Creation Lake

Guy Debord looms large over Creation Lake. The author does not, however, provide a thorough account of his life or detail his contributions to the French intellectual Left. Debord (1931-1994) was a 20th-century Marxist philosopher best known for his theoretical text The Society of the Spectacle (1967), which examines the roots of alienation in capitalist society. Debord argues in this text that although post-World War II society saw an improvement in working conditions for everyday individuals, those improvements did not translate to a decrease in alienation. Rather, in a landscape in which workers have more rights, better wages, and an increased standard of living, their lives become re-oriented toward the accumulation of capital and the endless cycle of the production and consumption of material goods. Because society is so oriented around production and consumption, there is little time for individuals to pursue their own interests and dreams or to develop their beliefs, values, and identities beyond work and consumption. In a pre-capitalist cultural landscape, individuals defined themselves according to church, family, and group affiliations. Under capitalism, this is no longer the case: People define themselves by what they can afford to purchase and what kinds of products they buy.

Although The Society of the Spectacle is Debord’s most famous and influential work, the ideas he espouses in it have deep roots in his own history of involvement with various leftist intellectual circles and the history of continental philosophy in the 20th century. As a young man, Debord was involved with the Lettrists, an avant-garde movement holding the central idea that art (particularly writing but also visual arts) had achieved all that was possible using the forms established by key early figures like Homer and that it was time for an entirely new way of conceptualizing and approaching art. Debord was drawn to the Lettrists in particular because he was interested in film, and he was excited by the Lettrist argument that old artistic conventions should be smashed in favor of new kinds of art grounded in leftist theory. Debord went on to be a founding member of the Situationist International, another avant-garde artistic movement that sought to break with established forms and practices in the art world.

Debord is additionally known for the documentary His Art and His Times, unreleased during his lifetime, which was a chronicle of both his own life in Paris and the social, economic, and political issues that characterized France during the 1990s. Debord, who long suffered from both substance use disorder and depression, died by suicide in 1994. Much remains a mystery about Debord’s death, but by that time, his ideas, particularly those outlined in Society of the Spectacle, had fallen out of fashion, and many in his inner circle reported that Debord had lost faith in society’s ability to self-renew and move beyond capitalist modes of both economic and social organization.

Although, in Creation Lake, Pascal Balmy gives up his interest in film in favor of more serious pursuits, Debord’s position within leftist, avant-garde movements makes him a natural fit as a figure of god-like influence over Pascal. In addition to their interest in French cinema, the two men share a fundamental opposition to capitalist society. In particular, both Pascal and Debord critique the way that capitalism reorients individual lives around production and consumption. Pascal’s retreat to his commune in Guyenne is a marked attempt to step outside of the world of consumption in particular: The Moulinards produce only what they need to survive and what they can sell to purchase the basic goods that they do not grow themselves. They purchase nothing beyond what they need, and their time is devoted to pursuits other than the consumption of material goods. They re-delineate personal identity around principles like group cohesion and collaboration, thus providing a model for the kind of society that Debord would have idealized.