La Dolce Vita – Part Two
1.
Very early in La Dolce Vita, Marcello communicates with girls bathing on a rooftop by wordless pantomime. Distance and the whirr of the helicopter rotors make his words inaudible to the women with whom he is flirting. The sequence is mirrored by the encounter with the angelic Paola in the film’s last scene. A monster has washed up on the beach and Marcello with the people from the orgy have come to see the spectacle. A creek runs as a rivulet across the beach and into the sea. Marcello turns away from the monster and sees the girl standing on the other side of the stream. The sound of waves and wind make it impossible for him to speak with her. They communicate briefly by gesture and pantomime. (Marcello makes a clownish gesture signifying helplessness.) One of the women from the orgy beckons to Marcello and, reluctantly, it seems, he follows her along the beach, moving in the direction of the flaccid, goggle-eyed monster.
In the middle of the movie, Marcello goes to the Cha Cha club with his father. They see a sad clown who mournfully plays on his trumpet. Again, the clown doesn’t speak but communicates by gesture.
La Dolce Vita is about spectacle. Spectacle is word-less, it’s about what can be seen. Celebrities and movie stars exist to be seen. The hordes of paparazzi that besiege them are capturing their image. In effect, spectacle dematerializes the world into image. The pop stars and glamor girls and the whole specious world of film are spectacular images. But, where everything is image, where everything is appearance, nothing is substance.
Where everything is spectacle and image, the world presents as “shallow”. Critics, often, describe La Dolce Vita as “depthless”. This description is certainly a misnomer with respect the Fellini’s camerawork and pictorial composition. In fact, many shots in the movie employ extremely deep focus; often we can see tiny figures in the far distance, standing like sentinels against Fellini’s bleak Roman horizons. (Fellini films suburban Rome the way John Ford shoots Monument Valley – it’s like a Western, with acres of desert between huge mesas and buttes of apartment flats.) Certainly, there is nothing “depthless” about the way the film depicts Rome and its denizens. Yet the appellation “depthless” may be accurate in several respects. First, critics often liken the vast canvas of La Dolce Vita to an church fresco. This means that the scope of the film is lateral or horizontal and not vertical or, for that matter, exposing depths behind the surface of the image. Frescos relevant to the mise-en scene-of La Dolce Vita are works by Giotto at the Arena Chapel in Padua and the Basilica of San Francisco at Assisi (the attribution of the Basilica frescos to Giotto is disputed) – these works show episodes in the life of St. Francis, in separate panels sprawling across the wall. Similarly, Fellini depicts separate episodes in the life of Marcello deployed in a structure that is essentially non-recursive and non-narrative. (Only the three scenes with Steiner, each isolated by other episodes in the film, form a narrative – and one that is highly disquieting). Modern life is characterized by anomie, detachment, alienation, and fragmentation – the “fresco” structure of the movie, deploying individual episodes that all have the same structure but that don’t cumulate into a narrative embodies this cubist fracturing of reality into individual discrete fragments, anecdotes that don’t cohere into a story. “Depthless” accordingly means the film’s horizontal structure, box-cars of narration on a single track running from nowhere to nowhere.
But “depthless” also means shallow. A world that is comprised of spectacle, of naked images bereft of any meaning except as spectacle, is necessarily shallow. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is a shallow film about how modern urban life, in a society of spectacle, is shallow itself. There are no hidden depths in the movie. What you see is what you get. It’s pointless to excavate the imagery in the film for profundity. What Fellini presents is a modernist spectacle of startling images not invested with any literary significance. They don’t “mean” anything except, perhaps, as symbols. And symbolic imagery is essentially wordless in that it can’t be reduced to anything but its appearance.
2.
