Homicide

Notably, in early 1944, screenwriter and journalist Ben Hecht—a relatively assimilated American Jew that initially had little interest in his Hebrew roots but later became a rabid Zionist propagandist of sorts as a result of the Third Reich—wrote in his book A Guide for the Bedevilled (1944), “Hollywood, is a town, an industry, an empire of toy-making, invented by Jews, dominated by Jews, and made to flourish like unto the land of Solomon—by Jews, and a few embattled Irishmen. Such is its truth, and if you wish to look for its deep meanings, it is into this truth you must look.” Indeed, unless you are a complete fucking moron or have never seen any movies, you know that Jews dominate and have always dominated Tinseltown, yet, somewhat curiously, Hollywood rarely releases truly Hebraic movies. Sure, there are plenty of crappy kosher comedies where some effeminate asshole Ashkenazi slob like Seth Rogen tries to be funny by mentioning his “Jewfro” in between creepily lusting over some dumb blonde shiksa, but rarely do Hollywood films actually take an intricate approach to the Jewish question or Jewish themes. After all, aside from his Hebraic brand of humor, Woody Allen only represents Judaism so much as he is a walking and talking racial stereotype as the virtual archetype of the classically weak, neurotic, and whiny four-eyed kosher cripple. Somewhat ironically but not surprisingly, the handful of the films that really take an intelligent approach to Judaism focus heavily on the theme of Jewish self-hatred, which seems to be almost as old as Judaism itself as indicated by historical figures ranging from Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada to tragic Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger to suicidal American neo-Nazi Daniel Burros. In fact, both Arthur Hiller’s Robert Shaw adaptation The Man in the Glass Booth (1975) and Henry Bean’s The Believer (2001), which was inspired by Burros, feature Jews masquerading as Nazis and delivering rather intricate and articulate speeches regarding the timeless problem of the Jewish peril. While it does not exactly feature Hebrew Hitlerites sporting jackboots, David Mamet’s third feature Homicide (1991) also deals with the theme of the self-loathing Jew in the form of a police hostage negotiator who unwittingly gets involved in a Zionist terrorist conspiracy and ultimately commits an act of Zio-terrorism himself against a neo-Nazi business owner in a desperate attempt to overcome his self-hatred and create a strong Jewish identity, only to be betrayed by his new Jew buddies and virtually destroy his entire life in the process. As a staunch Zionist conservative that more or less regards Jews who consider their favorite Jew to be Anne Frank as treacherous self-loathing scum, Mamet is thankfully no stereotypical xenophiliac Hollywood Jewish liberal faggot and he has no problem portraying blacks as extremely uncouth racists and rapist beasts (e.g. Edmond). In Homicide, Mamet reveals that no one likes kikes, including some kikes like the film's protagonist. 

 In his imperative text The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Jewish self-hatred, and the Jews (2006), Mamet makes it quite clear that he believes that the goyim will never fully accept the Jews and that any Jew that seeks to assimilate is dangerously deluded, stating, “Just as (in the view of the Christians) Christianity superseded Judaism; so the contemporary Jew may long to cast off that which he (consciously or unconsciously) understands as an outdated system of allegiance. This confused Jew may aspire to join in that which he understands as a more modern, non-Jewish confraternity, entry into which will more fully integrate him into society at large, thus bringing happiness. He is, here, twice deluded. First, the state of perfect, relaxed integration that he ascribes to the non-Jews, their absence of anomie and anxiety, is a fiction […] Second, this integration the Jew supposes his Christian brothers enjoy—just beyond the borders of his own unfortunate (spiritual or racial) segregation—should it exist, the Jew would, in fact, be debarred from it because of his race.” Somewhat curiously, in Homicide—a work that Mamet created when he was somewhat less racially radicalized—it is ultimately the fanatical Zionist Jews that most betray the Jew protagonist who is somewhat strangely played by glaring Sicilian-American Joe Mantegna. In fact, it is only when the protagonist comes into contact with other more fanatical treacherous Jews that he becomes treacherous himself and unintentionally kills his Aryan goy best friend/partner in the process. In unintentionally hilarious stereotypical oversensitive Jewish fashion, the protagonist completely loses it after his friend calls him a “kike” during a heated argument and decides to become a Zionist terrorist virtually overnight, thus breaking his oath as a police officer in the process. Quite contrary to Mamet’s unapologetically Zionistic political writings, Homicide is a fairly nuanced film that more or less argues that Jews are damned if they do and damned if they don’t when it comes to embracing their race and culture. In fact, while Mamet would probably argue otherwise, the film might be best described as a quasi-nihilistic Jewish film noir where the protagonist is confronted with the nature of evil and discovers that members of his race are just as violent, hateful, and criminally inclined as the neo-Nazis and ghetto negroes that despise them.  In short, it is strange to think that the same made that directed Homicide also wrote, “The quiddity of the self-loathing Jew, the opted-out Jew, is his grotesquerie.  Both to his people and to the enemies of his people, he is out of step, out of tune, and pathetic—his efforts at assimilation foiling the possibility of contentment with a group to which he actually belongs.”

 While the hapless working-class Hebrew protagonist of Homicide is unlikable for many reasons, not least of all because of his nonchalant self-hatred and rather glaring attempts at overcompensating for said self-hatred, he is far from the most unlikable yid in the entire film. In terms of its eclectic collection of repugnant, ugly, arrogant, smug, and/or just downright exceedingly unlikable collection of kosher characters, the film is somewhat ironically more effective in terms of spreading negative Jewish stereotypes than National Socialist classics like octoroon Jew Fritz Hippler’s agitprop doc Der Ewige Jude (1940) aka The Eternal Jew and Veit Harlan’s lavish melodrama Jud Süß (1940). Certainly you know a character is repugnant when you cannot help but hate him even though his mother was just brutally murdered as in the case in regard to a certain audaciously arrogant and pushy Jewish doctor in the film named Dr. Klein who, in stereotypical Jewish fashion, uses his clout to force the protagonist to take his criminal case, but of course that is exactly the sort of thing that makes a Mamet flick interesting. Undoubtedly, if Homicide was not the product of a Judaic mind, it would be regarded as a quasi-esoteric antisemitism that demonstrates with fairly good reason as to why everyone hates Jews, including many Jews. Featuring a protagonist that is so ignorant of his race and culture that he confuses Yiddish with Hebrew and is not beneath joking about certain negative stereotypes regarding his race, Homicide is also notable in that the ‘hero’ is a Jewish philistine who is surely more likeable and sympathetic than the rest of the members of his seemingly forsaken race that he encounters in his strange personal odyssey. In short, the film does not exactly make the best case for Judaism or Zionist, but then again it features an even less unflattering portrayal of urban negroes and their striking tendency to commit the most brutal and violent of criminal acts for the most trivial acts (notably, it is ultimately one of these brutal black crimes that leads the protagonist to virtually destroying his entire life after mistaking a coldblooded ghetto murder for an antisemitic conspiracy). Indeed, the only possible conclusion that one can come to after watching the film is that most Jews are too obsessed with their own race and Israel to ever be trusted by American—whether they be black or white—hence the reason as to why the majority of Jews endorse the flooding of the United States with third world rabble, thus weakening their much despised European-American enemy. 

