#774: Alphaville

Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution

Jean-Luc Godard
Initial release: May 5, 1965 (France)

In the last decade or so, the cyberpunk genre has been having something of a moment. From the long-awaited Blade Runner sequel in 2017 spawning a new expanded universe to the revival of Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk tabletop RPG franchise, to Neuromancer getting a TV adaptation next year, it's a good time to be into cyberpunk. But every genre has an origin somewhere, and cyberpunk, like many genres, has no concrete starting point, only bits and pieces that introduce ideas that would later become commonplace. We can probably point to Metropolis as the seed that would grow into the modern cyberpunk genre, but things still remained in a prototype stage until the late 1970s at the very earliest. Along the way were films that provided the building blocks, and perhaps no film is more foundational than Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville.

While Godard was once a household name in film circles, today he's almost forgotten; if anyone remembers him at all, it's as one of the sources of the stereotypical French arthouse film. At least, that's how it feels sometimes; so much of our cultural memory has disappeared in a fog of capitalist amnesia, new generations failing to make connections with the past after being fed a steady diet of superhero fast food. But Godard's films are still there, and Alphaville is still a work of baffling genius.

Let's step back. The bigger picture: Alphaville is a French film, nominally science fiction but predominantly film noir in style. An example of the French New Wave, a movement within French cinema in the 1960s and 1970s to revolutionize narrative conventions and the filmmaking process itself, Alphaville is more poetry than coherent narrative, and indeed poetry plays an essential role in the film's conclusion. Aesthetically speaking, it makes use of very recent architectural and structural developments in 1960s Paris — glass walls, modernist lighting, concrete buildings, new highways — to give the image of a futuristic city. The protagonist is Lemmy Caution, or at least some version of him, the character having been a fixture in French thrillers and noirs (based on British novels) for some time, played by veteran American actor Eddie Constantine in a variety of sometimes conflicting roles. This time around, Lemmy Caution is a secret agent from "the Outlands," sent to infiltrate the science city of Alphaville. Under the watchful eye of Professor Von Braun and the iron fist of supercomputer Alpha 60, Alphaville is a technocratic dystopia where emotions, empathy and poetry are banned; only cold logic and reason are accepted. Violators are executed. In short, Alphaville is a miserable place to live, sleek and futuristic but cold and alienated.

While the basic plot is easy enough to follow, Alphaville as a film defies easy understanding. The language of the city is slightly absurd, and it's difficult to tell whether it's literal, or if it's the city leadership forcing new language on its citizens, a la Newspeak in 1984. Examples include the frequent use of the term "light years" to denote time, not distance; places outside the city are referred to as galaxies, but cities like New York and Tokyo are mentioned, and it's unclear whether "galaxy" means a city. And so on; it's not even clear when, exactly, it takes place: Caution is an American veteran of Guadalcanal, and when asked his age, hangs his guess on around 45, but differing lengths of time are given for things like when Alpha 60 was actually created. Is it 1965? Is it 1975? Is it the far future? I don't know and neither do you.

None of this actually matters. What's important here is that Alphaville is, by most metrics, the first cyberpunk film, or at the very least a prototypical example, establishing a number of ideas, themes and images that would become central to cyberpunk. While Blade Runner codified the cyberpunk detective trope, we can safely point to Alphaville as the seed of cyberpunk's ongoing fascination with film noir and noir tropes. The sinister master computer of Alpha 60, with its voice like an electric shaver trying to talk and sinister designs for humanity, anticipates later computer villains of a wide variety ranging from AM to Skynet to the voice of Overwatch in Half-Life 2. Alphaville's grim dystopia being brought to its knees by poetry anticipates a recurring theme in cyberpunk, that is to say, the punk side of cyberpunk, where love exists in defiance of whatever brutal order has been established and is often the weapon that brings that order down.

Or to put it another way: in today's cyberpunk genre, from Neuromancer to Blade Runner to Cyberpunk 2077, Ghost in the Shell, Shadowrun, Altered Carbon or Batman Beyond, all roads lead to Alphaville.