On Jean-Luc Godard, Kanye West, and the Collapse of Revolutionary Icons
Michel Hazanavicius's 2017 movie Le Redoutable portrays the once-distant French cinematic icon Jean-Luc Godard as a man unraveling,whose revolutionary spirit, political confusion, and personal implosion make him strangely contemporary. The film follows Godard as he abandons the prestige of the Nouvelle Vague, or French New Wave. This movement rejected studio polish in favor of handheld immediacy, jump cuts, location shooting, and a director-as-author approach for radical politics. In doing so, he alienates the public, his collaborators, and eventually even the student revolutionaries he tried to align with. What emerges is a portrait of a man whose insistence on ideological purity leaves him both absurd and alone.
This trajectory resonates uncannily with Ye (formerly Kanye West), especially over the past five years. While Godard’s collapse came through radical leftism, Ye’s came through his rejection of Christian institutions, his public fixation on Jewish power structures, and his break with the entertainment industry. Taken together, their spirals illuminate how conviction can curdle into isolation.
In Le Redoutable, Godard begins with a principled revolt against bourgeois cinema but gradually devolves into paranoid, performative outrage. He storms out of screenings, picks fights over Maoism, and dons the “costume” of revolution more than its substance. His peers and students alike dismiss him as posturing, leaving him trapped in the shell of his ideology. Ye’s public pivot into antisemitic statements mirrors this descent. His now-infamous “Death Con 3 on Jewish people” tweet and even his song “Heil Hitler” echo the way Godard embraces alienation, as if burning every bridge were proof of truth. Like Godard, Ye insists that systemic hypocrisies can only be exposed by rupture, even when the cost is self-exile.
Anne Wiazemsky, Godard’s wife and muse, is central to this portrait. She begins as his confidante, but as his ideology intensifies, she becomes a silent witness to his collapse. He projects his insecurities onto her, accusing her of not understanding his urgency. In car rides, in bed, and at political meetings, Anne’s quiet detachment serves as a measure of his unraveling. The parallel with Bianca Censori is striking; her silent presence beside Ye during his most controversial outings recalls Anne’s muted distance in the film. Both women become mirrors of implosion, emotional anchors who also reflect how little room remains for intimacy when conviction consumes everything.
The radical French student left rejected Godard, further sharpening the tragedy: he marched into May ’68 classrooms eager to be embraced as a revolutionary, but they dismissed him as out of touch. The rejection was devastating because it came from those he thought were allies. Ye foreshadowed the same paradox on Jesus Is King. On “Hands On,” he rapped, “Said I’m finna do a gospel album, what have you been hearin’ from the Christians? They’ll be the first ones to judge me, make it feel like nobody loves me.” Like Godard, he sought belonging through reinvention, only to encounter estrangement.
Betrayal by peers compounds the isolation for both men. Godard’s split with François Truffaut marked the end of a friendship and a movement, with one choosing integration into the system and the other permanent rupture. Truffaut was a leading New Wave director and former critic best known for intimate, personal films like The 400 Blows. Ye’s grief over Virgil Abloh’s ascent at Louis Vuitton echoes this divide. To Ye, Virgil’s triumph was also a compromise, a diplomacy where he demanded revolution. Both cases reveal how ideological conviction turns friends into symbols of betrayal. Godard severed ties with philosophical disdain, while Ye publicly and often cruelly lashes out—that’s the difference in their responses. Yet both reveal the same wound: anger at collaborators who chose legitimacy over revolution.
There are also moments when enemies become allies in the name of a larger fight. After bitter disputes, Godard occasionally found himself reunited with his peers when political struggle required it. Ye’s shifting stance on Drake follows a similar logic. Once rivals, he now speaks positively of Drake in light of Drake’s lawsuit against Universal Music Group, accusing the label of hypocrisy and gatekeeping. Ye’s recognition that former enemies can align against structural power underscores how his outbursts often mask a deeper urgency.
This complexity reshapes how we see Ye’s antisemitic persona. Like Godard’s ideological posturing, it is not entirely ideological but also performative, a destructive attempt to embody the villain society accuses him of being. The performance does not excuse the harm, but it shows how both men turned provocation into a kind of weapon, convinced that alienation itself would reveal hidden truthsBoth Godard and Ye became villains in their own narratives, exposing what they believed others were unwilling to confront.
By the end of Le Redoutable, Godard is left ideologically pure and personally alone, while Ye’s fate remains unresolved. There is the unsettling possibility that, like Godard, he may one day be vindicated in certain critiques. Godard’s radical politics, once ridiculed, later shaped the intellectual climate of European cinema. Ye’s warnings about exploitative contracts and the need for Black ownership in fashion were mocked before they became mainstream. The danger, as with Godard, is that the truths may outlast the rhetoric that carried them.
Godard ultimately found refuge in political marginality and arthouse obscurity, where mythmakers folded his collapse into legend. Ye, on the other hand, remains in the storm’s center, testing how much disintegration a persona can withstand before nothing is left to rebuild. What we are witnessing is not simply a downfall but a contest between vision and destruction, genius and provocation, estrangement and the hope for redemption. The title, borrowed from France’s first nuclear submarine, captures this paradox perfectly: immense power paired with claustrophobic isolation, a life lived sealed off from the world.
In the end, maybe it is as the film says, “Ainsi est la vie à bord du Redoutable.” So is life aboard the Redoutable for Godard, for Ye, and for anyone whose genius collides with the world faster than it can be understood.
