The third film in my analysis of the films of Julia Ducournau is the allegorically harrowing Alpha. This
Palme d’Or nominated film reaches back into the recent past, to bring AIDS and
gay panic once again to the forefront, simultaneously intertwining COVID and
trans panic into a salient cultural metaphor for our current context. While the
overall application of this metaphor is clunky and less focused than in her
previous work, Ducournau crafts a visually arresting film with a captivating
narrative that seizes the viewer. This brief paper will engage in the
historical underpinnings of Ducournau’s pandemic analogy and its similarities
with other historical events, while contemplating the film’s conceit that grief
is a Durkheimian “social fact”.
PLOT
When Alpha (Melissa Boros), a 13-year-old second
generation Algerian immigrant, living in the north of France, gets a homemade
tattoo at a party, her Doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani) fears she may have
contracted a new devastating blood born disease that slowly turns the body to
stone. The same one that took her Uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim). As they wait for
the test results, Alpha gets bullied and ostracized in school while the mother
and daughter pair begin to be haunted by Amin. A spectral vision induced by the
emotional volatility of the situation and the trauma surrounding Amin’s death 8
years prior. The question is, can both mother and daughter be able to move past
this grief, or shall it consume them in a “red wind” storm.
HISTORICAL
CONTEXT
Ducournau’s
third feature cements her visual and storytelling style. Like her previous
installments, Alpha weaves a narrative that intersects time periods in a
nonlinear structure. Jumping back and forth in time to increase tension around
a traumatically transformative event, parallels the social reaction to major
health scares and outbreaks over the last 45 years. This section will engage
the similarities between the events depicted and the variety of health crises
we have experienced in the last half-century; including the scapegoating of the
ill, and the socio-political polarization in the wake of each tragedy.
From
AIDS to COVID
Ducournau
refreshingly does not specify a particular time period in which Alpha takes
place. Instead, she leaves context clues through car models, clothing, building
architecture, and a lack of modern technology that indicates the film taking
place prior to the turn of the 21st century. This adds credibility
to the marble disease in the film being a narrative allegory for HIV/AIDS (Human Immunodeficiency Virus/
Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome) which was first identified and garnered
increasing attention beginning in 1981.
All
those who lived through this period, and were aware,[1]were affected by the HIV/AIDS
epidemic. Global
fear gripped nations. That fear led to the scapegoating and vilifying of the
LGBTQAI+ community in ways the current Queer youth may think hyperbolic, but were all vitriolically and venomously
validated by both the general public and the broader social institutions at the
time. According to Halkitis (2019), the overt homophobia that both preceded and
followed the HIV/AIDS crisis, contributed to the prolonged suffering of the community.
Because some of the early cases of what would eventually be called HIV/AIDS were first found in gay men, that gave the vocal supporters of
religious and anti-gay policies justification to condemn the LGBTQAI+ community
as immoral and feel vindication in their bigotry. This is reflected in the CDC
first labeling the disease GRID (Gay Related Immunodeficiency). The misinformation that followed, allowed for
a lack of Government support services in the community, forcing a grass roots information campaigns and outreach that saved lives. The Government eventually came
around to disseminating the information about the disease and started to
pay (a modicum of) attention to this issue; primarily because it started to show
up outside of the LGBTQAI+ community, moved beyond drug addicts and in addition
to those needing blood transfusions. At the time, the Queer community
constructed best practices (which included condom use, and
disclosure of sexual partnership) various organizations, and a helpline. Those
grassroots behaviors that were born out of necessity in the face of institutional
apathy, became foundational to the Government’s response to the crisis. This
was extended around the globe but no more so than in African countries where cultural
norms and superstitions about virginal sex as a cure, allowed the disease to
spread quickly.
The
disease’s origin and the communities around where it initially spread fueled
racist, homophobic and classist discrimination. This vacillated from ignorance
and violent intolerance to describing AIDS as a “deserved” biblical
genocide. This was all in service of minimizing
government involvement by defining the core of the issue as a personal choice. “Culture”
and “lifestyle choices” were used as a political dog whistle to mean non-white
(specifically Black) and gay. Meanwhile, drug addiction was framed as poor
financial choices. This tendency to identify social problems, as a personal
problem, is consistent with the white cis/het supremacy that founded the United
States; allowing for a dehumanization of these groups. This continued for
decades as these groups were perceived as a threat to the foundational core
identity of upwardly mobile, productive able-bodied, straight white men. The
accusation of anything else is met with violence, ridicule and ostracization. During
the height of infection, AIDS was removed from obituary
causes of death (along with any same sex partners); labeling it instead as the illness
contracted after the individual was immunocompromised.
