Simply the title of Jean-Luc Godards film, 2 or 3 things I Know About Her

could raise enough questions about cognitive and ontological theory to keep one
debating for hours, if not days. The film, too, also explores how one makes sense
of the world and, in particular, the role that cinema plays in this process.

The film centers around the thoughts and actions of Juliette Janson as she
is interpreted by actress Marina Vlady. Juliette, a young wife and mother who
lives on the outskirts of Paris in one of the massive public housing developments
to be found there, also embodies Paris and its surrounding suburbs during the
mid-1960s. This is made explicitly evident during the opening credits where the
word elle is presented next to the words, la rgion parisienne. In one scene
she explains to her 7 or 8 year-old son that she has been having dreams that
leave her feeling fragmented, ...like being scattered into a thousand pieces.
This statement prompts the spectator to wonder whether a collective identity
such as an entire city can suffer the same kind of mental fracture that occurs to
individuals due to traumatic experience. This splitting or disassociation of the
mind as defined by Janet, Breuer, and Freud entails what Ferenczi described as
an individual shattered by a trauma that his or her subjective emotional system
cannot represent and whose objective intellectual system, although able to
perceive a trauma, cannot feel it.1 Judith Herman describes the dialectic between
hyperarousal and the absence of affect --- between the extremes of amnesia or
of reliving the trauma, between floods of intense, overwhelming feeling and arid
states of no feeling at all.2 But what exactly is the trauma that plagues Juliette
Janson and by extension, the rgion parisienne that she inhabits?

Through formal cinematic devices such as montage, abstraction, and
sound-image relations, Godard effectively brings the Vietnam war and the battle
between capitalism and communism straight to Juliette Jansons dining room.
Before being introduced to Juliettes hearth, a non-diegetic image appears on the
screen, 18 Lessons on Industrial Society, alerting the spectator to the economic
and political nature of the film and, in particular, of the dining room scene about
1

Laplanche, Jean, and J.B. Pontalis. Splitting. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. London, U.K.:
Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1980: 427-429. Print.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: [the Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to
Political Terror]. New York, NY : Basic, 2003. Print.

to take place. This image is then replaced by an extreme close-up of what the
spectator subsequently learns is radio parts, although they could easily be
mistaken for elements of a bomb if one is not well-versed in the assemblage of
either the former or the latter or both. Moreover, the sound of real, non-diegetic
bombs is later added to this same shot which is repeated at the end of the scene.
Before this takes place, however, the camera presents two men, Robert,
Juliettes mechanic husband, and his friend, Roger, who, while sitting at the
Jansons dining room table, are listening, perhaps translating, and repeating the
words of President Johnson as he describes (with what appears to be an even
voice if not a heavy heart) the bombing of Haiphong, Hanoi, and Peking. In the
auditory background, one can distinctly hear the voices of Juliette and Roberts
children as they play before bedtime. One might interpret the simultaneously
political and domestic nature of this space as a way of encouraging the spectator
to reconsider the definition of a traditional wartime battlefield whose significance
would seem to be more far-reaching and complex than a non-suspecting
homemaker and her husband might initially imagine.

Another space that reiterates these questions is the daycare attended by
Juliettes daughter, Solange, which also functions as a pseudo-hotel where
couples escape to engage in amorous and/or adulterous relations. Here, too, the
close spatial proximity of inferred prostitution along with child-rearing evokes
what Hannah Arendt terms the banality of evil, where evil generally is not
executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accept the
premise of their state and therefore participate with the view that their actions are
normal.3 But wherein lies the great evil? Juliette leaves her daughter in the care
of a seemingly decent elderly man trying to run a hotel business on the side in
order to get by as Juliette, herself, has often declared. Where is the harm in
that? Why does the scene cause the viewer to recoil? Is it simply Solanges
screams that derange the spectator or is there more to it than that?

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Print.


Perhaps one possible answer is that this scene represents how the
foreigner is rendered uncanny or unheimlich4 at the gates of a globalized
economy, which, according to Rebecca Saunders article, Uncanny Presence:
The Foreigner at the Gate of Globalization is discursively constructed by visions
of free trade, liberalization, openness and opportunity.5 It is surely not without
reason that the film primarily takes place at the gates or portes of Paris, one of
the worlds most elegant gated communities according to Nicolai Ourousseff.6
But who exactly are these foreigners who ought to remain hidden and secret, yet
nonetheless appear throughout the film7 ? At the daycare, the other is cleverly
evoked through various posters adorning the spartan-like space. Posters of
Bangkok, Israel, Greece, Spain, South America, and Japan adorn the rooms
white walls and intermingle with the characters therein, demonstrating how
foreigners and foreigness have become hot, exotic commodities absorbed
and co-opted by globalization. But might there be other, more subtle forms of
foreigness represented in this scene? It is important to recall that Juliette Janson
(as well as Marina Vlady) is dorigine russe. And although it is less a question of
her national or ethnic identity, this hint at foreigness is essential. Might she, too,
be considered a foreigner at the gate of a globalized economy that positions her
less as a producer than as a quickly obsolete product? When Juliette leaves
Solange at daycare in order to shop and prostitute herself, another vital question
is brought to light: what happens to people when they are reduced to replaceable
products? Or when it becomes easier, as Fanon said, to pathologize individuals
rather than critique and dismantle systems of war and inequality? Or when
money becomes the most important commodity, and everything-- everything-can be said to be for sale?

