the October incursion into Israel proper to kill Israelis and take hundreds of hostages. The intent of the filmmakers to show the world the physical and mental suffering being inflicted by the Israeli military for more than a year renders the theological question especially salient, especially as the recurrent use of the word “martyr” evinces a distinctly religious interpretation by a significant number of the residents of Gaza (though perhaps not all of them, as glossing over an entire collective is often contrived and thus artificial).

The psychological toll itself begs the theological question. In the first short story, a Gazan refugee in a camp near Egypt has a sense that her life is over. Her father had been killed by the Israelis in 2014, and more recently her sister’s entire family was killed in a bombing. In the short story, “Sorry, Cinema,” a filmmaker who was barred from leaving Gaza to receive a film award at a festival says, “Time has become my enemy.” In “Flashback,” a young woman says she keeps a bag packed because she might have to leave her house at a moment’s notice. “My mind stops because of the drones,” she says. In “The Teacher,” a man waits for his phone to be recharged but there are no unused sockets, water has just run out when he is next in line for it, and the same occurs when he is in line to get food. In “Overburdened,” a woman admits, “I am very surprised that we survived” walking north to get out of Gaza. In “Hell’s Heaven,” a man sleeps in a body bag that he took from a morgue because he has no blanket and it is cold in his tent at night. “Nothing remains of this city except the sea,” he laments. In “Offerings,” a writer says of infliction of suffering and death, there is “no recognition of human beings.” This resonates with statements in the media by Israelis referring to the Palestinians as dogs. Such dehumanizing sentiment had ironically been inflicted on the Jews in Nazi Germany. In fact, in the short story, “Fragments,” one of the charcoal drawings could be assumed to be of Nazi concentration-camp survivors being liberated. The psychological toll and the natural reaction of intense hatred may go beyond the comprehension even of psychologists.

The physical, psychological and even spiritual toll being inflicted by human beings on other human beings could bring victims to question whether God exists as a personal being rather than there being what in Hinduism is called brahman, which is impersonal ultimacy as conscious infinite being. In terms of political theory, both the human toll and the extent of bombed, collapsed buildings shown throughout the film may mean that the residents of Gaza were living in something akin to Hobbes’ state of nature, in which life is short and brutish. This state, however, pertains to the relation between Israel and Gaza, rather than between the residents of Gaza, as a sense of solidarity among them is evinced throughout the film. For example, the bread-lines filmed were orderly; people were not fighting each other for food.

In spite of Jeremy Bentham having written that the notion of natural rights (i.e., in a state of nature) is ridiculous, and Hobbes’ social-contract theory being short an explanation for why people in a state of nature would feel obliged to enter into a social contract instituting a government before it is up and running, the scenes of order documented by the film even though the people in line may be close to starvation may point to the natural fellow-feeling of which humans are capable even when a police presence is lacking, though the threat of an onslaught of Israeli troops may be a sufficient motivator to keep the peace while standing in line for food, water, and medical care. The filmmakers could have explored the peaceful atmosphere in the cities in Gaza—whether it was due to a shared sense of camaraderie from having lost martyrs, and thus a shared “brotherhood” as Muslims, a psychological or religious sense of futility and even numbness, or a fear that disorder would incite even more ruthlessness from interlarding Israeli soldiers. The question of whether Gaza resembled the Hobbesian state of nature could also have been explicitly asked and explained without viewers being lost in the midst of philosophical jargon and a de facto mini-lecture.

 

Breathless

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, in Godard's film, "Breathless," is overcome by existential angst.

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.  

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[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: The Wisdom Library, 1957), p. 22.
[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