Le Fou

Halfway through ‘Pierrot le Fou’ (1965) by Jean-Luc Godard, Ferdinand, played by French star Jean-Paul Belmondo†, attends a Paris cocktail party. There, every guest speaks in advertising slogans. One praises a brand of deodorant with perfect lines; another recites the virtues of a new Italian car (check the surreal scene here).

The part draws on the language and colors of Pop Art, whose attitude towards marketing and consumerism was famously ambiguous: part satire, part fascination, and sometimes almost celebration. In the 60s, when Pop Art peaked, Godard was looking from Paris at the same advertising age that the exceptional series ‘Mad Men’ (2007-15) would later dramatize.

In his movie, he suggests that the language of selling has replaced the language of living.

A similar phenomenon can surface, less cinematically, in business and finance. Much of what passes for communication resembles slogans engineered for impact, as highlighted in ‘Writing Has Become Coding’ (2023).

The risk is semantic satiation: any word said aloud thirty times is shown to dissolve into pure sound, stripped of meaning. The trouble in a corporate setting is not that the words mean nothing. It is that, after many uninterrupted months of immersion, the ear stops registering what they plainly mean.

Ferdinand’s response is extreme. Within an hour of leaving the party, he has abandoned his apartment, his marriage and the varnished machinery of a respectable life. He drives south towards the Mediterranean with no plan and even less money.

Summer is the drive south: a temporary escape from the familiar vocabulary, rituals, and rhythms through which the year is conducted.

Distance refreshes the ear and the mind.