Pepe Le Moko (Or: The Policeman Inside)

Julien Duvivier's 1936 film Pépé Le Moko presents the story of a notorious gangster played by Jean Gabin hiding out in the Algerierian Casbah. A "Prince Among Thieves" Pépé is portrayed as a shrewd, charming, dangerous figure, possessed of a magnetic sexual charisma.

The story opens in Algiers Police Headquarters. A special squad of detectives, recently dispatched from Paris, are speculatively preparing for a swoop on the Casbah, in the hope of capturing Pépé in his lair. Brushing off the advice of the local detective Inspector Slimane, a mission is planned for that night. It goes ahead, and is a disaster - "I told you so," says Slimane, "Protected by an omniscient network of lovers, friends, and spies, Pépé cannot be taken so long as he remains on his own turf."

The Paris detectives defer to Slimane's greater experience. Slimane gets to work. Recognizing Pépé's one weakness to be women, he sends a particularly intriguing one his way, and lets her work her magic. This girl is Gaby, a Paris showgirl, a frame in whom, as Proust would have it, Pépé finds himself compelled to wrap-up the landscape, of all of his nostalgia for his Paris past.

Finally, Slimane's elaborate sting drives Pépé to the point where he can no longer stand the paralysis the Casbah has become for him. Discovering that Gaby is scheduled to leave Algiers, seized by passion, he makes his way to the dock, where he is promptly arrested. Resigning himself to his fate, he begs Slimane for a moment, to simply look out across the ocean. Slimane agrees, and Pépé slits his wrists as he watches the indifferent Gaby sail into the sunset.

Two things are noteworthy about this film. Firstly, Duvivier's idea of community concieved in the terms of a kind of immanent buffer against State power - Pépé is fine so long as he remains within the Casbah. Secondly, the character of Slimane, who taunts Pépé throughout the narrative continually with sly warnings that his day of reckoning is coming, that the date has already been marked out. In this respect, Slimane exists with respect to a Pépé according to the logic of "a second self - a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles." (Styron)

As such, Slimane conforms to the trope of what Burroughs called "the policeman inside" and what Foucalt identified as "the Fascist within." He operates freely within the Casbah, and is tolerated there, but in the form of a kind of inherent irritant. Played by Lucas Gridoux (an actor previously cast by Duvivier as Judas Iscariot) Slimane is presented as the very incarnation of obscene ressentiment - a jittery, almost repulsively cunning inhuman parasite, whose only motivation seems to be the destruction of Pépé, and whose ultimate pathetic triumph is the victory of nihilism, won on the ground of queasy nostalgic sentimentalism.

And yet: the final act of Pépé, his infinite decision to leave for good, and no matter what the cost, the cocoon of the Casbah, was undoubtedly an Act in the strict Lacanian sense of the term. He does it because he must, he is not fully aware of what he is doing...why then is it so spectacularly catastrophic - and indeed, why must it be?

To be sure, the precise narrative reason why Pépé Le Moko specifically ends in tragedy is on account of Pépé's Casbah lover Inez, who, becoming hysterical in the face of Pépé's open preparations to leave Algiers and her for good, enacts the final and decisive twist by betraying him to Slimane just at the moment at which it seems Pépé may yet escape from his shadow's clutches. Claiming that she loves Pépe too much to lose him, Inez's betrayal here strikes a stark contrast to the betrayal enacted by the character of Patricia in Godard's Breathless, who decides to give Michel away to the police in order to find out whether she loves him, only to discover, by virtue of the fact of her own action, that she doesn't - as Patricia herself puts it: "If I loved you, then I couldn't have betrayed you."