An agent of an intergalactic power arrives in a totalitarian city on a mysterious mission, using a false identity as a journalist. The city is massive—so large, in fact, that its northern districts have a completely different climate than those in its southern half. The city is governed by an artificial intelligence that rules with a (metaphorical) iron fist: Public executions, staged as performance art, take place regularly.
The agent’s mission? Find the scientist responsible for the creation of the supercomputer that runs the city and retrieve or terminate them. And while he’s at it, find a way to destroy the artificial intelligence before war breaks out between the “Outer Countries” and the city.
No, this isn’t the plot of a novel by Iain M. Banks or Ann Leckie. It’s not even a novel—though it does borrow its protagonist from the pages of some mid-century pulp fiction. Instead, it’s Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, which uses the visual language of film noir to tell a story which, on paper, looks like pure space opera. All of which is likely why it’s still being discussed nearly 60 years after its release.
Or, to put it another way, Alphaville is a film that references intergalactic travel where there are no special effects. Its supercomputer is represented by a blinking light and a mechanical voice; the most unnerving sign of its authoritarian state are the numerical tattoos (or “control numbers,” as one character refers to them) that adorn the bodies of the titular city’s residents. The allusion to Nazi concentration camps here seems very intentional; the scientist at the center of the narrative has the surname “von Braun,” after all.
And that’s the other thing about the setting of Alphaville—stating that it’s set in the future or stating that it’s set in the mid-20th century would be equally accurate. There’s a kind of temporal flattening at work here—yet another way this film remains so singular.
***
Some cult films have a clear lineage, where you can see visual and narrative homages made over the years that followed. Alphaville isn’t like that—though the film has certainly remained in the public consciousness over the years. There was a pop band called Alphaville active in the 1980s and later sampled by JAY-Z; there’s a venue in Brooklyn called Alphaville where I’ve seen a host of punk and indie rock bands play shows over the years.
But it’s harder to think of a film that utilizes Alphaville’s big conceit—setting a futuristic story in a contemporary landscape and letting the audience do the math to bridge the gap between the two. The closest thing that comes to mind, for me, is the way that many of the guns in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet are emblazoned with brand names that recall their Shakespearean counterparts—“Dagger,” “Rapier,” and so on.
That said, certain elements of Alphaville will be familiar to those who have watched or read works of science fiction released in its wake. The alias that Lemmy Caution, the film’s protagonist, uses while undercover in Alphaville is that of journalist Ivan Johnson, who works for the news organization Figaro-Pravda. Throughout the film, viewers will find hints that the Outer Countries represent something of a fusion of rival 20th century powers.
There’s also the curious matter of the film’s English subtitles, which translate some of the cities that Caution references directly into English. It’s worth mentioning here that Caution does not actually say “New York” and “Tokyo”—instead, the cities he names are “Nueva York” and “Tokyorama,” evoking futuristic and altered versions of the cities viewers may be more familiar with.
That the protagonist is named Lemmy Caution is another way Godard and his collaborators allude to a kind of malleable reality. Throughout, Caution references other operatives with names drawn from pulp fiction—Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon among them. But Lemmy Caution is also the protagonist of a series of pulp novels, many of which were adapted to film. Actor Eddie Constantine played Caution in those film adaptations as well, though it’s fair to say that Alphaville is the only film set in this particular fictional universe.
***
Alphaville’s galaxy-spanning science fiction with no special effects is also in keeping with some of the film’s preferred themes. At one point, supercomputer Alpha 60 makes an almost metafictional argument about the nature of time. “The present is the form of all life,” it says. “Unless words change their meanings, and meanings change their words.”
It’s not hard to read this as a statement of purpose for the film—in other words, that this futuristic narrative is being translated before our eyes into one that matches with the present moment in which it was made. Essentially, it’s the equivalent of the tradition of performing Shakespeare in modern dress—a practice that goes back to Shakespeare’s own time. And there’s another line of dialogue uttered earlier in the film that also seemingly alludes to its temporal mash-up: “No one has ever lived in the past and no one will live in the future.” Why does the future look like the 1960s? Because for its characters, it’s as familiar as the present is to its viewers.
Buy the Book
Dead Country
We’re heading into “time is a flat circle” territory here, I realize. And it’s also worth noting that the film’s protagonist offers a more cynical take on Alpha 60’s proclamation. “I didn’t understand a word he was saying,” Caution says.
Still, that question of words changing their meanings—or vice versa—hangs over the film. Natascha von Braun, the scientist’s daughter, tells Caution that “some words I was very fond of disappeared.” (If the rumored film adaptation of Yōko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police is made, it would likely make for an excellent double feature with Godard’s film.) But the ways in which words are erased from the society of Alphaville—and its residents are taught to suppress emotion—adds an even more unsettling layer. Is this eternal present some bizarre side effect of Alpha 60’s regime? Characters do allude to “galactic space” and to governments sending “brainwashed agitators to other galaxies,” after all. This is a work of space opera—it just doesn’t look like one.
***
The cinematic juxtaposition of two time periods is more commonly associated with a combination of past and present. Director Julie Taymor’s film Titus combined elements from ancient Rome and fascist Italy to tell a story of the excesses of power. Director Alex Cox blended 1980s media and technology with century-old history to critique the U.S.’s foreign policy in his film Walker. And turning slightly to the world of prose, Michael Swanwick’s Jack Faust uses a retelling of the story of Faust to condense centuries’ worth of European history and technology into the span of one man’s life.
There are similar contemporary (i.e. mid-1960s) concerns afoot in Alphaville, from the allusions to World War II to an alarm over the effects of the workplace—“people have become slaves to productivity,” one character observes, in a line that’s just as chilling now as it was when this film was new.
In a 2015 article for the British Film Institute, Barry Keith Grant calls Alphaville “Brechtian science fiction with social satire and critique,” while The Guardian’s John Patterson called it “a sort of retro-futuristic noir that partakes equally of Raymond Chandler, Jean Cocteau and Leon Trotsky.” It might not be the space opera you were looking for, but it has a way of sneaking up on you—and, perhaps, making you wonder what other works of space opera might look like if given the same dramatic treatment.
Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books).
