Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

 Jean-Luc Godard's "Vivre Sa Vie"

After watching Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 film "Vivre Sa Vie," I walked away from the screen feeling a sense of emptiness. Where did this emptiness come from? I wasn't sure. I felt like I had to really sit and ponder the film in order to obtain any sense of emotional connection. What intrigued me most about the film was not the 'New Wave' elements that Godard uses far more subtly than his other work. It was also not the storyline itself revolving around a woman's descent into prostitution. Rather, it was the woman herself, Nana.

Nana starts the film aspiring to be an actress (and in need of money). The film is broken up into 12 vignettes, each one detailing chronologically how she slowly ended up in the business of prostitution. What is surprising really, is that it's not some big, elaborate circumstance. Rather, it is a very mundane process. Nana goes to the movies, plays pinball, dances to a jukebox, works in a record store, poses for pictures, and above all, is on the search for cash. In the end, she becomes accustomed to the life of a prostitute until a tragic ending.

What I noticed about her experiences simply living her life, even as I was typing them out in the previous paragraph, was that most of her experiences involve consumerist entertainment. She lives in a world full of entertainment and art: films, pinball machines, magazines, jukeboxes, record stores, advertising, pin-ups, pool hall, and the list goes on and on. Nana's slow descent into prostitution, to me, becomes a slow resignation to becoming one of the these commodities of entertainment in this post-war landscape.  

In this way, "Vivre Sa Vie" reminds me very much of G.W. Pabst's 1929 silent masterpiece, "Pandora's Box." In Pabst's film, the protagonist Lulu (whose hair-bob matches Anna Karina in Godard's film) also becomes a prostitute and becomes the image of the commodification of the self. In "Vivre Sa Vie," our Nana must conform to the capitalist post-war society built on empty entertainment, pleasure, and consumption. She is an active participant in this world and slowly, becomes part of the very enterprise and fabric of it. 

What's even more interesting about this fusing into this consumerist landscape is her passivity to it all. It feels as though Nana is taking no active measures in her life and doesn't assert a level of responsibility over herself. Godard even metatextualises this paralysis by having Nana comment on her own sense of responsibility: "if I move my arm, I am responsible. If I move my leg, I am responsible." Nana explicitly iterates that the results of life are a direct affect of our activity in it. Everything Nana does in the film is done passively to appease the people around her. She continues to be a passive observer of her own life and because of this, she turns herself into a commodity for others. In watching the film, I was watching a woman quietly resign herself to the mechanism of consumerist and capitalist structures. In the end, her downfall is ultimately due to refusing to sleep with a client, an act she finally makes actively rather than passively. Her final tragedy came from doing something for her own interest instead of the interest of others. In refusing her own commodification, she was punished.

Perhaps this is why the film is called "Vivre Sa Vie," or "to live one's life." By not living your life and being an active participant in it, you simply become a mechanism to economic and social structures. You become just a piece of entertainment, or a piece of art, or something to be bought and sold. The void inside Nana that she was constantly trying to fill is the void we all feel in this post-war consumerist landscape. The hollowness of our lives are filled with cinema and art, coffee and commerce, games and entertainment. Are we truly living our lives in this capitalist utopia? Or, like Nana, are we quietly resigning ourselves to it in order to fill that emptiness with something, just so we don't have to take responsibility for our lives?