On the void

Jeanne Dielman's life is marked by a grammar of routine and repetition. Every day, she tends to her kitchen, washes dishes, peels potatoes, heats the stove, sits with her son for dinner, opens doors, clears her son's plates, talks to him before he sleeps, opens other doors, receives her Wednesday clients for whom she has sex for money, goes to a shop for coffee, looks after a neighbor's baby, and keeps herself in constant motion.

The idea of movement is dear to Akerman's cinema, and it's no accident that Jeanne Dielman has been classified by certain critics as an action movie. The entire successive line of Dielman's routine is built to avoid having nothing to do, to avoid that void of an oppressive domestic existence that keeps any minimal desire from taking shape unless it's aimed at tending to personal chores and directed at satisfying someone else — whether her son, the clients she has sex with, the neighbor's baby, all beings in relation to whom Dielman is defined by her potential to satisfy their needs. Delphine Seyrig's almost Bressonian performance has a rigid, mechanized composition, a flow of actions that makes her a cinematic embodiment of what Simone Weil wrote about the power of force in the protagonist of Homer's Iliad:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.
Force employed by man, force that enslaves man,
force before which man's flesh shrinks away.
In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown
as modified by its relations with force,
as swept away, blinded, by the very force it thought it could handle,
as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

The power that subjugates Dielman is responsible for the systematic oppression of millions of women around the world, but that power doesn't itself emanate from an order, from an other — it's internalized, agglutinated, swallowed involuntarily: the image of a human being shaped by conventions, by the rules of a system that assigns her, as the meaning of her life, the role of almost not existing for herself. A machinic figure in her repetition.

And this oppression occurs regularly in her life, until the moment it doesn't. At a certain point, small cracks enter her usual becoming: she forgets to properly heat her food and burns her potatoes, she walks somewhere for no reason, forgets to turn off the bedroom lights on her way out, accidentally drops a spoon on the floor. These small moments are like particles of an atomic bomb. They define the structure of the work all the way to its climax, in which Dielman kills a client with a pair of scissors on the bed after sex, and remains, in the film's final shot, in complete silence, bloodied, in her living room.

Murder as a rupture of every social convention that had defined the film's structure is less an act of rebellion by the character, and more a self-expression of the same machinic tool she uses in her domestic chores. Death is carried out mechanically, without emotion, without any feeling of satisfaction or joy afterward. It's the only language the character has to offer as a way to escape this non-life. And the protagonist's silence is less a conflict than an entrance into the abyss of the void. Since her routine no longer exists, there's no way for her to exist either. The void she so avoided is now witnessed. The complete negation of her own desire as a routine practice has now vanished. Without the dishes, without the potatoes, without her son, without her men, Dielman does not exist. Strangely, it's through murder that Dielman finally manages to find a way to be herself, because it's the only moment in which she makes a choice, creates a divergent line, reveals herself — and now what's left is a void to be confronted, a void that can only exist through the emancipation of a desire that exists beyond the idea of satisfying the other.

The void shouldn't be something to be avoided, but confronted directly, as a way of creating a language, a line of rupture, a way of embodying one's own desire. The tragedy of Jeanne Dielman is that of its heroine living within a system, a society, in which she only exists through a becoming that abhors the void, that opposes it, that vilifies it. It's never purged, and must remain merely encrusted within her being.