The Impossibility of Critique: On "The French Dispatch" & May '68
Image by Angelo Maneage
1.
Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is a movie in vignettes, a whole that emerges through the sum of its parts. The film is not “about” so much as it takes viewers through the final issue of a fictional, eponymous literary magazine overtly modeled on The New Yorker. Each story in the film inserts viewers into one of the magazine’s feature essays, disclosing a sense of the author’s writing style and view of the world. Through these essays and an introductory sketch, the Dispatch reports one last time to a U.S.-based audience from the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé.
Given its multiple, divergent storylines—each complete with dense, world-building detail—the film could be viewed as something of a magnum-opus for Anderson. By so thoroughly de-emphasizing the personal narratives of any one character, the movie is free to do what his films have always done best: move indirectly, framing subjects with a certain uncanny, rigorous aesthetic. In the process, Anderson’s films render the pathos of everyday life, following weird, imperfect people clinging to what matters to them, no matter how idiosyncratic or eccentric, and in spite of whatever chaos erupts around them through the normal course of living. Dispatch stages this pathos more elaborately and intricately than perhaps any of his previous films. Yet its very achievement in this sense guarantees the movie’s failure in another: in its cavalier, de-contextualized references to real-world events, Dispatch proves that Anderson’s aesthetic universe can’t effectively co-exist with our own.
The problem is that, in order to reach such ambitious heights on Anderson’s own cinematic terms, politics too must enter at an angle. Never dealt with directly, it is kept at some remove, refracted only through how any one event or context affects the story being told. For as much as I enjoyed the film (and I did), my first major problem with it involves this oblique entry. In contrast to Anderson’s other efforts, Dispatch attempts to incorporate material from the real world—references to both actual people and historical events—into its singular aesthetic space. But bringing Anderson’s characteristic frivolity and deadpan humor to issues and people that really matter to viewers doesn’t work in the same way as the completely fantastical space of Moonrise Kingdom, for example, or the hilarious (ahem) ennui of The Life Aquatic; when the stakes are higher than Anderson admits, his humor falls flat.
In this essay I stick closely to the vignette that continues to vex me most of all, “Revisions to a Manifesto.” It is this second dispatch that most directly invokes a political context from the real world, and not just any: the cataclysmic events that took place in France during May of 1968 are particularly loaded, suffused with political implications that Anderson appears to consider hardly worth acknowledging. That the film treats May ‘68 as a vehicle for something is where I begin to have some difficulty with Dispatch as a whole.
The story in question is reported in the film by Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), and while it concerns the events of a student uprising generally, the reporting quickly focuses on one of the movement leaders, Zeffirelli B. (Timothée Chalamet). Early in the scene, Krementz—a friend of Zeffirelli’s parents—attends dinner at their house, only to find Zeffirelli himself hiding in the bathroom, working on his political manifesto. In one of those Andersonian shots that’s both arresting and humorous, the two end the evening by donning twin gas masks and heading off to the strike together, facing the camera squarely to announce, more or less, that the (dinner) party is over.
Throughout Krementz’ narration, the student movement is portrayed as both charming and naïve, philosophical and adolescent, hip and avant-garde, limited by the very inexperience from which it draws power. The students debate one another, disagreeing “only for the sake of argument” while hanging around the Café Le Sans Blague, playing chess, wearing turtlenecks, and dancing to the jukebox. It is a stereotype of French youth culture, perhaps, but one that is meant to capture something of the radical change ripping through French society during the 1960s. The students are idealistic and sharp, committed to views that remain more admirable than they are specific, and incomprehensible to the elders short-circuited by an unarrestable modernity.
In the vagueness of their demands, the students of Ennui share much with those of real-life Paris. But in plain contrast to the small-town portrayal of Ennui’s student revolt, the actual events of May ‘68 constituted, as Kristin Ross writes in May ‘68 and its Afterlives, “the largest mass movement in French history, the biggest strike in the history of the French worker’s movement, and the only ‘general’ insurrection the overdeveloped world has known since World War II.” Far from a regional dispute in a boring town, “no professional sector, no category of worker was unaffected by the strike; no region, city, or village in France was untouched.” As in Ennui, students in Paris protested the rigid hierarchies of academia, the strict, Platonic divisions of people into their “proper” roles as determined by a series of evaluations, state exams, and other disciplinary regimes that filtered students into certain professions from a young age.
Diverging from the playful depiction of the police in “Revisions,” however, it was in fact state brutality that escalated the protests in Paris: not only the police’s indiscriminate beating of students, but prior to this, their imposing presence on school grounds in the first place made clear the connection between the authority of the university and the authority of the law. When the police invaded the sanctuary of the Sorbonne on May 3, a line had been crossed. “By May 11, the key demand on the part of students had become the removal of police from the university. Again and again, the mere presence of police served to politicize situations” (Ross).
