Party Favour Vol 1: Screening of U.S. Go Home (Claire Denis) and Portrait of a Young Girl at the end of the Sixties in Brussels (Chantal Akerman), presented by Lucent Film, and programmed by moi + Brandon Kaufman.

U.S. Go Home Introduction/Lovingly Accusing Party Guests of Fascism

During the cold war, the U.S. established a handful of military bases in France. Some 11 major air force bases, plus other facilities were erected between 1950 and 1967, and many U.S. soldiers were deployed to France, tasked with constructing and maintaining these sites. Finally, in ʼ66, French President Charles de Gaulle evicted non-French NATO forces from the country, giving them a year to up and leave.  

Claire Denis’ U.S. Go Home (1994) establishes itself here, between the unwelcome presence of American imperialism, and pop’s British invasion, in a Parisian suburb, bordered by one such military base on the other side of the highway. Among the first songs in the film are by The Yardbirds and The Animals, both bands seen before heard, their posters tacked up onto the amazingly mod wallpapered bedroom of Alain, one of the movie’s three teenage protagonists. He’s reading the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who condemns both partying and war—the very crossroads this movie finds itself at, and its two major themes. The Yardbirds’ “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” starts playing as his little sister and best friend, Martine and Marlène, head to school, and is still heard as the camera drifts over to Vincent Gallo, playing some wayward America soldier hanging around, and like a Chekhov's gun that must go off, the pervy song suggestively links the teenage girl to Gallo, whom in the last act, she will inevitably meet. All of this is established in the first few minutes of the film, which is such tight storytelling, and such effective exposition—it really floors me every time I watch it. I love the use of The Yardbirds’ song here because it makes you think that when Denis was tasked by the TV broadcaster Arte to make a film using music from her adolescence, she must have listened to this song and imagined a movie plot.

Teenagers are terrifying: like, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type horror. They’re so uncanny. They literally have the souls of children trapped inside adult bodies. And children are monsters. But then again, so are adults. 

The work of adolescence, psychologically speaking, is individuation: rebelling from the dictates of your parents, finding yourself, becoming your own person. But belonging to a political party (and often political consciousness is first awakened in adolescence), requires shedding your individuality, sacrificing your voice to a collective voice, and fighting for a common cause. And attending a party, which this movie is also about, also promises the shedding of individuality: the ego death being a major factor in alcohol’s allure. So this movie invites us into a paradox, and maybe this is the paradox of adolescence, or maybe this is the paradox of existence: to be one of many, an individual apart from and a part of a collective. 

Martine wants to get laid. She’s gotta go to this party that the older kids are at because she has to lose her V because her best friend Marlène just did. And Marlène’s got a crush on Alain, Martine’s big brother. And they’re all going to this party to chase their dreams. U.S. Go Home sets itself up like any high school movie, a genre film about kids going to a party in an attempt to have sex. It also plays itself like a New Wave film, tying it through style to the time and place its set inside, as our image of 1960s France is provided to us and preserved for us by the French New Wave. So the film plays all our associations with the movement: American movie imagery brushed up against French politics, radicals, intellectuals, cool guys, and chic, plus the inclusion of philosophy and pop: characters as consumers of culture but not commodities. Alain is a product of the world around him: the books he’s reading and the music he’s listening to. This is a trope of New Wave film but it's also a fact of adolescence. And again, that conundrum of individuation is present. Who are you? Who? Who? Who? Who?

Alain is an intellectual. He’s a Marxist, and he lets us know. He reads philosophy in his free time, and dances to rock ’n roll. He’s totally crushable, after all he’s our best friend's big brother—a classically crush-worthy archetype—and when he leans at the bus stop, smoking a cig with his foot up, he looks so cool. The scene of Alain singing along to The Animals is amazing. It’s one of the most memorable scenes in this movie. But it bears noting that the only times he’s at all charming are when he’s embodying someone else: impersonating a rock star, or reciting an ancient philosopher’s ideas. Every other time he opens his mouth, it's to call his little sister an ugly whore. 

“You cunt,” every boy at the party says to every girl whom he’s trying to get to put out. The hate in the kool-aid of adolescence is the casual misogyny that poisons most every scene. In girlhood, the mark of how cool you are is usually how well you can swallow it. Denis gives a lot of airtime to this sexist ambiance. And because of her signature aloof style, and cinematographer and longtime collaborator Agnes Godard’s aloof camera—always held, and so holding us, at a distance, always biting its tongue and letting its scenes speak for themselves—she subverts the typical high school romp: namely the celebratory manner that its misogyny is usually shoved down our throats. 

