In early1988, I litigated a case against Butcher Boy involving an industrial accident at a meat-packing plant. Butcher Boy, I think, was a tradename used by Lasar Manufacturing, a company that made meat saws in a suburb of Los Angeles. I traveled to Century City to take some depositions in a law office in that part of LA. I was recently divorced and, at loose ends, and wondered if I shouldn't leave Austin, Minnesota where I live for the big city. And, so, I spent a couple of additional days after the depositions were completed exploring Los Angeles. At that time, I had never been to California or the West Coast and, so, everything was fresh and new to me. The city seemed comfortable and, for some reason, the freeways were mostly empty and the weather was mild and pleasant; I recall the scent of eucalyptus in the air around the patio hot tub at the little motel in Brentwood where I stayed. (I have been to LA several times since that visit and the city has never seemed so welcoming and temperate on later visits.) One night, I ate in a Mexican restaurant a block off Sunset Boulevard and, then, decided to go to the new movie by Jean-Luc Godard, King Lear. The picture was showing at a cineplex in a mall in Beverly Hills. I recall the big, angular mall complex with a cavernous underground parking lot that was almost completely empty. I found the theater without any difficulty and attended the movie, projected in a small, Spartan screening room that gave the impression of being concealed in the large building at some great height above the ground -- in fact, it was only on the third floor of the complex. I was alone in the theater until just before the movie began. Then, some young people, perhaps three or four, entered and seated themselves on the other side of the small room. "Coming attractions" were already underway and, so, the young people -- they seemed to be college students -- were just shadows against the spray of light on the screen. I had no idea what Godard's film was about. I didn't even understand the titles, let alone the rest of the picture. I recall that Molly Ringwald played the part of Cordelia and that Burgess Meredith was acting as Learo (Lee-air-oo), possibly some kind of gangster. People stood by a lake. Some shots showed actors rambling around aimlessly in a small, shabby glade of trees under grey skies and there were muddy puddles on the trails. The soundtrack was a confusing cacophony of lines by Shakespeare, voices whispering off-screen, and bursts of music, either played too fast or too slow (or, as I now know, a Beethoven string quartet played backward.) I was utterly baffled. The students left before I could see them, at what they thought was the end of the movie -- in fact, there were a couple more minutes: the picture ends several times and, then, fitfully starts up again. I waited for the final credits, but there were no credits -- the movie just stopped and I was sitting in the dark and, then, the lights came up on the empty screening room.
Criterion has just issued a CD version of King Lear. The disc comes with several informative interviews and an appreciation by Richard Brody. (There is no actual on-screen commentary -- probably a wise decision since the film is so fantastically intricate that adding another layer of soundtrack would just make the movie confusing to the point of being unintelligible; in any event, Godard layers a sort of ongoing commentary on thefilm's images into his soundtrack and, so, an additional commentary would be weirdly redundant.) Even with these aids, the picture remains extremely hard to interpret and willfully perverse. Many of Godard's pictures of this era (1980 to 1990) are hard to understand on first viewing, but became fairly clear on a second screening, and, in fact, lucid and profound when viewed a third time. I'm not sure that this is the case with King Lear, a movie so overdetermined as to its systems of meaning that parts of it, I think, simply can't be deciphered. Godard has tried to put everything he knows about moviemaking into this film. The problem with the picture is not that it spitefully savages (and vandalizes) Shakespeare, but that it is a veritable encyclopedia, crammed with all sorts of riffs and rants on various subjects -- there's stuff about the history of Las Vegas, Jewish mobsters, lectures about cinema and so on. By the end of the picture, the film has moved so far afield that it has somehow become a movie about Joan of Arc. Inexplicably, Norman Mailer appears in the first scene with his actress daughter and they have breakfast, with orange juice, on a hotel terrace overlooking Lake Geneva. It is equally puzzling that Woody Allen is featured in the last scenes, reading a sonnet by Shakespeare and, then, stitching together film footage using a needle and thread on his editing machine. (This is an odd detail, insisted upon by the film's close-ups and eccentric mise-en-scene that seems to be justified on two grounds: first, Godard has a tendency toward what might be construed as mild anti-Semitism; Allen is stitching the movie together like a Jewish tailor. Second, the movie is nominally a post-apocalyptic science fiction film and, perhaps, after the end of the world, all editing machines are defunct so that movies have to be literally sewn together.)
