Who has contempt for what in Godard's Le Mepris?

I don't buy the usual intepretations of Contempt, particularly the interpretations of just who has contempt for whom about what.

The short version of the Standard Reading is: the eponymous “contempt” is that of Bardot’s character Camille for Paul, who represents the Artist Without Integrity, a contempt shared by Godard. My view is that Godard sides against Camille: the film portrays Camille’s contempt as itself contemptible or grotesque.

The usual interpretation can be reduced to the following three claims:
1. Godard has contempt for Hollywood because Hollywood is art's pimp.
2. Bardot's character has contempt her boyfriend because he's pimping her to Mr. America.
3. Pimpin' be liberal democracy's version of fascism.

This correctly identifies the three themes: Cinema, Sex, and Politics. And it suggests three critiques: a critique of the degradation of film by money, of the degradation of women by men, and of humanity by capitalism.

But has it drawn the right conclusions about these themes? I think (3) is right, and fairly obvious (Mr. America's dialogue spells it out: "Every time I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my checkbook," which Lang's character then spells out: "For those of you playing along at home, that's a reference to the Nazis.") But (1) and (2) are off the mark.

I.

In favor of the first truism, we have Godard's status as an artist and his long history of, yes, contempt for the Hollywood system. We also have the fact that Le Mepris was his first big budget U.S. funded co-production, with Godard butting heads with the Americans throughout the filming. So we might jump to conclude that Jean-Luc’s message is: "I'm making Art here, get your damn hands off my pure virginal film, you fascist pimps!"


Why is this a mistake? First of all, Godard's relationship to Hollywood is ambivalent. True, like anyone with a lick of sense he has contempt for Spielberg and for The Hollywood System. But he and his Cahiers pals were also notorious for championing Hollywood flicks that others were quick to dismiss (noir, Hitchcock, Ford, Fuller). So Hollywood and art aren’t insurmountably opposed.

Second, the fact that Contempt was an attempt to work within and with the Hollywood system is a further indication that the standard reading pushes an overly simplistic “art good, Hollywood bad” moral. Godard made substantial compromises on the film. For example, the American producers wanted Bardot to get naked to sell tickets. When the final cut didn’t have enough skin, they asked Godard to add some more and he complied. I point this out not to suggest that Godard is a hypocrite, but rather as evidence that he had a more nuanced and mature understanding of artistic integrity than the usual readings of Contempt assume. The common reading suggests not only that Godard was a hypocrite who sold out his own art while preaching against selling out, but also the outlandish idea that he went out of his way to criticize his own hypocrisy in the very same movie in which he’s committing that hypocrisy. Note that this would be hypocrisy on two painfully ironic levels: not only is Godard, on this reading, pimping his art, just like the character of Paul almost does. He’s also selling Bardot’s body, just as Paul supposedly tries to sell Camille's body to Mr. America.


(There is, admittedly room here for a cynical reading: Godard recognizes the impossibility of pure art and so happily prostitutes himself, and Bardot, to Hollywood in order to get out his message criticizing this state of affairs. But this would hardly fit with the movie’s ending. The cynical reading would require an ending that underlines the impossibility of what Fritz Lang's character tries, and at the end of the film says he will continue, to do: to work with Hollywood to create art.)

Finally, the movie’s official Artist With Integrity character is Fritz Lang, a wonderful example of the more nuanced view of integrity, since he had, at the time of this film, been working successfully in the Hollywood system for ages. (I’m tempted to stand the prostitution theme on its head, and say that Lang is the positive image of the artist making Hollywood/capital his or her bitch.) His character, you’ll also note, sticks with the film and works with Mr. America, while supposedly contemptible Paul quits in order to pursue the “finer” art of theatre writing (a decision that would, in itself, be a strange model of artistic integrity for Godard, one of whose innovations was to treat film as an art form on par with literature and theatre).

II.

The second truism is that Camille has contempt for Paul because he pimped her off to Mr. America in order to advance his career. This would, then, make Camille the heroine, since her character’s condemnation of Paul would reflect Godard’s condemnation of the Hollywood prostitution of art and the economic prostitution of humanity under capitalism.

There is little evidence in favor of this view, but I suspect it has its basis in a number of factors. First, Bardot is, you know, smoking hot, so we’d really like to take her side. Second, the Artist With Integrity motif is flattering to the Audience That Appreciates True Art. Finally, the pro-Camille reading supports the sort of feeble-minded, weak-kneed form of simplistic feminist critique that average viewers are capable of formulating and always enjoy congratulating themselves for. While I do think there is a feminist critique in the movie, it is not the obvious one, and not one that fits with the standard reading.

