This approach to reading films focuses on how they come to expose the degree to which many commonplace assumptions about reality and literal meaning are the product of arbitrary, but widely held habits of thinking. In other words, the deconstructive film theorist is concerned to point out how individual films function to unmask the arbitrary conventions that secretly inform our assumptions about what films mean and what reality they portray. Thus, films are said to disrupt or subvert our ordinary, everyday ways of thinking about the relation of film to the real world, and about the literal meaning of signs (i.e., words, sounds, images) as they are rendered in the cinema. The point here is not that films "destroy" all notions of reality and meaning. Rather they "deconstruct" these notions--which is to say films render them in a new light. In this new light, traces of experience or perception that are ordinarily excluded from "reality" now appear categorically to belong to it; and similarly traces of meaning (i.e., different senses of terms) that are normally rejected from the domain of "literal meaning" are suddenly included within that domain. Once again, this does NOT amount to a "destruction" of the concepts of reality or literal meaning. It amounts to a demonstration of the degree to which these conceptual categories are fundamentally open and unstable. And this insight runs contrary to all our usual habits of thinking about reality and meaning.

The first logical question that arises here is: WHY would anyone want to destabilize the concepts of reality and meaning? After all, the world apparently gets along very smoothly when there is a stable consensus about what is real and what is unreal, what something means and what it does not mean. This is what our common sense tells us. But here we should recall that "common sense" is just another term for our arbitrary, conventional habits of thinking. What a deconstructive theorist would want to ask here is: DOES the world run all that smoothly with supposedly stable concepts of reality and meaning? Is there not actually a heavy price that we pay when we habitually repress any consideration of the instability of these concepts? And finally, what is that price? These are the driving questions behind deconstructive theory, and they have been posed in many different contexts. Here I will briefly sketch just three of the more important contexts where these questions have been posed: Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics.

In the context of philosophy, deconstructive theorists have brought to light the constitutive blindspots of the major philosophical systems of Western civilization. From Plato to Hegel to Heidegger and so on, Western philosophy has routinely exposed the instability of its foundational concepts--only to repress its insight into this instability, and so to "close," or "formalize," their systems. Thus, while Western philosophy has from its very beginning effectively unveiled the instability of "the Good," "the Real," and "the True," it has routinely blinded itself against this insight in order to justify itself as the discipline that pins down the precise nature of the good, the real, and the true. These habitual acts of self-blinding have left their mark on the texts of Western philosophy. And these marks appear as lapses in logical rigor (e.g., contradictions, logical fallacies, rhetorical evasions, etc.), lapses that have ordinarily gone unnoticed by generations of readers, (so strong is our habit of thinking that we, too, habitually turn a blind eye to the points where conventional thinking threatens to unravel). Thus, to return to deconstruction's driving questions: The world of philosophy does NOT run smoothly with its supposedly stable concepts (it is spotted throughout with lapses in logic); there IS a heavy price philosophy pays for its repression of instability; and this price amounts to a self-imposed restriction (blindness) regarding the limits of philosophical inquiry (philosophy does not permit itself to philosophize about the instability of conceptual thinking in general).

In the context of politics, deconstructive theory has been particularly receptive to the way that the instability of "reality" and "meaning" is born out in the relations of people belonging to different socio-economic, racial, sexual, and ethnic orientations. Thus, for instance, in The Declaration of Independence, the precise, literal meaning of the terms describing human relationships is demonstrably unstable at several points. Let's look at one very obvious example of this. The text of this document reads "all men" are endowed with certain inalienable rights. Does "all men" refer to women as well? Does it refer to the slaves owned by the signers of this document? Today, of course, we all agree that "all men" here refers to every kind of individual person. Things, as we know, were not always so. The meaning of "all men" is accordingly unstable. It has shifted over time in accordance with the increasingly progressive political climate of this country. Deconstruction teaches us to take note of such shiftings, because all meanings do shift. They are fragile, always liable (heaven forbid) to slip backwards, or forwards (inalienable animal rights??). Similarly with the concept of "reality," deconstruction gives us a way to think about the fact that what is unquestionably "real" for one group of people may be regarded as superstition, ideological programming, or simple psychosis by another group of people. The point is not that there are different beliefs about what constitutes reality. (We don't need deconstruction to see that). Rather the point is that there are frequent shifts in what counts as real within any given belief system. We are all familiar with the old saying: "There are no atheists in foxholes." Well, this saying contains a pearl of deconstructive wisdom. It points out how God can suddenly become real--even for habitual non-believers. In the political context then, the driving questions behind deconstruction have been answered as follows: The world of politics does NOT run smoothly with stable concepts of reality and meaning; there IS a high price we pay for our dogmatic reluctance to see the instability of these concepts; and that price is racial-religious-ethnic intolerance, war, and class/gender-exploitation.

