Baudelaire, Carax, and the Fallen Sublime
"One day, on the pavement, I saw a big gathering; I managed to peer over the shoulders of the curious onlookers, and this is what I saw: a man lying stretched out on his back, his eyes open and staring at the sky, another man, standing in front of him, and communicating with him just by gestures [...] saying [...] ‘Come on, a bit further [...] we’re still not out on the high seas of reverie…
The other had in fact doubtless reached the high seas [...] , for his beatific smile said in reply: ‘Leave your friend alone’[...] This is the height of sublimity. But in drunkenness there is a hyper-sublime, as you are about to see. His ever-indulgent friend headed off alone to the tavern, then returned with a piece of rope in his hands. He passed the [rope] round his [friends] waist [...] then he trotted away, like a gentle, discreet horse, carting off his friend to where happiness awaited him. The man being [...] dragged away [...] was still smiling his ineffable smile.
The crowd remained stupefied; for everything that is too beautiful, that surpasses man’s poetic strength, produces more astonishment than real feeling." (10-11)
This passage demonstrates to me the aesthetic and political logic at work in Baudelaire’s understanding of drunkenness as a “hyper-sublime” (11), animating a relationship between failure, intoxication, transcendence and resistance. Baudelaire’s two drunks can be understood as failing into a particular kind of sublimity, one that resists normative framings of failure and success.
Staying for a moment in Paris, Leos Carax’s 1991 film Les amants du pont-neuf engages similarly with this embrace of failure, and does so in a way that more overtly illuminates the politics involved. The film tells the story of Alex, a homeless, alcoholic street performer (a fire breather) who lives on Paris’ Pont Neuf, and Michèle, a painter with a rare eye condition that is causing her to slowly lose her sight who becomes temporarily homeless after a breakup. The two meet when Michèle sees Alex have his foot run over by a car while he is passed out in the middle of the road, and after she begins living on Pont Neuf with him and his older friend Hans, they begin a romantic relationship living together as vagrants. On the night of July 14th (Bastille Day in France), Alex and Michèle decide to stay on the bridge rather than going to a more public place to watch the traditional patriotic fireworks display. They get drunk on cheap wine and dance wildly (to Carax’s soundtrack of Iggy Pop, Public Enemy, and classical music) on the bridge, paying no attention to the magnificent pyrotechnics in the background.
This scene, the centre-piece of the film, is thrilling both on purely aesthetic and provocatively political grounds; it is a kinetic articulation of the sublime powers of joy, intensity, intoxication and the embrace of (social -- these are vagrants getting drunk on a bridge) failure as a form of resistance to hegemonic power. By refusing to accept the power of the state (represented by the fireworks display) and its imperative to “choose life”, as Renton would put it in Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting (deployed by Judith Halberstam to introduce her ideas about queer failure as political resistance), Alex and Michèle transform their socioeconomic failure into a kind of explicitly resistant sublimity, best expressed not through words, but through the languages of film and dance. Indeed in an interview with Les Inrockuptibles, Carax calls cinema “a kind of resistance to the world [...] but a generous, projected kind, that has to make a splash” (13, my translation).
