"Isn't there a limit to doing nothing?" – Michel (The Devil, Probably)
"Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do." – Zizek
Robert Bresson's "The Devil, Possibly" opens on a newspaper headline which informs us that Charles, the young son of a wealthy property developer, has committed suicide. The film then proceeds to document the key moments leading up to Charles' death.
At first glance, "Devil" doesn't resemble Bresson's previous film. Early portions, in which French radicals rage against capitalism, scream mid career Godard. Gradually, though, Bresson's personality appears. If "A Man Escaped" was about rejecting a passive acceptance of God in favour for action and self-actualisation, its caged hero struggling to latch on to a sort of Sartrean "authenticity", then "Devil" posits the opposite. Here, the young Charles, a dejected kid with forlorn eyes, rejects action outright, accepting his own impotency and making the ethical choice to cease participating in a world which he deems abhorrent, which he can no longer support and which he knows cannot be changed through revolution, religion or politics. Committing suicide, in other words, becomes a moral statement, Charles not only the ultimate dropout, but the poster boy for radical non participation.
"Do you get pleasure from non action?" a psychologist asks Charles, hours before his death. "I'm perfectly aware of my superiority," he replies, "but if I did anything, then I'd be useful in a world that disgusts me." It's not only that Charles is crippled by his intelligence, but that he is both unable to find an "outside" of capitalism and is unable to ethically justify operating within it. It then becomes easier for Charles to imagine the end of all life than the end of his political-economic system. A system which, because it consists of an endless Eternal Now, no longer allows for a future.
Charles flirts with resistance at first – he hangs out with other disaffected youths and activists – but eventually rejects their "shocks to the system" outright. Their subjective outrage to violence and immorality simply blinds them to the objective violence endemic to a socioeconomic order in which they themselves are perpetrators of violence and not just innocent bystanders. Buy a stick of dynamite to hurt the machine, and your dollar fuels the machine.
What Bresson and all great directors were concerned about during this period, was the question of where political and revolutionary agency now lies. Where did the political radicalism, hopefulness and sense of urgency of French youth (and cinema) of the late 1950s and 1960s go? What Bresson finally hits upon is not post 60s political disillusionment and despair, not the rejection of all politics, not the admittance that political engagement turned out to be infinitely more complex than simple Lefts versus Rights, but the need for total fking suicide. This is a form of nihilistic conservatism, but intellectually, and ethically, Charles has no other choice. Ironically, even Charles' suicide is quickly commodified. He thinks techno-capitalism's the devil – the invisible hand which guides all things - and yet is forced to pay a friend to help him die (and 200 francs to his psychologist!).
Incidentally, Bresson's film was released at the same time as "Star Wars", one of many "fight the power!" orgasms routinely churned out by Hollywood. Lucas' bombastic climaxes were the kind of thing parodied at the end of Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point". Antonioni's climax was not an attack on consumer culture, as many think, but an attack on a cinema image bank that sells a specific, and desired, violent fantasy; the possibility of an apocalyptic purge. What Antonioni was concerned about was the seductiveness, flatness and perhaps impossibility of a very leftist fantasy.
As "Devil" unfolds, Charles' friends begin to deem him mad. Charles, though, recognises that capitalism requires psychosis. He thus views THEM as being insane; hypocritical apologists who offer nothing but distractions and dilutions and who unwittingly fuel a brutal machine. From here Bresson then splits the film in two, using heavily symbolic scenes and dialogue to examine where exactly, if at all, political agency now lies.
In "Devil's" first half, political agency is shown to reside with the masses; church gatherings, political rallies, bookshops and various group activities. Things then begin to fall apart after a bus scene, in which jaded radicals state that "maybe society is not run by us, but by the devil and other obscure forces". Inexplicably, the driver of the bus then stops and gets off. The point: both their radicalism and their very social order has no leadership, no conscious driving force. Who then controls things? The Devil, probably; the market's invisible, amorphous hands.
From this point onwards, the "group" disappears and Bresson focuses on Charles. Agency and morality now lies solely with the individual, but the only revolutionary action is seen to be suicide. As capitalism has no outside, Charles will remove himself rather than risk support. But this itself is merely a kind of apoptosis or programmed cell death, Charles' self annihilation becoming the very self-defence mechanism of his socioeconomic order; a "suicide switch" which gets rid of all contaminants, individual cell destruction rather than the death of the socioeconomic super-organism itself.
Typical of Bresson, the film is slow, sparse, heavily symbolic and filled with shots of faceless people and anonymous, tired bodies, all of whom have long succumbed. Though much hated, "Devil" has many supporters. Rainer Fassbinder loved the film and threatened to quit the 1977 Berlin film festival unless it won an award (clips of it are included in Fassbinder's "Third Generation"). Musician Richard Hell dubbed "Devil" the "most punk film ever made". Claire Denis, Leos Carax, Nicolas Klotz, Dennis Cooper, Elisabeth Perceval and Olivier Assayas all likewise champion the film heavily.
8.5/10 - Worth two viewings.
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