Godard's King Lear never really progresses beyond the opening scenes in the play -- that is, Shakespeare's depiction of Lear dividing up his kingdom and, then, disinheriting Cordelia because she refuses to be as profuse in her protestations of love and affection as her treacherous siblings, Regan and Goneril. (In Godard's version, Regan and Goneril deliver their speeches by fax and never appear in the film; Cordelia is motivated to deny Lear's request that his "favorite daughter" shower him with rhetorical love, perhaps, because she has been sexually abused, even deflowered by the old man.) There is something typically French and insouciant about adapting Lear for the screen but omitting almost the entire play -- Godard stages a bit of the opening four or five pages and, then, a fragmentary speech from the end of the play; the rest is simply ignored. (I had a friend who had studied in Paris at a prestigious university; when he was required to write an essay at the University of Minnesota on Paradise Lost, he spent forty pages on the typography in the first six lines of Milton's poem and never went beyond that passage, a necessity for him since he despised Milton and hadn't read more than sixty lines of the poem. Similarly, all commentators agree that Godard didn't like Lear and probably never read the play at all.)
King Lear begins with typical Godard titles, block letters stating that the film is various things, but none of them an adaptation of a play by Shakespeare. On the soundtrack, we hear a phone call scratchily recorded between Godard and Menachim Golan, the movie entrepreneur who with his partner named Globus, financed the picture for one million dollars. (The movie, which looks beautiful, is incredibly low-budget -- everything is filmed in the environs of a hotel in Geneva where the performers stayed and near Godard's house; the shoot was about two weeks, with another ten days or so of supplementary footage added.) Golan complains that the picture is badly behind schedule and likely won't be ready for premiere at the Cannes Film Festival -- Golan kvetches that Godard already has missed the deadlines for Cannes' submission the previous year. Next, we see Norman Mailer in profile preening about having finished his script. He and his daughter discuss the adaptation which involves setting the action among mafiosi. They have breakfast. For some reason, the short scenes with Mailer and his daughter are shown in a second almost identical take -- I suppose Godard is foregrounding the notion that we are seeing a movie and must remember that everything on-screen is a contrivance. There is some confusion in the mind of the audience as to whether the young woman with Mailer is his mistress or daughter or both -- Godard exploits this uneasiness in furtherance of an incest theme that is pretty close to the surface in the movie but never explicitly stated. (Later, we see some spectacularly gory sheets signifying that the young woman has been deflowered although with horror-show gore.) After Mailer and daughter fly back to the United States, Molly Ringwald appears as Cornelia with Burgess Meredith who seems frail and a little discombobulated as Lear (or Learo). The false start with Mailer signifies an actual dispute during the making of the movie -- originally Mailer and his daughter were to perform the roles of Lear and Cordelia, but were reluctant to continue when Godard insisted on pursuing the incest angle with regard to the relationship of father and daughter. A title repetitively shown tells us that the movie is about the conflict between virtue (Cordelia) and power (presumably Lear). The reference to power with respect to the enfeebled Lear demonstrates that Godard has not real understanding of the play. A young man with an ugly punk-rock haircut is trying to reconstruct Shakespeare's plays from the post-apocalyptic cultural detritus. This kid is played by Peter Sellars, then, the enfant terrible of avant-garde theater. Sellars tells us that his name is William Shakespeare, the Fifth and that he is lineally related to the playwright. He wanders aimlessly around the hotel and the shore of the lake reciting lines from the bard and provides, as it were, the narrative integument as to the actual play here under consideration. Many of the scenes with Sellars are quite opaque -- for instance, we see him walking through the woods with young people trailing behind him and imitating his shambling gait. (As it happened, Godard was simultaneously shooting a jeans commercial and had a cast four or five young models, all of them very attractive, who were involved in making the advertisement. He employs them in King Lear as "sprites" or supernatural spirits. Accordingly, we see them dancing around in rooms where Cordelia and Lear are emoting or otherwise squatting outside the hotel in the rain. This intervention in the play, an example of Godard's opportunistic approach to film-making, is utterly confusing -- everything is shot scrupulously realistically, even in a documentary style, very lean and uninflected, and, therefore, there is simply nothing to explain why these model-handsome young folks are capering around. Unless, someone explains this to you, there is absolutely no clue that Godard has added a crew of sprites, after the manner of Midsummer Night's Dream or The Tempest to the action in Lear. The presence of these pretty kids darting about enlivens the movie's rather dull pictorial aspect, but it has nothing to do with King Lear or, even, any of the themes adjacent to the Shakespeare play.
