Kill James Bond! - S3E24: Alphaville

Starting point is 00:00:00 INTRO Hello and welcome to another episode, alle episode de 2A James Bond. Oh my god. J'ma- J'ma- J'ma- Hey just we fucking joined by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hi. Bonsoir. Bonjour.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Stretching GCSE French to its fucking limit there. So it's okay. Listeners you know that I don't speak French, but I do kiss that way. Pfft. I never learned to speak French before. The language of love I hear. We say anything else. The pitch up front.

Starting point is 00:00:54 August 9th, August 10th, August 11th. You don't have things that you need to be doing on those days. The thing that you need to be doing on those days is going to killjamesbond.com slash live and buying tickets to see us in London watching the Johnny English movies and suffering through them for you. That's right, baby. We will be recording three episodes of this podcast live in front of a live theatre audience, which is you! Be there! Please! RILEY Yeah, you could be there! They're so much

Starting point is 00:01:26 fun. I fucking love doing the live shows every time. ALICE It's alright, we're gonna have exclusive merch, we're gonna have us hanging out afterwards, probably, definitely on the third night, you're gonna have like, a room full of cool Kill James Bond fans, so please, come to this, buy the tickets. SONIA Many of whom, based on the last couple live shows, will be of a transgendered persuasion. ALICE It's true. fans, so please come to this, buy the tickets. in Keir Starmer's constituency, one of the Transist in London, at that given moment. ALICE You can leave the house, house, house!

Starting point is 00:02:08 RILEY Go outside, outside! ALICE Don't touch grass! Touch seats. Touch seats at Conway Hall on August 9th, 10th and 11th. RILEY Touch your keyboard and type killjamesbond.com slash live. ALICE Essentially touch your keyboard and type killjamesbond.com slash live into it. RILEY Caress your keyboard and type killjamesbond.com slash live into it.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Caress your keyboard. Also, based on the last couple of live shows, some people do be starting relationships at the Kill James Bond live shows, so like, buy a ticket, come along, meet someone you fall in love with, you never know. It's true. Imagine if you met your future partner at the Kill James Bond live show, and then listening to Kill James Bond was kind of like a thing that you did together. Wouldn't that be cute? Wouldn't that be so sweet?

Starting point is 00:02:47 Doing the kind of Tina Belcher anxiety noises. Also, if you can't make it to the actual thing, we have a live stream you can buy tickets for. Don't worry about that, forget about that. No, shut up, be there. Yeah, but like try to make it here first of all, like just like just if you're like in America or something, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Euro Spy season. And I think this is a film that's very much a film guy film, and I'll get into the kind of canonical implications of this in a minute, but I think there's a legible read of it as a Euro Spy film, I think it takes a lot from the kind of Euro Spy films like OSS that we've seen. And I'm really excited to talk about it with you guys. Yeah, I can definitely see... I mean, it reminds me a hell of a lot of Blade Runner, first

Starting point is 00:03:46 of all. Well, Blade Runner reminds me a lot of this, I think. Yeah, it's a really influential film, in the sense that a lot of the stuff in it, that you go, oh, it's doing the society screens, there's too many screens now, stuff, it's because it kind of invented a lot of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or was like, earliest to it, in the kind of sense of influencing a lot of stuff that's downstream of it, like Blade Runner, and so on.

Starting point is 00:04:08 Dark City, a little bit of the Matrix in places... Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, as far as the canon of these things goes, right, because it's so influential, because it's like, much written about, I have to emphasize, I am very dumb, right? So as much as I've tried to do the reading on this one, please understand, I know nothing of what I'm talking about, and may well be completely wrong about it. It's also, cause I hadn't seen this before, until you guys recommended it, and I like Goddard, I like Band of Outsiders, I like Breathless, I really like Vives-a-Vie, right?

Starting point is 00:04:43 But I'd never gotten to this one, and it's kind of interesting coming to it backwards, as it were, having seen a bunch of stuff that's been influenced by it and going, oh, it's cause of this. ALICE Yeah. It's interesting also that you say that you guys suggest it, because we've now kind of finished out all of the Eurospy movies that we had pre-planned, so for the next couple of weeks, if you want to get a Eurospy movie or something of the kind talked about, we're 100% taking suggestions.

Starting point is 00:05:10 If you throw them in the comments under this, I'll certainly read them. ALICE Yeah, we will take your submissions in a sense. So AlphaVille is more generally thought of as a sci-fi film, but it's a sci-fi film done in a way that differs from a lot of others, in that it makes no effort to construct sets, or props, or like, y'know, this is well before CGI, but there's no modeling or anything like that. ALICE I love that. I love that it's a sci-fi film, but it's just been like, this has been at the end, listen,

Starting point is 00:05:42 it's like, we drove all night through interstellar space and it's just a car on a highway. ALICE Yes! Yeah! Don't worry about it. NICOLAS The film is just like filmed in Paris, it's just like, yes, the towering Neo-Tokyo skyline, and it's just like Paris. ALICE There's two things going on here, right, with Godot, they usually are.

Starting point is 00:05:59 One of them is the thing that we're gonna get to about the kind of like, serious felt meaning of doing it this way, but the other is that he didn't have any money? And this was the kind of constant preoccupation. Why, if you look at stuff like Breathless, why it's acted like that is because they wrote the script the same day they started filming. The reason why Alphaville is the way that it is, or one reason, is because it's a kind of adaptation of a pulp IP that they didn't really care about to get the money to make it, and then they had no money and no time. Yeah. It was a pre-existing IP?

Starting point is 00:06:33 Interesting. Yeah, so this is, it's technically called a strange case of Lemmy Caution, and Lemmy Caution is a kind of like gumshoe pulp detective existing character who had been played by this American actor Eddie Constantine for a number of years and a number of films, which, you know, plausibly we could have watched on this season. RILEY It's true we could have. ALICE And what Goddard did was he kind of got the rights to it and went, I'm doing something that's gonna like change the context of this

Starting point is 00:07:02 completely. Having never like read one of one of the pulps this is based on, he essentially detailed a guy to read it, write a script, the script went to the backers, the backers gave them the money, and then they ditched the script immediately. It's just a kind of elaborate con in order to make this movie. Niamh Goddard It's incredible that back in the day you could just do that. Luke You could still do this.

Starting point is 00:07:22 Luke You could just lie to producers. Niamh Yeah, once! ALICE Well this is the thing, like, Goddard's career is kind of the ability to do this kind of career filmmaking, like, multiple times, somehow. And so this movie, Alphaville, is kind of like, it's shot on the run, it's shot entirely in Paris at night. It just kind of, that stands in for dystopian future, in ways we're gonna talk about. NARESH Yeah, it's so good that they spend the whole time being like, this is like the hyper-technocratic capital city of this galaxy, right? And it's all 1965, France, just looking awful. ALICE Structurally, this is the same joke as the

Starting point is 00:08:03 one I really like in OSS Sonde de Sept Rio and Ropponpà, where the woman is like, what do you call a dictatorship where there's like one news channel, the army control the politics, everybody's like walking around queuing and looking sad, and he's like, well France. It's the same thing, it's being like, well if you're gonna make a kind of dystopian sci-fi future it would look exactly like Paris in 1965. So, we begin...

Starting point is 00:08:30 It's also quite a hard movie to explain the plot of in a linear sense, which is a problem for a, we explain the plot of the movie in a linear sense podcast. We can give it a bash though. We start with some classic noir detective voiceover, where, let me caution, he's going by the name Ivan Johnson for the first two thirds of the film, he's like, oh, it was nighttime when I approached the suburbs of Alphaville, the wretched hive of scum and villainy. And we learn that Alphaville is, well, there's also signs outside it that are like, war,

Starting point is 00:09:03 peace, silence, logic, security, prudence. It's like a dystopian place. Suburb, he says, city... it's Paris. It's many things. ALICE It's a kind of like, galaxy of its own that is like, co-located with... actually, La Défense, the kind of like, business district, kind of like, docklands in London, of Paris, which was really newly built at this point, so these huge skyscrapers were going up.

Starting point is 00:09:30 And God, I was like, okay, well clearly I can use this weird alien environment to be a weird alien environment. And ostensibly this guy is a reporter from the Outer Planets, he says like that. He works for the Figaro Pravda, which is a little kind of like thumb in the eye of the Cold War. This is a thing that recurs as well. The name too, Ivan Johnson, is like Russian American. The Figaro is like a sort of infamously conservative newspaper, Pravda is the official Communist

Starting point is 00:10:01 Party of the Soviet Union newspaper. NICOLA I'm Bobson Dugnud, I work for the Telegraph Mirror. Well this is kind of the joke, is essentially that the two things have collapsed into one, although they're the same thing, they're interchangeable, right? I have like, really ambivalent attitudes about trans people. Yeah, I don't care, but I feel that very strongly. Yeah, radical centrism. But like, the Cold War is not still going in the future, but it has collapsed into a kind of synthesis, right?

Starting point is 00:10:28 RILEY Yeah. SONIA And he turns up at this hotel, and the hotel clerk... well, we're actually giving you more information at this point, listeners, than the film does, because the first hint that we get that things are maybe under quite tight control in Alphaville, is the hotel clerk reminds him that he needs to register with the Bureau of Civil Control as a visitor to town. You can't just come in, you need to go and tell them who you are and where you're staying. Which, like, how dystopian! It's a thing you fucking have to do now, you do it online when you check in to fly abroad.

