You know what I love about Italian movies? I love that I can watch them more than once.
American movies? Too easy. Give me one viewing and I’m good. Citizen Kane? Yeah, I knew what time it was. The Godfather? Didn’t need a Ph. D in Best Movies Ever Studies to figure that one out. But the Italian ones? Sometimes, I need that second helping of lasagna.
Which hasn’t prevented me, during my initial viewing of said Italian movies, from steadfastly denying this fact. A man has his pride.
And so it was that, while watching Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita for the very first time, I don’t doubt that I told myself, “Oh, I totally get this,” but, perhaps more than a little like Marcello Rubini in the film’s final moments, I think I stared incoherently into the distance, emitted a mystified shrug, and kind of gave up. I mean, I didn’t really get 8 ½ the first time I saw that either, but I got La Dolce Vita even less than I got 8 ½, so what does that tell you?
Narrative too non-linear? Not exactly. Dialogue too intellectual? I wouldn’t say that was quite the issue. Maybe I just needed to get the “hype” out of the way. Or experience the movie in a cozier environment.
It was one of those free Sunday screenings that took place in the vast lecture hall at my undergraduate university known as Chem 194 – a hall once described by a fellow student of mine as “a room without insulation or mercy.” But come Sunday, that prim, proper, nondescript auditorium would let its hair down, hike its skirt up, and revel in ribald, carnal abandon, for Sunday was when a small, clandestine society of film geeks would attempt to spool ratty old prints of various art house favorites (acquired by God knows what antiquated means) through something called a “film projector,” for the benefit of the twelve other dweebs in the audience whose social lives were equally lacking.
And we’re not talking some simplified, late ‘90s multiplex projector here, with the film essentially residing on one reel, or (gasp) a digital projector, but the classic 35mm style, with eight different reels, and the projectionist needing to switch reels whenever the funny little warning dot would show up on the screen – AKA the kind where you actually needed to know what the hell you were doing in order to operate it.
Chem 194 was where I first caught, for instance, The Bicycle Thieves. During the screening, the student projectionist accidentally mixed up one of the eight reels, so that the film jumped ten minutes ahead, jumped twenty minutes back, and then played through in sequence, but I’m pretty sure I just figured, “Well, it’s a foreign film, maybe it’s supposed to be like that?” Anyway. I don’t believe the projectionist handling the screening of La Dolce Vita I attended a few weeks later erroneously switched any reels, but if they had, I doubt I would have noticed.
You know what I was thinking the whole time I was watching La Dolce Vita, and its gentle wisp of a plot, on that maiden viewing? “Oh my God. I am watching La Dolce Vita. THE La Dolce Vita. The movie that Roger Ebert, in his ‘Great Movies’ series, practically fellates Linda Lovelace-style, so … this must be great, right? It’s got all that stuff I keep reading about when people talk about La Dolce Vita. Marcello Mastroianni. The Trevi Fountain. That character who inspired the term ‘paparazzi.’ Yeah.”
Truth is, the first time I was watching La Dolce Vita, via that scratched and bruised print, I was barely watching La Dolce Vita, but rather was “watching La Dolce Vita” in quotation marks, so that I could cross it off my impressively labyrinthine list of movies I needed to watch. I probably had more immediate concerns on my mind that Sunday, like whether I was going to eat Taco Bell or Carl’s Jr. at the nearby food court afterwards. In retrospect, I don’t think, at that age, I had interacted enough with the opposite sex to have been able to relate to the themes to the extent I would be able to in later years. Zampano in La Strada might have been more my speed. The film certainly had that million dollar “look” that almost every late ‘50s/early ‘60s foreign film seemed to have almost by accident.
I dimly sensed that the film was obviously not “not great,” but did I really understand what was unfolding before my eyes? Did Ben Franklin really invent electricity with a kite?
Naturally, despite not having comprehended it one iota, I immediately added La Dolce Vita to my list of “favorite movies” and kept it there for years.
The Trevi Fountain continued to emit its hydraulic charms to an endless parade of unimaginative tourists. The planet continued to revolve around the sun. More narratively elusive foreign language films came my way: L’Avventura (AKA The Film That Loses Interest in Its Own Plot), Persona (AKA Bergman Drops Acid), Au Hasard Balthazar (AKA Best Donkey Movie Ever). Additional Fellini films came my way: La Strada, Amarcord, Satyricon … I even purchased my very own DVD copy of 8 ½ (mostly so that it would look good on my shelf?).
However, every time I kept seeing La Dolce Vita on “greatest movies” lists, I felt a slight twinge of unfinished business, a needle-prick of incompletion. When push came to shove, I had to admit that I couldn’t remember a thing about it other than the shot of Marcello riding on a woman’s back and slapping her rear as though she were a horse. In short, I realized that I needed to re-watch this sucker.
I got it more the second time.