 In The Wicked Son, Mamet interestingly argued, “Why do some Jews reject their religion and their race? For two reasons: because it is ‘too Jewish’ and because it is not Jewish enough.” As far as the film’s protagonist Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) is concerned, he seems to be more honest than Mamet on the subject as he rejects Judaism because he associates it with weakness, cowardliness, and effeminacy, which are surely serious sins among cops. As a Jew, Bobby was blessed with the gift of gab and thus he was more or less forced to be the ‘The Talking Man’ aka ‘hostage negotiator’ of his police district (although the city is never mentioned, the film was actually filmed in the aesthetically grotesque post-Europid wasteland known as Baltimore). To the slight chagrin of his partner and best friend Tim Sullivan (William H. Macy), Bobby always has to be the first cop to bust in the door when nabbing bad guys because he is desperate to prove himself and demonstrate that he is no stereotypical pussy candy ass Jew coward.  Of course, as a self-hating Hebrew that has no problem hearing co-workers regularly throw around racial slurs like ‘yid,’ Bobby is more masochistic than he is courageous.

 At the beginning of the film, a bitchy negro named Mr. Patterson (Louis Murray) that works for the city mayor severely internally wounds Bobby by calling him a “little kike,” thus initiating the first step in the protagonist's rather tragic path of personal transformation of the racially oriented sort that ultimately ends in abject failure. Since the FBI botched busting a negro dope dealer and killer named Robert Randolph (Ving Rhames) in a night raid that resulted in the deaths of two FBI agents, Bobby and his partner Tim have been assigned to locate him since they are already fairly familiar with him. Unfortunately while on the way to grab Randolph’s cousin, Bobby happens upon a murder scene in a black ghetto where an elderly Jewess was mysteriously killed during an armed robbery. According to some ebonics literate negroid children, the old Jewess was murdered because of supposed secret treasure in the basement of her store.  When a black officer arrives on the scene, he practically blames the Jewess for getting liquidated since she had no business operating a store in an all-negro ghetto neighborhood. Needless to say, Bobby is more than a little bit irked when the dead Hebrewess’ outstandingly arrogant doctor son Dr. Klein (J.S. Block)—a virtual posterboy for Nazi propaganda as far as grotesque Jewish caricature are concerned who immediately complains of an antisemitic conspiracy in regard to his mother's death—uses his kosher clout to make him work on his dead mother’s murder case. Indeed, instead of having the honor of busting ghetto arch-criminal Randolph and swaggering around like a big bad hero, Bobby has to suffer the whiny and hysterical paranoia of a family of opulent Jews that he just cannot stomach as they clearly remind him of the negative qualities that he hates in himself, not to mention the fact that they have way more money than he does. 

 While Bobby manages to coerce Randolph’s proud negress mother into helping the police to catch her son by telling her that they will put him in prison instead of six feet under, his superior—a loudmouthed guido named Lieutenant Senna (Vincent Guastaferro)—makes him take on the lowly job of dealing with the Jews because, as he tells him, “they’re your people.”  Needless to say, Bobby is extremely offended when his boss describes the Jews as his people, so he goes on a rant and yells, “I’m his people?! I thought I was your people, Lieu,” but he is ultimately a pushover and begrudgingly takes the dreaded Judaic case.  When Bobby is forced to go by the luxurious Klein castle after the Jews get scared as a result of ostensibly hearing a gunshot on their roof, Dr. Klein thoroughly pisses off the protagonist by threatening him by stating in an audaciously arrogant fashion, “Have you got the pride to do that job you were given? Do your job, or else.”  Despite himself being connected to a Jewish terrorist conspiracy, dickhead Klein believes there is an antisemitic conspiracy and berates Bobby for supposedly thinking that he is dealing with, “hysterical Jews [...] that are always making it up.”  Rather ironically, the conclusion of the film ultimately proves that, for the most part, Dr. Klein is a delusional Hebrew hysteric that could probably find a antisemitism at a Bar Mitzvah.

After getting extremely annoyed with the Jews, Bobby goes to a room and vents out his frustration to his partner Tim over the phone, stating in an almost wildly excited fashion, “I’m stuck here with my – my Jews. You should see this fuckin’ room […] Fuckin’ bullshit. Bunch of high-strung fuckin’ bullshit. They pay so much taxes – Fuck ‘em […] Don’t send the old lady work down there and tell me how you’re so surprised. Fuck ‘em and the taxes they pay. You tell me. Ten more bucks a week they’re making’, lettin’ her [dead Jewess] work down there? Ha! Hey, not my people, baby. Fuck ‘em. There’s so much antisemitism the last 4,000 years. . .we must be doin’ somethin’ [to] bring it about.” Unbeknownst to Tim, Dr. Klein’s daughter Miss Klein (Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon) was in the room and heard the entire conversation. While Bobby immediately attempts to apologize, Miss Klein immediately verbally reams him by passionately declaring, “My grandmother was kill today. She stayed down there because she wanted to stay there. She was a fighter. She wanted to die there. She died there. You’re a Jew, and you talk that way in the house of the dead. Do you have any shame? […] Do you hate yourself that much? Do you belong nowhere?” After swearing to Miss Klein that he will “find her killer” in regard to her dead grandfather, Bobby hears a gunshot and immediately investigates the roof of the building where he finds a torn piece of paper that reads “Grofaz.” That same night, Bobby also discovers that the elderly dead Jewess used to be a Zionist terrorist that was involved in gunrunning, among other things.  At this point, Bobby begins to speculate that there is indeed some sort of antisemitic conspiracy and soon finds himself engulfed in a sort of quasi-Kafka nightmare of obscene obsession and paranoia that inspires in him an ultimately rather untimely Jewish awakening of sorts.