In voice-over commentary on the La Dolce Vita DVD, the once-famous movie reviewer Richard Schickel struggles with the film’s opening sequence. As everyone knows, Fellini shows a helicopter transporting a rather garish statue of Jesus over Rome’s urban wasteland. Schickel correctly describes the imagery as complex in its meanings, but, then, asserts that the sequence is, more or less, blasphemous. (Schickel was once the reviewer of the weekly magazine Life and was one of the few critics who had the ability to “make or break” a newly released motion picture with American audiences.) So far as I can see, Schickel generally interprets everything in La Dolce Vita in a way that is exactly opposite to what I think the movie intends. But the difficulties Schickel has with the film’s opening sequence, one of approximately 12 episodes that comprise the movie, is indicative of the way that Fellini constructs meaning in the picture. Fellini works symbolically – Schickel apparently doesn’t want to discomfit his middle-brow listeners by reminding them of High School literature classes and, so, he doesn’t invoke the concept. But this yields an interpretative crisis in his commentary after about only 60 seconds into the work.
A symbol is an image or figure of speech that can’t be reduced to any single meaning or set of meanings. Symbols evoke a constellation of meanings that exceed the literal significance of the image or text. If you can replace an image or trope with a single meaning, it is probably not symbolic, but, perhaps, metaphorical (a likeness) or allegorical (an emblem that typically has a one-to-one correspondence to some other concept.) By their nature, symbols are suggestive, allusive, and evasive. Hence, Schickel’s attempt to put into words the meaning of the helicopter conveying Christ, with arms outspread, over the city of Rome – the image can’t be reduced to any single response; rather, it conveys a set of responses. Decoding a symbol in literal terms defeats its purpose.
Christ borne over the city of Rome by helicopter evinces the clash between ancient and modern, both literally materialized as the shadow of the helicopter on Roman ruins, but, also, demonstrated in the conflict between Christian morality and the pagan hedonism the reigns on the Via Veneto. Christianity hasn’t gone away; rather, it hangs suspended, like the sword of Damocles over our heads – Christ both blesses His imperial city and condemns it. His outstretched arms will embrace the entire spectacle presented by the film, suggesting theological dimensions to Marcello’s pilgrimage through night-time Rome. In another sense, Christ is instrumental – he is brought here and there, trotted out when needed, but otherwise ignored. (This notion of the instrumental peripatetic Christ is shown explicitly in the scenes involving the apparition of the Virgin – the children dart here and there, following an invisible presence that only they can see.) The supernatural is omni-present. The decadent aristocrats in their ruinous villa hunt for ghosts and one of the women has an uncanny seizure that resembles some sort of sinister orgasm. Fellini is ultimately a moralist and the imagery of Christ held high over His city suggests that the self-indulgent hedonism that motivates the film’s characters is set against a Christian frame of reference. The symbol shows Christ triumphant, Christ debased, Christ as judge, Christ as an irrelevant and kitschy figure moved from place to place like a piece of advertising – no single interpretation of the opening sequence is correct or, even, available and, in fact, it is difficult to put into words what this symbol means.
La Dolce Vita is replete with complex and enigmatic symbols. Consider the sea-monster on the beach juxtaposed against the angelic Paola, the teenage waitress at the seaside resort, the Madonna’s apparition in the blighted rural landscape, the prostitute’s flooded basement apartment, the grotesque aristocrats’ ghost-hunting in the abandoned villa, Marcello astride the woman at the orgy, riding her like a donkey, the lonely wastelands surrounding Rome, the sad clown at the Cha Cha cabaret, the searchlights probing the darkness as visible from the balcony at Steiner’s apartment, and innumerable other images and sequences. At the threshold of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, we must be conscious that the director works poetically by deploying symbols with complicated emotional and intellectual correlatives. The overture to the film, Christ carried over the city, establishes Fellini’s modus operandi – the sequence is mysterious (why is Christ being transported? And where?), non-narrative, and never explicated within the movie. Fellini’s prelude establishes that meaning in La Dolce Vita will never be reducible to any single formulation and, further, that there will be no consolation afforded by a single, consistently developed story-line or narrative. The plight of urban elites is to live in an absurd flux of sensations in which all meaning is necessarily fragmentary – La Dolce Vita doesn’t hold together or cohere; it consists of a series of disconnected, highly affective, fragments, a mosaic with the pieces scattered in all directions.