Starting point is 00:10:55 ALICE It's something that you had to do like this when you registered at a hotel in France, as well. It's a plot point in, like, the Day of the Jackal, too. And, like, the whole experience, this whole, kind of, like, it's a plot point in, like, The Day of the Jackal, too. And like, the whole experience, this whole, kind of like, surreal, gracing experience of him checking into this hotel, beautiful shot of him going up in the lift, filmed from another glass lift alongside. Him being sort of like, getting all these intrusive offers of help in really stilted language, in the kind of, like, inane conversation. This is just, it's just checking into a hotel, kind of then, now.

Starting point is 00:11:29 It's like, this is the kind of modern world transposed onto the future. Right? Yeah. And the music is like, ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN the hotel and the location, someone tries to kill him. Like a guy tries to attack him. Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Hold on, settle on. Hang on a second. Cause first of all, he's walking to the hotel room and the entire time he's got a woman stood next to him, walking with him, going, are you tired? Would you like to go to bed?

Starting point is 00:12:16 Just like over and over again, just saying things to him, calling him sir the whole time, like he's not really responding. Three or four times someone tries to take his- his luggage and he like, really raises out of the way of them. Yeah. Also the hotel room itself is fucking gorgeous! It's beautiful. I mean, Alphaville sucks from like a dystopian point of view, but like, really nice accommodations.

Starting point is 00:12:37 Lovely, sweet. Um, so he says, I'm gonna take a bath, I'm tired. She helps him take off his jacket and tie. She then takes off her clothes. So she's just in her underwear and she's like, can I take a bath with you? Brackets, fuck. At which point he is attacked. ALICE Yeah. And a guy tries to attack him, and already, like, we have a lot of the kind of story beats of, you're a spy of James Bond, right? We've got like sex and violence and kind of like glamorous location, kind of. RILEY

Starting point is 00:13:03 It's a really interesting detail where as the goon is attacking him in the bathroom, the lady is just in the bath just bathing herself. She's not facing this at all. I am fascinated by the way this film depicts violence, right? Which is, a lot of the time it just doesn't, or it depicts it really badly. And again, not to do the thing of like, you don't enjoy it on as many levels as I do, right, but it's always this thing with Godot where it's like, is it done this way because it's done on the cheap because it's trying to say something, and the answer

Starting point is 00:13:33 is always both, right? It's like, partly it's because they didn't have the budget or the expertise to shoot really convincing fight scenes, but partly it's because the way in which these are filmed in stuff that actually does have that budget is not that convincing already, it's ridiculous. RILEY Yeah. You've heard us talk about the fight scenes this season. It's hard to make a convincing one. ALICE Even Bond! But Bond throwing the toaster into a guy's bathtub and electrocuting him is ridiculous, and it bears as little resemblance to actual

Starting point is 00:14:05 violence as this, where they're just kind of flailing at each other and obviously not even hitting each other, and there's weird jump cuts and shit. Yeah, they sort of flail... The guy chases him through three consecutive glass doors, which is very funny, and then Lemmy just shoots them twice and he leaves, and he just closes the door and they just don't talk about it again. Very much just like, that happened.

Starting point is 00:14:28 God, let's you know that this is meant to be silly, because as this is happening the music is like boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop- Anyway, at this point the lady gets out of the bath and Johnson slaps her across the face for no reason. ALICE But Bond! Classic Bond shit. You strip the conversation that might occur out of that, and you just have kind of... It's like watching, it's like dreaming a James Bond movie, right? Or a Euro Spy movie. NICOLA Yeah, that's a really good description, I see.

Starting point is 00:14:59 ALICE Every beat is there. It's just... ALICE It's pastiche, or more specifically what it is is detournement, but I'll get to that. And he says, who are you, what's your deal? And she says, my name is Beatrice, I'm a level three seductress. I'm like, oh, nice. They've significantly raised the level cap on being a seductress since the 60s, so you

Starting point is 00:15:16 can get a much higher level in seduction now, but back then that was really good, you know? Yeah, back then there was a three tier system. It's interesting that the only other Godot film we've talked about in this podcast is Vives Savi, a film about sex workers, because now I can get to say, huh, it's almost a bit like genre Godda has a bit of a thing about women and about sex workers, specifically. This will not be the first time I make this observation about this movie. This exchange also made me wonder what is a level one seductress. Oh, just like glory mole.

Starting point is 00:15:48 She's really not good at it. Yeah. Yeah, it's rubbish. Okay, do you wanna fuck? Damn, okay. How- just grinding my seduction by like striking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's just being a pickup artist, isn't it?

Starting point is 00:16:00 That's just a fucking numbers game. Level one pickup artist versus level 99 seductress. One dollar seductress. ALICE He has to, like, hold up a centerfold from a porn magazine, he shoots the nipples off the centerfold, and then says, not bad for a Guadalcanal veteran. And again, we are like... Fascinating. To dispose... Yeah! Is the Guadalcanal... you push the testicles into that? Is that muffing?

Starting point is 00:16:31 Yes. Yes. Thousands of marines and Japanese soldiers were muffed on Guadalcanal. On Guadalcanal. It was the first major land-muffing in World War II in the Pacific theatre. But yeah, this is a reference to a World War Two battle, right? And we're not told any more about this, it's just kind of dropped in there as a piece of like strangeness, right? To make you go, well wait a second, what, are they just sharing the name, or is this kind of like displaced in time?

Starting point is 00:17:00 SONIA Is he making a joke about being old? Like, ehh. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Depicting the future by depicting the present, and the sort of obsession with future, past, and present, and sort of like, time, is gonna be a big thing in this movie. I should also say, in the course of him driving into AlphaVille, we have not only heard his voice, we've also heard another voice. We have.

Starting point is 00:17:21 Which is a kind of like, more machine-inflected voice. Which is a kind of, like, more machine-inflected voice. This is, we'll later find out, is the voice of Alpha 60. But it just intones mechanically and menacingly. Yeah. This is your supercomputer, this is your master control program, this is your big brother, it's your big, you're fucking the big Victoria from iRobot, it's your big machine. ALICE This is your philosophical antagonist of the movie. RILEY Yeah. And which says, to begin the movie, sometimes reality can be too complex to be conveyed

Starting point is 00:17:55 by the spoken word. And throughout Alphaville, throughout particularly these first sequences, everything is kind of interrupted constantly by flashing lights and like beeps and morse code and the kind of intrusion of technology. And this thing of flashing light is something that I will come back to again, because I think it's important. But essentially, the first that we hear from Alpha 60 is that conventional modes of storytelling are outdated and we've had to invent new forms in order to understand.

Starting point is 00:18:28 It's worth talking to, I think, about who provided the voice of Alpha 60. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. It was a guy who was a French man who had laryngeal cancer, and so he had to speak with a mechanical voice box. So it gives him this really interesting cadence, and obviously timbre as well. ALICE It's so good.

Starting point is 00:18:49 SONIA That is, I mean, this is just like a really fucking fantastic performance. I can't remember this actor's name, but he's just like really fucking good and unique. I respect the fuck out of that. ALICE Absolutely. SONIA It's a game-recognized game, you know. ALICE So Lemmy Caution kicks the seductress out of his room. When he does, by the way, he says, the subtitles translate as, don't try your act on me, but instead of act he says, chinoiserie.

Starting point is 00:19:12 Your like, Chinese-ness, your Chinese thing. This is, again, two of the things Jean Le Godard has a problem with, women and China. At some point now have us watch Les Chinoises. Don't try your Chinese-eness on me, what? I mean, it does kind of fit with the kind of like insane racism of pulp fiction. Yeah, and show me a fucking futuristic dystopia if it isn't weird about Asia. Yeah, absolutely. It's where it starts. Well, it's not where it starts, it starts with like Sax-Roma, but...

Starting point is 00:19:43 Anyway, so Alpha-60 is also the voice of all the computers in town, basically. So this one he gets a computerized message that says, hey, you've got a visitor, this lady Natasha Von Braun is here to see you. And he's like, oh! He takes out a couple of photographs from his suitcase, and they're like, people of interest, people he's looking for, right? And one of them is this guy Leonard Von Braun. So he's like, oh shit, maybe she's related, right? So in comes Natasha, she's a fucking smoke

Starting point is 00:20:07 show. ALICE Anna Carina. RILEY Anna. Hello again. Welcome back. ALICE Yeah. N A Bonsoir. ALICE She had been married to Godard for a few years at this point. NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN Fair enough, y'know? Because this man spends a lot of these shots being, look how beautiful my wife is. Which I would also do if I was making a film. ALICE Yeah, this is kind of a wife film, and there's

Starting point is 00:20:30 a theory about that, which I'll get to. So he does a trick gunshot where he lights his cigarette lighter by gun, just to really re-emphasize the clownish nature of the violence here. NICOLA I'm like, dude, that's such a nice hotel room, they're not going to appreciate you putting holes in the walls. He talks to Natasha. Natasha von Braun, again, we're splitting the Cold War here. Von Braun evokes, especially for the scientist, Werner von Braun, the Nazi and then naturalized

Starting point is 00:21:00 American rocket scientist. And Natasha's quite Soviet know, quite Soviet, and also like, Tolstoy and stuff. Ivor Johnson. Yeah. And she says, I'm at your service while you're in town, the authorities have put me at your disposal, I'm here to show you around. There's an interesting thing that starts happening here, which is that rather than do typical shot reverse shot, they do do that, but both

Starting point is 00:21:24 actors are looking straight down the lens, and it cuts between them. I have a theory about this, which we will get to later on, at the scene that takes place in the swimming pool, but it's very cool. And she says, oh by the way, don't forget to go to civil control and register. And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna fuckin' not do that. Yeah. It's also worth putting down that she, I don't think it's she, it's either she or Beatrice double checks that there's a Bible in the hotel room, and that does end up coming back.