In the context of aesthetics, deconstructive theory has helped to uncover the arbitrary conventions that shape our interpretive habits when we approach a work of art. The deconstructive art critic proceeds by analyzing the ways in which meaning in art is produced and defined in a given work. Generally speaking, the production and definition of meaning are governed by one or more central concepts (e.g., "artistic intention," "realism," "tragedy," etc. etc.). It is this central aesthetic concept that allows us to derive and define the meaning of an artwork. And this concept is itself always defined by excluding certain aspects of the work. (Thus "artistic intention" is defined by excluding all references to meanings that the audience "reads into the work"; "realism" is defined by excluding all elements of fantasy or romanticism; "tragedy" is defined by excluding all comedic elements, and so forth). In other words, the central aesthetic concept that governs our interpretation of a particular work is defined in a relation of binary opposition to a counter-concept that it fundamentally excludes. This exclusion purifies the aesthetic concept, renders it stable and clearly identifiable. However, deconstruction is all about discovering how such concepts are never as pure or stable as they seem. Thus a given work of art, governed by a central aesthetic concept (whatever it may be), will inevitably include elements of the excluded counter-concept. (We accordingly come to see that: "artistic intention" is something that, to a certain extent, the audience must project upon, or "read into" the work; works of "realism" must evoke and draw upon elements of fantasy or romanticism in order to reject them at some point; works of "tragedy" must similarly include comedic moments which can be rejected or subsumed--as comic relief--somewhere within them).

By demonstrating how works of art will simultaneously evoke a particular aesthetic concept which functions to define their meaning, and at the same time incorporate aspects of the counter-concept, deconstruction ultimately demonstrates that all of the concepts by means of which we interpret art are fundamentally unstable. This in turn destabilizes any given interpretation we might arrive at. This does not mean that all conceptually driven interpretations are to be rejected as false. It simply means that they are all incomplete--which is another way of saying that no single interpretation can contain all the meanings that are produced when we try to come to terms with a work of art. By destabilizing the central aesthetic concepts that conventionally govern our interpretive habits (and thereby destabilizing all concrete interpretations of any given work), deconstruction grants us access to new dimensions of a given work--dimensions that are conventionally (habitually) overlooked. This way of reading accordingly allows us to find new meaning in those works which have supposedly been "definitively" interpreted. To return to the driving questions behind deconstructive theory: The world of artistic interpretation does NOT run smoothly with its supposedly stable concepts which supposedly yield stable interpretations; there IS a high price we pay when we repress the knowledge that these concepts are unstable and thus incapable of grounding or governing our interpretive acts; and that price is an arbitrarily self-imposed restriction on the available dimensions of the particular artworks we wish to interpret, and on the possible range of interpretations that a given work might yield.

Turning now to Chris Marker's La Jetée, we are afforded here an excellent opportunity not only to observe the interpretive potential that deconstruction yields for film studies, but also to observe the way in which the principles of deconstruction can be incorporated into a film's own discourse.