As students, professors, and those “carrying books” increasingly became the subjects of indiscriminate beatings, the workers of France were moved by a feeling of solidarity with their cause. This is what helped transform a critique of hierarchy into a critique of labor inequality under capitalism. But of course, it is not just the fact that workers became involved that marks May ‘68 as a flashpoint in class warfare; from the beginning, the students themselves were inspired by and directly engaged with Marxist academics like Henri Lefebvre, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Rancière. Indeed, the power of the movement lay in its refusal to see young university students as somehow separate(d) from the concerns of working people.
The events of May ‘68 were not only emphatically un-playful, but so dire that President Charles de Gaulle secretly fled amid the chaos, consulting with General Jacques Massu in West Germany. Thus, for a time, no one in France knew where the President was. But rather than providing an escape, de Gaulle’s trip abroad functioned to shore up alliances, consolidating his power and a plan of action. Upon his return, de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly, scheduled a new election, and brutally clamped down on dissent. Protests were repressed both directly and indirectly, through an atmosphere of intimidation and paranoia embodied by the figure of the plainclothes policeman.
Since that time, according to Ross, May ‘68 has been the victim of revisionist histories that seek to strip it of its radical politics and the violence with which it was met, characterizing it instead as a generational conflict between the old and young, something akin to the British Invasion. Rather than understanding capitalism’s retrenchment as a defeat for the 68 activists, the “official narrative” in public discourse celebrates this retrenchment as “the accomplishment of [their] deepest desires,” suggesting that capitalist modernity had been the goal all along. In sum, for Ross, “May ‘68 in the last thirty years has been buried, raked through the coals, trivialized, or represented as a monstrosity.” Indeed, in some ways the prevalence of such trivializing perspectives marks a return to or victory of the arrogant view offered in the mainstream press prior to 68: that French students in the modern era had heads filled with useless pop culture, and “were only interested in getting permission for the girls to go into the boy’s bedrooms at Nanterre.” (A similar demand, in fact, is made at the beginning of the Ennui protests.)
We can begin to sense The French Dispatch’s relation to this discourse by considering that Mavis Gallant—the real reporter on whom Krementz is based—in fact published a dispatch from Paris, written across May and June of 68. Reading even two sentences of this essay will allow readers to hear how Krementz’ film narration successfully retains markers of Gallant’s style. But reading two paragraphs, I suspect, will create a feeling of dissociation: in “Revisions,” the dramatic stakes of the protests—so palpable in Gallant’s reporting—are entirely removed. What’s left is the thin remainder of a writer’s style, a shiny and mere surface disconnected from the material concerns that informed it.
The disconnect is about more than just tone. As viewers glean from their mutual abandonment of the dinner party in favor of political activism, Krementz and Zeffirelli share an obvious connection. Shortly after meeting, they sleep together, and (being a professional) Krementz also edits Zeffirelli’s manifesto. By the end of the story, as in reality, the protest movement has escalated, and we find the students in a standoff with the police, barricaded behind sandbags in a public square. Because Anderson treats this real-life conflict the same way that he does all conflict, the standoff is both mediated and metaphorized through a chess game, played between Zeffirelli and the town’s Mayor. And perhaps this game also analogizes, in a straightforward way, the source of my difficulties with “Revisions to a Manifesto”: it participates, indisputably, in the kind of trivialization that Ross identifies. In portraying a standoff with the police through a chess game, Dispatch reduces police violence (and by extension both the entire socio-political significance of May ‘68—as well as the violence of the police in this country) to a matter of diversionary amusement, simply a backdrop for the more important storyline: Zeffirelli’s romantic entanglements.
2.
During this climactic standoff, another student at the forefront of the movement reads the manifesto that Zeffirelli has distributed and takes issue with its contents. When Juliette (Lyna Khoudri)—always the purist among them—discovers that an appendix has been added by Krementz, an argument breaks out between the three of them around journalistic neutrality, as well as Krementz’ inappropriate involvement with both the movement and Zeffirelli himself. Verbally cut, Krementz realizes that she has not only compromised her journalistic neutrality (“if it exists”) but also gotten in the way of a budding young romance between Zeffirelli and Juliette. After resolving things with the two protagonists of the story, Krementz delivers what appears like the storyline’s entire moral: “Stop bickering. Go make love.”