Furthermore, we must accept that episodes in the film are non-narrative, posited as random events, and that each new episode will likely involve characters that we haven’t met before and that will probably drop out of the movie after the episode has screened. (It’s instructive to watch the movie with someone who isn’t familiar with it – naive viewers tend to be very confused by the lack of overlap between the episodes.) Anita Ekberg’s character, Sylvia Rank, has come to epitomize the film in the popular imagination – her scenes cavorting with Marcello in the Trevi Fountain are emblematic for the movie. But she appears only for a fifteen minutes or so in a picture with a running time of almost three-hours. Descending into Rome like Christ, dropped from above in an airplane, she adorns the movie for a little while, “a poor player who struts and frets (her) hour on the stage” and, then, exits never to be seen again – indeed, never even to be mentioned again. Fellini seems to suggest that narrative continuity is a pre-modern luxury upon which we can no longer rely.
In the place of a continuous narrative, Fellini creates alarming juxtapositions, sudden transitions that are completely disorienting and, even, shocking. There are two examples of these disconcerting jump-cuts in the first few minutes of the film. The camera tracks the two helicopters in the Roman sky, following the statue of Christ, or its shadow cast upon the ground. But, suddenly, we encounter several women in bikinis sunbathing on a terrace atop a tower. One of the women gets up and the camera-angle emphasizes her derriere – the lady’s ass is thrust at us as the statue of Christ swoops by overhead. When the sequence ends, Fellini cuts to an uncanny Asian figure, some sort of animated idol from Thailand or Angkor Wat – the figure seems to be metallic, gilded like the Christ dangling from the helicopter. The Asian god quivers and utters a ullulating cry. Two masked body builders with scimitars flank the idol-like figure. The jump-cut establishes a violent clash between the figure of Christ and the specter of this weird, shrieking Asian god, the latter a spectacle presented on the floor of a palatial night club. The juxtaposition signifies, it seems, the remote, dangling Christ in contrast with the eerie, pagan energies of the night-club. Fellini devises a series of oppositions to energize his film and propel it forward on the basis of a strident dialectic – this against that.
3.
Consider one of the most celebrated sequences in La Dolce Vita – the media hysteria surrounding an alleged apparition of the Virgin occurring in a singularly desolate landscape somewhere near Rome. Even people who dislike La Dolce Vita (and there are many) must concede that this episode is a tour de force, a bravura display of what camera movement, chiaroscuro lighting, and image composition can achieve on the sheer level of astonishing “sight and sound.” Of course, simply construed, the sequence is one of the “stations of the cross” as it were in Marcello’s pilgrimage. The film systematically, even, encyclopedically exhausts the possibilities for meaning in the modern, urban world of celebrity-mad Rome. The life of the mind and its fatal debility is demonstrated in the episodes involving the civilized, but doomed, Steiner. Celebrity is shown to be empty, particularly in the episode involving Anita Ekberg and her sybaritic companions. Love as an escape from the world of trivial glamor is shown to be futile. Naked desire and lust aren’t the answer to anything. And, Fellini is at pains to demonstrate that religious faith and piety are largely fraudulent; the miracle sequence involving the apparition, on its simplest level, signifies the “disenchantment” of religion. (Fellini, although a “cradle Catholic,” is weirdly Protestant; Max Weber said that the Protestants “disenchanted” the world. This project of “disenchanting” the spectacle of modern life is central to the meaning of the film.)