 As a result of being forcibly entrenched in a world of Jews and anti-Jew hatred (aside from the death of the old Jewess, the protagonist discovers anti-Jew flyers around the city that compares Jews to rats), Bobby becomes extremely enamored with the Klein case and begins following every lead he has, including the word “Grofaz,” which he soon discovers is an archaic nickname for Adolf Hitler and an acronym for ‘Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten’ aka ‘Greatest War Leader of All Time,’ thus leading him to suspect that there is indeed some sort of sinister neo-Nazi plot against the Klein family. Meanwhile, Bobby’s relationship with his partner Tim begins to fall apart as a result of his obsession with the Jewish case and his glaring disinterest with the big Randolph case that they were working on together. While Tim gives Bobby wonderful words of advice about the importance of not being too emotionally attached to the case by stating, “Bob, I’m gonna tell you what the old whore said, and this is the truest thing I know. ‘When you start cumin’ with the customers, it’s time to quit,’” he also gets quite emotional about his partner's strange unbecoming behavior and calls him a “dumb kike.” When Bobby goes to a Jewish library and an absurdly arrogant Orthodox Jew says to him, “you’re say you’re a Jew, and you can’t read Hebrew. What are you then?,” it naturally only compounds his guilty feelings of racial confusion and deracination. While at the library, Bobby asks for information on ‘GröFaZ’ and ‘anti-Semitic acts,’ but the two-faced yarmulke-adorned librarian (Mamet stock Jew Steve Goldstein), who is actually a Mossad agent, lies to him and says that they have no such information because he knows that it has been loaned out to a local Zionist terrorist organization that is plotting to attack a local neo-Nazi. 

 Upon eavesdropping on the lying kippah-sporting librarian, Bobby learns that the information has been loaned out to a group called ‘212’ and soon discovers their address, which he visits. When Bobby dares to ask a couple young joggers about the seemingly empty building at the address, they reveal they are Israeli terrorists by randomly pulling guns on him and threatening to kill him. Luckily, a small group of Jews, who were previously at the Klein home, recognize Bobby and invite him into the building, which is revealed to be the headquarters a secret Zionist paramilitary operation that seems to be inspired by the real-life Jewish Defense League (JDL) founded by assassinated ultra-nationalist rebbe Meir Kahane. Somewhat humorously, the old Zionist terrorists have stereotypically ugly old Jewish guy names like ‘Barry,’ ‘Lev,’ and ‘Merv.’ Impressed by the militancy and supposed masculinity of these militant Zionist Jews, Bobby immediately offers to help, but when the elderly Israeli leader of the group demands that he give the group an ancient document in regard to gunrunning with various local Jewish names and addresses, he refuses since it is police evidence.  Bobby found the document in the basement of the store owned by the dead Jewess and it seems to prove that a good percentage of the city's Jewish population is involved in a vast Zionist conspiracy that has lasted for about half a century. When Bobby insists that he cannot do it because he does not want to break his oath as a police officer, the geriatric Zionist leader mocks him by asking him “Where are you loyalties?” and then has him thrown out, but not before melodramatically stating to his compatriots in regard to the protagonist, “He disgusts me.”  Like a stereotypical overbearing and shrill-sounding Jewish mother, the Israeli terrorist attempts to guilt Bobby into stealing the document by questioning his Jewishness, but the cop just cannot bring himself to break his oath, even though he is willing to now commit terrorist acts.  Indeed, it seems that the Zionist geezer's whiny words worked wonders on old Bobby boy, as he has transformed from a self-loathing Jew into a Zionist terrorist in virtually a single day.

 While Bobby’s meeting with the Zionist terrorists certainly did not go well, he still attempts to help them by hooking up with one of their female members. Indeed, Bobby originally met Chava (Natalija Nogulich)—a vaguely attractive Jewess with a fairly flat affect—at the Klein’s house and it does not take long for him to lose his phony tough guy person and pour his entire heart out to her, stating like the stereotypical whiny Jew that he used to hate, “They said I was a pussy all my life. They said I was a pussy because I was a Jew. And the cops – They’d say, ‘Send a Jew? Might as well send a broad on a job. Send a broad through the door.’ That’s what they said. All my goddamn life. And I listened to them. I was the donkey. I was the clown […] They made me the hostage negotiator ‘cause I knew how the bad guys felt.” Ultimately, Bobby makes the major mistake of carrying out one of Chava’s Zionist terrorist missions out for her by blowing up the model train store of a neo-Nazi named Anderson. Needless to say, when Bobby examines Anderson’s shop and sees a swastika flag, a picture of a Nazi soldier shooting a Jewess holding a baby, and books like Martin Luther’s anti-Jew classic The Jews and Their Lies, he is more than a little bit angered, but he does not get the gall to blow up the building until he reads a propaganda pamphlet that reads, “It is only common sense to cull the weak. The admixture of Jewish blood into the clean White Race is a crime against humanity against which the greatest plagues of history must pale. The effeminate ideals and weak physical appearance of the Jew proclaim to all his inferiority. To tolerate the presence of the vile sickness in our midst is not justice, IT IS MADNESS.”  While Bobby has no understanding of Hebrew or the tenets of the Jewish religion, he can certainly identify with the racial element of Judaism, hence his rather melodramatic reaction to the racially-charged propaganda pamphlet. Unfortunately for Bobby, members of the Zionist terrorist group took photos of the protagonist blowing up the store and use said photos to blackmail him into giving them the document they want. On top of everything else, Bobby realizes just after he is blackmailed and beaten by a rather rotund Zio-terrorist goon named Aaron (Jewish magician and sometimes actor Ricky Jay) that he is late for his date with his partner Tim to knab alpha-criminal Robert Randolph. 

 If his day could not get any worse, Bobby discovers upon arriving at Randolph’s rather quaint ghetto hideout that the entire operation has turned into a horrific disaster and that is partner Tim has been shot. Of course, had Bobby been on time to negotiate with Randolph instead of committing terrorist acts for the benefit of treacherous Israeli terrorists, his best friend probably would have not been shot. Totally unafraid of dying at this point in his increasingly lonely and pathetic life, Bobby bravely busts through the building while Randolph is shooting at cops to get to his partner Tim, who randomly states to him, “Do you remember that girl that onetime, Bob?” and then tragically dies in his arms. With his best friend dead, Bobby screams to Randolph, “You shot my partner, you fucking nigger. I’m gonna kill you” and then climbs down to a sort of almost mystical subterranean realm to confront the negro in a crucial climatic scene that auteur Mamet notably described in the Criterion Collection DVD audio commentary as, “The sort of apotheosis. The meeting with the keeper of the secrets […] He’s going deep into the cave to find the Minotaur. To finally find the secrets. And he’s finally about to descent into the underworld.”