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), XVII: 220.
Saunders, Rebecca. Uncanny Presence: The Foreigner at the Gate of Globalization. Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East XXI. 1 & 2 (2001): 88-95. Print.
Ourousseff, Nicolai. Remaking Paris. The New York Times 08 June 2009. The New York Times Breaking News & Multimedia. 08 June 2009. Web. 11 July 2010.

In his essay on the subject, Freud not only associates the uncanny with the operations of the
unconscious but with the foreign, signaling the degree to which the German unheimlich (uncanny)
connotes foreigness (quoted by Rebecca Saunders 90).


Throughout the course of the film the viewer gets the impression that
Juliette is struggling to formulate these questions and articulate possible
answers. In her kitchen she tries to explain,

Like a message from beyond... I was doing the dishes... I started to cry. I
heard a voice say to me, youre indestructible... Me, myself, I... Its all very
mixed up. Time? I really dont know. We often try to find, to analyze, the
meaning... of words... But were too easily amazed. Frankly, nothing is
easier than to take one thing or another for granted.

Like many victims of trauma, Juliette appears to experience at least a certain

degree of linguistic and cognitive breakdown, making it difficult to express
traumatic experience in everyday language, like when she asks herself, and by
extension the viewer, What does it mean when a European thinks of someone in
Asia? This effort to piece together the fragments of a larger world picture and
make sense of her malaise is a difficult one. In fact, in the 1890s, Janet
proposed that traumatic memory might be distinguished from narrative
memory in the sense that the former freezes traumatic experience in a
constantly re-experienced present. This time and memory of crisis, from the
ancient greek kairos, can then be distinguished from narrative time and memory
or chronos and may therefore help to explain why Juliette is at times a difficult
narrator to follow 8:

One doesnt know where nor when... I only remember that it happened... it
was the feeling that I was looking for all day long... there was the odor of
the trees... that I was the world and that the world was me.

Another symptom occurring under traumatic circumstances that was
developed by Anna Freud and is demonstrated by Juliette entails the conflict of
ambivalence where an individual returns to ambivalent impulses that are both
pleasurable and destructive, submissive and aggressive. When the boy from the
Metro asks Juliette whether or not he may position a mirror by the bed in order to
better see their sexual relations, Juliette responds, Its not my fault if I have a
passive side. Later, she identifies with, while at the same time violently rejecting
her obsession with sexual promiscuity, Being sexually independent of a man is
8

Kairos. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 25 June 2010. Web. 11 July 2010.

tempting to me... But actually it revolts me... Its no good. Despite acting out or
exhibiting the erratic behavioral symptoms through which traumatic memories are
expressed, Juliette nonetheless commits to working through these same
experiences, in other words, attempting to acknowledge, narrate, interpret, and
come to live with her traumatic realities.9 10 But how does an entire society begin
to work through such traumas?

For Godard, and for many of the French New Wave filmmakers, il ny a
pas de mystere or, there (should be) no mystery:

...they pushed the limits of editing technique during the late 50s and
throughout the 1960s. French New Wave films used a(n)... ...editing style
that did not conform to the traditional editing etiquette of Hollywood
films. ...French New Wave editing often drew attention to itself by its lack of
continuity, its demystifying self-reflexive nature (reminding the audience
that they were watching a film), and by the overt use of jump cuts or the
insertion of material not often related to any narrative.11

Thus, through a non-conventional cinematic narrative structure as well as a

demystifying self-reflexive nature, Godard is able to convey the experience of
living with traumatic symptoms as well as imagine what it might mean to work
through these same symptoms as a society. References to Old Father, (Bertholt)
Brecht and his theory that actors should, read as if they are quoting citations;
demonstrating differences in Point of View (POV) through the eyes of Juliette and
another woman as they both scan the images of a womens magazine in a
Parisian bar; drawing attention to lighting in the scene where Juliette turns a lamp
on and off before joining her compatriot, Marianne, for a rendez-vous with an
American war correspondent played by Godard himself... and, of course, the very
comical allusion to demystification by the waiters response to the writer, (Were)

Laplanche, Jean, and J.B. Pontalis. Acting Out. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. London, U.K.:
Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1980: 4-6. Print.

10

11

Laplanche, Jean, and J.B. Pontalis. Working Through. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. London,
U.K.: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1980: 488-489. Print.
Film editing. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 08 July 2010. Web. 11 July 2010.

out of Mystery, (the name for a popular brand of ice cream in France). And the
list does not end here. To borrow Tracy Chapmans phrase, one might deduce
that for Godard (also a key narrator in 2 or 3 things i know about her) talking
about a revolution sounds like a whisper and looks very much like the red, white
and blue color scheme adopted for the film, evoking not just the ideals, libert,
egalit, fraternit, but also the fear that these ideals need protection from a
globalization spinning out of control. And in response to all questions of a
cognitive and ontological nature, Godards whispered response permeates the
viewers senses as (s)he stares hypnotized into an extreme close-up of swirling
coffee which could easily be mistaken for an image of the universe or even the
conception of an earthly being:

(We) have to listen, more than ever, (we) have to look around (ourselves),
at the world, at our fellow creatures, (our) brother(s). ...If by chance things
come into focus again, it may only be with the advent of conscience...
everything will follow from there.