In various ways, La Jetée overtly challenges and radically destabilizes a certain aesthetic concept that conventionally governs the interpretation of narrative cinema, and of all narrative per se for that matter. This aesthetic concept is that of "linear sequence," the arrangement of elements into a coherent sequential pattern. Linear sequence can accordingly be defined as an organizational principle that excludes the "random reiteration" of elements. What our deconstructive reading of La Jetée will therefore focus upon is the way in which the film overtly challenges the fundamental narrative concept of linear sequence by demonstrating the degree to which this narrative film is subtended by the counter-concept (random reiteration) that all narrative is presumed to exclude. This destabilization and contamination of linear sequence is made manifest in Marker's film at several points in the film's discourse. Here we will focus on just two such points: the film's plot structure, and the articulations of the film's ambiguous title.

PLOT STRUCTURE. In the third century BC, Aristotle defined plot as the representation of "a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end." Plot is here conceived by Aristotle in terms of chronology, a linear sequence unfolding continuously over time so as to render a coherent program of action, one that is "whole and complete." This understanding of plot has subsequently become a standard feature of all narrative art. Even when narratives transgress it (as will La Jetée), they do so self-consciously--evoking it in order to deviate from it.

Let's reconstruct the program of action rendered in La Jetée:

A boy watches a man die -- Then he sees a beautiful woman, whose image he will retain vividly in his memory -- World War III breaks out and the man becomes a soldier -- His side loses the war, the world is all but destroyed, and our protagonist is consigned to a prison camp -- In the camp, scientists conscript him into an experiment in time travel -- He first travels back in time, aided by his vivid recollection of the woman he saw as a boy -- He meets and commences a relationship with this woman -- The experiment is successful -- The man is called back into the post-war present -- He is then sent into the future to procure a device that will stabilize the economy of the post-war present -- He delivers the device, then escapes back into the past, where he is killed in front of a boy looking at a beautiful woman.

Such is the linear structure of the film's plot. Boy sees girl -- Boy gets girl -- Boy dies: Beginning -- Middle -- End. It's the familiar tragic story, unfolded in the familiar chronological fashion. But is this really what we get with this film? Hardly. In the first place, the very hypothesis of time travel wreaks havoc upon all notion of narrative chronology. Beginning (childhood past), Middle (post-war present), and End (death in the future? or is it the present? or the past?) are all effectively scrambled in this film. The protagonist's temporal movements repeatedly place him in various different chronological zones. In simplest terms, he is a man always out of touch with his times. Right from the Beginning (in the film's opening sequence), he experiences his fatal Ending in the future. In the Middle (while he participates in the time travel experiment), his present is merged with an experience of the Beginning re-lived, and an experience of the End of his involvement in the world (insofar as he rejects the future of his civilization). His End is a return to the Beginning of his narrative.

Thus the "linear sequence" which seems to govern this narrative is radically destabilized by seemingly random reiterations of Beginning, Middle, and End. But destabilized here does not mean overruled. The plot is, as we saw earlier, somewhat coherent and chronologically paraphrasable. A linear sequence is still, to a degree, discernible. The point is that this sequence is profoundly problematized in a number of ways. Let's look at one of these ways. Remarkably, the fatal Ending here manages to precede the Beginning of the protagonist's story. He witnesses his own death before he fixates on the beautiful woman--an act that will eventuality lead him to die the death he (fore)saw. What new dimension of the film is made available by way of its deconstruction of linear narrative structure? Here the film seems to espouse a reconsideration of the ancient and outmoded belief in fate, or destiny. The conventional linear progress of this man's life is presided over by its pre-ordained Ending. Random reiteration (or perhaps we ought to say preiteration) is built into the chronological unfolding of his life's story--just as it was built into the life-stories of the ancient protagonists of Greek tragedy. It is accordingly a story that is linear, but not quite purely linear. The linearity is unstable at its very point of departure, a point where--contrary to standard convention--the end brings about the beginning, and not vice-versa.