In what proves to be a symbolic common occurrence for the protagonist that demonstrates that he is a shitty cop that lacks the marital prowess to fight bad guys, Bobby manages to lose his gun while making his descent and is thus naturally immediately shot when he finally reaches Randolph, who acts rather smug and mocks him for losing his gun. When Randolph asks the protagonist if he wants to beg for his life, Bobby pathetically replies, “It’s not worth anything.” When Bobby makes the quasi-suicidal mistake of claiming to Randolph that his mother sold him out to the cops, the negro copkiller shoots him again and calls him a “piece of shit,” to which the injured protagonist replies while in glaring pain, “I am a piece of shit. I killed my partner, and your mama turned you in.” When Bobby proves to Randolph that his mother sold him out by showing him a bogus passport that the police procured for the specific purpose of busting him, the trigger-happy negro outlaw is so stunned that he does not even notice when a couple cops show up and blow him away with a couple bullets. After being shot, Randolph’s body lands on Bobby and he states while lying on the wounded Jew, “God. God help me. What did you do to me?”

In what ultimately proves to be quite bitter biting irony for the protagonist, Bobby learns in the end that there was never any sort of antisemitic conspiracy and that elderly Jewess Klein was actually killed by the very same young preteen negro boys who proclaimed at the crime scene that she was killed for mythical treasure in her basement. Additionally, the ‘grofaz’ paper that Bobby found on the Klein’s roof was not in reference to Uncle Adolf but a pigeon feed company called ‘Grofazt.’ On top of everything else, Bobby is kicked off of homicide and is immediately regulated to a stereotypical Jewish position of abstract paper-shuffling.   Notably, at the beginning of the film, a deranged dude named Walter B. Wells (Colin Stinton) that committed familicide with his trusty hunting rifle made a somewhat strange offer to Bobby by stating, “Perhaps someday I could tell you the nature of evil. Would you like to know how to – to solve the problem of evil?,” but the protagonist declines, stating, “No, man, ‘cause if I did, then I’d be out of the job.” Of course, by the end of the film, Bobby has encountered various forms of evil, including among his own race, but he is hardly capable of destroying it, especially since he himself pathetically succumbed to it.

 While auteur David Mamet decided for whatever reason not to mention to the name of the superlatively shitty quasi-third world east coast city where it was shot, Homicide—a title that perfectly describes said city’s most booming trade aside from dope-dealing—does a great job demonstrating that Baltimore is an absolutely forsaken and criminally malignant hellhole where corrupt self-serving spades run the government, perennially unemployed killer colored folks roam the streets at all hours, and corrupt white collar chosenites use their money to manipulate politicians to benefit of their true nation of Israel. Of course, the entire film almost takes a sadistic glee in depicting virtually every great American racial stereotype, including that bourgeois Jews are paranoid supporters of Zionistic terror, urban negroes are barbaric brutes that are not beneath committing senseless violent murders during early childhood, and Jews make for crappy cops because they do not have the testicular fortitude or martial prowess to get the job done nor deal with the ruthless teasing of his fellow cops. It should also be noted that the least violent and racially hateful people in the entire film are the ‘white’ (translation: non-Jewish people of European descent), yet the black and Jewish characters are so belligerent in their racial sensitivity that one would almost assume that Mamet is attempting to say that there is a direct link between racial neuroticism and criminality. Indeed, the only whites that dare to say racially insensitive things are neo-Nazis and they do it via flyers while the negroes characters, who seem to see their anti-whitey hatred as a sort of badge of honor, quite regularly exchange charming racial slurs to complete strangers.  In fact, even when the protagonist's friend calls him a “kike,” it hardly seems to be for racial reasons.  As for the negroes, Mamet makes it more than clear in Homicide that he believes that American negroes—a group that has been exploited as a sort of socio-cultural political weapon by Hollywood, Jewish groups, and politicians for at least a century—has a deep-seated collective hatred for all-things-kosher.  In short, Mamet's confirms in a variety of subtle ways that he believes that all the conspiracy theories about Jews are true.

 Undoubtedly, after watching Homicide, the only conclusion that the viewer can come to is that it sucks being Jewish, especially when it comes to having to deal with other Jews. Indeed, had the protagonist not had the grand misfortune of interacting with pushy rich extremist Jews, he probably would not have virtually lost his mind, committed a terrorist act, and got his best friend killed. Considering Mamet’s own rather extreme Zionistic tendencies, it is quite curious that he would write and directed such a strangely Zio-unfriendly film, but as Stuart Klawans noted in his essay Homicide: What Are You, Then?, “That even the hint of a Jewish conspiracy should be conjured in HOMICIDE may disturb some viewers, including, today, perhaps the author himself, who in recent years has issued a number of bluntly worded commentaries accusing virtually all critics of the State of Israel of anti-Semitism (or of self-hatred, if they’re Jews), and of having feeble brains haunted by THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION. Rather than address the merits of this position, I will merely suggest that it’s a mistake to identify Mamet the artist with Mamet the polemicist.”

 Although just speculation, I can only assume that Mamet, as a famous and politically active Jew, is perfectly aware of the criminal and conspiratorial nature of rich and powerful Jews and that has instilled him with a certain deep and unwavering sense of paranoia that makes him feel the need to be militant about Zionism lest there be some neo-pogroms or even another shoah. After all, people that are not wracked with guilt do not feel the need to go on the defensive, yet Hollywood incessantly defecates out anti-intellectual holocaust agitprop films that are supposed to make the stupid goyim think that the Jews are history's foremost innocent victim despite all the contemporary (and historical) evidence to the contrary.  This might also explain why Jews constantly complain about the holocaust and antisemitism in Hollywood films and TV shows yet virtually never actually create truly Judaic themed works, as if they are afraid of gentiles, especially white Christians, truly understanding the intrinsically racially chauvinistic nature of Judaism and what it truly means to be a Jew in a world full of ostensibly stupid gentiles.  Hollywood's curious fear of revealing its innate Jewishness certainly disturbed Ben Hecht, who once complained regarding the complete and utter disappearance of Jews from films of the 1930s and 1940s, “The greatest single Jewish phenomenon in our country in the last twenty years has been the almost complete disappearance of the Jew from American fiction, stage, radio, and movies. . . .And for this false oblivion and for this dangerous exile, the movies are the most to blame.”

Aside from emotionally manipulative holocaust propaganda films featuring good goy protagonist's like Schindler's List (1993), the occasional overt Zionist propaganda film like Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960) and Spielberg's Munich (2005), and the disgusting deluge of semi-cryptically kosher comedies featuring revolting Hebraic hogs like Seth Rogen, Hebrew-owned Hollywood is strangely silent when it comes to addressing its own heritage.  As far is films that manage combine genre conventions with Jewish themes, the only thing I can really compare Homicide to is the fairly mediocre fourth season The X-Files episode “Kaddish,” which takes the legend of the Golem from the Kabbalah and transports it to contemporary times in an imaginary antisemitic Brooklyn where a trio of thuggish neo-Nazi proles kill an orthodox Jew for fun after reading one-too-many antisemitic flyers.  Needless to say, The X-Files episode is putridly politically correct (in fact, the original antagonists were a Louis Farrakhan-like figure and his negro underlings, but the Fox network were afraid that dindus would get made, so Jewish writer Howard Gordon rewrote the episode to make it more characteristically p.c.).  Of course, I doubt any Jew would have the artistic or intellectual integrity to make a film like Homicide nowadays, as it would be politically and financially risky to make a fairly ambiguous intellectual neo-noir that dares to features a group of shadowy scheming Jewish terrorists whose members are a also part of the city's cultural elite.  Indeed not unlike the pre-Code Hollywood flick The House of Rothschild (1934), Mamet's film ultimately does more harm to the Judaic cause than good.

