repost: Godard v. Dostoevsky

This time last year, I turned in the first chapter of my thesis, and to celebrate (and to nurse my ailing, pre-tendonitis wrists and forearms) I decided to take a couple of days of from typing. I wanted to relax and take it easy, to clear my mind of all the convoluted mental acrobatics required to make a the muddled mess of Lacanian thought into a (relatively) straight line of reasoning.

Q: How does a super-genius like myself choose to unwind?
A: French films and Russian novels, of course.

Jean-Luc Godard and Fyodor Dostoevsky, scaled to stature

First, le film du jour, Godard's Vivre sa vie, which stars the impossibly comely Anna Karina as the prostitute Nana:

dig the Voltaire in the background

Vivre sa vie has all the wonderful Godard tropes: crime, allusion, tabletop philosophy, episodic construction, and a great jukebox dance scene:

Unfortunately, it also has that other quintessential Godardian trait:

the vacant woman.

Her lines are delivered emptily (sans la motivation, sans l'effort), and with Karina this is especially disturbing because she and Godard were married during the early and mid-Sixties. One cannot help but feel a certain animosity leaking into the frame from the man directing the camera, an invisible contempt tinged with subtle personal acrimony and the not-so-subtle misogyny of the camera's gaze.

The clearest demonstration of this is the final scene, when Nana is gunned down not by one, but by two pimps who were in the process of trading her. The film ends abruptly, with a long shot of Nana on the ground as her former pimp makes his getaway.

C'est la vie?

Hoping to lighten my mood, I decided it was the perfect time to start Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Although I read Notes from the Underground a couple of years ago, which had great lines like:

"Vice begins with that in which true love finds its consummation."

It was Crime and Punishment, however, that instilled my awed, fearful reverence for The Dead Russian. I read it as an undergraduate (also for fun, also without adult supervision) sometime in the late Nineties, and a six-month period of mild insanity followed. In fact, I've never quite been the same since reading of poor Raskolnikov and the murdered pawn broker. Something broke inside of me while reading the novel (I mean this in the best possible way), and I wish I had taken better notes on the experience.

There was simply something different me after the book, something so fundamental as to elude my ability to say it, yet so profound as to inform every thought and action that came after it. The novel had lodged itself into my unconscious mind, and I've been unable (and unwanting) to shake it in the decade that followed.

The same thing happened the first time I heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; maybe it's something about dead Russians:

The dead Russians are beside the point.

The point is that I started reading of Mitya, Vanya, and Alyosha last night, and I found myself captivated at the end of the first chapter: "In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we."

I know this is true in my own experience. The gremlins and ghouls and monsters that populate and terrorize this world are acting out of ignorance rather than malice, out of fear rather than evil, out of forgetting rather than remembering.

And so, I humbly submit myself once more to the divine will of the degenerate master, let come what insanity may...

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One year later: the thesis was written; the book remains unfinished.