Starting point is 00:21:47 ALICE Yes. Yeah, Beatrice does. So she invites him, she says that, y'know, there's a big festival on, and she invites him to, like, a party, functionally. Again, totally normal interaction filtered through this strangeness. RILEY Yeah. And he says, okay, first I've gotta go and visit an old friend of mine, but I'll pick you up later, but can you give me a lift?

Starting point is 00:22:07 On the way down, she asks about the outer planets, so what are they like? We're not allowed to think about them here, but I guess I'm asking you because I'm curious. Again, this thing of like, this American pulp character has come from presumably America, New York has mentioned a few times for instance. No way they yuck! And this kind of like obsession, but also distance and being in this lockdown, strange society that can't quite access these things, it's pure trying to imagine the US as a Frenchman of the 60s, right? Mmhm.

Starting point is 00:22:39 Imagine a burger! She was just, you know, an hamburger. She also doesn't know what the word love means. I think it comes up and she's like, what does that mean? And he's like, what? There's a strange beat where he just chokes her against a wall for no reason? Wasn't a big fan of that. No. But again, it's evocative of the thing, right?

Starting point is 00:23:02 He gets part of a lift from her and then gets out to make a phone call back to his handlers. NICCOLE- There's another nice little detail where she says, oh, the address you're after for your friend, it's just past Heisenberg Boulevard, near Mathematics Park? ALICE- Yeah, on Fermi Street, yeah. NICCOLE- What the fuck? Doc? Fermi Street!

Starting point is 00:23:22 There should be a lot of people living on it, but where are they?! I can't communicate with them! The house is lying empty on Firmie Street, tragic. Everyone here's a nerd! The cop pulls over Heisenberg and says, do you know how fast you're going? He says, no, but I know where I am. And he says you're going 60 miles an hour, and he says, great, now I'm lost. Nice, nice.

Starting point is 00:23:41 So he stops up to make this phone call, in what is like this weird futuristic but also entirely grounded prison phone booth set, and we get one of the classic scenes of Guy follows you, calls into the phone, or Guy tries to kill Bond in the first act, again, to establish the stakes, a guy with a little lapel pin that says Alpha 60 on it, tries to kill him while he's making a phone call, and he just like, again, because it's not important to show it, he just like effortlessly kills him more or less off screen and bundles him into the phone booth, and goes to visit his boy.

Starting point is 00:24:14 Niamh. There's also a really nice moment in the car on the way there, when he asks Natasha about Professor von Braun, he's like, is Professor von Braun, is he your father? And she goes, oh, yes he is. And he goes, oh, so where might I find him? Also, like, what is he like? And she goes, oh, I don't know, I've never met him. And it's like, we've seen like this photos of Professor Von Braun around the town, like on the walls- Like Hitler or Stalin, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or King Charles III in a school. And like, so we've established this amount of some importance, but the way that she says

Starting point is 00:24:48 like, I've never met him, is a really interesting way of establishing that there's something sinister about Alphaville, that's like, she has never met her father, she has no idea what he's like, and that is like, just something that's apparently totally normal. She doesn't seem like, it's not the way that somebody now would be like, I actually never met my parents or I was adopted or whatever. She doesn't say it that way, she just says it as if it's the most fucking normal thing in the world. It's just like, I have no idea, I've never met him.

Starting point is 00:25:13 So he goes to this very grimy hotel, the Letoille Rouge, the Red Star Hotel, dropping some more communism in there, where his friend is a kind of, like, washed up alcoholic who is being ruthlessly exploited by the proprietors, who straight up tell him when he gets in, he has to get a loan of money to get his key back, and the guy stops him in the doorway, having handed him his key, right? And is just like, get yourself. RILEY Yeah, he's generally like, hey man, why haven't you committed suicide yet? ALICE Yeah, cause we need the room back.

Starting point is 00:25:53 like, yeah. RILEY Yeah. And this is, this is Dickson, who we establish as like an old friend of Johnson's, slash precautions. ALICE Another, another comic book character. RILEY Yeah. ALICE And this is, he asks after Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon. So these are clearly all real people within the thing, right?

Starting point is 00:26:14 This is a sort of class of people. RILEY They all hang out together. ALICE Yeah, exactly. SONIA And he says, Dixon, what happened to you? What's going on? Why did you never contact us? And we established that these guys are from the same organization, which we are beginning to doubt as a newspaper. And he says, you know, why didn't you kill Professor von Braun? Like you were sent here to kill

Starting point is 00:26:32 him just same as me, right? And Dixon gives us a little bit of background about AlphaVille. He says AlphaVille is like a super technological society. It's run by Alpha 60, which Professor von Braun invented. And they only obey the laws of logic, and 150 years ago, they got rid of all of their artists. And he says, lots of people here kill themselves, and the ones who don't are executed. On my notes, say it's just like being trans in Britain. RIley Yeah, Lemmy's like, man, why did that guy ask you to kill yourself? He's like, oh, lots of people do it, like, if you just move here and you can't really adapt to it, most people do.

Starting point is 00:27:10 ALICE Yeah, yeah. RILEY That's the bit he says. RILEY And he's like, what about the people that can't adapt and don't kill themselves? He's like, oh, the government does it. You're like, okay, cool. ALICE He goes at a Chinese method as well, which Jean-Luc... RILEY Again?

Starting point is 00:27:22 What? RILEY Calm down, brother. ALICE Yeah, brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so, he also, in the course of this conversation, Cauchon says, but his name didn't always used to be von Braun, right? He used to work at Los Alamos, and so now we're mixing things up a bit, and we're making him into Robert Oppenheimer.

Starting point is 00:27:39 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of these things have been transposed and mixed up a bit. Went by the name of Leonard Nosferatu before he was born, and they're really good. Also the whole time throughout this we're cutting in more flashing lights, right, in particular. And in particular a set of flashing neon signs which show E equals MC squared and E equals HF. So special relativity quantum

Starting point is 00:28:05 mechanics. Yeah, it just flashes up every time that Dixon mentions the scientism of Alphaville, it just flashes those two up on the screen. Yeah, hey, do you wanna, do you wanna, like, a mathematical description of physical truth flashed in your face? Which, we'll get to. And so Johnson's like, for fuck's sake, Dickson, pull yourself together, we've gotta get you out of here, we've gotta get out of this place, it's clearly like fucking everything up.

Starting point is 00:28:30 And Dickson's like, hang on a minute, first I have to fuck. Yeah, wait a minute, I've got a seductress level three coming here. And she seductresses the fuck out of him, while Caution is like hidden in the cuck cupboard. Although, as she's seducing him, he pops out and takes some photos, because he has a little 35mm camera, with a flash, a really obnoxious flash flashing light again, and just occasionally he will just like snap a photo of someone, he does it to Anna Karina earlier. And so, as this guy's getting killed, Caution is like, like a detective, like a voyeur, like a photographer, is like taking photos, right? And because we see the flash,

Starting point is 00:29:12 we're all like compromised as well, we're all also voyeurs. Which is why these shots are held sort of uncomfortably long and close. LWX And Dickson does a fucking heart attack. Mmhm. He does. And as he's dying, he says to Johnson, conscience makes Alpha 60 destroy itself, save those who weep, and dies. Tenderness. Yeah. And also, he finds a book under his pillow, which we'll get back to later.

Starting point is 00:29:42 So he gets in a cab to go meet up with Anna Carina, we get a little literary illusion where he says, I'm fucking journeying to the end of the night, okay. And he goes to meet her at her work, which is a place called Central Memory, and in Central Memory we're in a dark room getting a series of slides presented, where Alpha 60 is talking and explaining the relation of life and death, right? And says, no one has ever lived in the past, no one will ever live in the future, you're stuck in an eternal present, which is terrifying for its realness. It's also, by the way, perfectly legible as a cinema, this kind of environment.