As
an allegory, The Marbling disease in Alpha functions in a similar
fashion both medically and socially to HIV/AIDS:
·
The
disease is depicted to be transmitted by blood or sexual fluids
·
The
characters we follow that contract the disease are shown to either share
needles for drugs or tattooing, or it is heavily implied that they are gay
(Both Alpha’s teacher and her Uncle Amin).
·
Once
Alpha is suspected by her classmates, she is ostracized. Students flee the pool
in a panic when Alpha bleeds in the water and move out of her way as she walks
into the classroom.
·
In
scenes where the public interacts with people with this disease, there is
palpable fear and distancing from the person. One person allowing someone who
contracted the virus to sit next to them by offhandedly saying that “It’s fine.
I’m dead anyway.”
·
Much
like the cultural norms, misinformation and superstition that allowed for
HIV/AIDS to spread in African Countries, Alpha’s Grandmother, an Algerian
immigrant talks about “The Red Wind” that gets trapped in the body, and the
only way to fix it is to pray, bathe and drink lots of water
Because
Durcournau was writing and shooting this film in 2024, it is difficult to not
also make a connection to our more recent pandemic, COVID-19, and the lessons
that we learned (or more likely did not learn) in the years in between.
The commonality between all major
global events, be they pandemic, World War or economic crisis, is that, in
order to overcome the horrific event(s) there needs to be an intersection
between every observable/measurable aspect of a society from the Micro
(individual) level, the Mezzo (community/group level) and the Macro (Institutional
Global level). During wartime, it was the interlocking mechanism of civilian
industrial logistics and the military war effort. During an economic crisis
there are government subsidies, bailouts and one instance of an increase in a
variety of social programs (New Deal). With pandemics, the Government would
work on developing a vaccine and make it readily available to everyone (thus
eating the cost) then give every household an amount of money to stay at home
and where masks in public to stop the spread. In hindsight, writing this 6+ years after the
initial lockdown orders of 2020, while these things did eventually happen, and
we reached the desired (but tenuous) threshold of vaccine parity (that may now be put in jeopardy
given new 2026 guidelines),
we still had to go through a period of anomie.
Anomie is a Durkheimian term to mean
normlessness or chaos. Societal periods of anomie typically arise during
periods of social change during a transition between either a type and/or form
of leadership. Minor forms of anomie take place during the change of leadership
within an established system. For example, a new political party leadership in
positions of established power. The focused emphasis and exercise of that power
is going to be different, but it is (supposedly) not going to deconstruct the
entire system itself. The normlessness experienced here is in the unknown way
the new authority will exercise their established power. Major Anomie is where
there is a break in the fundamental structures of power. Where the system that
delegates and defines that power is removed. This may lead to anarchy, causing
the established institutions to crumble, becoming then a steppingstone to a
greater anomic effect as the established norms that allow for a civil society
are obliterated. And because there are no longer established and agreed upon
rules for any type of interaction, all interaction is thereby organized through
a lens of acute individualism; making all communication and decision making
transactional.
During the pandemic lockdown, this
anomic period was fueled by inherent racism and misogyny that we’ve established
in the US since its founding. There was a class divide that caused the
experiences of white-collar workers to be able to weather the lockdown easier than
others whose jobs could not be completed from home. People of color were
disproportionally a part of the workforce that were identified as essential
workers (from nurses and doctors to food service workers), and because women
are more likely to be members of the part time service industry, they too were
unfairly put on the front lines of labor. This was especially significant because
we did not have a working vaccine at the time. This period of normlessness also
fueled conspiracy theories about bleach, and horse dewormer; which was moving people away from
necessary behavioral change and into fear induced apathy.
This anomie that we felt was also
politically weaponized as the mask mandates and lockdown orders came about. The
inability for some to accept that this was happening became a point of
political manipulation to pry apart social solidarity, and for the Trump
administration at the time to maintain power. In addition to peddling the conspiracy theories mentioned above, Trump stated that
he believed it would just go away. He actively attempted to gaslight
the American people
into believing that COVID wasn’t serious. He defied his own mask mandate orders,
repeatedly not wearing a mask or taking off the mask in public. This caused several
of his supporters to protest the mandates with their
guns in their local
cities. Trump hid his own infection with
COVID, twice. Once
during the first presidential debate with opponent Joe Biden, and again during
the confirmation announcement of Amy
Comey Barrett;
thinking that he’d seem weak if he was wearing a mask or taking his health
seriously. The bungling of the COVID-19
responses which contributed to over 1 million American’s dead, was the major
factor that cost Trump the election in 2020.
