Teenage Survey
Jean Luc Godard said something like, “Each time any teenager talks, they’re taking a survey.” I suppose this means that anything teenagers say to each other is up for analysis. Perhaps to compare and contrast each other’s lives, to see if the status quo is being followed. Godard’s characters in Masculine Feminine seem to adhere to his theory because their conversations often follow a question and answer format. Sex, parents, music, and politics are all fair game. Yet oftentimes characters will be speaking one thing, but their body language and physicality will communicate something completely different. The way I see it, Masculine Feminine was a film about the different ways people can communicate with each other, both verbally and nonverbally.
To speak of verbal communication, one example of a survey occurs in the bathroom near the start of the film. In the scene, the protagonist Paul is prompting his love interest, Madeleine, to go out with him later that night. During this dialogue-heavy scene, the camera remains trained on either Paul or Madeleine’s face for long intervals as they ask questions and then receive responses. This allows the audience to track each character’s personal reactions, feeling their hesitation, their discomfort, and their barely contained thrill as the flirting progresses. However, the underlying purpose of the scene is not just to acquaint the audience with the characters, but to expose from the very root of their relationship the fundamental differences between Paul and Madeleine.
As the survey evolves, the questions grow more intimate. “What is the center of the world to you?” Madeleine asks and the camera switches back to Paul’s face as he mulls over his answer. After a moment’s pause he responds quite seriously in clear opposition to Madeleine’s more playful demeanor: “Love,” Paul offers, looking at Madeleine. The camera is still studying his face, but Madeleine answers off-camera with a smile in her voice: “Funny. I’d have said ‘Me.’” Paul casts his eyes down as if in thought. “Does that sound strange?” Madeleine asks, but Paul does not answer. Madeleine continues as if she’s uncertain of the answer she’s given him, “Don’t you think you’re the center of the world?” There is some silence before Paul finally admits, “In a way, sure.”
In terms of nonverbal communication, Godard has his characters perform habits such as Paul’s cigarette flipping and Madeleine’s hair touching. These quirks are used by Godard as physical evidence of how each character is faring throughout the story. For example, Madeleine plays with her hair almost incessantly throughout the film, but it is very prominent when she’s angry or uncomfortable. When Paul reads her profile from a magazine in an outlandish voice, the camera looks up at her tensely tugging a piece of hair around her fingers until she says, “Don’t make fun of me.” The same anxious hair pulling occurs at the end of the film when she’s in the police office giving a testimony of Paul’s death. And while listening in the studio to the song she’s just recorded, Madeleine toys with her hair, unhappy with her performance, and also unhappy with Paul, evident when he tries to hold her hand and she pulls out of his grasp.
Madeleine’s hair is also used as a prop for other characters to establish a kind of claim on her. In the movie theater, Elizabeth intimately brushes Madeleine’s hair aside in order to whisper into her ear. Paul watches this occurrence with thinly veiled jealousy, and when he walks past the two girls’ seats, he carefully, purposely smoothes down the hair Elizabeth had touched. It is almost like a claim to Madeleine herself that the two are fighting over. Like dogs who piss in order to mark their territory.
On the other hand, Paul habitually flips cigarettes up into his mouth in the film, a kind of dorky trick to establish his character as a French youth with a blaise sort of attitude. The first couple of times we see him do it (in the cafe, in the bathroom) he gets it on the first try. However, the only times he fumbles the toss is when Madeleine is with Elizabeth. The first time he messes up the flip is when Madeleine and Elizabeth are walking out of the dance club to the bar where they get sodas. The second time is in the bedroom scene where Madeleine invites Paul to sleep with her and Elizabeth. Paul cannot get the cigarette into his mouth on the first attempt when in Elizabeth’s company, perhaps because he feels threatened by her presence.
At the tailend of the film, Paul resolves in a voiceover how all the surveys he has been conducting have been failures. The questions he was asking people reflected a deformed collective mentality. “My lack of objectivity, even when unconscious,” he says, “tended to provoke a predictable lack of sincerity in those I was polling. Unawares, I was deceiving them and being deceived by them.” I would argue that the same lack of sincerity occurs between Paul and Madeleine in the bathroom scene. They ask each other questions as part of a “teenage survey”, to follow Godard’s theory, and they are deceived by one another. As Paul experiences with the polls he’s conducting, people search for the answer they believe is expected or desired of them. I suspect the same might have been true for both Paul and Madeleine when they questioned each other.
If all teenage interactions are surveys, then the bathroom scene which serves as a foundation for the rest of Paul and Madeleine’s relationship is built on faulty ground. How could their answers not be value judgements, the same as the people Paul was polling? Was there any truth to their interactions? These are questions I am still asking myself even after watching the film multiple times, and I doubt that I will come to any definite conclusions until watching it several more times. But it is clear to me that Godard’s use of both verbal communication as well as nonverbal communication is very important and that sometimes a character may be saying one thing, yet their physicality will speak to a different feeling entirely.