This is another way Denis took to task the project of making a movie shaped by the music of her adolescence. Its characters are formed, almost pathologically, by the music they consume. And because action is driven by actors, and these particular actors are acting under pop’s influence—shaping their desires, sense of self, and understanding of one another—the soundtrack serves as narrative cues. For instance, “Wild Thing" is playing when we meet the cool girl in the bathroom. I love being hit over the head with heavy-handed literary devices like this. I think it feels amazing. And I especially appreciate it from a director otherwise known for being withholding. “I hate these parties,” says the cool girl, lighting a smoke, which is probably the single most impressive thing you could say to someone who spent the entire first half of the film trying to get to the party. We quickly find out that she hates these things because her boyfriend, drunk on high-school power and lukewarm sangria, is another oppressive asshole. 

Forgive me for going there, but in his preface to Anti-Oedipus (1972), Michel Foucault asks, “how does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?” These boys think themselves Marxists and rebels, but in keeping the girls down, they’ll always live as puppets to the ruling class, strutting around in big-boy pants and trying on hand-me-down power dynamics for size. Critiques of commodity fetishism are moot points when coming from those who treat their sisters-in-arms like objects. Sexism and capitalism mystify each other equally, but their shared goal is to exploit us, which is why all forms of power have to be fought in tandem for any true liberation. It’s “not only historical fascism,” Foucault writes, “which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” In other words, you’re not not a fascist just because you’re in the right party or at the right party. 

Though born in Paris, Denis spent her childhood throughout West Africa because her father was a colonial administrator, so the anti-Colonialist perspective of much of her work may possibly also be a rebellion against her dad. Interviewed about her childhood, Denis said, “in Africa, I would see war films: America flooded us with stocks of damaged, awful copies. In a way, I loved these films…I think they made us quite anti-American.” As is the case with ambivalent desire, it was perhaps these formative screenings that also shaped her love for a man in uniform. This is one of a few themes, predicted here through the presence of Vincent Gallo, dressed up as a military captain, that will be taken up again in later works like Beau Travail (1999), along with the military presence of one country in another, and allusions to Jean-Luc Godard. Gallo has apparently spent the whole movie chilling by his car. Before carrying out a flirtation with Martine that—for imposing upon her youth, her culture, and her turf—plays out like a mundane Madame Butterfly-esque colonialist mini-drama, offers Martine and Alain a couple of cokes. Martine accepts and Alain refuses, a funny allegory for the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. 

Denis alludes to Godard again in Beau Travail, by giving actor Michel Subor the same name as, and I think a promotion to, his character in Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963). Both films have Subor as an official of the French government, and in both instances he plays masculinity as equal parts sexy and toxic. Le Petit Soldat was banned in France upon its release for its representation, and aestheticization, of torture by the French government. This bears remembering because it's proof that art matters, even though we’re constantly told otherwise. 

You have to understand these things as connected. Foucault tells us to track down “all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.” These films are not images of separate histories. These are flare ups in the constellation of colonialism, and tales of its traumatic reverberations. This is our shared history. Obviously, I’m talking about Palestine now. All writing, and most everything we consume is about Palestine right now, whether explicitly addressed or not at all, because the genocide on Palestine is the world-historical tragedy that defines our moment, and is what’s essential. Everything else is sleight of hand, warping, obscuring and distracting from the essential, which is how ideology is carried. U.S. Go Home is about a party, but the military presence at its periphery defines it. In the same way, all partying may be about escaping our condition, another flare up in the shadow of colonialism, and an attempt to blur our perception, but the military presence at perception’s periphery is what defines it. 

There is a reason rebellion is often represented as a triviality of adolescence, written off as either senseless juvenile delinquency, or belittled as hopelessly misguided naive optimism. In either case, we’re told that a rebel is not a meaningful political actor, but a stupid persona that ought to be outgrown. After all, the first dictators most of us rebel against are our parents. But you have to see these things as connected: both the enormous and the petty, the individual and the collective. This means that we matter. That our behaviours serve something bigger than us. I sincerely hope that our complicity in the genocide on Palestine reminds us of the brutal stakes of behaving in the interest of the ruling class. I know this is a bummer. And the reality is real horror. But Foucault, again, offers this: “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality(and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.” This is where Alain, who is a poser, fucks up, reducing rebellion to its affected posture, and his desire to mere objectification. In both cases he flails in the face of the real thing. But you can enjoy this film without making the mistake that Alain does. Remember that art is not merely radical chic. It’s important, if you can, to be present in and at the party. To really be here….okay, enjoy the film. <3