Homicide hints at many reasons as to why people hate the Jews, but it never really gets to the heart of the issue, which Friedrich Nietzsche probably summed up best when he wrote in his classic text On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) in regard the decidedly deleterious effect of Jews on the Occident, “Whatever else has been done to damage the powerful and great of this earth seems trivial compared with what the Jews have done, that priestly people who succeeded in avenging themselves on their enemies and oppressors by radically inverting all their values, that is, by an act of the most spiritual vengeance. This was a strategy entirely appropriate to a priestly people in whom vindictiveness had gone most deeply underground. It was the Jew who, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/noble/powerful/beautiful/happy/favored-of-the-gods and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent, that "only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the godless, and thus the cursed and damned!" . . . We know who has fallen heir to this Jewish inversion of values.. . . In reference to the grand and unspeakably disastrous initiative which the Jews have launched by this most radical of all declarations of war, I wish to repeat a statement I made in a different context (BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL), to wit, that it was the Jews who started the slave revolt in morals; a revolt with two millennia of history behind it, which we have lost sight of today simply because it has triumphed so completely.”  Indeed, only in a slave-morality-ridden bizarro world dreamed up by Jews could homos, cripples, lard asses, dykes, mongrels, untermenschen, and retards be propped up as the height of moral righteousness while white men—the single greatest contributors to culture, civilization, science, and technology—are the most monstrous.

Undoubtedly, what makes Homicide and Mamet's greatest works most interesting is that they dare to depict harsh realities as opposed to Hollywood bullshit, but I would expect nothing less from a man that once hilariously wrote, “In my lifetime we Jews, mythologically, have served the cause of soft pornography.  The world weeps at our being killed.  What fun.  I wrote, years ago, that Holocaust films are ‘MANDINGO for Jews,’ and that the thrill, for the audience, came and comes from a protected indulgence of anti-Semitism: they get to see us killed and to explain to themselves that they feel bad about.”  Of course, Homicide is ultimately a reminder as to why I am not being paranoid when I sense that someone is attempting to emotionally swindle me anytime I see a holocaust movie.

-Ty E

Every Man for Himself

Although I still regard him as a somewhat preposterous and pathologically pedantic quasi-autistic frog who ranks among the most overrated filmmakers in filmmaking history, my opinion of Jean-Luc Godard has changed somewhat drastically over the past couple years and I now at least consider him to be a sort of eccentric cinematic genius whose overall oeuvre is not even really truly appreciated or understood by many of the same communist and left-wing dildos that claim to be his greatest proponents.  After all, even Godard himself regards one of his most famous and insanely overrated films, Bande à part (1964) aka Band of Outsiders, as nothing more than mere hack work that he created to help his then wife Anna Karina's career, or as the auteur once stated himself in regard to its lack of importance in the context of his entire oeuvre, “That's why I called it ‘Bande à part.’ It's really apart, it won't change anything, it's a diversion, a Bande à part.” Despite the fact that he never stopped creating innovative films or evolving as an artist, many people seem to assume that he stopped being an interesting filmmaker after he finished his apocalyptic dystopian black comedy Weekend (1967 film), fired his regular crew, and began living a more reclusive existence. Although Godard did waste about 12 or 13 years creating mostly worthless Maoist agitprop flicks with kosher communist Jean-Pierre Gorin under the so-called ‘Dziga Vertov Group’ and tinkering around with building a video studio and experimenting with then-state-of-the-art video technology, he did eventually return to what he described as “cinema cinema” and attempted to reenter the mainstream with a fairly fine flick that he would curiously describe as his “second first film.”  Indeed, although largely plotless and fairly idiosyncratic, Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) aka Every Man for Himself aka Slow Motion was a fairly serious attempt by Godard to get back into the public consciousness and create a film that could be appreciated by more people than just ‘bobos’ (aka bourgeois bohemians) and socially retarded film dorks. After finally watching the film, I must admit that is indubitably one of Godard’s most humorous and accessible works, albeit if not for some of the wrong reasons which largely have to do with self-exploitation and what might be described as ‘aesthetic autism.’

 Notable for being an embarrassingly personal work for Godard, especially in regard to his early years with his longtime partner Anne-Marie Miéville, the director once described the title as being best translated into English as “Save Your Ass,” which makes much sense when one considers the absolutely appalling female lovers and ex-lovers that the insufferably hip and emotionally broken protagonist must put up with while walking around like a sullen bohemian ghost. Don’t get me wrong, the overtly autobiographically named protagonist Paul Godard is a too-cool-for-school sack of shit that has incestuous fantasies about his own preteen daughter (who was inspired by Godard’s partner Miéville’s daughter), regularly calls his daughter and girlfriend a “bitch,” and is just an all around unlikable frog shithead that has next to no redeeming qualities aside from his biting sincerity, yet he still seems to have a tiny inkling more of humanity than the “Les Bitches” that plague his absolutely miserable life. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons I enjoyed the film so much is due to Godard’s unadulterated honesty in terms of demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that he and many of the people in his life are soulless snakes, self-absorbed pieces of elegantly packaged excrement, and intemperate sexual predators with patently pathetic post-Marxist political persuasions who really seem to epitomize everything that is wrong with post-counterculture Europe, especially among the so-called cultural elite (after all, one cannot forget that Godard is considered a national treasure of sorts and that he has been strongly supported by influential leaders like Hebraic socialist Jack Lang, who served as France's Minister of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and 1988 to 1992). 