Starting point is 00:30:25 ALICE Alpha 60 says another, well a number of other very interesting things too, it says that the grand truths of the universe are unknowable to human beings, humans can only know a tiny little fragment of it, and it also says that humanity tends towards its own destruction, and Alpha, is merely the means of that destruction. Um, there's a moment afterwards, which kind of illuminates what's going on here, where Kortion asks Natasha, like, I couldn't follow the lecture, like, what did you learn? And she says, oh, I don't fear death because life and death are the same thing. And I think what's happening here is kind of in a sort of big brothery way, Alpha 60 is trying to

Starting point is 00:31:04 introduce doubt into all things as a means of control, like, there is zero difference between good things and bad things, you idiot, you moron, says the wise supercomputer. And therefore, like, don't fucking resist or think about it, because you're just a dumb little fucking worm and I'm gonna fucking kill you. Yeah, shut up, post the fucking Kamala memes, just love it, enjoy yourself. Don't question. Yeah. Part of it is also about the confusion

Starting point is 00:31:26 of language, right? And the aloneness of being in the present, Alpha 60 said, we're all totally alone here, wretchedly unique. SONIA You just fell out of the coconut tree. ALICE I have a movie recommendation. SONIA It's Alphaville. ALICE Yeah, it's Alphaville. But also, if you're interested in this idea of obscuring of language and muddling of language, I think you'll probably enjoy the Yugo Santimos film, Dogtooth, which I saw before this, and

Starting point is 00:31:53 which is very, very influenced by it. So they leave, she says, like, good evening, comrade, so again, I'm gonna get some more Cold War stuff to her friend. And in the cab on the way to this party, this festival that they've been invited to, he calls her a pretty sphinx in voiceover, right, and that repeats a few times, because again, we're introducing this idea of, like, useless language. Language without understanding. Language without communication.

Starting point is 00:32:24 She doesn't know what the word love means, she doesn't know what conscience means, but she's like adept at, you know, displaying the language of this society, right? ALICE Yeah. It's almost like this place is fucking getting under his skin. Because, and this is a moment where I'm gonna fulfill my promised callback to the unnatural staring down the lens, when we arrive at this next location, and we'll tell you what it is shortly, um, their body language as they speak to each other about it is really unnatural.

Starting point is 00:32:50 He like faces directly away from the camera, turns 90 degrees, delivers his line to her, turns back to the front again. She then turns 90 degrees, delivers her line to his shoulder, turns back to 90 degrees as well. The longer he spends in this place, the more unnatural he becomes, the more his language breaks down, it's fucking getting to him. He's adapting. degrees as well. The longer he spends in this place, the more unnatural he becomes, the more his language breaks down, it's fucking getting to him, he's adapting! ALICE Yes.

Starting point is 00:33:09 Oh, it's so good. So good. It's good! So there goes this party, which she has said is at, like, one of the ministries, and this turns out to be the Ministère de la Dissuasion, the, like, Ministry of Dissuasion. Just as it says. ALICE My god. That sounds like a BDSM parlor.

Starting point is 00:33:23 ALICE Really, it'd be a really good name if you wanted to do a really meta-textual BDSM club night, which now I'm thinking. LIAM That actually rocks. ALICE Yeah, the Minister de la Dessuasio. So he asks what it is they're going to see, and she just says- LIAM Al Pacino's in there doing poppers. ALICE She says it's a light and sound thing. Which, again, we're sort of like, everything about

Starting point is 00:33:47 this has been cinema, right? Yeah. Yeah. But you've lost the word. Cinema, exactly. Like, this new form of flashing lights, this kind of truth 24 frames a second, truth 24 times a second thing, it's a form of communication done in flashing lights that is, like, technological and scientific and ordered, and has a kind of internal logic that when you expose it to, like, critical thought makes no sense whatsoever.

Starting point is 00:34:16 What did James Bond do to that guy? You know? ALICE And it turns out to be a public execution. ALICE Yes. RILEY Yeah, a series of them. ALICE It's almost as if this sort of medium you've created tends towards the fascistic... By the way, to get there, they get in a lift and they press SS, the button says, which

Starting point is 00:34:34 is Su-sol, like sub-basement, but also obviously the fucking Nazi SS. It's a subtle movie in a lot of ways, but I appreciate it. RILEY It is not a subtle movie in a lot of ways, but I appreciate it. It is not a subtle movie in a lot of ways, but I love it, absolutely. Also want to say, since we're about to see a scene of an execution, that as social commentary, France had capital punishment for another, I wanna say, 11 years after this movie came out, they were still guillotining people? What? Yeah, for real.

Starting point is 00:35:02 Like, the last guy they executed was in the 70s. Until the 70s? Yeah, in the 70s. Like, again, this is the thing, people don't know a lot of the time. RILEY The guillotine remained the official method of execution in France until the Defendant was abolished in 81, although that doesn't necessarily mean that they were killing people by guillotine in 81. ALICE Yeah, I think the last execution was 77 or 79.

Starting point is 00:35:20 RILEY The last, the final three were in 76, and two in 77. ALICE Yeah. So. Again, this is the thing, people don't know that France was like as repressive and as fascistic as it was post-war. ZOE I guess like, Emily in Paris has done a lot for the sort of reputation of the nation.

Starting point is 00:35:39 ALICE Absolutely. ZOE Nobody asked what she was doing in Paris. ZOE A glamorous fashion place, like the city of love, rather than like the city where we were executing people like Illinti in until 1977. The city where the police were like, you know, machine gunning Algerians into the Seine, you know, like, and that was the thing that happened in the 60s. So like, this is something that Goddard engages with allegorically, but it's not something

Starting point is 00:36:01 that made it into the kind of like popular understanding of France, which I think is a great shame. So this light and sound thing, Lemmy asks if he can take pictures and she shakes her head yes, which we'll sort of get to. ? As in she shakes it from side to side and it means yes. So he asks, you know, as these people are lined up to be executed, and you know, next to a swimming pool, what have they done?

Starting point is 00:36:24 She says they've acted illogically. Take that as a pretty good criticism of a criminal justice system in general, right? That's what we tend to punish people for. I twist the knife on this a bit more by saying, you know, isn't that what you do in the, like, outer countries too? Just to really drive it home, but like, so much of what we do in relation to punishment and execution specifically is to do with people who we want to punish because they have acted irrationally

Starting point is 00:36:50 or illogically. ALICE And the condemned people on the diving board before they're shot off in the back, protest. They say like, you know, friends, we've found the truth, like, this is not a good way to live, this society's fucked up, like, we need love, we need faith, we need to, like, come together, this endless focus on computers and logic, we're being dehumanised, this is fucking wrong, we shouldn't be doing this, bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang. ALICE They don't just get shot, though.

Starting point is 00:37:16 RILEY Mmhm. But as they're shot in, they fall forward into the pool and then a bunch of synchronised divers all dive in at the same time? ALICE Yeah, SS also standing for synchronized swimming, perhaps. Very funny. There's one where the guy gets shot and doesn't actually die off that, so you see him swimming and the divers catch up with him, and it's sort of a what does James Bond do to that guy moment.

Starting point is 00:37:36 I think they have knives, I think. I believe so, yeah. But yeah, again, synchronized swimming, like, the fascist calisthenics, the desire for order and synchronization and becoming more like a machine. Yeah, they fish the body out of the pool and administer the coup de gras if required. By the way, the entire film is in black and white, so we don't see the bloody water, you just have to fucking imagine that, and obviously can't help but imagine that. And fucking how is that movie in black and white, baby?

Starting point is 00:38:02 Because it's mostly black and white, and it's shot mostly at night and like Goddard instructed his cinematographer to only use like the available light. Like there's no additional lighting setup. So it's all like fast for the time films push process to try to get some sort of like image out of them. And it's so high contrast and the whole point of the movie is like the harsh lines between black and white, right? So like the whole film, just like the visuals of it, all comes together to push this message forward. Beautiful. You could imagine a night one cinematographer weeping. Please, please, please, night two, he doesn't set up, he goes home.

Starting point is 00:38:43 Again with the like the sort of double meaning thing, if you can't afford a spotlight, right? You get fast film and you just hope for the best. But also you're like making a statement with it. So on the way out, he follows Professor von Braun out. Who's here, by the way. Yeah. And he's been watching the executions. Doesn't say anything to his daughter.

Starting point is 00:39:01 He's just here. And he bundles him into a lift to try and talk to him, to separate him from his security. And Brown doesn't really engage with him at all, and Lemmy gets captured, and he gets beaten. But he gets beaten in the sense of, like, he's pushed from off one side of the screen off onto the other. GARETH Pretty good, yeah. ALICE It's, again, really comical.

Starting point is 00:39:19 And he gets, sort of, like, beaten up by the secret police, and sort of, like, taken into a car and taken to another building and then bundled into a podcast studio. Yeah. Meanwhile, Natasha has also been caught and they ask her if she's gonna cry and she says no of course not because that would be illegal and you still do see a tear come down. Crying illegal. Illogical emotions, etc. So he's taken to be interviewed by the authorities, and this is done by Alpha 60, which is, he's put in an interview room and there's a series of microphones on the ceiling which move around in quite a cool way, and lights flash up as the computer voice interrogates him.

Starting point is 00:39:58 And it asks him, like, what is the privilege of the dead? What is the distinction between knowledge and love? Do you imagine yourself as a detective when you jack off? Just ask him a bunch of really esoteric questions. What turns darkness into light? At which point he replies, poetry. ALICE Yeah, which is an unexpected answer from a guy who looks like a kind of gumshoe and played one as the same character in all these movies that played it completely straight. So he gives these answers, and clearly they confuse and annoy the computer, right? Because the next thing is he speaks to one of the scientists, who says, oh, I was trying to figure out what you were saying, but in the meantime he says to give you the tool,

Starting point is 00:40:38 essentially. Yeah. What I really like is the sort of shot reverse shots while they're doing this interrogation is it's a close-up of him when he's talking, but when Alpha-60's talking, like, is the sort of shot reverse shots while they're doing this interrogation, it's a close up of him when he's talking, but when Alpha-60's talking, it's the screen and behind it is a bunch of little tape decks and things, like this was an actual supercomputer that they used to represent him. And there's technicians walking around in there.