Thus, the wild madness shown in the miracle scene is a critique of religion and religious faith. But the sequence has other overtones. Fellini emphasizes that the miraculous apparition of the Virgin in this industrialized wasteland is primarily a cinematic spectacle. The movie emphasizes that the miracle is being filmed by camera crews on scaffolds, cranes arched over the mob, and huge Klieg lights in batteries spraying their beams across a scene thronged with a literal army of extras. In fact, the scene of the miracle (like the glamor of the celebrities) exists for the ubiquitous spectators of the paparazzi – the miracle is a movie staged for the camera. (In this sequence, the Madonna is a kind of celebrity.) Accordingly, we can say that the miracle scene is about not only religious faith but, also, movie-making. The sequence shows us an attempt to make a movie. We are watching a film, very much like La Dolce Vita being produced right before our eyes. So, with this episode, Fellini reaches the ne plus ultra of his endeavor to “disenchant” the world – he shows us that the very apparatus of film-making is also futile. The children dart back and forth pointing to places where the Virgin has appeared to them – but they are gesturing to emptiness, trampled mud, a mangled tree. In short, the children direct the eye to the very feature of the world that most characterizes La Dolce Vita – that is, sheer nothingness. In the end, the camera can’t show what is truly real or significant. It aims to produce the image of an apparition but nothing can be seen. The entire vast spectacle of the miracle scene – and it is as huge and elaborate as a battle in a big-budget war movie – exists as a frame around what can not be seen; all the cameras in the world can’t film what isn’t there – and what isn’t there is any sense of meaning in the huge and empty spectacle. So, finally, Fellini disenchants even his own endeavor in making the film.
There’s a famous novel, and less well-known film adapting the book, by Nathaniel West called Day of the Locust. The novel and film are about the hollowness and false values that animate Hollywood. In the miracle scene, Emma prays that the little tree which has sprouted foliage where the Virgin appeared will embody for her another miracle – the resurrection of Marcello’s love for her. But, in the rainstorm, the mob descends upon the tree like a horde of locusts. They shred the tree, tearing it apart. The lure of celebrity makes the populace of modern cities into locusts who destroy the very environment upon which they are dependent for life.
4.
It’s interesting to note that Fellini stages the spectacle of his parties, orgies, and crowd scenes as if these images were history paintings made in the academic style of the 19th century. He composes the his parties like battle scenes that you might see in the Louvre or any number of other art museums. In these scenes, we see crowds of people in motion, throngs that spill out to the edge of the pictorial canvas. Some of the combatants have fallen; others are detached from the violent spectacle contemplating it with bemused horror, some seem to gaze out at the spectator. Look at the dance scenes in the Caracalla bar with Sylvia, the drunken Lex Barker as Sylvia’s lover – he seems to be doing a crossword puzzle – and the wildly Dionysian Freddie who walks upside-down on his hands and seems to be some kind of leering satyr. Group shots look like Gericault, Delacroix or Gros: in the center of tapestry, figures move in concentrated choreographed masses (like soldiers advancing into heavy fire), people are fallen, wounded, hors de combat, and, at the edges of the spectacle, there are witnesses who stand-in for the audience in the cinema and people who have, quite simply, gone mad.
5.
Rome always falls. It’s decline and fall are always imminent.
6.
The paradox of “la dolce vita” is that everyone is trying to escape from it. “The sweet life” is a kind of prison. The film’s rhythm of nocturnal revelry and disillusion at dawn demonstrates the dimensions of the cell in which the characters are locked. Since escape is impossible, La Dolce Vita presents the impression of ennui, interminable running in place – progress toward some sort of authentic existence is impossible. The film systematically forecloses all avenues of escape.
Romantic love is a fiction: the encounter with Maddalena and Marcello ends in the flooded basement of a prostitute’s apartment; at dawn, Marcello’s long-suffering girlfriend, Emma, attempts suicide (not for the first time). Glamor is a dead-end – Marcello’s pursuit of the fabulous Sylvia ends unconsummated in the Trevi Fountain at dawn, floods of desire reduced to a faint trickle. (Back at the hotel, Sylvia’s husband punches Marcello in the gut.) Religious ecstasy turns out to be fraudulent. When Marcello’s father visits the Via Veneto, family ties and nostalgia about the past turn out to illusory – ill, the old man abruptly leaves rebuffing Marcello’s pleas that he remain for a few more hours in Rome and the good old days aren’t all they were cracked up to be. The occult and aristocratic past are ghostly apparitions, grotesque remnants of something long rotten. The paparazzi that are instrumental to the “sweet life” are shown at the end stalking and ambushing a woman whose husband and two children have just been killed – the stars of publicity are not only the rich and beautiful but, also, those who have suffered unimaginable tragedy. Horror and mourning are grist for the mill. Desire peters out, ending with a whimper and not a bang, at an orgy in which there is no sex, only violent humiliation. The two most promising avenues for escape, represented by Steiner’s seemingly serene domesticity and the life of the mind and Paola, the angel at the seaside resort, are inaccessible to Marcello. The rot is too deep; it has claimed Steiner as its victim and the angelic child, presented as a symbol of innocence, is physically inaccessible, beyond the stream that bisects the grim, grey beach.
