One of the funniest and most trenchant critiques of Parisian existentialism takes place in the 1961 film The Rebel, in which Tony Hancock plays a deluded would-be artist who has quit the stifling mediocrity of East Cheam for the delights of avant garde Paris. Having accidentally found himself the new darling of the Left Bank, Hancock is invited to a fashionable party by a busty, kohl-eyed woman in a tight black polo-neck sweater. She huskily intones gnomic gems such as, “Why kill time when you can kill yourself?” Hancock gawps at her in bafflement. “I’m an existentialist,” she goes on, by way of explanation. “All of my friends are existentialists.”
The lad himself is unimpressed. “Well, it’s company, innit!” he finally says, barely disguising his gentle derision. It is hard to imagine a more delicious cultural collision than this, or one that so effectively captures how – to the sceptical English eye – French philosophy, for all its fag-waving sexiness, is also mostly pretentious and daft.
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