The premise for the film's narrative is that the catastrophe at Chernobyl has somehow destroyed Western culture, although, also, idiosyncratically sparing the expensive hotel with its chambermaids and restaurants. As in Weekend, which Lear resembles, the problem is that of assembling the canon after the apocalypse. Godard is averse to histrionic melodrama. His post-apocalyptic world in Weekend looks like a bucolic road-trip in the country; the post-apocalyptic world in Lear is quite pleasant with good food, drink, and shelter. Cinema has vanished, but it is being reconstituted by "Professor Pluggy" played by Godard himself. (Pluggy is the cinema history version of Shakespeare V, both figures also similar to the people who have memorized books wandering around the woods in Weekend). Pluggy is a grotesque figure with electrical cords and adapters by the dozen braided into a fright wig. He's unshaven and smokes a cigar and talks like Samuel Fuller out of the corner of his mouth, his lips ridiculously contorted as he speaks.. Pluggy's English is heavily accented and Godard uses an intentionally rebarbative growl with the effect that half of what he says is completely unintelligible. Pluggy rants about film and, finally, reinvents cinema. But this is after several false starts -- in one attempt at reconstituting the movies, he has the audience facing a black void while the walls and sides of the auditorium are lit as if to serve as screens for the images to be projected. Godard's Professor Pluggy is supposed to be funny but the character is just deeply annoying and Godard is not a particularly good actor -- of course, wearing dreadlocks of film cables, there's not much chance that the character will be taken seriously. Two-thirds of the way through the movie, Shakespeare the Fifth gets gunned down, apparently by Edgar (played by Leos Carax). I don't know why Edgar killed poor Shakespeare, but, not to worry, the homicide takes place on Easter Eve and the character is resurrected as church bells sound in a village somewhere. Professor Pluggy maybe commits suicide -- this is what Brody thinks -- and is shown lying on the ground with his mouth still twisted awry as if to yap out of the corner of his lips. He also appears in later scenes none the worse for wear. It's at about this point that Godard tiring of Shakespeare, whom he has barely considered in any event, deviates into sequences involving an essay on the "image" by the surrealist poet, Pierre Reverdy, and readings from Virginia Woolf's The Waves, apparently motivated by shots of water lapping against the shore of Lake Geneva. And, at this point, Godard reimagines Cordelia as Joan of Arc, prophesying that in "seven years the Americans will be d iven out of France" -- the speech is adapted from Robert Bresson's film about the figure. At the end of the movie, Cordelia sprawls dead on a boulder; Burgess Meredith broods over the waters of the big lake holding a long gun like a lance. (Brody remarks that Godard, citing some other filmmaker -- ostensibly D. W. Griffith -- said that all a movie needs is a "gun and a girl.") The shot of Lear and Cordelia is suitably iconic -- it looks like an image from a Howard Hawks or Budd Boettcher Western. There are some slow-motion images of a beautiful white horse, an emblem for Joan of Arc apparently. The movie ends with Woody Allen stitching together a film with needle and thread.
The narrative scenes are interrupted by shots of famous art works (Gustave Dore and Fra Angelico's angels). In some scenes, a candle is held close to pictures by Goya, nightmarish images form the House of the Deaf Man where the artist lived in his last years -- I think these pictures have something to do with the question of old age and its indignities, afflictions suffered by Lear, the cinema which is posited to have died of senescence, and the demented Professor Pluggy. Godard, apparently, identifies with Lear -- he's the king of a realm of cinema that has been sold out to jeans' commercials and American blockbusters. Godard has the habit of choosing the worst takes for the film -- he shows Molly Ringwald flubbing her lines when she tries to recite some Shakespeare and poor Burgess Meredith, obviously confused, speaking a passage from Hamlet when he can't quite recall the lines from Lear.
The movie was ridiculed when it was premiered in Cannes in 1987. The tenor of the questions posed to Godard were basically, why do you make such lousy movies? Godard had a good rejoinder: he cites a statement by Picasso that if he were imprisoned and had no access to art materials he would paint with his own shit. Sellars was translating for the hostile critics, only a few of whom had remained in the theater. Godard's implication was that the state of film world gave him only shit to work with and so he had to make do with that substance for his pigment. I am deeply ambivalent about this movie and will have to watch it several times to see if I develop any actual affection for the picture. It is so dense and perverse as to unwatchable without someone to provide you with guidance as to what you are seeing. The surface texture of the movie is unremarkable although there are many beautiful shots. (Godard made the movie with a crew of two, a sound man and a photographer, but the picture is elegantly filmed and composed -- one shot in particular with Molly Ringwald rim lit against the whorl of white and silver hair of Lear's profile is startlingly beautiful.) The soundtrack is impenetrably dense, adding to the viewer's confusion. Godard is so obviously intelligent and works with such great intuitive grace that the film is certainly worth studying.
In an interview, Molly Ringwald observes that Godard was a very demanding director and notwithstanding the low budget, nothing was improvised: "you had to say the words just like he wanted," she recalls. Ringwald was 19 when she made the movie and she remarks in the Criterion interview that Godard made her look more beautiful than the version of her that appears in the elaborate made-up, lit, and costumed movies directed by John Hughes, things like Pretty in Pink and 16 Candles. For the garments in which she appears in the film, Godard simply selected things that she had packed for the trip. She says that people were always flying back and forth on the Concorde and that, at least, half the budget went to plane tickets. She didn't accompany the movie to Cannes and only saw it when it was briefly screened in Beverly Hills. She saw it at the Beverly Center where she says that there was a small screening room in a multiplex in the shopping mall. She recalls that the theater was either empty or occupied by one or two people. After those screenings, the movie vanished from sight and hasn't been revived until this recent Blu-Ray issued by Criterion.
