boredom is always counter-revolutionary

Nihilistic Conservatism

Rewatching Robert Bresson’s Le Diable, Probablement (The Devil, Probably 1977) recently, it struck me that this is a film out of time; or, more precisely, a vision that is neither today’s prehistory nor a premonition of tomorrow. By which I do not mean so much that it is either ahead of its time or behind the times. Instead, having chosen to distance themselves from an immediate engagement with the corporeal present, the film’s characters are suspended between the past and the future. They reject the status quo, but also they reject any alternative or any action against the status quo, resulting in an unhappy limbo of nihilistic conservatism.

I say ‘they’ but really I mean Charles, the central protagonist around whom the other (romantically) disaffected youths orbit. These others occupy a scale of disaffection, from the drifter who is paid by Charles to shoot him, to the more level-headed activist whose girlfriend has left him for Charles and now acts as the altruistic voice of reason, but comes across as an apologist for an order that he knows to be injust. None of these secondary characters can offer anything other than dilutions of – or distractions to – Charles’ existential doubt. All of the alternatives offered to Charles, he rejects but does not condemn entirely: he is critical of organised religion, but has a respect for the omnipotence of God; he engages with psychoanalysis but is uninterested in its proposals; he is motivated politically but calls the attendees of a gauchiste rally ‘idiots’; he hates life, but he also hates death.

This unhappy limbo is, in some ways, a fitting temporality to a film made by a reflective 70 year old director about teenagers anxious of their future: these people are located before and after the ‘main event’ of mature adult life (I apologise to any septagenarians reading this). Bresson tries to figure out what happened to the political radicalism, hopefulness and sense of urgency of French youth (and cinema) of the late 1950s and 1960s. The inflammatory anti-imperial and ultra-leftist politics of the previous generation has given way to the Seventies, with its post-’68 political disillusionment and despair in the face of ever worsening ecological calamity. Young people have become wary of the forms of the preceding generation’s radical politics: the groupuscles gauchistes and psychoanalysis; the former having become a parody of itself, and the latter institutionalised and motivated solely by profit. ‘The rejection of all politics’ is the only pragmatic alternative to the unresolved dialectic of a defeated past and an uncertain future.

No Future

But the film is not rooted to this moment, and I say that this film is out of time because now, in 2009, this film that presents itself as retrospective is recognisable as neither the past nor the present. Historically, it would make sense to say that this film represents a bygone age of political disillusionment that we have worked – or are working – through. Sixties political idealism has imploded into the post-’68, Cold War era, and the forms of political engagement have proven to be infinitely more complex than simple Left versus Right, gauchisme versus reaction.

Yet this moment of absolute despair, Charles’ nihilistic rejection of all politics, seems to have never quite arrived. During one of the scenes of three students watching projected footage of industrial environmental degradation, one comments – in that sloganistic, non-conversational style of speech of the earlier Nouvelle Vague films, but with the affirmational slogan reduced to end-of-the-world prophesy – that, ‘Once the [air] traffic has doubled, there will be no more blue sky’. Is this fear of the future now what we still battle with today, expressed in much the same language? We too imagine ourself – quite rightly, I think – to be at a precipice, at a point of no return; and a future that offers only unresolvable despair is always at the horizon, but which never quite arrives (although, the prevalence of the term ‘uncertain future’ is misleading: has the future ever been certain?).

You have to go along with it

Beyond the specifically environmental worries, it seems that the reason for the film’s sense of doom is that politics is now absent from the people’s lives. In asking where political agency now lies, Bresson uses two particular scenes to explore the two most immediate answers: that political agency lies with the mass, which is, roughly, the proposal of the first half of the film; or that political agency lies with the individual, Charles in the second half of this film.

Firstly, the bus scene – with Charles already having distanced himself from the Church and the political rally and radical bookshop milieus – voices what is not necessarily a lack of faith in the government itself, but a recognition that the government does not really govern at all. But if the locus of politics is not with that political body, nor is it with the masses. The people on the bus seem to imagine that the political People are always Other to themselves. ‘Obscure forces whose laws are unfathomable’. To be of The People, according to these passengers’ conception, is not an active role: ‘You have to go along with it’. Eventually, they decide that someone else is leading them by the nose. ‘The devil, probably’. Then, inexplicably, the driver of the bus stops and gets off. The symbolism is obvious: the people may be gathered together, communicating, conscious; but there is no driver, they are not moving and no-one is leading.

The second relevant scene is Charles’ visit to the psychoanalyst. Again, he engages willingly, with a dose of scepticism, but is ultimately unconvinced because this external form of authority can tell him nothing about himself that he does not already know (except, tragically, that the Greeks employed friends or servants to help them commit suicide). The psychoanalyst’s insights come across as dogmatic, reductive and predictable, and his diagnosis is challenged and undermined by Charles, who denies that he wants to die. ‘I hate life. But I hate death too. I find it appalling… I’m not ill. My illness is seeing too clearly.’

Charles eventually decides to kill himself. Yet he lacks even the motivation to perform this final for himself. As his friend – who has not once questioned this macabre favour – shoots him in the back of the head in Pere-Lachaise cemetery, it seems as though Charles is about to vocalise his first moment of clarity, however much it comes as an anti-epiphany. ‘I thought at a time like this I’d have sublime thoughts,’ he says, but his next sentence is cut off by the gunshot. ‘Shall I tell you…’ Then Charles is dead, and we shall never know what answer he had arrived at. His last words remain suspended in time.