In Seattle, Goodbye to Language played at the most expensive theater in the city with one of the largest movie screens this side of real IMAX, the Cinerama. Yes, I was watching sub-internet-quality footage of a dog defecating in the woods while wearing 3D glasses and listening to somebody ramble about philosophy in Dolby Atmos. Such is the confounding nature of Goodbye to Language, a movie that seems to be a poor college student’s thesis about the nature of the internet.
As weird as Goodbye to Language is, this is the first Godard film which seems to be influenced by the television shows and web videos which are, in turn, indebted to Godard for the style they built upon. The VHS artists Everything is Terrible and Adult Swim’s late night programs Infomercials and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! are prime examples of pop culture’s similar experiments predating the experience of Goodbye to Language. The primary takeaways of Goodbye to Language can be boiled down to structure and form, where Godard is experimenting with both in order to deconstruct the medium.
Structure
Godard loathes traditional storytelling. As he got older, Godard became increasingly allergic to anything resembling a linear storyline or forward momentum. With Goodbye to Language, his allergy to a traditional structure is even more apparent as the “plot” is secondary to how he tells the story. The plot could be summed up as two couples walk around a house naked, have a connection to Africa, have a fight, experience domestic violence, and then separate; a dog is involved. There isn’t much that resembles depth in the plot. Looking for depth of character seems almost to be a fools errand, as the plot is even relayed obliquely.
Godard structures the film in 4 sections. The first section concerns one couple experiencing their scene of domestic violence in public, and the third is how that couple got there. The second section concerns the second couple experiencing their scene of domestic violence in public, and the fourth is how that couple got there. Some characters are repeated, such as an observant reader is in both public scenes. But, Godard uses the parallel structure with complete rigidity, asking us to spot the differences. Both couples have a naked walk through the house. Both couples have a discussion about philosophy while the man takes a very loud and wet shit on a toilet. Both couples have a fight while an old movie plays on the television. The same dog, Roxy, is involved with both couples. Yet, there are differences between the two. In the end of the third section, Roxy is left tied to a dock in the summer with the owners saying “We’ll be back.” In the end of the fourth section, the dock is empty in the winter.
The dog, Roxy, acts as a meta character in Goodbye to Language, invading both stories with lovable cuteness. She wanders around the woods, takes a dump on camera (like Daddy, like Doggy!), and becomes a sort of center for goodness. Her role in the movie constantly increases until she improbably becomes the main character, if only because the couples are irritatingly obnoxious while Roxy is so lovable. Even as the couples talk over footage of Roxy’s outdoor wanderings, we’re left to decide to whom we give our attention.
If the primary purpose of a Godard film is to have us examine stories in parallel, challenging our powers of observation and concentration as Godard throws Brechtian disruptions at the audience (more on that in Form), then we can look at Too Many Cooks, a short movie from Adult Swim’s Infomercials series. Too Many Cooks begins as the opening credits sequence of an 80s sitcom in the vein of Full House or 8 is Enough as the camera documents a family, The Cooks. Satirizing the credits format, it goes through many of the genre cliches, including smiling at the camera and concluding family photos on couches improbably set in the middle of a living room. Just as the sequence ends, a second, even longer, sequence begins going through more cliches but expanding into Dad’s office job, a black family, a shirtless fireman, and actual cooks in a professional kitchen. Then the credits go again as a cop sequence, and again as a G.I. Joe cartoon, and then a Dynasty rip-off, eventually including a sci-fi credits sequence.
Much like the dog, Roxy, is a meta character of Goodbye to Language, showing up in both couples’ stories, Too Many Cooks has its own meta-character. At the 29 second mark, a mysterious character is spotted in the background hiding on the stairs. Throughout Too Many Cooks, this meta character becomes bolder and bolder, showing up in other characters’ backgrounds, disrupting freeze frames, and generally being out of place, until he finally comes out as a horror slasher in the G.I. Joe credits sequence wielding a machete. For the rest of the piece, this slasher kills anybody who pops up with a name. By the end, he is the sole star of the credits sequences. Even though Roxy was lovable and the slasher is a psycho killer, they both have a similar disruptive arc throughout their respective pieces until they take over their movie.
Form
While it may seem glib that I’m comparing a new 70 movie by a French New Wave master to an 11 minute short, I challenge that Godard is challenging the internet video through his use of form. Goodbye to Language is filmed on five different digital cameras with varying frame rates. The information flies by very quickly in the end credits, but he films all the way down to 15 frames per second. Ostensibly, he’s experimenting with visual results in a big screen lab test. But, some of the work is grotesque and pixelated. If I hadn’t read the list, I would have guessed that large portions of the movie were filmed on a Nintendo 3DS and manipulated through some cheap manipulation software with limited resolution capability. Given that I saw Goodbye to Language on a very large screen, the pixelation becomes even more apparent than if you were to watch on your television, 3D-capable computer monitor, or even Nintendo 3DS (which would be a perfect release format for this movie).