If May ‘68 has been trivialized in public discourse, it continues to hold outsized significance for certain, overlapping groups of scholars who read that event as a commentary on the very possibility of the work that we do: the work of critique, and, following Marx, the possibility of changing the world. For those who study in the divergent lineages of the Frankfurt school, May ‘68 is both a moment of singular revolutionary energy and a heartbreaking scene of lost potential, a quasi-mythical event that we can’t stop thinking about insofar as it is overburdened with symbolic meaning, representing the closest Western society has come to identifying and overthrowing the inequalities rendered by capitalism and imperialism in modern times. It also points to a moment before the consolidation of neoliberal policies in the late 1970s and throughout the 80s, an incandescent flashpoint in which other ways of living seemed not only imaginable but possible.
Insofar as we can read May ‘68 as a metaphor for both critique of existing hegemony and organized resistance to it, Zeffirelli’s abandonment of the cause in favor of love seems to endorse what scholars have identified as the “reparative turn” in critical theory, a wave of study that, as Patricia Stuelke puts it in her book The Ruse of Repair, “is concerned with how people find ‘comfort,’ ‘nourishment,’ and tools for survival in the text of capitalism and empire,” a concern which “so often is articulated as a relief from the exhaustion of struggling against structural violence that never seems to abate or recede.” Departing from the Frankfurt school’s approach, reparative studies defer critiquing power structures that everyone supposedly already knows are exploitative, instead advocating “finding joy where one can, honoring practices of survival, finding comfort in contact across temporal and other scales of difference, and celebrating reforms as a win.”
In The Ruse of Repair, Stuelke thoroughly criticizes the reparative turn as a generative but ultimately misguided development, and one that is moreover informed by even as it helps sustain the very practices of neoliberal capitalism from which it seeks to hide. The starting point is, of course, eminently understandable; in a world where state violence is both ordinary and inevitable, a world governed by what we might call, after Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, it is of little wonder that certain scholars came to believe that finding pleasure was the best we might be able to hope for. The catch is that repair becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By deciding in advance that critique is pointless, repair preemptively turns us away from collective struggle into the very individualized aesthetic concerns that neoliberalism promotes, even if those concerns involve a measure of community-building. To focus on one’s own pleasure might be radical in a context where pleasure is systematically denied to those marginalized under capitalism; but it also guarantees the victory of the status-quo. Indeed, as Zeffirellli and Juliette abandon the standoff, the police are storming through the barricades. A thought for later: saying critique is pointless is another way of saying that it’s impossible.
And yet, the police’s victory isn’t quite where the story ends. It’s true that Juliette and Zeffirelli forsake their cause to have sex, and it’s true that upon doing so, viewers are led to understand that the struggle has ended—the police’s invasion signals de Gaulle’s ultimate victory, and by extension, the return of capitalist order. But just then, Krementz’ narration returns at the last minute to inform viewers that before her story went to press, Zeffirelli died young, and that his likeness, “mass produced and shrink-wrap packaged, will be sold like bubblegum to the hero-inspired.” And here my second difficulty with this story emerges: how should we understand Zeffirelli’s death? Treated as an afterthought, does it alter what I read as Dispatch’s endorsement of a reparative position?
We are left to infer at least two possibilities: 1) since the last action we see Zeffirelli take is to read his “revisions to a manifesto” from the pirate radio tower, it could be inferred that his death results from his not being content to stay hidden away after all; perhaps his returning to the struggle (so goes the implication) is what winds up getting him killed. In this case, his death reads as an indictment, a commentary on the futility of misguided protest, and a confirmation that martyrdom is the best outcome for overzealous rebellion. In other words, had he continued to stay in bed, this might not have happened.
On the other hand, 2) perhaps the acknowledgement of what happens to Zeffirelli after his death is a means of pointing both to the inevitability of capital’s victory and to the monstrous way in which that victory is secured; a critique, in other words, of the ways that capitalism devours—not even but especially—its most ardent critics, taking the venom out of Zeffirelli’s critique by killing him and selling his likeness. In this case, the sardonic acknowledgement of Zeffirelli’s fate is a means of critiquing a system in which all political struggle becomes reduced to a politics of representation: feminism, decolonialization, trans rights, anti-imperialism, and social justice are free to circulate, so long as they do so on and through commodities. It is only when those same commodities inspire direct action that the state intervenes.