But does wiser, older me blame himself for coming away from an initial viewing of La Dolce Vita a little bewildered, if not exactly underwhelmed?
Heyyyyll no.
Even viewing it now, I still often have the odd sensation that … nothing particularly exciting is happening on screen. It is, shall we say, leisurely paced. Its storyline is precariously subtle, deviously intricate. La Dolce Vita might not be as confusing as 8 ½ is, but it’s not as aggressively weird. I find the rhythm of the editing slower, the camera movements less bold and dynamic. I almost sense the images lingering nonchalantly, as if even Fellini is a little bored with the characters he’s documenting. The film often induces within me the impression that I’m tethered to the merest hint of a plot, and that perhaps the “real” plot has been filmed in invisible ink, and I would have to hold the film’s negative up to infrared light in order to be able to spot the true arc of the storyline. It’s like there’s some “secret” movie hidden within the cracks of the “actual” movie. Do I sound like an insane person?
Perhaps this essay, then, could be considered my misguided attempt at emulating the spirit of the film I’m discussing: for the majority of its length, it might seem like a meandering trifle, but once the philosophical depth surreptitiously kicks in, look out. Not to mention random appearances by Albert Camus, Hank Williams, Peter Fonda, my dead English professor … strap in your seatbelts.
At any rate, if the movie is that boring, then why does it come in at #6 on my list? Unlike my #7 pick (Doctor Zhivago), I couldn’t snip out a random five minute slice from La Dolce Vita, slowly unravel it, flatten it out, and discover that it stretches from Seattle to Miami. And yet, nothing that pops up on the screen in La Dolce Vita bothers me, or strikes me as out of place, or makes me wish it was cut from the final edit. I feel like La Dolce Vita is just a little bit surer of the film that it wants to be than, say, Doctor Zhivago or Midnight Cowboy, more in tune with the world it’s depicting. Complaining about the pace of this movie would be like complaining about the pace of my most intense, most enveloping dreams. Can a dream be “too slow”?
From what I’ve heard, few casual American filmgoers forking over their hard-earned dough in 1960 to watch La Dolce Vita would have found the film boring in the sense that 19-year-old me found it a little boring, because OH MY GOD ALL THE SEX! But I think those viewers would have missed the “real” La Dolce Vita as well. While the most salacious scenes were likely the ones that stuck out in the minds of prurient Midwestern college boys and the terrified dates they’d brought along with them in a misguided attempt to expose themselves to a little “culture,” I’ve come to the realization that the most important scenes in La Dolce Vita might actually be the tamest ones. Or the briefest.
*****
You might as well know what is right for you
And make the most of what you like to do
For all the pleasure that’s surrounding you
Should compensate for all you’re going through
– Roxy Music, “The Thrill of It All”
You ever get the feeling that you should be enjoying your life more than you really are? Say hello to Marcello Rubini.
On paper, Marcello’s life wouldn’t strike most people as being a particularly unpleasant one. He lives in Rome, works in an exciting profession (journalism), boasts a “steady” girlfriend while engaging in the occasional fling with willing aristocratic cuties … where do I sign? And yet, he can’t escape the nagging sensation that something is missing. He’s searching for his Maltese Falcon, his Rosebud, his ruby slippers.
And so, Fellini presents the viewer of La Dolce Vita with a series of nocturnal vignettes, and within each of these vignettes, his protagonist almost manages to grasp that ineffable, elusive “something” for which he’s been searching. It’s juuuuust at the tip of his fingers, it’s right there, just one more wafer-thin mint, and yet, when the dawn arrives … WHOOSH. He’s right back where he started, the vignette serenely flying away on a breeze of inscrutable disappointment.
For instance, let’s take the famed second vignette, where that ineffable, elusive “something” has long blonde hair, an impressive bust, a scratchy tickle of a laugh, the attention span of Beavis and Butthead, and the substance of a Hostess Cupcake.
He knows he shouldn’t be attracted to her and yet … this knowledge only increases his level of attraction. As if I could relate to that.
I must admit that I have occasionally been the male in the new class, or the new office, who sees the best-looking woman in the room and says to himself, with the utmost confidence, “Right, so there’s the woman that everyone else would say is really attractive, but I don’t find her all that attractive.” And I would repeat this mantra until I became ABSOLUTELY INFATUATED with her, more so than the mythical “everyone else.” While intending to be nonchalant, I would morph into an even bigger sucker for superficial beauty than the rest. It’s a bad habit.
