Godard's Elvis
The new movie about Elvis is titled, “Elvis”.
It’s not Jean-Luc Godard—more on Godard after a few commercial interruptions—it’s directed by a fella named Baz Luhrmann and stars an actor with whom I wasn’t familiar with as Elvis and an actor I was familiar with, Tom Hanks, as Col. Tom Parker, Elvis’s puppeteer. It’s an earnest film in an occasionally spectacular kind of way.
The ‘theme-song’, if there was one, of the movie is the song “Suspicious Minds”, recorded in Memphis in 1969, Elvis’ last #1 hit, with the unforgettable refrain, “We’re caught in a trap, and we can’t get out…” The song’s a weird amalgamation of love story and nightmare.
I thought while watching the movie, and listening to Elvis sing, that what makes “Suspicious Minds” such a great song is that it could just keep going and going and going forever, a kind of endless soundtrack. Listening to Elvis sing “Suspicious Minds”, I could also see the sight-line from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Thelonious Monk to the Four Tops.
No matter what movie he was making, Godard would have made a much different movie than the “Elvis” Baz Luhrmann made. Once Godard got past the noir phase he started making thinking movies, movies much more about thought than about action. While watching the later Godard movies it seemed to me that I could turn off both the soundtrack and the sub-titles and make the story up myself—that making up the story was my responsibility, both a chore and a joy! I couldn’t relax during a late Godard movie, relaxation wasn’t the point, nor was entertainment; the entertainment, if there was any, was all in the thinking about what I was seeing and hearing, and making it make sense.
My dear late friend FD thought Godard and Hannah Arendt were the two most important philosophers of post-war 20th century. I’d argue with FD, especially disagreeing with his use of the phrase, post-war; ‘there is no such time-frame as post-war’, I’d argue, ‘it’s been one continuous skirmish after another’. But I was clearly on the wrong track; that is, my interpretation of both Arendt the writer and Godard the filmmaker was so obvious that FD had left me behind for other more complicated, philosophically nuanced positions.
The question of the human relationship to empirical truth, and an examination of what that relationship might mean in almost every conceivable human situation, was paramount in Godard’s work, though Godard preferred to scramble the structure of the question, the way-through, with ambiguities, mis-directions, non-sequiturs—one thing never leads to another in a Godard storyline. For Godard, the whole idea of ‘narrative’ was to somehow sneak up on truth, as if it was something no one had seen or heard before, so as to surprise it and then see what happened.
Whatever ‘answer’ that might be offered in a Godard film was never ‘the answer’; rather the answer was always caught in a trap that couldn’t be pried open or rescued by outside forces, but only within the puzzle of one’s own mind.
Carrots as brainstem: the mind of Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022).