La Dolce Vita, accordingly, is a spectacle characterized by the continuous repetition of the same, a pattern that, by necessity, must be revealed by the film’s length. Fellini’s subject matter is tedium, the dull boredom that arises when the same thing occurs over and over again. To keep this boredom from enervating the film, Fellini and his co-writers design episodes that can be broadly interpreted in accord with the film’s systole/diastole of inebriated rapture giving way to dawn’s disillusion but which are complicated with themes that run in counterpoint to the picture’s fundamental structure. The individual episodes are never baldly schematic, but, rather, complex with ambiguities and complications.
As an example, the placid domesticity of Steiner’s family is undercut by the detail of searchlights sweeping the sky as if in search for the bombers that will carry the nuclear weapons at the end of the world. The gathering is polyglot, cosmopolitan; people speak in allusions, citing Shakespeare and other writers. The natural world is kept at a distance, confined within Steiner’s tape-recordings; the culture of the peasants and dispossessed is appropriated – a woman sings a Negro spiritual. The serenity of Steiner’s world is undercut by the very intellectual qualities of skepticism and angst that it values. His existence rests on knife-edge – the leisure and intellect that allow Steiner to critique his world also induce despair.
When Marcello’s father appears on the Via Venuto, the script posits a warm reunion between father and son in the Cha-Cha Club that will later turn to ash at dawn. But this diagram of the episode’s meaning is complicated by complex imagery that mourns for a romanticized past that never really existed – nostalgia is just as much a trap as eros. Rome has changed; the old traveling salesman can scarcely recognize his old haunts. There is something specious about father and son pretending to an intimacy that they never had when Marcello was a boy. Ultimately, people who are nostalgic for a fondly imagined past are revealed to be clowns and sad clowns at that.
The scene in the suburbs with aristocrats listlessly partying in their haunted castle is played for comedy. The rather inconsequential sequence begins with an oddly protracted procession of cars departing from the Via Veneto for the decaying villa, filmed like Dracula’s castle atop an improbable prominence of cliff. At the party, superannuated aristocrats are half asleep, mechanically going through the motions of revelry. A strangely skinny youth, like an elongated figure from an El Greco painting, hauls a wagon behind him stocked with bottles and glasses – he trudges through the party like a mule. The corridors of the villa are adorned with huge enigmatic and rather cartoonish frescos; battered Roman emperors in bust guard the entrance to the haunted house and line the walls of its rooms. In one gallery, there are pictures of eminent women from the past, a gynaeceum someone says. The aristocrats are spectral, ghosts themselves, and, so, it is ironic when they storm out of the new villa (probably built in about 1700) to visit the ruinous, dilapidated old palace said to date from 1500 – the father berates his son: “Why did you let the villa go to pieces?” Why not? The aristocrats hunting ghosts are ghosts themselves, and, in the final shot of the sequence, the English painter, Jane, who apparently seduces Marcello is shot in enormous close-up, a dark ravenous face with open mouth and eerie glittering sparks in her eyes. Love, in this sequence, is opportunistic and assumes the fraudulent glamor of vampirism – these are the Undead. All of this is demystified in the dawn when the partygoers, staggering out of a dark forest, encounter the princess grandmother on her way to church with her pet priest. Three or four of the revelers obediently follow the old woman into the chapel – so much for their nocturnal corruption.
