March 21, 2008
Note: Rather than write a standard review of this film, I've decided to simply post a transcript of a sociological essay I prepared and presented on the film.
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For this commentary, rather than choose a single image or sequence, I have chosen to analyze the film ?Le Fou...( read more) Follet? (The Fire Within) directed by Louis Malle in 1963, in its entirety. To Begin, I will present a brief synopsis of the film to provide the necessary contextual background for this analysis. Then, drawing from the work of Chris Shilling and other essays on illness, I will analyze Malle?s film in relation to the protagonist?s illnesses, addiction and depression, the materialist conditions of modern society, and his fears of aging.
?Le Fou Follet? depicts two days in the life of Alain Leroy ? days which are leading up to his planned suicide. Alain is a recovering alcoholic, a bourgeois falling on financial hardships, and may or may not have a heart condition. He had lived in New York with his American wife, from whom he is now estranged. He is in Versailles staying at a clinic, supposedly long after he has been cured of his alcoholism. He however does not wish to leave. In addition to his addiction, he has also frequently battled periods of severe depression. His depression is peaking during the film, thanks to his fears that he will relapse, his fears of aging and facing the reality that he is no longer the handsome playboy he once was, his financial hardships and resulting distaste for materialism over humanism, and the woes of his love life. He is estranged from his wife, who he realizes not only does not love him, but he does not love either. He also finds that neither is he in love with another woman ? a woman who wishes to marry him, a woman whom he begs to stay with him at the beginning of the film but must leave for New York herself. Alain?s revelations come as he journeys to Paris to visit old friends, where he does indeed relapse and come to question the materialistic lifestyles of his bourgeois friends.
Robert F. Murphy discusses in ?Illness, Disability, and the Self? the ?radical loss of self esteem? in Goffman?s terms as a ?stigma? or ?spoiled identity? (p.64). Murphy discusses this in terms of his own physical disability and experiences in a wheelchair, but it is equally applicable in the case of Alain Leroy. In many ways, alcoholism can be and is a debilitating condition, and Alain?s constant fear of relapse and having to leave the comfortable confines of people like himself at the clinic destroys his self-esteem. He states in the film that has no control over his own willpower, his own body. His alcoholism has lead to a ?spoiled identity,? one which he perceives as a person with no control or sense of internal worth.
Murphy also discusses the concept of a damaged person?s senses of anger. In Alain Leroy?s case, he experiences and discusses a sense of existential anger (indeed the film is very much structured as an existential exercise). Murphy describes this type of anger as ?a pervasive bitterness of one?s fate? (p. 69). Alain seems to express this sentiment throughout the film, wondering why he cannot ?touch? himself or others, and expresses this most candidly at a party where he has relapsed and gotten too drunk.
Throughout the course of the day as Alain visits old friends, seemingly to say goodbye before he commits suicide, but implicitly looking for a reason to not go through with it, and his revelations lead him to a decision. His addictions to alcohol and his depression over his predicaments become fully realized as he relapses and openly proclaims what bothers him at the party. This I think is very similar to Karp?s discussion of the crisis, which for Alain this very much is. ?The crisis solidified the emerging consciousness that the problem was within themselves? (Karp, p. 88) ? Alain realizes the problem is perhaps with himself; he is the architect of his depression and addiction, he is the one who is keeping others away from his ?touch.? In this way, Alain is discovering himself through his illness, but rather than finding reason to move past it and move on with life, Alain finds instead only the callousness of modern materialism, the inevitability of death and a life of loneliness.
Alain?s materialistic bourgeois friends, still living their abundant and party lifestyles for the most part (minus one friend who is ridiculed by the others) present to him the emptiness of such a life, which he declares openly to one of them in anger. He openly distains religious or spiritual authority, which Shilling points out gave at one time a meaning to life and death, but also comes to distain the bodily life, or at least his regret that he no longer is the handsome young womanizer he once was (?Back when I was 20, and handsome?). He fears his body?s inevitable process of ?age and decay, and the inescapable reality of death? (Shilling, 1993, p. 7). Alain indeed speaks in a soliloquy that life is too long, and he would only be ?speeding it up? by committing the inevitable now. With the combination of illness (addiction and depression), aging, and his inability to find a meaningful existence, Alain comes to evermore realize, as Murphy puts it, that he has ?been alienated from his old, carefully nurtured, and closely guarded sense of self by a new, foreign, and unwelcome identity? (p. 70)
The illnesses experienced by Alain in ?Le Fou Follet? then are quite similar to the experiences discussed by Murphy and Karp, and his futile search for a meaningful existence can be aptly discussed in work of Shilling. He is damaged, not only in body, but in mind and soul. Murphy stated that ?the sequence of the person damaged ? goes from punishment (the impairment) to shame to guilt and, finally, to the crime? (Murphy, p. 65). In the closing epitaph, Alain gives his reason for committing his crime as ?Because you did not love me, because I did not love you; because our ties were loose, I tighten them now.? His crime is, of course, the ending of his own life.
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