Ducournau
embraces this anomic vibe and uses the unrest witnessed during these two historical
crises (HIV/AIDS and COVID) as a backdrop; and unspoken tension that exists in every
scene. There are displays of fear and panic that are based in entrenched
bigotry but thinly obfuscated as legitimate individual concern. When Alpha
confronts the boy she’s seeing about their similar tattoos, he sheepishly
admits that he received his tattoo right after her; the same night, with the
same needle. When Alpha asks why he did not speak up when he saw that she was
being bullied, he demures, indicating that he did not want their classmate’s
ire to fall on him. Here, Ducournau
illustrates the hollow rationalization of dehumanization justified by a medical
crisis that both reinforces the narcissistic urge of self-preservation, and a
desire for social acceptance. Rather than stand in solidarity with Alpha, he
allowed peer group socialization to guide his choices and behavior. Granted,
during this time of middle school, the social pressure to conform to your peer
/friend group is considerably gargantuan. Nevertheless, it was clear through
his depiction, and how he treated Alpha, that his caginess around Alpha’s
potential illness wasn’t just to protect himself from social ridicule, but to
also gain sexual favors from Alpha (kissing in bathrooms and nearly having
intercourse in his bedroom).
Mini rant: How Child sexualization
on screen contributes to pedophilia
As an aside: much in the same way I am hard
pressed to know the social and political intention of a piece of pop culture
because I do not know how that culture is going to be consumed, so too do I
bristle at the inclusion of childhood sexuality in coming-of-age films. Especially
when they are explicit or contain nakedness of any kind. I question both the
purpose and the audience. How does it serve the story, and what is the overall
point? Who does this service? Because it doesn’t seem like it is serving the
story, the audience, or the actors involved.
I
directly questioned the depiction of child sexual behavior in my previous essay
on Water Lillies by Celine
Sciamma back in
2024. Like Sciamma, Ducournau cast an adult actress to play younger (Melissa
Boros was 19 playing Alpha at 13), and while Ducournau did not personally sexualize
her main lead, as Sciamma did in her film, she did have a significant
development gap between the actor and the age she was portraying. Considering
the wide variance in development among girls, there is some authenticity to a
“more mature” looking 13-year-old. Yet, to depict them as being in intimate scenarios
when they are depicted by someone older, increases the likelihood of their
sexualization by the audience and contributes to the normalization of
pedophilia.
Regardless
of sexuality being a legitimate part of the coming-of-age story, there is a gulf
of a difference between including the turmoil of rising sexual feelings and the
depiction of sex and nudity amongst characters that are underage. The former is
valid, while the latter is exploitatively pedophilic. It continues the “adultification” of girls on
screen and contributes to the sexual objectification of girls in public, which
happens so early and with such frequency as it does, that it doesn’t need
assistance from the cinema.
SOCIAL
ANALYSIS
The
sociological question that Ducournau asks, outside of the allegorical
representation of historic medical crises, is the value and interpersonal
impacts of generational grief. What does it mean when an individual can’t let
go, or someone cannot get past the worst time of their life? Narratively, this
is unique as few films explore the failings of a protagonist to find solace or
redemption. The primary reason being that people have been conditioned through
generations of storytelling to value character arcs that show growth and moving
past that point of pain. Generally, it is desirable to see characters that are
not in the same place at the end of a story as they were at the beginning. This
change shows both acknowledgement of, and a reward for, the investment of time
the audience puts into watching the story unfold. It minimizes disappointment. Rare
are films that show characters with an inability to grow. When they are
depicted, it is usually a moral failing, a cautionary tale. It is something to
learn from, so that unlike these characters, audience members can move on; and
hold on to hope for something better. However, this messaging becomes muddled
with the realities of grief and the way that people engage with it, and the
societal expectation of grief and its processes. Few realize that grief is a
social fact.
Grief as a Social Fact
A social fact is clearly
defined as any way of acting that is fixed or not, capable of exerting over an
individual an external constraint or that which is generated over the whole of
a given society whist having an existence of its own, independent of its
individual manifestations
(Durkheim 1982:59)
A
social fact has three components to it:
1.
Externality: to exist outside of something (prior or outside of
the individual) something that we learn through the process of socialization
(e.g. language)
2.
Constraint: puts forth a compelling
force or coercive power over individuals. It sets limits and constraints on
people
3.
