By Abigail Shields, Year 12
“Where do we start? But start what? God created heaven and earth, sure, but that’s too easy. We should put it better: that the limits of my language are my world’s limits, and that when I speak, I limit the world, I finish it. And one inevitable and mysterious day, death will come and abolish these limits, and there will be no questions nor answers. It will all be a blur. But if by chance things come into focus again, it may only be the advent of consciousness.”
This film is an investigation into how our modern life structures and shatters consciousness. Rather than telling the story of Julitete Janson, a Parisian housewife who sporadically engages in prostitution the film examines the conditions that make her existence intelligible at all. Godard treats all the aspects of our world from the economy to our language as interconnected systems, and asks himself how individuals come to understand themselves within a rapidly modernizing consumer society.
The film’s central concern is articulated through the recurring philosophical reflection that the limits of language define the limits of the world. He reflects this with the directing choices he makes, the dialogue is fragmented, the narrator whispers, and the conversations often feel incomplete or displaced. When characters speak, they repeat clichés, advertising slogans or standardized expressions which we could reflect in our even more modern day tiktok language, suggesting that personal identity is mediated through already-existing linguistic frameworks.
Juliette’s prostitution is not treated as moral transgression. Instead, Godard presents it as continuous with everyday economic exchange. The distinction between domestic labor, and sexual labor becomes entirely blurred. By placing the prostitution alongside shopping, childcare, and casual conversations the film suggests that capitalist modernity commodifies all forms of human interaction. Value circulates everywhere, and intimacy itself becomes transactional.
One of the film’s most significant strategies is its attention to objects. Consumer goods, which persistently receive prolonged visual focus. These objects are not merely props like in a lot of films, they illustrate how material culture organizes desire. Advertising imagery saturates the film’s visual field, demonstrating how capitalism produces needs by attaching meaning to commodities. Individuals do not simply buy objects, they buy identities promised by images. Godard implies that modern consciousness increasingly encounters reality through representations rather than direct experience.
Gender plays a crucial role in this inquiry. Women in the films are constantly positioned within networks of images like magazines, advertisements, and beauty standards, that define femininity eternally. Julliette’s identity appears constructed through these visual and economic expectations. Godard critiques not simply sexism but the broader mechanisms by which capitalism produces idealised roles that individuals internalise as personal desires. There is no conventional dramatic progression because Godard rejects the idea that meaning unfolds over time. Instead the film accumulates observations, scenes functions like essays or thought experiments, encouraging the viewers to reflect rather than emotionally identity. Which reflects the focus on consciousness itself. Godard believes that if language defines the boundaries of the world, then death represents the dissolution of those boundaries. Godard contrasts this uötimate silence with modern society’s endless production of speech and images.
Ultimately, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is not about knowing Juliette at all. The title is ironic, knowledge remains partial, and mediated. What the film reveals instead is the difficulty of consciousness within modernity. How individuals attempt to think, feel, and exist inside systems that precede them. Today meaning is increasingly produced not just through our languages, but through AI algorithms and social media platforms that curate and amplify the way we perceive and experience everyday life, and perhaps fabricates it entirely.
