King Lear: After the End of the World

Staying in a comfortable hotel in that fictitious, composite Swiss town, William encounters another father-daughter duo, an American gangster called Don Learo (Burgess Meredith) and his daughter Cordelia (Molly Ringwald). William’s observations of and interactions with them, including his quick friendship with Cordelia, help him to rediscover Shakespeare’s King Lear. Meanwhile, his acquaintance with Pluggy helps to give his rediscovery of the play a cinematic dimension.

King Lear is a Möbius strip of realities and fantasies, of drama and life—because, in Godard’s performative view, a film of King Lear is inherently an act of rediscovery, and a film of the rediscovery of the play is also inherently a rediscovery of the cinema, which, as William emphasizes, had also been lost in the Chernobyl disaster. That’s why William’s encounters with Pluggy—Godard wearing a headdress of cables and ornaments—prove crucial: Pluggy has been holed up in his editing room for decades in an attempt to rediscover the cinema. When Pluggy is ready to conduct an experiment to this end, William shows up for it, as do Learo and Cordelia. This reinvention fuses both with William’s quest and with the very substance of the play King Lear in ways that become clear only near the end—when the rediscovery of Shakespeare’s work gives rise to nothing less than what William calls the “first image.”

The center of the film King Lear is the intense bond and mortal conflict of Cordelia and Learo, the irreconcilable opposition of a love that will not speak and a love that is unspeakable. Godard throws out most of the rest of the play; there’s no court politics, no war, hardly any other family business (Cordelia’s two sisters flatter Learo via telex and are never heard from again). Relying on a text by Viviane Forrester, “Cordelia’s ‘Nothing,’” Godard portrays Cordelia as not merely a silent innocent but an assertive agent of revolt—her silence is an active form of speech, an ardent resistance to her father’s regime of power.

Learo poses a graver menace to Cordelia than merely disinheritance, namely, the one that caused the rift between Mailer and Godard: there is the implication (and it’s only an implication) of an incestuous relationship between father and daughter. Godard draws this implication into a convergence of Cordelia with another young tragic rebel, one whose strength is associated with virginity: at times, Cordelia (endowed by Ringwald with assurance, fragility, and grace) becomes a modern incarnation of Joan of Arc, even speaking to William as the teen warrior spoke to one of her English interrogators in Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc: “You do not write for me; what you write is against me.” Joan’s prophetic mysticism itself converges with a supernatural thread that runs through Godard’s King Lear, both dramatically, in the recurring figures of antic young goblins, and aesthetically, in an associative mode of editing that joins the movie’s many plots and sidebars in a unified field of coincidences and visions, and in a sound world that slows down Beethoven string quartets and ambient noise into a chthonic rumble, includes a polyphonic underlay of fragments of Shakespearean recitations, and adds a constant chorus of seagulls crowing in a mode of metaphysical menace reminiscent of The Birds.

Throughout his career, Godard did more than risk ridicule—he seemed to court it actively, because his disregard for cinematic convention was laced with insolence and mockery. His contempt was as essentially political as it was artistic: he saw adherence to convention, whether as willful conformism or unchallenged habit, as more than an obstacle to aesthetic progress—he understood it as the inertia of the existing order. The prime element of derision built into his King Lear is of the notion that adaptation is straightforward—that the play is a given and that a proper adaptation uses its text like a script. His approach to King Lear defamiliarizes a classic work of art in order to restore its radical power, to make it shock as if new—exactly as he sought to do, constantly, with the cinema itself.

The postapocalyptic cultural wasteland that Godard fancifully dramatizes here is one that he was in fact inhabiting, at least inwardly; the movie is the most explicit and most dramatically literal metaphor for his long-standing assertion of the death of cinema. Obviously, movies were being made, yet even with his return, after years of more experimental work, to commercial filmmaking in the eighties, and even as he advanced the art of movies into new realms, Godard was obsessed with the idea that the cinema, of the classic sort that he had loved, no longer existed. One aspect of that idea is given voice in King Lear by Don Learo himself (played with gruff grandeur by Meredith, then nearly eighty, one of the great veterans of the classic era), a gangster of a distinctively Godardian sort: he’s writing a book, and Cordelia is his amanuensis. His subject is the interconnection between Las Vegas, with its gangland origins, and the modern-day entertainment business, and Hollywood. Godard’s King Lear reverberates with the notion that gangsters are among Hollywood’s exemplary subjects because Hollywood is an exemplary domain of gangsters—and that the corporatized industry lacks the vitality, however dubious, of its earlier generation of crude kingpins.

Yet Godard’s view of the death of cinema was an obsessive theme that went far beyond practical charges of corruption or decadence and even became a kind of cinephilic cliché, one that was both principled and self-serving. With this notion, he did more than merely look back to earlier glories: he scorched the earth of movies around him and presented himself as a lonely exile, a living martyr to his art, to the cinema itself.

Pluggy, locked in his editing room, delivers a long-gestating audiovisual manifesto on his main subject, the image—for which Godard borrows a text from the early surrealist poet Pierre Reverdy and renders it cinematic with his own extravagant examples created by his own playful editing. Pluggy also conducts an experiment to display his invention: a big room where images are projected from the back to the front, and where everyone in attendance sits facing them, looking in the same direction—in other words, a movie theater. The experiment is a success: he has a place to show images, if only they can be reinvented.

At the same time, the humor built into the grandiosity of Godard’s self-identification with the fate of the cinema didn’t escape him. Even in his movies of the sixties, he filmed the tragic deaths of his male heroes with an element of absurd humor, and, with King Lear, he brought that comedy to new extremes, matching, and foreshadowing, the unrivaled majesty of the film’s mournful outcome. (Keep an eye out for his toy dinosaurs.) Pluggy is endowed with a supernatural power to revive nature—and, in the process, the image—with his own two hands, but exhausts himself mortally from doing so. Pluggy dies so that the cinema may be reborn.

The noble absurdity of Pluggy’s death registers as a mere glimmer alongside the tragedy that arises from William’s rediscovery of Shakespeare’s play—and alongside the weighty role that the reborn cinema plays in that tragedy. The rediscovery of King Lear is followed by the creation of the so-called first image—the new beginning of the cinema—which puts on-screen what Shakespeare put into the play, namely, the death of Cordelia. The rebirth of the cinema, as dreamed by Godard, is more than the symbolic product of a filmmaker’s self-sacrifice—it’s the tragic death of a young woman, sacrificed both to patriarchal power and to cinema, which, for Godard, were inseparable.

In the theater that he invented, Pluggy delivers a monologue of exaggerated grief and moaning, declaring, with a wail, “Whatever you called it, reality or image, we fought for it, and by that, we are no longer innocent.” Those who enter the cinema are complicit in the inherent violence of its business and its stories alike. Godard liked to quote the (perhaps apocryphal) D. W. Griffith quip that, to make a film, all one needs is “a girl and a gun.” In King Lear, he reveals the dark implications of that fateful pairing. Tragic sublimity merges with guilt. The exalted image does more than capture life; it takes it.