Virtually every scene reflects the unraveling of Rousseau's social contract and points to an inevitable disintegration into tribal atavism. Godard, who trained as an ethnologist, adapted the film's structure from Friedrich Engels's "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" (1884). Engels developed his ideas from the anthropologist Lewis Morgan's study of the Iroquois and Seneca tribes...Engels describes the emergence of civilization from barbarism, and barbarism from savagery, as marked by stages in the development of articulate speech, the invention of weaponry, and the transition from migratory hunting and gathering to fixed communities based on agriculture. In Weekend, these stages are set in reverse: a dominant class alienated from "the production of the immediate essentials of life" and devoted to mindless consumerism, is shown regressing to a state of savagery. Even Morgan's Indians, alluded to at the outset of the film by a little brat in a headdress, turn up in the form of revolutionary cannibals frying up English tourists. One of them, toward the end of the film, says "The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome with more horror." Godard presents them as the inevitable outcome of a historical process and surrenders the last part of his film to an endless tribal massacre. [Despite the seriousness of Godard's social commentary, it could all be viewed as comedy]. -Gary Indiana on "Weekend"