Poetry that illuminates the night: Godard’s Alphaville
Sixty-one years after its release, Godard’s techno-noir masterpiece Alphaville remains shockingly current. That’s not surprising. Most good speculative fiction has a way of staying relevant. Godard’s depiction of a technocratic society controlled by probability and logic might seem pretty familar to AI-bombarded viewers in 2026.
It’s a reminder of how little has changed. To use a movie cliche: if 1965 and 2026 met, one might say to the other, “you know, we’re not so different, you and I.” I have a paradoxical confession to make: whenever I watch a movie, read a book, or watch an old interview from over a half century ago and find myself easily recognizing the same political themes and ideological tensions that we are dealing with today, I feel oddly comforted. There’s a certain solace I take in the realization that the things we are arguing about today are not all that different then what other generations argued over. I call this confession paradoxical because, naturally, I want to see progress in terms of our social and political maturation, and not live to see history constantly repeat itself. We should learn from past lessons and advance forward. And, in many ways, we definitely have advanced, but in many ways, we’ve retreated or remained stagnant. I make this digression about the immutability of political and class struggles because Alphaville articulates many of the same fears that artists today have about AI, and, more broadly speaking, the dehumanizing effects of our technological over-reliance and inexorable charge towards a surveillance state.
Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a secret agent from “The Outlands” who arrives in Alphaville posing as a journalist, whose motive is the capture or elimination of Abraham VonBraun (formerly known as Mr. Nosferatu), the inventor of supercomputer Alpha 60. Alphaville, ruled and manipulated by Alpha 60, has largely outlawed that pesky human trait called emotion in favor of logic and probability, all in the name of the public good. Early in the film, Anna Karina’s character Natacha VonBraun, the daughter of Abraham, unironically questions what the word “love” means.
When Lemmy reconnects with another agent, Dickson, he discovers his colleague living in squalor in a dingy hotel where the attendants question why he hasn’t killed himself yet. Dickson laments that 150 years ago, there were artists, novelists, painters. Now “people have become slaves of probabilities.” As he dies while fornicating with a “seductress, third class,” Dickson tells Caution to make Alpha 60 self-destruct and implores him to “save those who weep.” In Alphaville, crying and sadness is treated as illogical and unproductive. When Lemmy accompanies Natacha to witness public executions, Natacha says of one of the condemned “he wept when his wife died.” Moments later, after Caution is beaten unconscious, a tear runs down her face but she insists she isn’t crying because that would be illogical. The notion of sorrow as a fundamental human necessity is punctuated throughout the film with the repeated appearance of the book “The Capital of Pain” by Paul Éluard.
Language and syntax are constantly in question. The word “Why” doesn’t exist in Alphaville, only “because”. “Why” implies a question and, by extension, investigation and thoughtfulness. “Because” implies only answers, declarative and irrefutable. Bibles in Alphaville are revealed to be nothing more than dictionaries, which are constantly updated as more and more words are eliminated. The meaning, and existence, of the word conscience is repeatedly questioned throughout the film. Caution refers to the “inspiration of the conscience” as his principal belief. The conscience as the source of not just human morality but all human emotion, and therefore its expressions through art, contrasts with Alpha 60s role as the thought-dictator of Alphaville. Deprived of their own conscience, the citizens of Alphaville are under the vampiric spell of the appropriately named Mr. Nosferatu. Natacha VonBraun says conscience is a word that no one in Alphaville has heard, but later realizes she “knows that word without having seen it or heard it.” By acknowledging the term, she has uncovered her own repressed humanity, which allows her to then feel love.
Ultimately, Alpha 60 unravels because it is unable to understand a poetic riddle that Lemmy poses. Poetry, an artform that harnesses the illogical contradictions of the human mind, overburdens the cold logic of Alpha 60. It’s poetry, Caution says, that illuminates the night. I’m reminded of an episode of Smart Guy in which TJ Henderson’s underachieving brother helps him defeat a computer in a chess match by committing a series of illogical moves that the computer can’t comprehend.
What does mean in 2026 terms? Irrationality and human emotion is the edge that artists maintain against the threat of generative AI’s use in art. I read once somewhere that AI can’t make art because AI can’t be horny or hungover. It can’t weep. Humans are messy and make mistakes; generative art threatens to sanitize those mistakes, but the best art is riddled with errors and flubs. Want an example: Look no further than… Godard’s Alphaville. Around 10 minutes into the film, you might catch the film crew reflected in the mirror of Caution’s hotel room. I strongly doubt that this was intentional, but how fitting it is that a film so concerned with preserving humanity in art would contain such a glaring error. I pray it may never be edited out on future releases. Let it serve as a reminder that sometime in 1965, humans made this film.