Against Truism Two. First, Paul and Camille’s final scene together doesn’t support it. Paul continues to ask her why she has contempt for him, but she won’t say. Paul actually presents the Official Reading to her in so many words, and she responds, in effect, “Yeah, sure, let’s say that’s it, if it will get you to quit asking.” Her real answer? “You’re not a man.” We’ll come back to this. In any case, Paul, who is convinced of the Official Reading, does stop selling out his art in order to win back her love, and it doesn’t work. So it's not really about that.


Second, Godard is, while filming, in the process of breaking up with his own wife. The likelihood that he’s in the mood to make a movie in which a woman dumping her contemptible boyfriend is the heroine? Not bloody.

Third, Godard makes it very clear that Paul is only doing the movie so he can pay for their apartment, which in turn he’s only keeping because Camille wants to keep it. He also makes it pretty clear that Camille initially pretends that she still loves Paul in order to keep the apartment. In other words, the real pressure to sellout comes, not from Hollywood, but from Camille.


(This could be taken to mean that Camille's contempt is for Paul's willingness to sellout in order to keep her, which is true in a way, but then we'd have an opposition of Art vs. Love, where love is a diabolical figure alongside Capital and Hollywood, which anyone whose seen Alphaville cannot possibly buy. Camille's contempt does have to do with his willingness to sacrifice his art to his love for her, but because this shows a lack of virility, not of integrity.)

Finally, the film is clearly contemptuous of Camille’s contempt for Paul. (I like the Criterion's cover art, shown at the top of the page, since it captures this meta-contempt in a way the more well-known poster does not.) To return to why Camille has lost her respect for Paul: he’s not a man. What does this mean? She’s specifically referring to two scenes in which Paul lets her go off alone with Mr. America without a fight. He shows no jealousy or worry over Mr. America’s big square jaw, shiny expensive car, and lascivious glances at "his woman," where a real man would take it as a threat and defend his territory.


Far from, as the standard feminist reading would have it, this being a critique of Paul for pimping Camille to the American, this is a critique of Camille's conception of masculinity, one that reduces her, as woman, to property. Camille objects to being pimped off to Mr. America, not out of respect for her own humanity, but out of devotion to the principle of property. (There is a telling scene where in response to a drink invitation she replies, "My husband makes the decisions." This is patently absurd, and reveals what she wishes her husband were, not what he is. Godard couldn't possibly underline this more than by having Paul beg Camille, in two separate scenes, to tell him whether to take the film job or not.)


That’s why it’s an indirect feminist critique: it critiques the definition of masculinity as possession of woman-as-object (thus also of the capitalist definition of person as property owner), a definition of masculinity that Camille leaves Paul for failing to meet. In this way, the real object of Godard’s contempt in this film is not Paul but Mr. America, whose masculinity is reducible to wealth and the ability and willingness to buy and sell other human beings (including Lang and Paul). Camille is, consequently, a deeply problematic figure, since it is his love for her that motivates his surrender to Mr. America. To really twist the knife on this, Godard has Camille run off, in disturbingly cheerful fashion ("Dactylo!"), with Mr. America in his shiny red sports car. This final unification of Mr. America and Camille makes any reading that would place Hollywood and capitalism on one moral pole and Camille on the other, a highly suspect one. And the fact that Camille and Mr. America are given a shared death sentence is completely inexplicable on the standard view.

This is not to say that Camille is a villain. I suspect the film’s attitude matches the one expressed in Paul’s speech at the villa, when he first tells Mr. Amerika that he’s quitting. That speech bemoans a world in which human identity and accomplishment has to be measured in terms of money, a problem, he says, that even infects interpersonal relationships. So Paul (and I think the film agrees with him on this) doesn’t blame Camille, but a culture and economic system in which it is impossible to ground esteem for other human beings in any values other than economic ones. Perhaps that’s why the real "stars" of the film are not the lovers, not two persons, but two (admittedly drool-worthy) pieces of real estate. Godard clearly does not blame either Paul or Camille. In his brief summation of the film, he calls it a story about how a love falls apart through the fault of no one. It is not a critique of its lovers, but of a world in which human love cannot thrive—-our own.


Poster for the English language version of Contempt.