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You knew this was coming, right? Like, if you’ve ever heard me unload on him (except why would you?) over the past 30-odd years, you’d realize there’s no love lost between us. I’m referring, of course, to Jean-Luc Godard, great cinematic pooh-bah and critical monstre sacre, whose every work I pretty well loathe, the whole damn filmography, and maybe, for all I know, even the putative “genius” behind the lens. Not that he hasn’t earned it royally, that personalized dissing, or at least the endemic irritation–self-infatuated, arrogant, an absurdly pontifical piehole who’s forever getting acolytes’ credit for being what they’d call “inventive,” “creative,” “deconstructive,” “an endless source of cinematic ingenuity,” and so on and so forth, even as he’s ritually haranguing you half to death, spewing contemptuous bile for at least the 50,000th time, in what’s probably the cinematic equivalent of waterboarding at Guantanamo. Though actually it’s not you he’s hectoring and harassing but (thank god for it) them, millions upon millions of not yous, aka the great cinematic unwashed, a crass Weekend menagerie of contemptibles and out-of-its who simply can’t (or, more likely, won’t) admit to the master’s genius, who’d probably rather watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation than endure yet another of his knee-jerking public rants. But who cares, since the objects of his scorn aren’t actually the people he’s condescending to address: just another case of “Good for thee but not for me,” an utter lack of complicity with the target oafs and churls. Talk about needles stuck in grooves … so what’s Johnny Guitar been up to lately?
On the other hand, let’s give credit where it’s due: for a close, probing analysis of what I can only describe as my “Godard problem,” perhaps nothing remotely compares with Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1988 Reader review (registration may be required) of the mountebank’s King Lear, his “unforgettable” (put whatever construction on it you choose) free-form riffing on the Bard. As it happens I agree with Jonathan almost 100 percent on just about every critical point he raises: obviously we’ve seen the same movie (which is good for starters; doesn’t always work out that way), and I recognize myself as the perennially resisting, problematic viewer he so thoroughly dissects. Yet when it comes to the foursquare meat-and-potatoes issue of, to put it baldly, “Is the film any ‘good’?,” then abruptly we part company: three smooching stars from Jonathan, whereas I’d have given it ZERO. And probably still would … assuming I’d ever see it again … which a pack of wild horses probably couldn’t get me to do.