Even though the low resolution seems to be a college student’s senior thesis, Godard uses planes quite interestingly as if the 3D experimentation, itself, was his primary goal. He seems intent on pushing the limits of 3D, even if it means he creates ugly or boring images for long stretches at a time. His use of section titles, for example, operate on 2 planes. The first couple is denoted as “1. Nature” while the second couple is denoted as “2. Metaphor.” But, the way Godard creates the title frames, the “1” is a big red number operating on a plane far in front of “Nature” which is rendered in plain white text on behind it. This is repeated with “Ah Dieu” (My God) and “Ah Language” throughout the film.
Several of Godard’s scenes are framed in a way to create the same sense of planar existence. People talk in chairs several planes in front of an important passing car. Spaces are separated out to create emotional distance or domination. The visual formality of the frames are constructed impeccably when Godard puts even a modicum of effort into the frame. Still, the formality of the frame is almost the work of a very gifted and rigid college student.
If Godard had stopped at the visual formality of the frames, the film would have unworthy of discussion. Godard knows this. If his target is the internet, then he is challenging us on how the youth tend to watch multiple screens at once. In the majority of his movies, he’s been interested in Brechtian interruptions of the medium, and he really puts the limits of film to the test with Goodbye to Language. One example is the use of 3D’s dual frame to deliver competing images in each eye. One example is one eye follows a naked woman’s pelvis while the right eye follows a naked man’s pelvis, coming together if you’re watching both frames simultaneously. Another instance is watching an act of violence in the left eye and an observer in the right eye until the images eventually remeet through a very slick transition. This is strictly experimentation on how you react to such imagery, and my head revolted against it.
More disruptive is Godard’s use of sound to disrupt the viewing experience. Characters talk at varied volumes. The soundtrack frequently mimics speakers with bad connections with dialogue jumping from left to stereo to right. Music will start and stop at a whim, sometimes with more disruption sounds. Godard is trying to make it sound like the theater itself is breaking, perhaps being a meta-commentary for how the internet is ruining the cinema. His use of flora and Roxy recall the proliferation of “cute dog” and wildlife videos on the internet. The dog taking a dump on screen seems particularly in line with the worst of YouTube. And, he concludes the movie with the sound of the viral internet sensation Husky Sings with Baby, implying that we’ll all go running back to the internet now that we’re doing with the movie.
But, Godard is very late to the game in many of these experiments, making the movie seem as much like an experiment on film as an old man critiquing the internet by shaking his fist at it. In 2007, the exploitation of recreated natural decomposition of video and film was explored in three different locations at the same time.
One of the experiments was in cinemas as the three-hour double feature Grindhouse. In the experiment, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez exploit the natural disintegration of film as it got played to create emotional responses to the various glitches, including having missing reels in each film. Both movies suffered from frame skips, bad splices, dirt and scrubbiness, all digitally added to the final product to create Brechtian interruptions forcing the audience to permanently remember they’re watching a movie.
Another experiment played out on television with the start of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! on Adult Swim. Tim and Eric created a show meant to look like found television from a hellish alternate universe. The creators of Tim and Eric digitally destroy their show to make it look like it was found on a worn VHS, including tracking errors and resolution downgrading amongst others.
Yet another experiment was the website Everything is Terrible, which deconstructed and reconstructed found footage from various VHS discoveries. Though the Found Footage Festival preceded Everything is Terrible by 3 years, Everything is Terrible focused on re-editing and the use of montage in order to create new horrific experiences from their discoveries. They would use tracking errors and sound replacement or drop out in order to intensify the montage of their videos.
The end of 2014 also brought a new episode of Adult Swim’s Infomercials series, which seems perfectly in line with Godard’s internet commentary. Unedited Footage of a Bear begins with a seemingly cell phone-captured footage of a bear in the woods while the camera holder whispers a narration. 30 seconds in, this is interrupted by a YouTube ad for Claridryl, a vague OTC medicine with a whole bunch of side effects. This ad takes over the length of the 10 minute short turning, once again, into a horror movie. This time, Bear is an existential horror where the mother taking Claridryl discovers a double who brutally beats her and runs her over with the minivan. Then, the montage starts as the mother loses it with a variety of sounds including a seemingly industrial track almost left over from the 90s.
Conclusion
Goodbye to Language is a mess of a film. The structure and form suffer because Godard had already started the ball rolling on where the forms already were by the time Godard was able to make this thesis statement. Which brings up the issue of how to judge this. The closest movie I could possibly compare this to, as a whole movie, is Schizopolis. Schizopolis is an experiment in form and narrative pushing the envelope of parallel timelines and experimental dialogue to their very edge. Amusingly, Schzopolis could be named Goodbye to Language as easily as Goodbye to Language could be named Schizopolis. The main difference between the two is that Schizopolis feels progressive while Goodbye to Language feels reactionary. Outside the formality of the frame, there is little in Goodbye to Language that feels new or noteworthy. I know that I just spent 2000+ words on deconstructing a deconstruction, but I feel that most of Goodbye to Language is an experimental essay about the sins of modern film watching.
Maybe I’m reacting to that even though he may not actually be saying that. Maybe I’m reacting to Goodbye to Language because I felt that it was the most headache inducing movie this side of Gasper Noe. While it caused me to think deeper about what he was trying to say, I ended up thinking he has nothing original to say about the form or modern culture. Even though there were images I won’t soon forget, I also won’t forget the headache I was left with.