The thing is, Marcello has a better chance than most, because he knows how to fake disinterest just long enough. Is Marcello first on the tarmac when Sylvia, the blonde American movie star of the hour, disembarks from the plane? Pfft – he’s last. While the photographers and radio announcers swarm Sylvia as if she were the Beatles, the Monkees, the Jackson Five, and ABBA all rolled in one, Marcello plays it cool, lounging around in the back of the mob, seemingly indifferent to the excitement. He’s above this kind of feverish obsession with celebrity, you know? Responding over the phone to the jealous paranoia of his live-in girlfriend Emma (more on her in a bit), he explains, “Beautiful? Well, yes, if you like American beauty. She’s like a doll, like a big doll.” I mean, other guys might go for that type, but not me. Gawd.
Then Marcello and his media companions follow Sylvia into a church. Constantly climbing up, up, up, he’s chasing, chasing, chasing, and then suddenly … they’re alone.
“Come on!,” she playfully calls to him. Him! It’s like she knows him – wants him, and only him. They make it to the top, standing face to face. She removes his sunglasses. It’s happening. Then … POOF, the wind blows her hat away, and … back to square one.
So remember that jaded, nonchalant journalist who referred to Sylvia as “a big doll”? Cut to Marcello slow dancing with a barely present Sylvia at an outdoor nightclub: “You’re everything, Sylvia. You know that you’re everything? You’re the first woman of creation. You’re the mother, the sister, the lover, the friend … the angel, the devil, the Earth, the home.” I half-expect him to slip into Faye Dunaway’s speech from Chinatown: “You’re my sister, you’re my daughter, you’re my sister, you’re my daughter …” Now, it’s easy enough for me, from the comfort of my own couch, to conclude that Marcello is placing this woman on a pedestal she doesn’t quite deserve, but … I get it. I’ve needed my own objects of worship now and then.
(Side note: for years I’d assumed the lanky fellow singing what appears to be a phonetically learned version of Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy” at the outdoor nightclub wasn’t an individual of particular interest … until a friend of mine sent me a YouTube clip of Adriano Celentano performing his 1972 faux-English, proto-rap single “Prisencolinensinainciusol.” If I had a stroke, would all pop songs sound like this?)
I don’t even get the impression Marcello wants to sleep with Sylvia; it’s more like he’s a frog in a fairy tale, and somehow that one magic kiss from her lips will turn him into a prince. At three precise moments, the film suggests that Sylvia is juuuuuust about to kiss him, and then, hold on, hold on everybody: DOGS ARE HOWLING. She’s discovered her own kind. If someone shouted “SQUIRREL!” she’d turn her head and say “WHERE?” Sensing her kinship with the animal kingdom, as she stands next to Marcello’s parked car on a rural road, she proceeds to join the dogs in their nocturnal wailing.
A few moments later, she finds a stray kitten and cradles it in her arms. In the Metaphor Olympics, I think Fellini’s going for the gold here.
Then finally, the Trevi Fountain. Of all the pathetic, humiliating steps Marcello takes in order to taste that sweet, sweet Sylvia nectar, this might be the most absurd one of all. Here he is, a grown man, standing knee deep in a public fountain, making a complete imbecile of himself, but screw it – this is going to be worth it. He leans in, she closes her eyes and then … if she would just – if he could just – he’s this close – and then …
The fountain shuts off. Dawn has arrived. The spell hath been broken.
In the end, after all that effort, instead of being treated with a gentle kiss from “the first woman of creation,” he is treated to a gentle kiss from the fist of Sylvia’s surly, macho, drunken fiancée. Expecting filet mignon, he’s served a day-old Happy Meal. But life, in my experience, is usually like that.
*****
Then there’s Maddalena, another phantom in the mist. Unlike Sylvia, at least Marcello apparently manages to bed this one (see Vignette #1), and yet, she remains … ephemeral.
Maddalena is a woman who enjoys her “freedom” – if any character in a suffocatingly existential European art film like this one could be considered “free” – which means that, after an initial appearance, she doesn’t pop up again until roughly two-thirds of the way into the film (what we might call Vignette #5), when Marcello is twiddling his thumbs on the Via Veneto before becoming roped into an aimless adventure at a decaying Italian villa by, of all people, Nico.
Yes, that Nico.
How do you say “fronnnn” and “clonnnn” in Italian? Sitting next to her in a car, Marcello asks our future semi-Velvet, “What language is that? Where are you from?” Her answer?
“Eskimo.”
I expected nothing less. Fellini even gives her the opportunity to pronounce “spaghetti” in her inimitable manner. I am also amused at the sight of Nico wandering around the grounds of the villa wearing a massive medieval knight’s helmet on her head, claiming to be one of the villa-owning family’s ancestors.
Marcello doesn’t seem terribly jazzed about the company he’s found himself surrounded by on this particular evening, until a mysterious female covers his face with a scarf, and … well look at that! Maddalena has somehow ended up at this swanky gathering too, feeling rather frisky to boot, and she just might make his night a little more interesting. “I’m fine, I’m just drunk,” she offers as a disclaimer. Thus begins one of those tasty Fellini exchanges so rich in parries and thrusts that I almost need to offer a play-by-play.