Starting point is 00:40:59 ALICE Yeah, one of them trips over a cable! RILEY And it's like, the fact that those technicians aren't characters, they're like parts of Alpha 60, it's interesting to me. ALICE Yeah yeah yeah, and the fact that one of them visibly trips is great because it's like, this is a completely logical society and there's a guy tripping over his shoes. RILEY I'm sure that Godard did not intend this bit, but the scientist that he speaks to looks exactly like Andrew Tate.

Starting point is 00:41:24 Which is extremely funny. RILEY Yeah, you said that to me before I watched this and I kinda did not see it. ALICE It's Andrew Tate. RILEY Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you afraid of sparkling water? Bobble bitch.

Starting point is 00:41:34 RILEY If you're drinking fucking still water, it's illogical. ALICE Throughout this society, and especially from here, there are objectified women everywhere, and by objectified I mean literal. As, like, Kautan comes into the room with the scientist, there is a woman in her underwear standing on the conference table being looked at, and the guy just pats her on the leg and she gets off and leaves. There's another one standing in a perfectly enclosed Perspex cube facing the wall.

Starting point is 00:42:03 Yeah. When they're going downstairs, they walk past a big perspex cube that's just got, like, a woman in. ALICE The women on, uh, the various women at the execution have, like, tattooed numbers to identify them on themselves. But so, this scientist kind of explains that Alpha 60 has, like, a kind of obtuse logic of its own, it sets itself problems that they can't understand, it solves them in ways they can't understand, and he's taking them down into a very loud control room where there's a bunch of tape decks and reel-to-reels running.

Starting point is 00:42:36 Yeah, during that period he asks about Leonard Nosferatu, who was the previous head or something like that, and he no longer exists, he was expelled to expelled to the outer countries, we have Professor Von Braun now. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. As in, the outer countries, well, he was expelled from the outer planets to here. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. And the system has like, taken on a life of its own, it solves...

Starting point is 00:42:58 It's interesting as well that one of the examples of impossible problems it sets itself is a train timetable, right? Which is something that, like, not only is just a joke about how difficult it is to organize trains, but also a fascism reference, like both to Mussolini and the Holocaust, I suspect. Yeah. Absolutely. It's like, it's trying to make the trains run on time. Exactly, yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:19 But it is struggling to. Yes, yeah, because fascism is like an ideology that, but not just fascism, ultimately there's this pox on every house, like fascism, communism, capitalism, are all kind of indicted here as systems of control that purport to logic, but ultimately end up failing on those merits, right? RILEY Absolutely. NARES Well, and devolving into war, which this society is, because they're like, oh, by the way, we have a plan. We are about to declare war on all the outer galaxies and destroy them.

Starting point is 00:43:47 Yeah. That's, that's what we're doing. Wouldn't be logical for you to do anything about this. So we're just going to tell you that. There's also like an interesting turnaround because it says, well, war is in humanity's nature, humans are going to destroy each other eventually. So we have decided rather than to do anything about that, we have decided to just make that happen.

Starting point is 00:44:04 Yeah. Like, we'll just to just make that happen. Yeah, we'll just destroy them then. Yeah, logically, yeah. There's also a couple of things here. First of all, they mentioned prior execution methods they've tried, and one of them is literally the cinema that kills you instantly. They used that as a mass execution method when the first refugees rolled into Alpha

Starting point is 00:44:21 Ville as it was becoming a scientist utopia, as where they were like, we had a theatre set up where you would get electrocuted halfway through a movie and all the seats would rotate like Professor Evil's shit to drop you into a fucking incinerator below. ALICE Absolutely. NICHOLAS I dunno, I think I'd know if people went to the cinema and never came back. ALICE Do you remember that thing that's like, um...

Starting point is 00:44:43 NICHOLAS KillJamesbunk.com slash live, you'd like to be electrocuted and dumped into an incinerator. ALICE Please touch your hand to the metal plate. Yeah, no, do you remember that thing that's like, because a computer can never be held accountable, a computer must never make a management decision? VINCENT Yeah, I remember that. I think I'm like the only person left who does. ALICE What AlphaVille has done, effectively, is to invert that so completely that what they're left with is, because a computer can never be held accountable, ONLY a computer should be allowed to make a management decision.

Starting point is 00:45:14 It's very evocative of a lot of stuff around AI as well, right? Where it's like, its processes are deliberately obscure to us, right? But we trust that they're logical so we're just gonna do whatever it says, however inhumane or ridiculous it is. It's funny the degree to which going back to these Euro Spy movies, watching movies from the 50s and 60s and 70s, you're like, oh every problem is the same problem still. They're all still so current, even though this is like a black and white movie from the French New Wave.

Starting point is 00:45:44 Yes. NICOLAS Alpha 60's like, put glue in your mac and cheese, eat one small rock a day, and I have burned an acre of the Brazilian rainforest to tell you this. ALICE And so while it does that, it generates an image of Shrimp Jesus, and it's like, I still can't figure out what the fuck you're talking about about poetry, so I guess you're free to go while I do. NICOLAS Yeah, I'm gonna figure this out, you can wander around, but we'll get you when I've got some

Starting point is 00:46:06 ideas. There's a great detail because it goes back to the hotel, and it evokes a Philip K. Dexter about a door, actually. There's a newspaper machine, you know the thing, you put in a coin, and you open the thing and you get a newspaper out, right? The thing just says, please put in like one coin, and it's just a perfect box. He puts in the coin and all it dispenses is a little card that says, thanks. That's the funniest fucking thing in the movie.

Starting point is 00:46:31 It's perfect! And like, just as an example of technology, but also, if you look at it functionally, what they've done is that's an automated beggar, right? It's a sort of part of urban life that has been replicated with technology. With technology? That's so funny. God, that's so good. You've seen that joke about Philip K. Dick, where it's like, Philip K. Dick novels are

Starting point is 00:46:52 just like, thus I digitally sew my wild oats backwards, and then the movie is just like, killer! Yeah! He can't name a short story, I'll tell you that for free. He goes back to the hotel. He goes back to the hotel. Oh, there's another seductress. There's another seductress, she's also level three, and she asks him the exact same questions

Starting point is 00:47:13 that Beatrice did, and he realizes that she has been tattooed with a number. And he sends her home. Again, some obvious, like, uncomfortable implications, not just in objectification of women, but also fascism, right? ALICE And Natasha is waiting for him. She also has a number. And he says, what about this book that I got from Dixon in the scene earlier on? What do you think about this?

Starting point is 00:47:38 And she's like, I don't get it, it's just gibberish. She's like, no, it's poetry. And now, look, he's underlined some of the lines in this. He's trying to send me a secret message. ALICE It's interesting, right? The book is Capitale de la Duleur, Capital of Pain, by the surrealist poet Paul Elwar. SONIA Also a great name for a BDSM night. ALICE Oh, stop making me want to start a BDSM night.

Starting point is 00:48:01 But, so... RILEY Could just hold a slice. ALICE I have found an Elwar quote that I think really ties the movie together, but he kind of reads to this, and poetry is a secret language, as a sort of way of obscuring and encrypting and then deciphering meaning. It's something that, like, she gets the concept of secrets, right? And we know that this is a city that has spies, that sends spies out into the world to try and destabilize, we know that he is one, right, but the concept of trying to contain a secret within poetry for artistic reasons is foreign

Starting point is 00:48:37 to her. She lives in this world, if you apply this to cinema, right, it's like, if you try and decrypt meaning from cinema, you can either kind of do it as a film critic, as someone who is coming to it from a sense of art and poetry and meaning in that sense, like Lemmy Caution would, or you can do the way she does it, which is the kind of cinema-syn ding, right? Where she's like, well that doesn't mean what it says, therefore it contains tactically useful information.

Starting point is 00:49:06 LWX She's like, the Jedi are the good guys, that's what it's meant to be, soul is good, everything he did in the series was fine, why is it woke? ALICE And one of the lines, one of the sort of false quotations from the Capital of Pain, is, we live in the oblivion of our metamorphoses, right? Which is interesting, not just in the sense of like, moving from past to present to future, or in the sense of like, men being changed, which is another one, but also like spies, right? Like the identity of spies being mutable. Or actors. What?

Starting point is 00:49:41 To get to the word conscience, and she's like, what the fuck? His conscience, what the hell does that mean? I'm gonna look this up in the Bible. Yeah, I was sure this was in the Bible. So she gets the Bible out of the hotel room, and as she starts looking at it, by the way, a bellhop comes in to deliver their food, and he swaps the Bible out in her hands with a new edition. And she looks for it and goes, ah, there's no conscience in here. No one here knows what conscience means anymore.

Starting point is 00:50:05 Oh well. One lump or two. She just immediately forgets it and her next question is about the two. Just goes straight back to like, you know. They have breakfast sitting orthogonal to the TV. Oh my god. Sitting very uncomfortably on the arms of the armchairs instead of like on them. So that they're in the shot, right?

