Masculin/Feminin: Remasculating Capital

I know Godard is often treated as an embodiment of the spirit of the 60's, but I see Masculin/Féminin as a critique of the phony progressivism of his day, in particular, of the ideology of sexual liberation. Very much in the spirit of Michel Foucault's critique of the 'repression hypothesis', the view that sex is repressed, that this repression plays a fundamental role in the social and political subordination of human beings, and that the history of the 20th century is that of the liberation of sexuality which is a key factor in political liberation.

Two key criticisms emerge. First, sexual liberation is shown to have no connection with political liberation (a great deal of the film is devoted to exposing the political ignorance and indifference of its young, sexually progressive, characters). Second, the ideology of anti-repression is shown to be reactionary--serving the subordination of the narcissistic pleasure-seeking individual to capital and to consumption. (These are the themes of the "children of Marx and Coca-cola" respectively--with the emphasis upon how this shared lineage is primarily a betrayal of Marx.)


The second theme arises in the saturation of the film with shallow consumption (best illustrated in the interview with the winner of Miss Nineteen magazine's model of the year contest, an interview in which a perfectly harmless and sweet 19 year old is cruelly and hilariously subjected to difficult questions about sex and politics. (A segment given the title "interview with a commodity," though it doesn't explicitly point out that she, like the popstar main character Chantal Goya, is first and foremost a sexual commodity, which would underline the way in which sexual liberation serves capital rather than revolution.)


The politically regressive nature of sexual liberation is further underscored by the constant interruption of utterly random and purely destructive (thus counterrevolutionary) violence from the movie's beginning to its end, closing with an apparent suicide.

The film critically anticipates the complete victory of the pleasure principle. This is not, it should be stressed, a victory of pleasure as opposed to the reality principle, for the reality principle is (as Freud emphasizes) in the service of pleasure. Instead, it is a pure negation of reality, of precisely the kind that dominates present day American culture and, most explicitly, politics. Masculin/Féminin proposes that this victory, so strongly endorsed by the sexual liberation movement, will ultimately release dangerously regressive drives that culminate in murder rather than peace, indifference rather than love. It is an excavation of the hidden, true spirit of the 60's, an era that ends appropriately in the community of Manson rather than Marx. An era whose children inherit the earth only to produce--surprise!--the world we inhabit today.