Abstract

The subject of this research focuses on the analysis of Seul Contre Tous, 1998 movie from Gaspar Noé. A social tragedy crossed with an individual tragedy through “the struggle of a former butcher fighting alone against the entrails of his country”. The 1980s’ dull, racist, dilapidated France is his country.

The stakes of this subject were raised from the cinematic treatment which is made by “moral” and “justice” (quoted from Noé) confronted to singular psychological violations (parent abandoning their child, incest) and the social sufferings in which they are held (the war, misery and solitude).

Through Gaspar Noé’s Seul Contre Tous, and the definitions he gives to Moral and Justice throughout the movie, we will attempt to prove that at the core of a social historic tragedy, the symbolic law is lawless. Noé does not try to show through his movie the reconciliation between Love and Law (a primary condition to hold a sustainable position in the world), but in a desperate way, the reconstruction of a swollen identity through history (the father of the main character is a communist resistance fighter who died in a concentration camp).

Is the violence of original traumas (father’s death, and mother’s abandoning) fixable or doomed to be repeated generation after generation? Isn’t the subject convicted to violate even in a “love saving” move, the symbolic law of incest prohibition?

When socially, nothing is right, is only love against all conceivable?

Is Gaspar Noé misunderstood? From his first full-length feature film Seul Contre Tous until this day, Noé has continually been spoken about for reasons that may seem illegitimate to some, but essential to others. The themes that are dealt with in his work pieces, as misery, incest, rape, are to say the least, tough, violent and horrifying. But isn’t it in this way that Noé has proved being the high priest of “Look at what you refuse to see”? All at once, being also, crucial to the cinematic world.

Keywords: Social tragedy | morals | justice | symbolic | love | loneliness