BLOG #21: PROUD FRANCOPHOBE
My friend Camilla teaches at Pratt and they wanted me to pull up with a little guest lecture on a topic of my choosing. I decided to take an old Nazi punk presentation I did at Columbia on media transmission and applied it to fashion and style for the yoots. It went swimmingly; afterwards during their studio time a few people even asked me for my advice on how to go concept idea, which, honor. I also had someone tell me that I “shouldn’t talk about schizophrenic people like that because I have a friend who’s schizophrenic and he’s just a guy” with regard to a chapter on my favorite recent media theory book, The Technical Delusion by Jeffrey Sconce. Which, like, honor and a half. Hoes mad.
And a brief moment for One Battle After Another for reaaaaally demonstrating just how mad the hoes are. And another not so brief moment for all of the Ye naysayers that tried to cleanse him from the Wired festival in the UK. Hoes. MAD.
And hoes mad at Alpha, Julia Ducournau’s latest, too, allegedly. I went to an advanced screening and Q+A on March 16, and was kind of floored by how many movie people walked out of the theater like, “That movie was not a horror flick,” as if there was some level of top-down misinformation from Neon. And in talking to some friends I coincidentally ran into, they brought up a valid point: that Neon packaged the movie like a horror to get asses in theater seats. Which, like, yeah; that’s the game of distro. But, we all agreed, to read Alpha as horror is to misread it.
Alpha is a culmination of Ducournau’s best strength, in my opinion: calculated restraint. The film is a story about AIDS that never said AIDS, for example. The time period is revealed via a calendar tacked up on a bulletin board in a medical office. Wholly, the movie is about its titular character, processed over and over again by the world around her: her mother, her Algerian family, her uncle Amin who we later learn is dead of “the virus.” The virus itself—again, never named—turns its victims to a white marbly stone, their blood a thin red dust. We see Amin shoot up in the beginning of the movie with young-girl Alpha, we see him do it again at the movie’s climax, when we learn that the teenaged Alpha we watch so closely through the majority of the movie is a projection of Amin’s imaginary future where he lived to meet her adolescent self, as much as it is about teen-Alpha’s reality. She is 13, tattooed by a dirty needle at a party, and feared by the institutions around her as someone with a contagion as medical as it is social. The spread, to quote the media theory I learned in my MA, is viral, literally and figuratively. Alpha gets tested for the virus in secret by her mother, a nurse ad ally to those with the virus, and the mere thought she may be sick causes all those around her to treat her like she’s not just dirty, but deadly. Mysteriously, her heroin-svelte uncle comes to visit, and the two later embark on an adventure leading into a topsy-turvy time-tornado (we won’t say timeline, it’s jumbled by design) that reveals Amin to have been dead, his memory living on in Alpha’s mother via her daughter’s gowning social contagion.
One of my favorite scenes happens when Alpha is getting ready for a swim course in gym class at school, and after busting through a gaggle of mean white girls trying to trap her in a bathroom stall so she won’t get in the water with them, she smears her fluids (I forget if she rubbed blood on them from where she’d had blood drawn, or licked them?) in their faces and then gets in the pool. The mean girls jump in after her and in this really great sequence try and drown her, but while Alpha swims away, she hits her head and begins to bleed in the water. We see the red cloud form around her as the camera pans out, showing all the other kids in the pool clamber out like their lives depend on it.
This moment is as much about AIDS as it is about culture. Alpha and her family are Berber and practicing Muslims, and we know how the French feel about assimilation (Ducournau herself identifies as mixed; her father is white and her mother is Berber). Alpha’s isolation happens in the mixed environment of your run of the mill school, but the fact that she is dirty while others are not speaks volumes as to who gets to be clean in the society in the movie. Alpha has a secret relationship with Adrien (ethnicity unknown, but brown) who also got a tattoo by the same needle at the party; he didn’t stick up for her at school because he didn’t want to be looked at like he’s dirty like her. There is a gay teacher who is also dirty; when Alpha visits her mother in the clinic, she sees him with his partner, half-cast in stone, and there’s a level of visibility they get to have with each other, like a silent “you too?” Alpha ends up not being sick, the movie taking on the tropes of coming of age narratives (bullying, intimacy, et al) neatly situated within this system of othering. It doesn’t need to be expressed because it is felt; in Amin’s ghost looming, in Alpha’s isolation. It happened to her because it happened to him, with the subtext being that this othering extends beyond the film. Which, like, obviously it does.
I use restraint because Ducournau only ever “goes there” emotionally so as to avoid gratuitousness. That idea is, on its face, antithetical to horror as a formal film genre, a category traditionally based on shock, mangled bodies, fake blood and guts, and the like. Instead, Ducournau’s horror exits within the dynamics of the characters and the larger real world it contextualizes on the screen: it’s not about being scared because your insides are suddenly outside, it’s about being scared because you yourself are made to identify with the outsider characters. In Alpha, it’s Alpha and Amin and Alpha’s mother. In Titane, it’s Alexia (who becomes Adrien). In Raw, it’s Justine. These are young women whose bodies become the site of a great conceptual reckoning, one so great it tears them apart from the inside. The body is just the vessel for the idea, so to just look at the way Ducournau deploys it from a formal aspect is to miss all the great parallels that her heroines’ bodies represent in situ with culture.
In this essay, I will…just kidding. To take it one step further from my conversation post-movie with the pals I ran into, to read Alpha, or the rest of the films in Ducournau’s feature-length ouvre as horror, is reductive. I’d even go as far as to say willfully ignorant because movie people HATE to see a bad bitch with big ideas.
I see Ducournau and Leos Carax to be two sides of the same coin; making movies about France through characters plunged into complicated timelines and absurdist situations. Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge has similar impact on me as Alpha: characters feel powerfully, as the powers that be create circumstances that mediate their bodies, where they can live, who they can be. The circumstances reflect French culture, the body embodies (I had to) emotion. Where Ducournau differs in a really wonderful way, however, is how violence is never gratuitous, it is a vehicle to deepen emotion. Carax (I’m thinking Pola X, which I watched recently), does not do this; his mangled, afflicted, shit-stained bodies are more tools of absurdism, of an extreme kind of rage that is typically associated with male anger, and thus, power. Ducournau wants to get to the root of anger, the root of power. Alexia (Adrien) fucks a car and gives birth to a baby born out of a metal ball in Titane. Justine and Alexia crave human flesh. It’s not as simple as the shock. It’s a vessel for greater investigation about the world, and that, my friends, is what movies should do.
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I’ve always said I’m Francophobic as a reaction to the Francophiles in my life who suck that country off from the back every chance they get. Sure, their greatest Western flex is a tableau of a judgmental bohemian layabout chainsmoking at cafes and talking about their “ideas” all day while a benevolent government takes care of them. And that sounds pretty nice, I won’t hold you. But romantic? I dunno. I think about France’s history with war, with protest, with more resent notions that you must be “French first” and anything else second, and I am critical of that. I don’t aspire to do nothing, or to chill. Neither does Ducournau. She imposes with her films. Insists. You will not relax, you will feel all that imposes on you, in your body, emotionally. For her as a French woman; she is my favorite Francophobe in this sense.
I just wrote this whole thing while beginning ER season 10 and uh wow they’re really playin with me. Noah Wyle is sexier older tbh.
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