 Notably, the Criterion Collection release of the film included an essay entitled Every Man for Himself: Themes and Variations by Amy Taubin where the misguidedly gynocentric authoress reveals she has never actually done any serious research on Godard or his personal life by absurdly arguing that the cinematic work is really the director’s “second first film” because he had some sort of life-changing feminist awakening where he realized the errors of the ostensible patriarchal male gaze, but in reality the auteur is a closest misogynist of sorts whose rare feminist posturing is even less sincere than his moronic Maoist phase. In fact, Taubin notes that the only “empathetic connection” in the film occurs between the female protagonists, but any sane non-cucked male will easily realize that the scene in question is nothing more than a stereotypical depiction of the sort of shallow female solidarity that women show for one another against a man that they both happened to have fucked. After all, only a thoroughly brainwashed feminist like Taubin, who once appeared in a film by ultra-feminist Jewess Yvonne Rainer, could describe a film like Every Man for Himself as “erroneously titled” that concludes with the male protagonist dying in the street whilst his daughter and ex-wife walk away in cold indifference (indeed, one can only assume that Taubin believes that Paul Godard's tragic death was well deserved).  Made after the auteur suffered two failed marriages that ended in bitter divorces and causes irrevocable emotional damaged that blatantly affected his filmmaking career, Godard’s “second first film” is the disturbing yet nonetheless devilishly humorous expression of a completely disillusioned man that has clearly given up on the prospect of true love and creating a family, hence the director’s lack of children and continued less than monogamous relationship with Miéville, who can hardly compete with Anna Karina or Anne Wiazemsky in terms of sheer elegance or pulchritude, among other things.

 Right from the get-go with his debut feature À bout de souffle (1960) aka Breathless where the male protagonist is killed after his dyke-cut-adorned American girlfriend betrays him by ratting him out to the cops, Godard revealed in what would ultimately prove to be a lifelong theme that the so-called fairer sex has a certain instinctual lack of loyalty and empathy when it comes to members of the opposite sex. In his semi-autobiographical eight feature Une femme mariée (1964) aka A Married Woman that was inspired by his one-sided marriage to Anna Karina, Godard would argue that modern European women lack the capacity for love and monogamy because they have been brainwashed by magazines, movies, and cultural trends that have instilled them with the grand delusion that the ideal 'liberated' woman is more or less a self-worshiping hedonistic whore of the culturally retarded sort who is only interested in her own quest for pleasure and shallow reputation among other vainglorious women that live to model their largely worthless lives after the fantasy worlds created by the homo advertisers of Madison Avenue. Of course, in Masculin Féminin (1966) Godard would demonstrate that most young women are mindless idiots that have the wants and needs of insatiable ADHD-ridden toddlers. Needless to say, Every Man for Himself—a film that was made at a time when Godard had given up on love and pretty much life in general—is no less unflattering in its portrayal of pretty people with pussies. In fact, the film seems to be a sort of rejection of women in general, so it should be no surprise that cultural Marxist wimp Robert Phillip Kolker once described the title of the flick in his book The Altering Eye (1983) as being “…not only sexist but almost the same as Werner Herzog’s EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND GOD AGAINST ALL.” Undoubtedly, only an exceedingly emasculated pansy would describe the title as “sexist,” especially considering the film more or less demonstrates that both men and women are responsible for dysfunctional relationships, even if women are inordinately cold and self-consumed beings that have a nasty knack for being able to turn-off their emotions when it is to their personal advantage, especially when men are involved. 

 In her classic text The Manipulated Man (1971), anti-feminist Jewess Esther Vila expressed a sentiment that Godard would probably agree with when she stated, “Women really are callous creatures – mainly because it is to their disadvantage to feel deeply. Feelings might seduce them into choosing a man who is of no use to them, i.e., a man who they could not manipulate at will.”  Undoubtedly Every Man for Himself is notable for depicting two very different female protagonists suppressing their feelings towards men in a film that subtly demonstrates that women all have a sort of innate quasi-sociopathic quality that is beneficial to their survival. Indeed, as someone that still seems to love her (ex)boyfriend yet wants to be completely independent and start a career of her own as a writer, Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye) cannot give into her true emotions lest she ruin her dubious professional plans. In a somewhat different and all the more debasing fashion, cutesy yet cunty streetwalker Isabelle Rivière (Isabelle Huppert) has to pretend she fancies fat bald old farts because she makes her living peddling her pussy. In fact, the only character that dares to ever expose any degree of personal vulnerability is male protagonist Paul Godard (French rock musician Jacques Dutronc), who makes one last desperate yet ultimately completely hopeless attempt at the end of the film in what is arguably the most memorable scene of the entire flick to both literally and figuratively ‘hold onto’ his ex-girlfriend Denise before she leaves him for good.  In that sense, Every Man for Himself is undoubtedly Godard's most strangely and unforgettably heartbreaking film.

 Divided into three main segments (and a couple sub-segments) that follows three protagonists whose stories prove to intersect in the end, Every Man for Himself is a sort of exceedingly eccentric esoteric romantic-comedy for lovelorn misanthropes and cynics.  Undoubtedly, one could also describe the flick as a melodrama for irredeemably miserable intellectuals who have forgotten what it means to truly feel something, especially when it comes to other people. Not unlike Godard, the autobiographical protagonist Paul—a less than sunny sunglasses-adorned jerk-off that somewhat resembles a more refined and anally retentive 1980s era James Spader—is a filmmaker that works at a TV station, loves fiddling with video equipment, and is responsible for using his professional connections to give his (ex)lover a job working in his trade. At the beginning of the film, Paul calls his ex-girlfriend Denise from a hotel while working on a television project and then leaves the building abruptly after telling her that he will be by to see her in an hour. Somewhat hilariously, while Paul is attempting to get in his car, a racially ambiguous male hotel employee declares his love for him and states in a sickly salacious fashion, “I want you to fuck my ass. Fuck me, sir. I’ve been fucked by half the navy. There’s nothing better than a nice little asshole,” but naturally the rampantly heterosexual filmmaker turns down the rather needy troglodyte's extra odious request. While Paul is not beneath banging hookers and fantasizing about his flat-chested preteen daughter, he is certainly no rectum-reaming homo.  Of course, it is only Paul's bad luck that the only person that wants to fuck him is a disgusting creature that he wants nothing to do with. As far as the viewer knows, the only pussy that Paul is regularly penetrating is that of less than sweet streetwalker Isabelle Rivière, who seems completely incapable of any genuine human affection, let alone love with a man. 