Starting point is 00:50:21 It's a forced thing to maintain perspective. But also because it's making it fucking unnatural. It's like the fucking TV is right there against where they're reading and like, it's so zoomed in that you can only see the table and the reflection of the table in the screen, and I went, woah! Screens! Anything else, you would be like, society.jpg. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:42 But he fucking got to it first, so he's allowed. This is the first society.jpg, this is the one that they were all aping afterwards. So she's looking through this Bible, and he kind of cottons on that this is a dictionary, and she says, oh yeah, they change it all the time, over the past two or three months, some words I was very fond of have disappeared. And she kind of totals this word, conscience, she actually misgenders it, grammatically, I mean, she calls it le conscience, and he has to correct it. But this, if you've read George Orwell, you'll recognize this is kind of exactly what they

Starting point is 00:51:15 describe in that Newspeak dictionary. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Starting point is 00:51:24 Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. asks her about the poets and she says... wait, no, hold on. I'm trying to remember if this is the bit where she says that, like, oh yeah, by the way, Alpha 60 is just using its spare capacity to lightly oppress poets, but it sometimes uses them, because it finds them interesting. I think this is that point. Yes, it is. She does say that. Okay, well, that's fine. We can just leave that in, then. Keep my confusion. Yeah, she says, like, oh, I've heard of people who write nonsense before.

Starting point is 00:51:47 The front-end's effect or whatever. They sort of exist in this thing on the edge of town, this zone on the edge of town, Alpha 60 allows them to write nonsense and occasionally executes them. And thrive to fit into the mould of a podcast. For fun! Just in case they write something useful. Yeah. And she also, at some point, she asks why, which we have established is

Starting point is 00:52:05 a forbidden word. People in Alphaville are not allowed to say why, they're supposed to say because, because it's all about logic. And he says, you just use a forbidden word. She's like, no, I didn't, no, I didn't. And he says, Natasha, where were you born? And she says, this is in Alphaville, obviously. And he goes, that's not true, is it? You were brought here when you were a little girl by your father, Professor Von Brown. Do you remember that? And she's like, oh shit, yeah. And he's like, so where are you from? We're like Tokyo or Florence or New York. And she goes, New York. I remember that. I remember that. And she says, I remember like snow on fur in Broadway. And he's like, there you

Starting point is 00:52:37 go. You're not fucking from here. You've been fucking brainwashed. You've been adapted. You're doing weird body language shit and sitting on the arms of chairs and reading the Bible as a dictionary because the fucking computer's got in your brain! And you don't know what love is, and it's not the same as fucking! Another police are here! Yeah, he's like, yeah, she's like, oh, I know love, it's like, when you have sex, and they're like, no, no, that's sensuality, it's different, love is something else.

Starting point is 00:52:59 She says, love is when there is one smile for the two of us, which I thought was beautiful. I have a- I love poetry, man. They fall in love by virtue of her defining love, right? Pretty good. Like making her definition of love. One of which is, light that fades away, light that comes back. Fucking flashing lights, that's what cinema is! It's fucking- yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:22 The way she's- seeing a clearer image of the human form. That's what cinemize is! Photography! It's photography! It's all photography. RILEY It's light on silver, baby. What I really love as well is the sequence of them sort of falling in love as well is like shot over, just sort of like images of the two of them really close up, but massively

Starting point is 00:53:40 overblown with light, in contrast to the oppressive darkness that the entire rest of this movie has been. Just, really nice, baby. That's the light that's been missing the entire time. Love, you know? Human connection. ALICE And beyond that, the human condition is not to be stuck in an eternal present as Alpha 60 has it, but to, like film, to advance,

Starting point is 00:54:02 right? It's a kind of seeking of of nearness of closeness, right? Mm. Mm. Looking to the future. A normal filmmaker at this point would've gone, okay, you get it, you get the message, I'm gonna stop being weird now, and the last 20 minutes are just gonna be, he either wins

Starting point is 00:54:17 against the computer or he doesn't. But no! No. But no! God, I was like, I'm not done being weird, I'm gonna get even more fucked with it! I'm gonna flip into negative sometimes. Was that deliberate, or is that just like, the print was done being weird. I'm going to get even more fucked with it. I'm going to flip into negative sometimes. Was that deliberate or is that just like the print was fucked up? I couldn't tell. It coincided with motion sometimes, so I just chose to believe that it was legitimate.

Starting point is 00:54:33 I think it's deliberate. So can you tell me why when the police arrived to arrest him, she tells a joke, a long joke about a man who didn't pay for coffee? What the fuck was that? Because. So they get him in there and they go, when he doubles over, hit him. Right. And you're obviously like, someone's gonna like kick him in the nods

Starting point is 00:54:51 or whatever and he's gonna go over. But instead the method is that she tells like a joke. And I think it's gotta be something to do with like logic versus like humanity in a sense. Coursing him to double over with laughter. Laughing like this must be also illegal. And like, Vajoke is a way to seek out people, filter out people who haven't bought into the ideology.

Starting point is 00:55:14 ALICE It's excess sensory input, it's like tear gas, it's like pepper spray, it's an incapacitant, it's a tactical incapacitant, for people who are like... RILEY Yeah, it's the Monty Python sketch, right? ALICE Yeah, literally, yeah! It's the incapacitant, it's a tactical incapacitant, right, for people who are like... Yeah, it's the Monty Python sketch, right? Literally, yeah! It's the same thing, and because it's a society where people do not have, like, humor, because humor is illogical, like, my preferred definition of humor has always been the kind of, like, the unexpected, right? She tells him this joke, the joke is quite funny, but I, I almost don't wanna spoil it. Like, it's...

Starting point is 00:55:46 Yeah. Watch the movie Alpha. Yeah, she tells him this joke, and of course he doubles over laughing, and they like, grab him. So it's like equilibrium, where like, but without the emotion suppressing drugs, where if you tell someone a joke and they laugh, they must be a sense criminal. Yeah. Yeah, basically. Aaaaaah, okay, fuck, I get it, that's really fucking clever. Also, it's making me imagine

Starting point is 00:56:04 the Metropolitan Police just like, getting on a bullhorn and doing a Type 5 at a protest. Instead of just, like, using chemical weapons on children. ALICE So, they bundle him back into the same podcast studio, the same interrogation room, and... GOOSE Yeah, and obviously, because I've had some more time to think about this, like, some ideas. ALICE I've been fucking buffering about this.

Starting point is 00:56:25 You are a secret agent, Agent 003, making this whole movie one elaborate 009 scene. And yeah, you've been sent here to destroy me and to destroy Alphavell. But we're gonna destroy them first. He has a great line where he says, uh, I refuse to become what you refer to as normal, and once again I've written so it's just like being trans in Britain. A lot of this is very much... It absolutely is, because Alpha 60, with the kind of technological confidence, is like, well obviously we're gonna fight the war, we're gonna win the war, I've gained the whole

Starting point is 00:57:02 thing out in my head, and with the complete assurance of the Labour right, or any kind of authoritarian, it's like, you know, failure is impossible. Yeah, we've fucking mathed this out, right, and opposing it is just stupid for you to do. Yeah, and this is the thing, because of the value of stupidity, and the kind of valor of it, what Korshen says is the kind of tent pole for the whole movie, I think, he says, I will fight so that failure is possible. RIghty good. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:30 Yeah. And Alpha 60 is like, it's kind of a paper tiger in this sense, because it's like, you can't fucking get out the doors barred anyway, but because just breaking through the door would be illogical and cinematic and filmic and contrived, he just fucking kicks the door down. Yeah, because they haven't taken his gun. Yeah, he's just like, actually, it's alright, I got a key. They haven't taken his gun, because they're like, well obviously he's not gonna fight, because that would be illogical, and it's just like, no, I'm gonna fucking do this. He just walks out and fucking domes all three of them off with the guns. It's actually like, shockingly violent as

Starting point is 00:58:03 well, we see like, blood coming from from like their heads and stuff, and- RILEY Again, all shot very, I would characterize this strangely, dispassionately, you know? ALICE Yeah, yeah, absolutely. SONIA He asks Alpha 60 a riddle, which is comprised of some of the lines from the poems that were underlined earlier on, and we see it like beginning to consider this. RILEY Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:22 ALICE Poetry. RILEY Yeah, you hit it with the fucking... The logic bomb is what it is. And there's another one of those coming on, because he gets down to the lobby. Oh my god, I forgot the word for that. Carry on. Paradox. Motherfucking paradox, there it is.

Starting point is 00:58:36 Anna Karina is Natasha's being, like, dragged away, so he has to pursue her in classic detective fashion. And there's a car chase, and in the middle of this car chase, he just like, perfectly whips the car around and starts reversing, and the cop car's chasing him do likewise. Which is a perfect, like, oh, it's so illogical that they have to follow it, y'know? RILEY Yeah, that's so funny. SONIA That doesn't quite happen yet, though, because first, he steals a cop car to go to Professor

Starting point is 00:59:06 von Braun's house. He does. Oh great, the way he kills the... Yeah. Classic Pope shit, yeah. Yeah, when he arrives, he's got the cop at gunpoint and then gets out of the car and he's like, don't go anywhere! And then shoots him dead and goes, now I know you'll keep your word.

Starting point is 00:59:21 Because it's like... He meets Professor von Braun inside the big computer room, and he says, I'm going back to the outer planets, come with me. And then Professor Von Braun's like, what if you stay? We'll put you in charge of a whole galaxy, because we have a new weapon that makes nukes look fucking pathetic. There's like a really long pan over a big room-sized computer, which was a real computer, I think?

