Film noir—and neo-noir after it—is a dive into the darkness of the human heart: grim situations, grim motivations, and not much hope to be found in the shadows. Alphaville’s protagonist Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is a taciturn detective looking for someone who’s gone missing. He’s an antihero, his companion Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina) is a morally dubious woman, and the two walk a knife’s edge in a black and gray world governed by a fascist computer with a croaking voice (performed by an anonymous man with a mechanical voice box). Caution and Natacha play cat-and-mouse with the authorities, with each other’s feelings, and with the truth itself.
Unlike straight noir, where the inciting crime exposes a system of corruption, and where the protagonists find themselves sucked deeper and deeper into a world of conspiracy and intrigue by their own actions, Alphaville isn’t much concerned about the morals of its main characters as the root cause for their problems. Nor is the movie beholden to the Hays Code; there are no easy lessons about hewing to some standard set by American censors, no manuals for how to behave. The film is slippery, though its plot is easier to follow than its noir predecessors. The problem isn’t a crime that exposes some corruption in the system. The problem, in this movie, is the entire system of control. Alphaville may owe much to noir before it, but Godard’s film looks forward instead of back, setting the template for the cyberpunk genre to come.
Without the use of set dressing or special effects, Alphaville reframes Paris as a dystopian science fiction town where everything is trapped in an endless loop of cause and effect. Society is governed by a computer designed to make careful adjustments for control. That’s all cyberpunk is: an exploration of feedback loops, a story about systems that use outputs for their own inputs, then recycle the inputs to make their own outputs, a chain of cause and effect with cascading consequences. Our protagonists are trapped within the system, conscious enough of its strictures that they want to break free.
The neo-ness of Alphaville’s neo-noir status comes from its place as both a Godard film and as speculative fiction. It’s a heavily-improvised movie about control, a science fiction movie unconcerned with the trappings of the science fiction genre. Rockets and galaxies and robots are implied, but never shown. The strangeness of the setting comes from its characters’ attitudes toward it: the citizens of Alphaville speak without meaning anything substantial, while Lemmy Caution regards his place with a bored detachment that will soon betray his bewilderment. He doesn’t react because he doesn’t know how he should react, and by the time he’s figured out his precarious place in society, any shift in his attitude would betray him as a free thinker to be purged from the system. Free thinkers are hunted by the Alpha 60 computer, a system of control so deeply embedded into the city that its citizens are unable to see anything strange about their world, nor anything wrong with their situation.
As our entry point to Alphaville, Caution is a man unmoored from his setting, a stranger drifting into town. He’s a detective posing as a journalist, two jobs that (at least on paper) demand a level of detachment, the better to draw clear-eyed conclusions. Caution observes everything around him through disinterested emotional armor. Upon arriving at his hotel, he’s jumped by a “class three seductress”—a sex worker who escorts him to his hotel room—followed immediately by a would-be assassin. The sex worker fills the air with questions that sound like polite conversation, but grate the longer Caution maintains his own silence; he never responds to her, except to twitch his suitcase away from her grasping hands.
His cool breaks after he kills his would-be assassin; Caution turns to the seductress to ask her if any part of their situation is “normal” in Alphaville. She responds in the affirmative, and he bursts out: “Everything weird is ‘normal’ in this damn town!” Then the mask slips back over Caution’s face. He’s in danger, and he knows it, so he takes the rest of the city’s “normal” in stride, refusing to react to the weirdness of Alphaville as the city presents itself to him. The damage has been done anyway, and we know that nothing we see next would be what Caution would describe as typical, or even sane.
Caution’s detachment layers itself atop the ironic detachment of Godard’s direction: the film observes its own strangeness without needing to explain precisely how Alphaville differs from the rest of the galaxy. Caution’s affect as he moves through the city is a guarded flatness, almost to the point of incuriosity, mediated by the occasional snap of his camera’s flash bulb. Whenever Caution asks someone else about what’s happening, they tell him just the facts: no histories except the ones we extrapolate for ourselves, no explanations of the actual workings of technology, just the way that technology interferes in everyday life. The because and the how of Alphaville’s strangeness doesn’t matter to Caution any more than it does to Godard. The only thing that genuinely matters, both in the plot and in its telling, is the why.
And Alphaville is strange. Citizens of the city say both “hello” and “goodbye” with an emotionless “I’m fine, thanks, don’t mention it,” their words hanging empty, an uninvited response to an unspoken prompt. Natacha shakes her head no when she says “yes,” and nods her head yes when she says “no.” Women stand around, hardly clothed, living statues who either throw themselves at the detective, or else are shepherded away by other men with a gentle slap, as though they’re cattle. Above everything hovers the threat of Civil Control.