Generality: This is something that is
widespread that has been deeply rooted in the cultural norms of a group or
society, to the point that they are seen as natural.
Grief
is an emotion that is felt by a variety of living creatures; not just humans.
It exists outside of any one person, even though every person can experience
it. Grief continues even if people don’t. Ironically, it is the emotional vacuum
experienced after the loss of someone else that propels grief amongst a
populace. Grief exists within the individual, and amongst the people. Both
inside and outside the person. Externality. Those that have experienced grief
understand how it may manifest as psychological and social shackles that keep
individuals inert. The cinematic language used to explain grief is one of a barrier.
It is consistently manifested as a hindrance; keeping something or someone from
“moving on”. That “moving on” is also always presented as something good. This
once again frames progress as linear and positive; because it is assumed, where
you are, is never where you want to stay. Especially in narrative storytelling,
grief is an albatross that must be cast off. Constraint. Since all humans and many
nonhumans experience grief, it is an emotion that is ritualistically self-generating
within our society. The experience of grief is not novel or unexpected, it is
nuanced to the social, cultural and historical context in which it is
experienced. We create rituals as a method to “process” our grief. Funerals and
other collective experiences around death are not for the corpse, but for the
collective conscience. It is a natural part of understanding life. Generality. Yet
just because grief can be understood as a social fact, does not mean that its
inevitability is how grief is neither conditioned nor socially experienced.
Socially,
grief is understood through a capitalist lens. It is a barrier that one must overcome
or circumvent to have “grown”. This is measured by our ability to look back on
that time of grief and value it for allowing us to be where we are in the
present. We understand this in very pro-capitalist economic terms: the process
of grief, our progress from it, and the growth or “profit” from experiencing it.
In this, grief is transactional. This understanding of grief is reinforced
through cinema.
In
cinema, grief is mainly played as a constraint. It is the source of tension and
conflict from which the filmmakers can create drama, stakes, and thus, audience
investment (again a capitalist frame). Therefore, to see a return on that
investment, the conflict must be resolved, the constraint removed, evaded or
abated. Unfortunately, the consumption of these types of stories through this
lens conditions us through the process of socialization to define grief as
being fundamentally temporary (again, framed as a process) its resolution an
inevitability. Additionally, that conclusion is reached with fundamental ease
and speed (about the length of a feature film). While, conceptually, we
understand that is not how the actual experience of grief works (emotional
experiences in humans tend to exist nonlinearly), it creates a social
expectation in individuals, organizations, and the social institutions in which
we live, to exist as such.
The
United States being a capitalist society, we’ve framed our social and
institutional interactions through the economic language of profit to be transitory
and transactional. Thus, the Marxian notion of commodification provides an understanding
that everything in human life, even the experiences of our emotions, can be
bought, sold, traded or exchanged; grief included. Grief then becomes
commodified. Usually manifesting in the form of self-help books with a variety
of coping strategies, self-care routines, pharmacology and therapies. Access to
these manifestations is not all equally distributed, with some groups, usually
those with greater wealth, being able to acquire more than those who do not.
Regardless, what often is overlooked is that there is always a societal time
limit to grief.
In
a capitalist system like the US, grief is assigned a value and is considered a
commodified resource. The misery of others is publicly traded, and their recovery
is profited from. It is cyclical as opposed to perpetually linear. This is
contradictory to the common assumption that sustained grief should be desired for
profit. Epitomized by the notion that therapy is never over. The rationalization
being that there is always something about yourself that you need to work on (a
notion that flies in the face of a therapeutic understanding based on having
goals that you want to achieve; and once achieved, the therapy ends). Thus, a
time limit to grief seems anti-capitalistic…until you factor in productivity.
Capitalism
is an economic system that dehumanizes. It is amoral and apathetic. It does not
care about the physical, mental and emotional wellbeing of its workers. Thus,
the arresting power of grief, halts productivity. The work never stops because
the profit cannot abide a limit (Marx 1993). Therefore, there are constraints
put on grief. No matter how generous the healthcare plan, no matter how
understanding your boss, emotionally supportive coworkers, family and friends
are, there is a variety of societal limits to grief’s expression.
Grief
is allowed to be intense at the outset, with strong emotional support and a
variety of empathetic gestures. But the greater the temporal distance from the grief
causing event, the quicker the societal acceptance and behavioral latitude
evaporates; replaced by an expectation to move past it and become productive
again. Once that time is reached, grief is perceived as an
individual and moral failing. Characterizing the person as broken if they cannot
get back to their previous productive self. Criticized as being “stuck in the
past.”