 When Paul goes to pick up his daughter Cécile (Swiss auteur Alain Tanner’s daughter Cécile Tanner) from soccer practice, he talks to her commie coach and asks him in a curiously nonchalant fashion, “You ever felt like feeling her up or fucking her up the ass or something?” In a scene that hints at the director’s somewhat less than ambiguous pedophiliac tendencies, Paul also complains to the coach, “I think it’s unfair that a mother can touch her daughter or son more easily than a father can,” thus underscoring the character's somewhat warped logic and busted moral compass (though one must admit that women are typically more likely to get away with child abuse; whether it be sexual or otherwise).  As a favor to his ex-girlfriend, Paul attempts to pick up filmmaker and novelist Marguerite Duras from a college, but the old hag seems to be absurdly antisocial and never even makes a single appearance in the film. Since Ms. Duras refuses to speak in front of a class that she is supposed to lecture to at the college, Paul reluctantly stands in for her and states to the class in a vaguely melancholic fashion, “I make films to keep myself busy. If I had the strength, I’d do nothing at all. Because I can’t bear to do nothing, I make films. There’s no other reason. That’s the most honest thing I can say about my work. That goes for me too. As for Ms. Duras, every time you see a truck pass by . . . think of it as the word of a woman passing by.” Ultimately, Paul falls to manage to bring Duras to the local TV station where they both work for a planned TV interview, so pissy prima donna Denise reacts by absurdly calling him a “fascist” and smacking the shit out of him right in front of his daughter, thus underscoring the heroine's deep-seated and highly irrational hostility for her ex-beau. That night, Paul eats dinner with his ex-wife and daughter (Paule Muret) and they treat him with bitter resentment like virtually all of the women in his life, so he reacts by calling them “bitches.”  Of course, the only reason Paul's ex-wife agrees to eat dinner with him is to get her monthly child support check.  Not unlike Denise, Paul's ex-wife deeply resents him and has no qualms about letting him know it.  Luckily, Paul has enough money that he can pay for a woman that at least tries to pretend that she loves him and his seemingly wandering cock.

 As hinted at various points in the film, Denise would not have a career in television were it not for her ex-boyfriend Paul, but now she has it in her mind that she wants to be completely free and is willing to live on a farm in the country and work at a publishing company that is owned by another ex-boyfriend to make a new life for herself. Indeed, over-the-hill debutante Denise—a nasty passive-aggressive bitch that no man should have to suffer—believes that her bicycle will bring her true freedom.  While visiting the farm house that she plans to live at, a girl that already lives there states to Denise, “Let me show you something” and then proceeds to drop her pants, bend over with her ass and pussy in front of a line of cows, and proudly declares, “Sometimes they give your ass crack a good lick.” Of course, being an emotionally barren woman that seems to lack a sense of humor, Denise is hardly impressed by the rather raunchy and zany quasi-zoophilic display. As Denise confesses to Paul over the phone in regard to why their relationship is a failure and why it must end for good, “People always say – They always say – They say you need someone to lean on. I wanted someone to lean with. We’ve never really leaned on each other. We never leaned on each other. Something seemed to stop us.” Of course, both Paul and Denise are miserable broken individuals that really know how to make an ugly situation even uglier.  To Denise’s credit, she does not seem to be nearly as innately and irrevocably soulless as Paul's prostitute pal Isabelle, but it seems dubious at best that she could ever maintain anything resembling a healthy relationship.  Needless to say, it is a good thing that Denise does not have any children, as she lacks any real nurturing qualities and could only bring great pain and misery to the lives of any progeny she might spawn.

 When we first meet pretty pussy-peddler Isabelle Rivière—a sassy bitch that lacks tact who seems to loathe everyone and everything, including men and sex—she is waiting in line for a movie with Paul, who is attempting to be a gentleman by taking her on a date even though he is really only with her to purchase her pink-eye. Not interested in the charade of romantic courting, Isabelle coerces Paul into skipping the movie and just going straight to the fucking. While they are having sex, Paul gets annoyed with Isabelle’s blatantly fake moans of pleasures and complains, “stop working so hard” and “stop pretending.” Of course, as the viewer soon discovers, Isabelle seems to lack the capacity for any sort of genuine human emotion aside from a vague degree of melancholy to the point where she seems like a rare women with Asperger syndrome. For whatever reason, all of Isabelle’s roommates seem to hate her and are quite glad that she is moving out of their apartment. When Isabelle’s sister randomly shows up at the flat and begs for money so that she can bail some friends out of jail, the robot-like prostitute gets a sick idea and offers to be her little sis’ pimp despite the fact that she hates pimps as demonstrated by the fact she was roughed up by one while being given the following words of wisdom in regard to her gender, “No one’s independent. Not the whore or the typist […] Only banks are independent, but banks are killers.” To make sure her sister has the appropriate carnal goods, Isabelle demands to see her tits and asks if she has a “thick bush.” To prepare for the pussy-peddling trade, Isabelle also asks her sister, “Have you ever licked a guy’s asshole?” and then remarks, “You’ll probably have to. But don’t just say yes to everything. What guys like is to humiliate you,” thus highlighting her rather misandric view of men. The next day, Isabelle is humiliated by a middle-aged mensch who makes her do a little bit of roleplaying where she pretends to be his daughter, but she fails miserably and is kicked out of the hotel room due to her lack of spirit and emotional authenticity. Luckily, Isabelle bumps into a grade school friend by happenstance who offers her an exceedingly easy job working for a TV station, but she does not even seem marginally interested in pursuing a lucrative career that does not involve allowing strange old men to defile her cunt.  Indeed, it almost seems like Isabelle likes being a prostitute because it gives her some exceedingly warped sense of personal sovereignty (of course, such deranged thinking is not uncommon among contemporary feminists, hence the preposterous propensity of certain porn stars and prostitutes to make lame statements about the supposed feministic qualities of their trashy choice of trade).

 In a nice little twist towards the end of the film where all three of the protagonists are confronted with one another by mere happenstance, Isabelle shows up to an apartment that she hopes to rent and randomly discovers Paul jumping over a table and tackling Denise in an allegorical scene where the filmmaker makes one last desperate attempt to save his relationship by symbolically breaking through the gap that separates him and his beloved. Of course, Paul’s rather sad and hopeless self-described “idea” is a total failure and he confesses, “We want to touch, but we only bruise each other.” Needless to say, little misandrist Isabelle is horrified by Paul’s final last attempt to save his relationship with Denise and complains, “You’re crazy. She looks like she’s hurt,” to which he humorously replies, “She’s got a hard head. She’s a banker’s daughter. I’m going out for a walk.” Not surprisingly, Denise and Isabelle seem to bond over their mutual resentment towards Paul, though the former confesses that it will be hard leaving him, thus revealing that she truly loves him after all even though her extremely harsh words and actions indicate otherwise. In the end, Paul is hit by a car after bumping into his ex-wife and daughter. On top of the fact that she seems totally disinterested in Paul’s previous proposal that they see each other more often, the ex-wife makes no attempt to get him help while he lies dying in the street. In fact, Paul’s ex-wife even says to their daughter, “it's nothing to do with us” and then forces the little girl to leave while her father assumedly dies in the street.  Notably, Isabelle's novice prostitute sister also sees Paul and even seems concerned about him, but her john manages to coerce her into leaving the scene lest the two be spotted by the wrong people. While lying in the street, Paul thinks to himself, “Rather stupidly, I started thinking I’m not dying. My life hasn’t flashed before my eyes. I’m not dying . . . I don’t feel any . . .” 

