Made In USA
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An unusual entry from me this week, not that I have a “usual,” properly speaking. I just saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Made In USA (1966), which is available just this month on Criterion.
The story is that this film was never released in the US (despite the title) because of a copyright suit by Donald Westlake, aka Richard Stark, because the film’s plot is based on the Parker novel The Jugger (1965).
Now here’s the thing: the film is remarkably unlike the book.
Westlake himself told the story (“Anything You Say May Be Used Against You,” in The Getaway Car):
A French producer named Beauregard wrote my agent asking to buy movie rights to a Richard Stark Parker novel called The Jugger, which happens to be the worst book I ever wrote under any name…. [We] sold it to him for $16,000, in eight monthly installments of two grand…. Meantime Beauregard had put all his money into a movie either about a whore becoming a nun or a nun becoming a whore, I’m not sure which, and when he was finished the French government told him he couldn’t (a) show it in France, or (b) export it…. He did say anything to us, ask for extensions or anything; he just disappeared after making three payments.
Time passed. A girl I know who was living in Paris wrote to say she’d seen my movie. What-what? Correspondence ensued, and here was this movie called Made in USA, and Godard had said in an interview in a French cinema magazine that it was based on a thriller by Richard Stark. What had happened, … to help out his old friend Beauregard, who was financially strapped, Godard took my book—which he thought was Beauregard’s property—an in twelve afternoons made Made in USA. (If you see it, you’ll wonder what he did the last three afternoons.) Godard had changed things around so much that Beauregard may have figured the film could be considered an original, but he didn’t tell Godard, who innocently blabbed.
Now text after text, review after review (Made in USA has now been released in the USA, because Westlake decided to let it go not too long before he died), everyone says that Godard made this remark in an interview in Sight and Sound. Westlake, you’ll note, said Godard said it “in an interview in a French cinema magazine,” where of course Sight and Sound is British. And if you search the archives of Sight and Sound, there’s no such remark. Didn’t happen.
Obviously he must have said it somewhere, because Westlake was able to sue successfully, but (as is all too common with critics and scholars of all sorts) everyone just references others’ references and doesn’t look anything up, and so I can’t—after some significant time searching—find the actual remark.
Well, anyway; let’s assume that Westlake’s version is reasonably accurate, just for the sake of argument. What about the film itself?
The film is bizarre, and it gets weirder and weirder. There are shots of a tape recorder, spools turning, and a crackling voice (Godard’s, apparently) reading out revolutionary pronouncements. There are continual references to major government-criminal-international conspiracies (the Ben Barka affair, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, etc.), and the constant sense that some of the characters had something to do with one or more of them, but no explanations. People get dead, and we never quite know who did it or why. And there are these comic-book or Warhol-like intercuts: comic visual cuts of POW! or BAM! when someone gets hit; or the way the last name of the murdered man is always erased by passing street noises (as in, “that’s when Richard XXX said…,” where XXX is a low-flying airplane overhead. So we never know his name—but why does it matter anyway?
Given that this is in some fashion based on a Parker novel, you’ll probably be surprised to learn that Parker is played by Anna Karina, and she’s come to look into Richard XXX’s death (supposedly by heart attack, and maybe it really was) because she used to be in love with him (or maybe she only thinks she was). She’s passably tough for a French New Wave female lead, but she’s hardly Parker (who, after all, is some kind of sociopath).
In Westlake’s assessment, the core problem with The Jugger is that Parker goes off to help out his contact, the eponymous retired cracksman (jugger). Despite the claims that the jugger is a “problem” that Parker has to deal with one way or another, it just doesn’t work: Parker would never go off to help someone. Ever. So from the outset it’s all special pleading.
That’s half the problem, yes. But the other half is that the real plot—how the jugger ended up dead in the first place, the whole back-story that has led us to this point—is dumb. I don’t mean Westlake’s plotting, I mean that the guy who’s responsible is dumb. And once Parker works out what this guy believes, he thinks it’s dumb.
So what should he do? Leave, that’s what. Who cares what this moron thinks, or that the jugger is now dead? Good riddance: he was getting weak and talky. Oh, I see, is Parker worried that the moron now knows too much as well? Fine, shoot him, and there’s an end to it. And the real problem of The Jugger is a lot of endless contortions trying to prevent Parker from just doing immediately what he obviously is going to do eventually.
To shorthand:
1) The incitement doesn’t fit the hero;
2) The McGuffin is meaningless; and
3) The follow-through is just delaying tactics.
So what does Godard do? It’s a pity Westlake didn’t get paid, because actually it’s clever.
1) The incitement does fit the hero… except we’re sort of left to wonder why, or if, because the hero’s connection to the dead man seems increasingly uncertain or irrelevant, raising the question of what she’s really doing here, and whether she herself knows.
2) The McGuffin is colossally meaningful and, finally, irrelevant. The McGuffin is the explanation of the conspiracies, the story of who shot JFK, the real story of Ben Barka, and so forth. Not only is none of this forthcoming, but everyone involved is something of a fool to believe that it will or could be. And indeed, as things go on, both of the main characters (Parker/Karina and the “police” guy—is he really?) increasingly realize that this is all nonsense, but they can’t just bail out of it because, well, they just can’t.
3) The follow-through is the same as the setup: it just goes on. There’s nothing delayed because there’s nothing to be delayed. If in the end Parker/Karina kills somebody and walks off, or someone else does it, or even potentially if it happens to her, so what? Does it matter? Will any of this resolve anything? (I don’t mean “resolve anything” in a moral sense or whatever, but only that insofar as there are some problems being bruited around, there’s nothing that anyone in this film can do that would actually alter any of it significantly.)
Now I don’t love this film, but the more I think about it, the more I think it is an excellent adaptation of a Parker novel—albeit not, perhaps, of The Jugger. It’s as though The Jugger revealed something about the Parker novels that Godard seized on, and I’m not sure that Westlake ever quite grasped this same quality of his own work.
In Godard’s vision, the Parker novels reveal a world—a USA, in fact—in which people come up with reasons for what they do, reasons for getting involved in things, that have nothing to do with what they’re really doing. They tell themselves it’s for honor, love, money, duty, whatever, but in the end people just do stuff. They set themselves targets, goals, things they want, but they don’t know why they want these things, and if they ever got them, they’d be just as miserable as before, and perhaps more so. If they ever stood back and really thought coherently, they’d just get up and walk away—which is why their lives of complexity and mess are just delaying tactics, helping them to not-see this obvious truth.
This is all spot-on for Parker novels—but not so much for The Jugger. Because normally, Parker is the exception. He knows exactly what he wants and why, and he doesn’t confuse extraneous factors for his own aims. He’ll kill people as quick as breathe, but not for pleasure or duty: he does it because there’s no simpler way (killing people is complicated, because it attracts the law and makes other people get emotional).
The USA in which Parker is made is that of Made in USA, but Anna Karina—not unlike the anomalous Parker of The Jugger—isn’t quite Parker.
And so here’s another Parker adaptation that gets Parker wrong… by getting his world perfectly, and revealing the strange absence of Parker from his own story.