I kid Bernard-Henri Levy!
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Just like watching Le Diner de Cons, viewing On N’est Pas Couché on TV5 Monde can be a cringe-inducing exercise at times, and not because, unlike Nausicaa, we don’t all speak French fluently (there are times when I wish the show did come with subtitles.)
ReplyDeleteBringing up Le Diner de Cons is a provoking but fitting premise, to be sure. Why else, indeed, one may justly wonder, most uncharacteristically of a TV talk show known for the no holds barred style of its hosts and at least some pretense to balance when it comes to “political guests,” would Laurent Ruquier, Yann Moix and Christine Angot egg on Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL) to iterate UNCHALLENGED, a cocktail of historic and political fictions “mingling,” as Nicolas Beau of Le Canard Enchainé and Olivier Toscer of Le Nouvel Observateur aptly put it, “the true, the possible, and the totally false”?
Is BHL a duplicitous propagandist or just simply an idiot? (Or maybe a “useful idiot,” as the saying goes?)
Most probably the latter.
Are Laurent Ruquier, Yann Moix and Christine Angot merely stakeholders in BHL narrative and agitprop enablers, or was this a Diner de Cons?
Those are all interesting questions.
Either way, the comparison stops there: BHL is no Francois Pignon.
As a matter of fact, BHL actually couldn’t be any further away from Francois Pignon, personality-wise, by either his character, demeanor or dispositions:
While Francois Pignon’s good heart and witless innocence makes him a better person than Pierre Brochant (the character setting him up for a dinner de cons in the movie) could ever hope to be. BHL, a Patrician (just like Laurent Ruquier, who host and co-produce the show), is actually more like Pierre Brochant whose wealth is outdone only by his smugness. (Except that BHL, who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is, of course, a lot richer than Pierre Brochant, the anti-hero of the film.)
While Le Diner de Cons (the film) ends in moral victory, with Pierre Brochant’s crisis of conscience and ultimate final redemption, this installment of On N’est Pas Couché, featuring (seven years into the disastrous and tragic aftermath of the destruction of Libya) a remorseless and unrepentant self-important BHL wallowing in his idiocy is utterly ghastly. Does the man have no shame or is he really that blind and dumb in his self-serving self-centeredness?
Whatever Catherine Barma and Laurent Ruquier’s motives (if motives there were, rather than simple spinelessness or complacent laziness, or a mere surrender of decency) may or may not have been, this last installment reflected poorly on the show and its producers as a whole, not to mention Yann Moix and Christine Angot.