Starting point is 00:59:47 Yes, the Bull Gamma 60. Yeah, fuck yeah. They were playing Snake on that shit. They only sold 20 of those, but they're real. The whole keyboard, and lots of flashing lights with very invasive noises. Dials and shit. So cool. Like tapes going back and forth.

Starting point is 01:00:02 And the professor's like, men like you will soon be extinct. And he goes, ah, maybe, but I do also have a gun. And he shoots him. Yeah. He goes, well, here's the thing. You know, I do fear death, but I sort of deal with it kind of every day, man. So like, whatever. And he goes like, are you going to leave Alphaville or not? And Professor Mara goes, obviously I'm not going to do that. And he goes, fair enough. And just kills him off screen as well. It's a refuge, much like the movie in a lot of of ways in the kind of like well-worn tropes of like, pulp, but also in like the use of violence and like masculinity and all of the rest of it as a like tool of resistance against

Starting point is 01:00:35 authoritarianism. Then we have the car chase. Yes. Yeah. And the whole time around this, you know, as you sort of like leaving buildings, we see the film invert a couple of times. Like radiation. And a bit like, since we've introduced the mention of nuclear weapons, and we've introduced like, illogic and unreason and misrule into this society, people are fucking stumbling around grabbing at the walls and shit.

Starting point is 01:01:01 Yeah. Back at civil control. Like radiation sickness. Also referencing here, I wanna say, reminds me of a later novel called The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman. Right? Mm-hmm. Ah, the Philip K. Dick novel which was adapted into the film...

Starting point is 01:01:19 Computers! Yeah! Close enough, yeah. And he finds Natasha, who is also similarly affected and is just like fucking ragdolled. NICOLAS Yeah, people are moving different, they're falling over in the corridors, shuffling along the walls, because Alpha 60, having been unable to solve this riddle, is now coming apart, along with everyone in town, and along with the film itself, which is starting to flip into negatives.

Starting point is 01:01:44 ALICE Yeah. Because their thinking is so adapted to Alpha 60s, when they don't have that kind of logic, when the machine breaks down, so do they. And he gets her into the car, and they drive like hell for the Boulevard Peripherique, the ring road around Paris. And the thing that I really really love about this is, again, the dual use of this, right? On the one hand, it's cheaper than a set, right? If you did a spaceship it would look more contrived. But on the other hand, you

Starting point is 01:02:16 are imbuing a fucking ring road with as much meaning as you've been able to trick your viewer into giving you in a hundred and something minutes, right? And so she tries to look back over her shoulder, like, um, like, uh, you're a deetcher. Eurydice? Mm. Eurydice. I'm too used to the opera. It's actually Orpheus who looks back.

Starting point is 01:02:40 Yeah. I would absolutely look back. I gotta be honest with you. Like Orpheus. Like Lot's wife. She's pillar of salt mode. ALICE Lot's wife is exactly right, right? Because she's the sole good person to be found in AlphaVille, right? And everybody else has allowed themselves to become so inhuman that they're gonna be destroyed by forces greater than they can possibly comprehend.

Starting point is 01:03:00 ZOE Mm. Because they've been fucking. ALICE Yeah, and because they don't have the strength of will to create new definitions for themselves. They don't have the Wikipedia that discovers the individual self has been lost to the citizens of Alphaville. Which is broadly true, right? But it's better to say that they can't create new definitions. Mmhm. And he gets her to define love, he gets her to, without his help, buy on her own.

Starting point is 01:03:28 N- Yeah, yeah! Cause she says, like, you're looking at me like, there's something that you want me to say, but I don't know what it is, and he's like, I can't tell you, you have to get there yourself otherwise you're just as lost as the citizens of Alphaville. And she slowly puts it together that she loves him. LH- Yeah, and she says, je vous aime, I love you. The vu is interesting there as well, in the formal. There is a theory about this that I don't believe, but which has a lot of credence amongst film people. Okay, let's hear it.

Starting point is 01:03:59 Okay, so Gara was married to Anna Carina at this point, and their marriage was not going well. There's another much more grounded theory that his movie, Contempt, Le Mepri, is largely about his relationship with Anna Karina. But the theory is that this whole movie and its script is an exercise in getting his wife to say, I love you, down the lens of a camera to him. I do not buy this. I think that, yeah, that sort of detracts from all the things we've said thus far. It sort of makes the whole exercise meaningless. So I don't want to.

Starting point is 01:04:29 I don't think it's true anyway. But yeah, she discovers herself as an individual with desires, and they escape back to beyond Paris, right, beyond this inhumane, technological, rigid society, and into the night. ALICE That's an interesting story you tell about the marriage, because I did think it was one of the weaker points of the film that her self-actualisation at the end comes in the form of her declaring her love for a man. I was like, ah, a sentence that starts with I, very very strong for this carriage. Like, cool, great, I could have just left it there, frankly, to be honest.

Starting point is 01:05:05 Like, that she's self-actualized, it's tough to self-actualize more than that, but the fact that she's then like, love you, man I just met who's beaten me twice on camera, I'm like, ahh, okay, you whiffed it. ALICE Again, Jean Lagarde, right, has a... is a misogynist in an interesting way, right, I think, is the way that I wanna frame this. Because, I think he's a wife guy guy despite having had like, three wives. them in a more artistically meaningful way, right? Because he's constantly interested in the things that, like, compromise, uh, like a feminine expression of self, like, sex work in his view, or like, being objectified by, like, society, but what he wants out of

Starting point is 01:05:55 it, his idea of, like, an actualized woman, is one that loves him, one that is, like, artistically meaningful, but he can't imagine an artistic meaning for a woman beyond that. Niamh He's a chaser for cis women. One of these guys is just like, I'd love to cast you in something, I'd be really, really good to cast you in something. Do you wanna have dinner? Could we do an intimacy workshop or like a chemistry read? I'd just love to cast you in something. Honestly, now that we fucked, the studio actually wants to give it to someone else.

Starting point is 01:06:28 I'm really sorry about that. I'm gonna be nominated for an award for it, so. It's tough, right? Because I like Goddard's work. Going so close. So close to libel, and then backing away. You're fucking flying very close to the radar on this one. ALICE Uh huh.

Starting point is 01:06:47 Uh huh. No, no, no. The thing is, I like and I admire Gara's work, but like, again, this was a woman that he met when she was ten years younger than him, who, y'know, maybe he made his muse, but in a way that was deeply conflicted. And I just... As with Vives Viv Savin, it's something that we didn't really get the chance to get into very much when we talked about it because I was too busy screaming about how much I liked the cinema shots, and how hot Anna Karina

Starting point is 01:07:14 is and how much I want to look like her, I'm just kind of like, this isn't great either, right? And the fact that Alphaville, of God Us films, does maybe the most to suck itself off about truth and beauty and art and meaning, makes it kind of more apparent. Do you know what I mean? Yes. But of course, we, three supercomputer galactic brains, can actually objectively rate this film.

Starting point is 01:07:40 That's true. With the logic and power of science. We've come up with a form that evokes physical truth better than any that came before it. Maybe better even than cinema. It's called the Scum System. Maybe better than the gods. It stands for SmaM, cultural insensitivity, unprovoked violence, and misogyny. How SmaMy is this movie?

Starting point is 01:08:01 It's very pleased with itself. It is pretty pleased with itself. It is pretty pleased with itself. It's a difficult question because... Every fucking film is about cinema. Yes. Like, the first film was about a train, and every other film subsequently has been about making movies. Or about being transgender or about 9-11, yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:18 Yeah, yeah. Sometimes all three are... Bro, we've discovered the third kind of film! It's done in a star... and I think Godot has this thing, right, in general that's very- Inception! Inception is the film that is about being transgender, 9-11, and movies. Okay, beautiful. It's like, very easy to take the piss, right, because it has a sort of determined pose of

Starting point is 01:08:36 like, earnestness, right? It's the same kind of thing that like, if you remember the old Stella Artois ads, that's like, oh, difficult French foreign films where it's like, oh, people talking to each other in rooms in black and white and not looking at each other, and saying very portentous things. That's just, they only mean Goddard, right? It's quite an unfair characterisation of the new wave, because he was unlike a lot of his contemporaries, but much like the facts of the production, it has to be two things, right? It's both very earnest and also very knowing.

Starting point is 01:09:05 And I think, in that sense, it's like, Smarmy, yeah, absolutely, it's like a high Smarm school, but in like, two different senses at once, you know? It's like a fucking quantum super position, but anyway, like, five. SONIA Yeah, I feel like we give it a lot of points for Smarm, but also take some back for sincerity. ALICE Cinema sins ding five points. SONIA I was gonna- that might be a little harsh. I was gonna go four, cause it is, it also means it, like I don't think he's being pretentious

Starting point is 01:09:29 and pretending to have deeper thoughts about cinema, I think he means it. Could go four or even three. ALICE mmm, like, the points kind of don't matter, right? RILEY Four. ALICE Four? RILEY Yeah. Four, sure. RILEY Cultural insensitivity, now as far as as I'm aware, there are no characters of color,

Starting point is 01:09:46 which immediately makes it two. ZACH It's at least two. ALICE There's one black actress who is like, one of the scientists with von Braun. But she doesn't get any lines. ZACH That's still a mission. ALICE Yeah, Alphaville is like, deliberately racially homogenous, they mention integrating, I think it's like, German, Swedes, and Americans, just to really drive home the fact that, like, oh, this is fucking Nazi as shit, right?

