8 Bot-Time Stories

Jean-Luc Godard's first choice of title for his 1965 French New Wave film was not Alphaville, the title he eventually adopted, but Tarzan versus IBM.
1
All films are exercises in the practice of semiotics, but Godard's Alphaville was to be a movie consciously steeped in the philosophy of semiotics. Signs and signifiers abound in bright neon and in large print, with significations that challenge and tease the viewer. Godard imagined a future dystopia—the eponymous city of Alphaville—whose populace is regulated and controlled by signs and in which the dictionary (found in every hotel room in place of a Bible) is continuously revised to excise proscribed linguistic signs and thereby limit people's access to proscribed ideas. We can see why Godard would want his film's protagonist and antagonist to be the most potently familiar signifiers of all. In a film that sets out to contrast the natural with the artificial and pit the human against the inhuman, Tarzan could serve as a signifier for all that is natural, virile, raw, and uncooked in the human condition. Against the passionate nobility of this savage, who bows to no system of control but instead obeys his own code of honor, Godard would pit IBM, a loaded signifier (in 1965 at least) for all that is automated, overregulated, passionless, and neatly buttoned down. This superficial clash of genres conceals a plotline that is commonplace to each. In the first, Tarzan is “the One” who must lead a rebellion against the machines that scheme to rob us all of our humanity, while in the second, IBM assumes the role of the colonialists in those old movies who scheme to turn the jungle into a factory and its natives into soulless slaves. Naturally, it is the neo-Tarzan who must disrupt and dismantle the machinery of power and dramatically escape with a liberated Jane by his side. This is a turn of events that is as satisfying as it is predictable, which is why we see it so often, in Tarzan, Alphaville, Blade Runner, The Matrix, and many other films.