JEAN-LUC GODARD'S 1967 anti-consumerist film Weekend is difficult to explain in the space of a column, but a single scene offers a cross-section of its absurdity.
A bourgeois married couple begin a road trip to kill the wife’s parents and inherit their fortune. Naturally, once the deed is done, they each intend to kill the other and run off with their respective lovers. But first, they must maneuver traffic.
A country road is frozen in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and for nine excruciating and exhilarating minutes, the camera methodically tracks along the road, gawking at the jam. Some people play chess in the roadway while others toss bouncy balls between vehicles; children have emptied out of a school bus and run through the grass; there are lions, a llama, monkeys; people lounge and flirt as the couple weaves through the mess. The scene is made even more chaotic by the insatiable, mechanical wail of competing car horns and screaming squabbles.
At the end of the traffic jam: a multicar crash, bloodied bodies askew in the road. The couple swerve around them and continue their trip. It is an omen of their descent into surrealism: Even when confronted with the fantastic, the bourgeois have no interest in others, only themselves.
The particulars of what happens next are less important than the absurdity of the events. The traveling pair continue to exude indifference when they meet a pseudo-messiah, sexual deviants, and the Italian extras brought on by the film’s production company — breaking the fourth wall. Eventually, cannibalistic revolutionary fighters accost them until they are burned and bloodied and one of them is eaten. Weekend is, as one of the film’s opening title cards reads, “a film found in a dump.”
Godard’s biographer Richard Brody summarizes the disorder simply: “In a world gone cartoonish, culture does the same.” Artists have always recontextualized tropes and mediums to draw larger points about society. Such is the case for Donald Glover’s TV series Atlanta and Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play,” which undress the folly of our modern conversation around race not just through cultural assessments but surrealist storytelling.
Weekend itself prefigured the May 1968 student and worker rebellion that halted Parisian life for weeks. Released when unrest was in the air but had not boiled over into revolt, Godard declared the movie “closer to a cry” than a film.
Weekend is art at its most anarchic, filleting the abstract horrors of modern life more clearly than any single fact or statistic. Faced with our own cartoonish society, it is not only a call to action but a bewildering comfort. Perhaps the world’s troubles feel insurmountable. Weekend is a reminder of how acutely people have felt this angst before.
Curtis Yee is a reporter and critic living in Washington, D.C. He covers faith, society, and everything in between. Follow him on Twitter @curtisfyee.
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