TITLE. We first encounter this film's title as it is spelled out for us in the opening credits: "La Jetée," or in English, "The Jetty." This title is perplexing because in English a jetty usually refers to a pier, or else to a rocky structure protecting a harbor from the sea's waves. It is no doubt possible that we could bring this sense of the term to bear on the film (an interesting idea!); however, once the film starts, the opening sequence of shots and the accompanying voice-over soon make it apparent that "jetty" is the French term for what we call an "airport terminal." Hence the term, "la jetée," seems straightforwardly to designate the scene of the film's opening and closing moments. Spelled out according to the linear conventions of European writing: L-a J-e-t-é-e has a more or less stable meaning in the French language. And if there is any residual doubt about what it means, the opening sequence comes around to reinforce this sense of the title. Thus a pattern of linear sequence (the sequence of alphabetic lettering, and the sequence of title followed by establishing shot of an airport terminal) here seems to govern our reading of the title, and to stabilize its ambiguous meaning. It has a stable, purely referential sense.

We would therefore expect any subsequent reiterations of the title that might be evoked by our watching of the film to fall neatly into line. The term should not waver and start to mean other things at random. If that should happen, the stable, referential meaning of the title would become compromised and contaminated. This could have a potentially enormous impact on the way we interpret La Jetée. After all, film titles usually tend to isolate and privilege crucial aspects of the films they name. They are, in a way, mini-interpretations of films, insofar as they underscore what filmmakers deem to be important features of their work. So if la jetée should come to refer, even obliquely, to something other than an airport terminal, then this first line of interpretation will open itself up and re-direct our attention to the role these other senses of the term can play in explaining the film.

The first little surprise we find in our search for other senses of this title comes when we translate the term into English, as "terminal," and another meaning emerges spontaneously--seemingly out of thin air. By virtue of the random coincidences of the English language, the term stretches to accommodate another, secondary meaning. This kind of coincidence is called a pun, which may be defined as a destabilization of meaning such that a single term can be understood to evoke two or more senses simultaneously. With puns, words effectively reiterate themselves to produce new meanings. In this case, terminal can mean in English both "airport terminal" and "fatal"--a noun and an adjective. So against the linearity of alphabetic writing, we posit the random, reiterative play on words, the punning left fork of destabilized meaning, to arrive at another sense of the title. Of course, this sense is at best only dimly proffered, and only to English speaking audiences for that matter. But for us, it nevertheless haunts the margin of what we will allow this term to mean. For this phantom double of meaning to materialize and become valid, we would require further justification for it. We would require that it be reiterated at some point somewhere in the film. And what do you know? In the opening and closing scenes there is a certain fatal something brought into photographic focus--namely the image of a woman, an image that will become fatal for the man who retains it. Is it then really much of a stretch to conceive that the film's title refers to this fatal beauty as much as it refers to that rather banal object of scenery: an airport terminal?

So we have two senses of the title then--one which derives from the linear succession of letter-to-letter inscription, and title-to-establishing-shot sequence, and a second one which derives from the punning reiterations built into the English language. This in itself constitutes, however minimally, a destabilization of the title's meaning, and therefore a destabilization of the programmed interpretive trajectory conventionally supplied by a film title. But la jetée does not stop here. As Garrett Stewart, a deconstructive film theorist at the University of Iowa, has pointed out, the film manages to maximize this minimal destabilization by evoking a wider range of puns latent in its title. His own examples (in French this time) include: La jetais (I threw/would throw her away), Là j'etais (There I was), Là j'aie été (I had been there--as in [I believed that (que)] I had been there), and finally L' âge été (The age of Summer--punning yet again on the season of happiness before the "Fall" of civilization). All of these punning self-reiterations embedded within the verbal articulation of the title are yet again reiterated--or at any rate, suggestively evoked--by subsequent developments within the film's plot. These random reiterations, born of the accidental coincidences of language, thus function to destabilize the meaning of the film's title, and, potentially, of the film that it names.

Deconstructive film theory accordingly serves in this case to open up the range of possible interpretations of Marker's film. It does so, once again, by destabilizing the prevailing aesthetic concept of linear sequence and thereby refusing to allow this concept to govern the interpretive project in hand.