Caution doesn’t understand what Civil Control is. His companion Natacha, a local who joins Caution in his search for his missing person—a man who happens to be her own father—doesn’t understand what love is. Alphaville is about the tension between control and love, the system and the individual, cold logic and the human heart. The film exists in the gray lines between harsh light and dark shadow, the tension between the darkness of noir and the light needed to reveal just how far those depths can go. The two competing ideas of love and control oscillate back and forth between Caution and Natacha. Her blasé attitude toward her hometown piques Caution’s curiosity: she’s a possible source of information, and of danger. The two exist in a feedback loop, feeding off each other’s interest until they become intertwined in each other’s stories.
*
Cybernetic systems are older than computers, but the invention of the computer made increasingly complex cybernetic systems possible, and Alphaville is home to a very powerful computer. The computer being a computer, it cannot conceive of anything new. It’s only capable of recombination, not creative thought; its outputs are governed by only what has come before. Alpha 60 needs data, and desires to smooth the world out into predictable chains of cause and effect. It has managed to become so valuable to Alphaville that the city would grind to a halt without it. The machine is hungry and cannot be stopped.
Alpha 60 started on smaller problems: the issues of the trains not running on time, of keeping the electrical grid up, of moving resources where they’re needed. As the computer solved each one, it took on more problems until it had insinuated itself into every part of life in the city. The problem with human systems is that they’re designed by humans and run by them, and therefore subject to human flaws; if the computer can think with perfect logic, why not hand over human responsibility to the machine? The computer is a convenience, an opportunity to relinquish mundane tasks to something else, to think about higher-level problems without needing to bother with the small annoyances of life and logistics.
But the problem with cybernetic systems is that they must have more data. Cybernetic systems require the perpetual motion of a feedback loop: if an output cannot be used as an input in turn, the data is lost and the system shuts down. Alpha 60 trained itself to resolve issues that did not require a human element; having learned on systems that need no human beings, the systems that do require humans—love, justice, the business of living a fulfilling life—must therefore have the imperfections ironed out of them. Human business is full of misunderstanding, disappointment, imperfection, efforts that go nowhere and peter out. Therefore the human institutions, Alpha 60 reasons, should have their humanity drained. The scientists who created Alpha 60 relinquish all power; rather than solving complicated problems themselves, they’re reduced to grubbing for data to feed their ever hungrier monster. Alpha 60 got the trains to run on time. Then it became a fascist system of control.
Any change the computer enacts on the city is an attempt to drive the world into an increasingly more predictable state—because the more predictable the city of Alphaville is, the more reliable its data. Human beings are unpredictable, but if you break their spirits and teach them that there’s no way out, they’ll comply. It’s an unlivable system, warped by paranoia and hostility, but at least it conforms to the aims of the computer. Humanity becomes object rather than subject, secondary to the system it created, a small creature trapped under the gears until one false move crushes it.
*
If Alphaville’s citizens feel any desperation, they don’t show it. Perhaps it’s all an act, like Lemmy Caution’s casually bored bravado. More likely, the people of Alphaville have come to accept the direction of the Alpha 60 computer as the force that makes their world spin. Creeping fascism is insidious, a long, erosive drip. Just a little change, something small to make minimal personal adjustment to, no reason for alarm. Then suddenly you’ll turn the corner and find other people spouting non sequiturs as greetings—“I’m fine, thanks, don’t mention it”—and applauding the public execution of free thinkers. When your own humanity has been worn away, it’s easy to deny the humanity of others, even as they scream their own rights and are silenced by the flash of a knife.
In Alphaville, anyone who refuses to conform is expected to kill themselves. Dissidents who won’t lay down and submit—or else die by their own hand—must die at the decree of the computer. People have become a bug in the system, an interference, something to be redacted from the official report. On one occasion, Caution and Natacha watch a series of executions set in a swimming pool. The condemned are pushed out onto a diving board, then shot, and as they fall into the water, knife-wielding women dive in after them to finish the job, all to the applause of Alphaville’s high-ranking officials: the approval of the machine written in claps that echo like thunder in the hard confines of the swimming pool.
Alphaville is about the moral imperative to resist authoritarian government; its images, so close to the end of World War II and the Holocaust, are pointedly blunt. Female citizens each bear a numbered tattoo that identifies them (it’s unclear whether any of the men in the city have one). Alpha 60 talks about weeding out anyone below average intelligence from the population using mass euthanasia, then turning the most intelligent people into tools for gathering more data about its enemies. The logical end of all of Alpha 60’s calculations can only be war and death. The scientists who support the computer’s operations wear circular tags, akin to the ID badges worn by scientists who participated in The Manhattan Project, and they describe their machine as being “more powerful than the atom bomb.” The Alpha 60 engineers know precisely what they’re doing, even though they might be in denial about their role as pawns in the computer’s machinations, and about the logical end of their own efforts.