This
understanding of the social conditions of grief is taught through the
consumption of cinema. As we engage with a plethora of stories that champion
the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity, and to not succumb to
trauma, nor the grief and loneliness that accompanies it. We reinforce the
social condition that grief is not only a social fact, and a normal part of
existence, but as something that we inevitably have to overcome multiple times
throughout our lives in order to simply exist within society. We also learn
that shame, ridicule and ostracization follows those who cannot defeat grief. This
results in people masking and self-medicating their grief. They realize that so
long as you are still able to participate in the system, you are left alone (to
“not be ok”). You are allowed to be mentally and emotionally broken so long as you
are undisruptively productive. Thus, we are given several cinematic depictions
of functioning broken people. If they do not improve by the time credits roll,
they learn to mask convincingly enough to allow the audience to assume a happy
ending; even when that may betray the context of the film itself. Film in this context then becomes one way in
which the acceptable image of grief is laundered. It hides the limits of grief
within a capitalist society, creating a culture that sees grief as an
aberration, and those that can’t control it, as failures. Ducournau’s Alpha
is an exception.
In
Alpha, grief is cinematically manifested in the character of Uncle Amin.
The audience is introduced to Amin as an intrusion into the lives of Alpha and
her mother. Alpha is noticeably
concerned, considering that she has no recollection of who he is at first
introduction (occupying her room). This is despite his protests that they know each
other quite well, and she was just too young to remember. As her mother returns
home, she is uncharacteristically accommodating to her brother whom, as we see
in flashbacks, is a drug addict. On numerous occasions, the film shows Alpha’s
mother resuscitating him after various overdoses. A flashback to when Alpha was
five, reveals that Amin had contracted the virus. He then decides to take Alpha
to buy drugs so he can overdose and die on his own terms. When Alpha’s mom
catches him in the act, she resigns to assisting him. But as he passes out,
Alpha’s mother revives him again, unable to let him go. Eventually, Amin, after
a painfully long process, succumbs to the disease and is turned into a marble
statue.
Since
the film is told in overlapping flashbacks, the story moves linearly but jumps
between past and present towards the same event (the inciting incident). Ducournau
builds to the moment that traumatized both mother and daughter: their collective
assistance in Amin’s attempted suicide. Alpha’s mom administering the lethal dose
and Alpha’s promise to make sure Amin doesn’t wake up. This schism results in
his haunting of them; a manifestation of their unresolved grief. The mother, unable
to let go of her brother, and the feelings of failure from Alpha for not being
able to teach her mother to let go. This culminates at the end of the film when
Alpha declares that Uncle Amin can’t be with them anymore. At films end, Alpha
looks on as her mother and Uncle begin to walk toward the house. Suddenly, the
spirit of Amin crumbles, carried off by the wind. Her mother screams, left with
nothing but anguish.
A
more hopeful interpretation of this final scene is that it is a turning point in
the relationship between Alpha and her mother, that they are no longer haunted
by the specter of their dead loved one. However, there has been nothing to
suggest that growth in any of the preceding scenes. Alpha’s recovery of her
lost memories and declaration to overcome grief has no practical weight to it. Given
the context of the entire film that proceeded it, it is more likely that this
is the start of another grief cycle for Alpha’s mother. Stuck resurrecting the
memory of her brother in her own mind because she could not bring him back to
life. Grief is a social fact, and for some, it becomes the only truth.
CONCLUSION
Alpha is a film that competently provides
a historical allegory for the HIV/AIDS crisis with Ducournau’s wonderful body-horrific
flare. Yet, the film seems like an allegory in search of a story. The metaphors
were so bluntly heavy handed that the narrative wasn’t cohesively held together
in the same way as her previous work. However, where this film shines is in its
meditation on grief and its circumventive subversion of audience expectations.
We expect the narrative arc to the expiration of grief, the conquering of loss
and a rebounding acceptance of life. Instead, this film shows us that
somethings aren’t overcome, they are adapted to and lived with. An infrequent
lesson that is as equally important as its rosier alternative.
REFERENCES
Durkheim,
Emile 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method and selected text on Sociology
and its Method. New York: The Free Press
Halkitis,
Perry N. 2019 “The Stonewall Riots, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Public’s Health”
in The American Journal of Public Health 109(6):pp 851–852. Retrieved on
4/18/26 Retrieved at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6507988/
Marx, Karl
1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy New
York: Penguin Classics
[1] Some of us were children. Many of us had the
privilege to be kept ignorant of both the severity and the horrors of death the
disease brought at the time