 Admittedly, one of the reasons I found Every Man for Himself to be so (unintentionally) humorous is because it features a number of absurdly awkward slow-motion scenes that make it seem as if Godard is fairly autistic when it comes to cinematically expressing certain human emotions. Godard named this strangely wacky slo-mo technique ‘decomposition’ and he first employed it in his quasi-pedo TV series France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1977). Notably, ‘decomposition’ is even utilized in a seemingly unintentionally hilarious climatic scene when the male protagonist is hit by a car, which becomes all the more strikingly odd when one considers that Godard almost died in the summer of 1972 as a result of terrible motorcycle accident that cost him one of his testicles and contributed to him becoming a social recluse of sorts. Surely, there is no doubt to anyone that has seen Godard’s “second first film” that it was directed by a decidedly unhappy and devastatingly disillusioned individual that is haunted by ex-lovers that he believes are ‘killing’ him. Indeed, while Godard might have a cold and unintentionally humorously smug exterior, it seems that a hopelessly haunted and terminally lovelorn man exists underneath. In a scathing review that she wrote on the film for The New Yorker, obnoxious philistine Jewess Pauline Kael somewhat rightly complained, “I got the feeling that Godard doesn’t believe in anything anymore; he wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn’t really believe in movies anymore, either.” Of course, what Kael seems to fail to realize is that Godard had finally matured and realizes that there was more to life than movies and making silly pomo Tarantino-esque movies about movies.  Not surprisingly, Godard would later criticize his former friends from the French New Wave due to their formulaic cinephiliac approach to filmmaking, stating, “I am amazed that people who lack ideas for new films (including some old friends like Truffaut, Rivette, who don't have any more ideas than the guys whom they denounced twenty years ago), continue to adhere to the one and self-same system of filmmaking, which is easy to describe: a sum of so many million, multiplied by so many weeks, multiplied by a certain number of people.”  Indeed, while one can argue that some of Godard's later films are nothing more than badly botched experiments, no one cannot deny that he has not continued to evolve as an artist and create cinematic works that were increasingly more complex and challenging. After all, only an obsessively committed oddball genius of sorts could create something like Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998).

 Indeed, instead of being a “film about film” like his “first first film” Breathless, Every Man for Himself is a surprisingly vulnerable and incriminating film about a uniquely unlikable and pathetically perverted man that finally got the gall to expose his particularly preternatural persuasion to the entire world.  As Richard Brody described in his biography Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard (2008), Godard did not even write a script for the film but instead created a “video script” that included still photographs of the actors and a voiceover commentary from the auteur where he describes “how I see” as opposed to simply “images of the film, how they will be.” Additionally, after hiring Nathalie Baye as the female protagonist (Miou-Miou was originally cast for the role, but opted out when she discovered she would be starring alongside Isabelle Huppert), he convinced her to let him stay at her country home for several days because, as the actress speculates, he “needed to imbue himself with each of [her] gestures.” In short, unlike his perennially infantile would-be-protégé Tarantino, Godard eventually stopped being a mere cinephiliac fanboy poser and began making films about real-life, most notably his own rather dejecting existence. While Breathless was a big hit that changed cinema history and inspired important film movements ranging from New Hollywood to New German Cinema, Every Man for Himself had a much different fate, including being booed when it was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980, though the film was a relative commercial success and positively received by many critics at that time.  Incidentally, Godard himself would once note regarding the difference between his “second first film” and how he originally approached filmmaking, “With BREATHLESS, I rebelled against all those tired shots with the camera anchored on a tripod, and now I made a film of what I used to think were those awful steady shots.”  Indeed, say what you will about the content, but Every Man for Himself is seemingly infinitely more immaculate in terms of form than Breathless, which is the rebellious work of an intemperate boy and not a thoughtful man with life experience.

 Personally, as someone that initially greatly disliked Godard because I felt his films were too phony and contrived (incidentally, I would later discover that the filmmaker considers some of his most popular films like Contempt (1963) and Band Of Outsiders (1964) to be more or less hack work), I must confess that Every Man for Himself is probably my favorite flick by the auteur. Indeed, in the film we discover that Godard is a bitter, spiteful, and all-around despicable self-pitying twat that patronizes hookers and fancies little girls, but certainly that is more interesting and enthralling to see than the mundane meta masturbation of a sexually challenged film dork like the young immature auteur that directed Breathless, which might be best described as the ‘poser film fanboy par excellence.’ Of course, one also cannot completely write-off the integrity of a filmmaker who once rejected a special prize from the New York Film Critics in 1995 because, to quote a fax sent by Godard, “JLG was never able through his whole moviemaker/career to: Prevent M. Spielberg from rebuilding Auschwitz.”  In Every Man for Himself, Godard rebuilt something that is certainly more horrifying than the Auschwitz showers of Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), as the filmmaker presents his life as a sort of perpetual purgatory where he is consumed by gynocentric ridicule and mockery and pangs of lovesick disgrace, isolation, and personal failure.  In short, quite unlike the director's early films, no aspiring filmmaker one can watch the flick and seriously see Godard as an admirable hero or cool role model.  Still, despite Godard's decided disillusionment with love and women in general, Every Man for Himself manages to express a deep affection for feminine beauty in an understated and nicely nuanced fashion, as if the auteur is almost ashamed to reveal his infatuation with femininity.  Certainly, I cannot think of another film where I became so entranced by a woman's hair blowing in the wind as I did with Nathalie Baye's in Godard's film, which I consider amazing on retrospect considering I found her character to be mostly insufferable otherwise.  Aside from being a one-man pity part, Every Man for Himself is also a film about the tragedy of still deeply loving a person that you have grown to loathe.  Also, the film is a rare cinematic work that manages to communicate the sort of metaphysical affliction that comes with being in love with a person but knowing your relationship with them is hopelessly doomed and that there is nothing you can do about it even though your soul longs to be with them for eternity.  In short, Godard's film is the sort of ruthless romcom Woody Allen might direct if he had some degree of testicular fortitude and was less interested in being a smart ass.

A portrait of the obscenely grotesque joke that has become Occidental love and romance, Every Man for Himself is a virtual testament to Godard's failure as both a man and lover.  Of course, judging by the female characters in the film who somehow manage to be both frigid yet whorish and heartless yet hysterical, it is easy to see why he has thrown in the towel on love. Although Godard might slightly disprove, I must admit that at the end of the film where the male protagonist is dying in the street I could not help but think of José Millán Astray's classic quote, “Death to intelligence! Long live death!”

-Ty E