La Dolce Vita isn’t a tragedy. The film presents a world in which tragedy is corroded by publicity. The paparazzi stalking Steiner’s widow encircle the woman. She remarks that they must have mistaken her for a movie star. Indeed, the cameras and gossip columnists are about to turn her into a celebrity. But the film doesn’t show the woman’s sorrow or, even, her reaction to the horrific news that she receives. Everything is image. Where image prevails, nothing is tragic. Tragedy requires depths that the movie can’t access and that may not even exist in the modern world. (The scene with Steiner’s widow ends with an emblematic image of a paparazzi approaching the camera; the picture centers on the man’s elaborate camera and flash bulbs – and, with that shot, the theme of glamor and the paparazzi comes to an end.)
The orgy celebrating the annulment of Nadia’s marriage (divorce being illegal in Italy in 1960) is asexual, without consequence. It’s as light as the feathers that Marcello scatters in the final sequences in that episode. Here, everything is weightless and ephemeral; the feathers signify what Milan Kundera called “the unbearable lightness of being” – repetition, in this case, renders individual moments meaningless; everything just repeats itself.
The monstrous fish hauled out of the sea in the film’s final scenes is another symbol replete with conflicting meanings. In Koine Greek, the Hellenic language spoken at the time of Christ, the formula “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior” can be abbreviated by an acroynm ICHTHYS; the letters “ichthys” spell the Koine Greek word “fish”. During the persecution of the Christians in Rome, church members used the symbol of the fish (“the Jesus fish”) to identify themselves to one another. Some critics believe the huge fish in the last scene, dead for more than a day (it is said), symbolizes Jesus; the “Jesus Fish” accordingly brackets the movie at its end, an image that resonates with the scenes showing the statue of Jesus the Worker carried aloft over Rome tethered to a helicopter at the film’s inception. Christ, who is the alpha and omega, is also arguable the beginning and end of La Dolce Vita. The hideous fish may be apocalyptic, a leviathan tugged from the waters and, by its monstrosity, declaring judgement on the depravity of the characters in the film. In that interpretation, the monster materializes as a physical emblem for the moral degeneracy of the people in the film. Fellini’s camera focuses on the creature’s slimy eye. Someone says: “it insists on looking.” Thus, the fish also seems to be connected to the ubiquitous cameras carried by the paparazzi and, so, suggests the idea of voyeurism, the impulse that animates gossip columnists and their minions. The fish’s eye may also stand in for the camera recording events to be shown to the public as La Dolce Vita.
In this connection, it is worth recalling various wonders and enigmas to which the film makes reference. The Virgin appears to children in a rainstorm; depraved aristocrats consult a Ouija board and a woman seems orgasmically possessed by some demonic presence; the ruinous villa is haunted by Sister Edvige who appears as a ghost carrying her severed head; in the new villa, a whispering gallery allows Maddalena to communicate with Marcello who is located in another room – this is a strange acoustic anomaly; the sad clown beckons to a herd of balloons that obediently follow him off-stage at the Cha-Cha Club. The beach monster is only one of a number of wonders depicted in La Dolce Vita. These strange apparitions are signs and wonders presaging the apocalypse.
7.
As he made plans to film the orgy, Fellini asked around. He wanted to know if anyone in his professional circle had attended an orgy. Fellini confessed that he hadn’t ever been involved in such a thing and didn’t know how to stage the scene. He consulted with Pier Paolo Pasolini, a homosexual poet and filmmaker with a somewhat sordid reputation. (Pasolini was later to stage spectacular orgies in his film Salo.) Pasolini admitted he had no idea what an orgy was actually like. Fellini said: “I’ll have to make it up. We’ll improvise.” A Danish woman on the set for the orgy scene remarked about Fellini: “He just doesn’t know how to do the dirty.”
8.
How do you read the expression on Paola’s face in the final scene? She beckons to Marcello but he is unable to cross the little stream to her. She is an angel and beyond the constraints of human emotion. She views Marcello with only the slightest tinge of regret. Angels come from the shores of light at the other side of existence. Her bright face is radiant with joy.
