The Politics of Sexuality in Jean Luc Godard's Films

Jean Luc-Godard's films have consistently been ones that challenges the viewer to address the fact that politics permeates every aspect of society, even those aspects that most would prefer to remain blissfully ignorant about. Godard's last accessible film before he entered his infamous radical Marxist avant-garde period, Pierrot Le Fou, is a film that burdens the viewer with the necessary discomfort of asking questions about how sexuality is as political as any meeting of Democratic Party pols gathering to discuss who they can find to blow a surefire election to the Republicans.

Pierrot Le Fou initiates with a scene that present the definitive statement on how people in this and the last century have been politically differentiated from one another as a result of Marxist-style alienation from the product they created. The way that those living since the time Godard made this film establish their own identify of self has increasingly been accomplished through the paraphernalia of consumerism and it is the buyers who have also been alienated from the producers of these consumer goods.

Fifty years before Godard made this film this division among people would have been depicted in ideological terms familiar to anyone who has ever taken a class in social theory: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The way that sexual politics exist within a symbiotic framework is reflected in the way that contemporary marketers and consumers are dependent among each other. All illusions of superiority are lost as each becomes both the parasite and the host in a bizarre example of a double symbiote.

As the lead character Ferdinand arranges to grace his presence at a party filled with bourgeois types that I would rather slit my wrists than meet, Godard sets the stage for his commentary on sexuality and the politics of consumerism in a scene in which Ferdinand declaims the advertising copy for woman's underwear almost in exactly the kind of manner that a Shakespearean actor would approach one of the many monologues by the very long-winded melancholy Prince of Denmark; a fellow that goes by the name of Hamlet.