Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Volume 40 Issue 1 Article 6 2016 The Judas Effect: Betrayal in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless Vlad Dima University of Wisconsin - Madison,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, and the French and Francophone Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Dima, Vlad (2016) "The Judas Effect: Betrayal in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless," Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 40: Iss. 1, Article 6. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1874 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Judas Effect: Betrayal in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless Abstract This article revisits the ending of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) in an attempt to untangle the complicated relationship between the two main characters, and to claim that they are characters that belong to no identifiable genre. Instead, they come to life as characters at the intersection point of existentialism, creationism, and two radically different genres, film noir and neorealism. In essence, they are characters without a genre, always out of place, and their existential drifting generates a Judas effect—a trope that establishes betrayal and sacrifice as necessary narrative tools and that suspends the classical (cinematic) Oedipal cycle.