Aw. But you can’t look at No Exit out of context. You have to look at it in terms of the totality of Beckett, Camus and Sartre, together. And it must be viewed in terms of the Zeitgeist of the era, including hard-bop jazz, the NY school of Abstract Expressionism (giving way to pop & tri-colorists and color field theorists) and tangentially related things like Heidegger and Kierkegaard, French New Wave cinema, Proust, Balzac, and the history of French censorship vis a vis Madame Bovary and Gustave Flaubert.

We are all alone, but as with Beckett in Waiting for Godot this is life-affirming. Just as the distorted reflection on the mantelpiece offers a glimpse of hell, it is merely a subjective version of reality, and so you have to deconstruct what French Existentialism says about the nature of reality.

In Alphaville, is reality part of a 19th century neo-Classical clockwork causal universe? No, no of course not. If we don’t live in a causal universe, from a positivist perspective how can we truly know others?

Only the French could put Madame Bovary, a fictional character, on trial. Really, if you go back and reread Flaubert it really informs No Exit. It is very good.

Oh I just love No Exit so much, I don’t even know. It is one of my great loves, certainly among my greatest inspirations, you can go back to it many times.

Are you teaching it?