Starting point is 01:10:09 So, that's kind of on purpose, but at the same time, it doesn't... The whole thing is to establish... He's got the weird shit about the Chinese as well, though. He literally says to Alpha 60, it's impossible to destroy an entire race, to put genocide as the highest peak of something that is illogical and impossible but is done allegedly for logic's sake, right? But to then not include anyone showing that to be impossible kind of undercuts the point. Also the weird Chinese bullshit, again, I don't have a watch, Les Chinoises. Goddard had a very weird feeling about Mao again, I won't have us watch Les Chinoises. Goddard had a very

Starting point is 01:10:45 weird feeling about Maoists, specifically. Again, French public discourse on the left. Mmm, four? cop, but at the same time he was a cop. ALICE He does? RILEY There's very little unprovoked violence. ALICE I disagree. I think you have to go higher, and I think you have to say that unprovoked violence, and by unprovoked I think you could also read illogical, is presented by the film as, like, the key tool that he has to resist, right?

Starting point is 01:11:16 RILEY That is true. Breaking down the door and killing everyone is, like, how he wins. ALICE Even from the first moment when the guy tries to jump in, which we later find out is like a psychological test, he gets the wrong answer by just killing him. It's the first thing that he does in town that really throws off Alpha 60, is to just fucking kill a guy. It's sort of like, not uncritical exactly, but it absolutely valorises that kind of thing.

Starting point is 01:11:43 I think at this point, we've seen a lot of films that, like, do unprovoked violence without commenting on it. I think this is one of the first, besides, like, Rambo, to be like, unprovoked violence is a societal good. And to say that with its whole chest. I wanna give it a seven. Like... Nah, I could go six on that.

Starting point is 01:12:02 Yeah, I think it's... Cause it also says love is nice. Yeah, you've taught me around, honest. Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I could go six. Fine, fine.

Starting point is 01:12:11 Let's do it, six. Six, sure. And misogyny. It's gonna be high, once again. Yeah, I think it is. Because it's the misogyny of, like, being alive to other forms of misogyny, of being alive to, like, objectification of women and advertising, or inequality in sex work, right, being like, well, but there is a kind of masculine, forceful

Starting point is 01:12:33 emancipation from that, that is artistic and truthful and meaningful. Yeah. I mean, there aren't any female characters in this that aren't sex workers. And that any woman would immediately construct her own desires around, right? Which is fucked. SONIA Part of his heroic, unprovoked violence is just slapping and choking women. ALICE Mmhm. Yep. SONIA Also, to cast Andrew Tate in the movie. ALICE Yeah. SONIA Come on.

Starting point is 01:13:00 ALICE You can't be giving him the work, yeah. SONIA Mmhm. ALICE Get him out of here. I think, I... I don't think it's discounting, although it might literally be in the sort of numerical sense, to say that we can forgive it some misogyny for being aware of other misogyny, if that makes sense? Mm.

Starting point is 01:13:19 What do we think? This is true, in the same manner that, like, um, sincerity takes away from... Mm. Yeah. from smarminess. But you're, I think you're right, Femme, that he's just like, oh, misogyny's very bad when other people do it, but when I do it, it's like, artistically cool. I mean, he's a chaser for sis women! Yes, yeah, he absolutely is, that's the best description of, like... It's terrible what, what, it's terrible how the government treats you, what does that

Starting point is 01:13:43 dick do? Like, it's... Not much, leave me alone. What does that dick do, brackets pussy. Like, he's the, maybe the only real, like, white knight there is. Mm, yeah. Is the society bothering you, Queen? What the hell does that pussy do? That's crazy.

Starting point is 01:13:58 Does it shit? Does it love? Do you think of yourself as a woman when you masturbate? Just like, two asses women? Yes! She's just like, I do! Like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I do Yes! She's just like, I do! Like, yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:06 I do, actually. Six? Yeah, I'd say six. Alright. This is a really high-scoring film for something I like. That gives it a total score of... Twenty. Yeah, no, I loved this movie, but it's an objective fuckin' measure.

Starting point is 01:14:19 Yeah, it's a really good film, but it is... It is... As bad as Thunderbolt. There you go. ALICE Well, I don't remember Thunderbolt. ALICE Well, in that way, it represents a kind of victory, right? Because in trying to use the, like, beats of James Bond or Eurospy, right, what he's done is hit perfectly the values, numerically, of James Bond. It's why it needed us, a James Bond podcast, to come and look at this like a James Bond movie and be like, you have made something

Starting point is 01:14:51 that's more like a James Bond movie than I think even you intended to. It's worse than Diamonds Are Forever. That sounds insane, but- That sounds completely mental, but I can't- listen, I can't lie. It's logic. The thing that I wanted to tie this together with, right, about sort of like, co-locating the thing and doing sci-fi without any like, sort of sets or props or whatever, is I found a line from Paul Elwar that says, it's about religion, actually, but I think it works very

Starting point is 01:15:19 well here. It says, there is another world, but it's inside this one. And I think that's the keystone for understanding alpha film, right? I think that's the way you pull it all together. And the way that you understand Goddard's view of cinema and cinema in this, is that it's all within the stuff that there already is, there's nothing new under the sun, and so in that sense, giving it a score that's entirely concurrent with the stuff that it's using to make that point, it kind of, it doesn't reflect what it is.

Starting point is 01:15:51 And I think in that way, this is the first thing to really challenge the scum system as a kind of part of film criticism, as kind of a mechanical exercise. So I'm really glad, in that that we've kind of, we've done it that way. We're all gonna be walking weird after we've finished recording the parts, gonna be like shuffling along the walls. Yeah, hanging off the wall. Oh shit. I'm really grateful that you showed me this film, because it's certainly a very like interesting

Starting point is 01:16:18 film, and I feel like I appreciate films more having seen this. I'm really glad. Criticism notwithstanding. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I had such a good time with this. I'm really glad. Criticism notwithstanding. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I had such a good time with this. I had such a good time. I'm so grateful to the Hogs for suggesting it, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is why I'm gonna apologize to both of you and the listeners for what I'm gonna make you watch on the bonus feed next.

Starting point is 01:16:39 Well, before you announce that, what we tend to do here is we try to keep the separation here. So if we're being really sensible on one feed, we find that we can get very silly on the other. So our last free episode was very silly, and then the last bonus was very sensible. This was a very sensible free episode. And what have you got for us, Abi? I have selected a film that is offensive, and bad, mainly offensive, it is the Mel Gibson comedy What Women Want, which is about a guy who accidentally develops the power to hear

Starting point is 01:17:14 women's thoughts. Hell. Hell. Fucking. Yes. Yes. I can't wait. If you can't wait either, subscribe to the Patreon, buy tickets to the live shows,

Starting point is 01:17:25 buy tickets to the live streams if you can't do that. Thank you for listening and we will see you next time. Bye everyone. Bye. Every so often we'll do an episode of this where I'm just like, I am a limpet clinging to the rising star that is November Kelly. I already knew that I was a limpet clinging to the rising star of Abigail Thorne, but it's just like, oh, both of them? Come on! Alright, KillJamesBond, you heard what the next episodes are, you know about the live shows, you know all of that, so I'm just gonna get straight in here and talk about our beautiful patrons. Patreon.com slash Kill James Bond. It's a great

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Starting point is 01:18:56 cunty mannequin in the third row, Captain Haddock, Style Icon, Ash, not Florida, Cayenne Belladonna is examining a Horus Minotaur. Update your charts. Hell, just the worst. Whitney Wolverine, Touchable Tips. Arthur, Sex Crime. Emerus, Trans Commissar. Sausage, Joyous Hoo-Woo.

Starting point is 01:19:14 I Boofed the Patches, but it didn't help. Well, keep trying. It'll work eventually. Steve Widdichins, Akira. Olivia, Arts Modular. Tops are precious, and if you do that to yours you're going to hell, Violetcyber, Isopod Gal, Lady Arianne, Annie Ruby, Rope Trick, Clarification, Mustered Cultist, Bronin, Alex, Noblesse Oblihy, John2089, Claire Voinz, Liz and Ash in Florida,

Starting point is 01:19:37 Wallscott, Connor's Cool Big Sister, Senchen, Ilniko, Corvid Cultist, Julia Cock, Quinn Valeri, Al Irwin, Philip Smith, Finn Ross, Wolfie is normal, Robert Greensmith, Cariat, Loz Piecock, Mega Combi, Abigail, Misidentified, Lemon, Pandora, Hex, Turfsy, Shit and Die Alone, Emily, Queen of Sloths, Josh Simmons, Lauren Bastin, Off to the Protests, I'll pick you up on the way, Zoe Sheppard and Talkative Tiger. KillsJSBod is November, Abby and Devon, our podcast artists by Maddie Pszczanski, our website is by Tom Allen, our producer is the wonderful Mr. Nape of Thay and I did that out of order and I got confused.

Starting point is 01:20:17 I'm gonna go have a sit down. I'll see you on the webinar's feed. Love ya. Go to a protest. Go to a protest. Go to the most extreme Go to a protest. Go to the most extreme protest you can go to.

Kill James Bond! - S3E24: Alphaville

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