Yesterday I returned, from a week hiatus, to the land where you can only mention God in the pledge of allegiance: public school. However, my students decided to pose some interesting questions during homeroom.
Girl: Who killed God?
Me: Nietzsche
Boy 1: Who?
Boy 2: No she means, who killed Jesus?
Me: Some Romans
Boy 1: Why?
Me: The Jews told them to.
Boy 2: That was dumb.
Girl: I won the bet.
As I laughed at the unflinching acceptance of “Girl” and “Boy 2″ I visualized the photo I’d seen Friday at a Korean dumpling shop. The image of Nietzsche’s tombstone had the caption “Nietzche said, ‘God is dead.’ God said, ‘Nietzsche is dead.’”
Today, I went to see a French film, Masculin Feminin, at the Alliance Francaise. I went because it looked more interesting than many of the films screened on the past few Tuesdays and because I got out of work with time to get downtown. In retrospect, I don’t what struck me as “interesting” about this film compared to the others. Nothing in the description prepared me for the weird conversations in the film. The main character, Paul, was conducting interviews to determine what French women wanted. I don’t think he reached any conclusions, but his questions were intriguing. He asked them about themselves, but also tossed in questions about birth control, falling in love, and politics. For the most part the girls knew about birth control but blushed talking about it, liked to fall in love but didn’t think it happened very often, and couldn’t define Communism or compare it to the American Way.
Paul was in love with Madeline. Her friend Catherine hated Paul (and seemed to be in love with Madeline) and her other friend Elizabeth was in love with Paul (which angered Paul’s friend). Madeline was not in love with Paul, but she slept with him and let him follow her around. At one point, they all go to the movies. Paul gets bumped from his spot next to Madeline by Catherine and glowers, then moves to the far end of the row. The seat switching antics made me want to call a friend in California last week who used to be a standup comic. When I tried to justify “putting your girl pals first” he winced. “One of them always has a messy breakup and you never get to see the girl you’re dating.” Since this friend isn’t my boyfriend, I’m going to keep putting the girls first. In Madeline’s case it also proved to be a good idea since Paul falls out a window during an argument at the end of the movie.