What are we to make of this as viewers? The description of Zeffirelli’s transformation into a series of mass-produced products is given to us swiftly and without commentary, as if conveying nothing but a foregone conclusion. But is the conclusion’s very predictability approached in the form of cynicism (of course this was the outcome, in such a cruel system), or rather resignation (of course this was the outcome, you fool)? Given what Ross has identified as the revisionist discourse around May ‘68, it becomes all too easy to understand this film as endorsing the latter position. Zeffirelli’s transcendence into pure ideal frames Ennui’s protests as a form of youthful rebellion, certainly dramatic, and for at least one person tragic—but in the end, “worth it” insofar as they opened French society up to the liberal and enlightened ways of contemporary society, from the sexual revolution to the time-saving convenience of American kitchen appliances. Zeffirelli may have been in a little over his head (who would want to overthrow capitalism, after all?), but his naïve idealism produced an unexpected good. In other words, Zeffirelli was a sacrifice necessary to drag puritanical France into the modern era.
But whether one reads the film as an indictment of capitalism’s monstrous inevitability or of Zeffirelli’s misplaced idealism, the conclusion amounts to the same thing: death and commodification, in that order. Thus, both reparative scholarship and The French Dispatch grapple, in their own ways, with the impossibility of critique, with the question of what it is we think we’re trying to do when we organize (thoughts/people) against oppression. The feeling that Dispatch gives off is the same as those studies that take as a given capital’s interminability, where academics are characterized as a little silly and idealistic for pointing out the violence of capitalism, which we all understand, but which is, after all, simply our reality. As in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise—widely understood as a prophetic foretelling of what May ‘68 would bring—revolution is forestalled, undone by the very idealism that first conjured it. In both films, reality asserts itself.
3.
The reason that it has been easy for “Revisions” to send me spinning in these directions is because claiming that critique is impossible ultimately means that my own job as a teacher is also impossible: what’s the point in learning to think critically about the world if that world is hellbent on stamping critical thinkers into the ground? Indeed, the feeling of futility haunts me on a daily basis, a feeling engendered by the corporatization of the university, that we are, students and professors alike, increasingly going through the motions as our card house collapses—or else, that critical thinking has been reduced to yet another term for increasing shareholder value. Teaching, learning, critiquing, all rendered impossible by decades of privatization and capital entrenchment. Is this where we end? If one lesson from La Chinoise, The French Dispatch, and May ‘68 involves the impossibility of critique, there is at least one other.
We do not need to consult any of the philosophers of ‘68 in order to understand this lesson. Instead, we can simply consider any number of the several dozen posters that students screen printed quickly and then plastered throughout Paris during the events of ‘68, in whose images we consistently see a conflation between the demands of the students and the demands of the workers, conflations that articulate clearly: from the factory to the university, all work is work. In contrast to the predominant posture in academia to this day, May ‘68 shows clearly that there is and can be no distinction between the intellectual and the worker. From this perspective, critique is only impossible insofar as one is not always already a part of that which one interrogates, insofar as academics imagine themselves to be separated from the very struggles they aim to theorize. This isn’t to argue for the futility of critical thinking but to argue that thinking is every bit as much a matter of labor as labor is an act of thought.
In a moment where we have reached peak precaritization—when as many jobs as possible, from NASA scientist to Uber driver, college professor to “content creator” have all become contract positions—has there ever been a more urgent time to insist on this reading? As I write, the United States is experiencing a wave of strikes, labor organizing, and activism the likes of which we have not seen in decades, and for good reason: we are, glaringly, appallingly, farther than we have ever been from establishing basic dignity for each worker, from living wages, universal healthcare, parental leave, affordable rent, and relatedly, from a “université populaire,” a university for everyone, a form of education that is common but all the more significant for it. Moreover, what little educational possibilities we have been able to preserve in this country have come under new (perpetually reprised) attacks from fascist propagandists who are literally burning our books. In the face of both the slow violence of the past decades and the increasingly pointed attacks on schools by resurgent white supremacy, President Biden refuses to fulfill his campaign promise to cancel student debt, and his proposal for free community college has been abandoned.
With all of this in mind, it bears repeating that the truth of ‘68 lies not in some theoretical formulation about the role of ideology in capitalist society, but in the moment when blue-collar laborers and philosophy students saw themselves in one another. It is this lesson that Dispatch entirely misses, but in so doing gives us an opportunity to re-articulate: the task of any worthwhile critique is not to deconstruct from a position of superiority but to render visible connections—in our moment, the connections between the strikes sweeping the U.S. and the #BlackLivesMatter protests that have modeled direct action for us for years; between these movements and the Indigenous activism around oil pipelines; between what’s happening in the U.S. and the protests at COP26—because racism, colonial displacement, and climate devastation are all constitutive functions of a capitalist system. Capitalism is, above all, a logic or epistemology, a whole way of thinking that prescribes clear answers for every question. In suffering the violence of those answers, we are all connected.
With thanks to Eleanor Paynter and Gennaro Di Tosto.