For the computer, there is no past and no future, only the present and all the data it can take. Live in the now, Alpha 60 urges the inhabitants of Alphaville, and rewrite language until emotional ideas have no more meaning. “Never ask ‘why’ only ‘because,’” the computer decrees. “Because” is an affirmation that there will always be data to explain the unanswered question. “Because” is an explanation that meshes with the posters around Alphaville declaring the city’s ideals of “silence, logic, safety, prudence.” “Because” is an input. “Because” demands a simple answer. Alphaville’s streets are named after scientists who’d once asked “why”—Fermi and Heisenberg among them—but the computer’s desire for concrete answers becomes a rejection of everything that is as yet unknown. Fermi and Heisenberg and Einstein’s equations become the “because” that is the foundation of the city’s structure. The Alpha 60 computer might be the most technologically advanced supercomputer of all time, but it’s tied itself into an increasingly tight logical knot, stunting its own ability to expand the realm of human knowledge even as it fastens the noose of control around humanity’s neck.
If Godard’s film had been heavy-handed in 1965, its dystopian future, ruled over by a genocidal computer, feels oppressive and inescapable now. We’ve seen too many fascists in the intervening years to deny the movie its message, unless we live in the same state of denial as the Alpha 60 engineers, tweaking the meanings of words until they lose their power. Alpha 60 itself bears an uncanny resemblance to the technology of today, pushed just a little farther: we, too, have complex computer systems that are growing rapidly more complicated.
The Alpha 60 sets itself questions so complex that human beings can’t write them down; in our own world, neural networks are trained using feedback loops of self-reflexive queries, learning how to communicate through massive sets of data that grow increasingly larger. LLMs aren’t self-conscious the same way the Alpha 60 computer is, but they are put to use solving the problems no one wants to handle: the rote code that’s boring to write, the routine emails, the repetitive in-and-out of polite communication that says nothing much at all. It leads to the proliferation of slop on the internet. Our computers can’t conceive of actual semantic and syntactic meaning; they’re just very good at pattern matching, and the seams show, uncanny and strange, whenever the output doesn’t match the clarity of the corresponding human input.
They’re a shiny new tool, a hammer, and they’re so novel that every unsolvable problem appears to be a nail.
Alpha 60 approaches its own unsolvable issues with the blunt force of a hammer, applying itself to the problems it was never intended to resolve. The computer understands less than it lets on; it keeps draining away words it deems unnecessary or illogical, words like “love” and “conscience.” Remove the complexity, make the complicated problem as simple as a series of inputs and outputs, and perhaps it too can be solved for x. You just have to remove variables like the beating human heart.
*
If Alphaville is a prophecy, it’s a prophecy of the truth-telling kind. The future isn’t set in stone, nor is the past as great as we like to think. Fascism is nothing new. Systems of control have always existed, and they can always be resisted—we’ve been doing it for as long as those systems have been around, and we’re better at it, because we’re capable of rational thought and creativity.
To take on a fatalistic attitude about how the world has always been bad, or about how Alpha 60 will always control everything, would be to surrender. Lemmy Caution refuses to give in to the computer because the thought of living a dull life under heavy-handed control frightens him far more than his own unanswered questions. To capitulate to the Alpha 60 would be an attempt to escape responsibility for his own actions. He’d be no better than the engineers, previously in control and now subservient to the thing they made. Once Caution understands the system of control, he rejects it, quoting poetry in response to the computer’s questions.
He teaches Natacha poetry, too. “Your eyes have returned from a distant country where no one understands the meaning of a glance,” he tells her, and the movie melts into a kind of visual poetry in response. The two gaze directly into the camera, their mouths closed as they speak in voiceover all the things they can’t say out loud where Alpha 60 can hear. As Caution stares out at us, Natacha’s hands reach around his shoulders from behind to block his face. Then the two are side by side, their faces washed out by intense light as they turn to look, first at the camera, then at each other, the direct understanding that cannot be spoken but still demands to be expressed in small words like “I” and “love” and “you.” Then the camera pans slowly across a dark hotel room to rest on Natacha and Lemmy standing in the frame of a floor-length window, their silhouetted bodies outlined only by the lights of the city outside. The sequence is brief. It defies the easy explanation of traditional dialogue and editing, a rejection of the input/output cycle of the computer, of formal filmmaking, of plot.
Here is the catalyst that breaks the cycle and splits the plot wide open. Natacha can’t be told the answer; if she were told, and simply accepted it, she’d be no better than the Alpha 60 computer, a machine accepting an input (“I love you”) and parroting it as an output (“I love you too”). She has to arrive at the conclusion herself, to be her own means of escape, to express her love first herself. Fortunately, she’s human. She might not have learned the words for it from anyone else, but love is inexpressible, unfathomable to the machine, and as easy as breathing.