Marcello asks, “The villa in the park, who lives there?”
“Nobody. It’s vacant. It’s the nicest, as far as style goes. I’m vacant too, you know?” Ah, nothing quite as charming as the self-aware woman. Is it just me, or does Marcello always seem a little less drunk and a little more philosophical than the jaded cognoscenti around him?
“You know, Maddalena, I thought of you often.” He speaks with an almost inappropriate level of sincerity. “I don’t understand you.”
“Really? Neither do I. It doesn’t matter.” She teasingly blows the scarf off her face. “If you’re trying to talk seriously, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Are you afraid of serious talks?”
“No! You don’t know how to talk seriously, do you?” Oh, it’s on now.
“Where are you taking me?” While more intoxicated than our befuddled protagonist is, Maddalena might possess one clear advantage over him: she’s been to this villa before. The woman is about to whip out some Houdini sleight-of-hand.
“Here. This is the room for serious talks.”
Don’t ask me how it works, but, even though she wanders off and sits several rooms away, somehow the sound of her voice can travel between that specially designed room and the room she’s left Marcello alone in. (Renaissance Italians too cheap to install an intercom?)
Marcello glances around like someone who has been hit on the neck by a spitball from a hidden assailant. “Where are you talking from?”
“From a faraway place, very far away. It’d be as if I didn’t exist anymore, if I were not to speak … Marcello. Would you marry me?”
Hmmmm. Probably best not to answer this one. “And you?”
“Yes, I’m in love with you, Marcello.”
“Since when?”
“So will you marry me? Or are you afraid to answer?”
Duh. “Why this question? Are you a bit drunk?”
“Yes, a little. I love you, Marcello. You know, I’d like to be your wife, be faithful. I’d like everything. I’d like to be your wife and to have fun like a whore.” Sounds like a good deal to me.
“Tonight, I don’t know why, I feel like I love you a lot, like I need you.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes, it’s true. I don’t know if you’re just playing, but it doesn’t matter. I love you. I only want to be with you.”
“You’d hate me after a month.” Harsh, but probably correct.
“Why should I hate you?”
“Because one can’t have everything. You can have one thing or the other. For me, it’s too late to choose. And I’ve never wanted to make a choice. I’m a whore, you know. It’s hopeless, I’ll always be a whore. And I don’t want to be anything else!”
Naturally, Marcello replies how any man in his situation would reply: “No, it’s not true. You’re an extraordinary girl, Maddalena. I know this.” (Come on, like he was going to respond, “Oh yeah, you’re the undisputed queen of all whores, everybody knows it”?)
But alas, just as Marcello is finally finding the confidence within himself to open up to a seemingly intelligent, receptive woman, sensing the germ of whatever might pass for genuine emotional connection in this milieu, a tuxedoed, blonde-haired stranger pops into the room from which Maddalena has been speaking, and puts his finger over his lips. Why hello there.
Remaining oblivious, Marcello continues to yak away.
“Your courage, your sincerity. Really, I need you. Your desperation gives me strength. You’d be a marvelous companion. Because I could tell you everything. You know everything.”
She may not know everything, but at least she knows how to have a good time, because once the stranger sits down next to her, they proceed to get hot and heavy.
“Maddalena, are you listening?” Something’s up. “Answer me. Maddalena, enough playing. Come back. I want to talk to you more.”
Some luck, eh? Right when he decides to share a snippet of his most personal, insightful ideas with another woman … she’s on to the next thrill. I’m telling you, it’s just not his movie.
He stands up to leave, and … look, the manner in which Italians designed their ancient villas is none of my business, but how many freaking doors does one room need? Because there are at least six different exit ways Marcello has the opportunity to walk through in order to track down Maddalena. Eenie, meenie, miney, mo … pick a door, any door!
Well, he finds something through the next door, all right, but it isn’t Maddalena. No worries, this new cluster of bourgeois jetsetters is more than happy to absorb him into their mischief. Perhaps not a particular admirer of his profession, one of the “society” ladies asks him, “So, what’s next for the great journalist? A nice third-page article on the stupid and corrupted aristocracy?”
“First of all, I write other things, and then, you’re really not that interesting.” Burn. He turns to the gentleman next to him. “Who did Maddalena come with?”
“Who’s Maddalena?”
Exactly.
A short while later, a woman impulsively grabs Marcello by the hand and escorts him to an empty room. Maddalena? No, it’s … Jane, a British author whose bizarre streak of grey smack down the middle of her hairdo calls to mind Cruella de Ville and who, only moments earlier, had been shown wandering around the abandoned manor clutching a massive candelabra and making statements such as “… producing little octopi, but every biologic test says octopi are oversexed!”
Jane is … not Maddalena, but whatever, she seems game. Or is she?
“No, not here. No, love. What are you doing? Crazy! You’re crazy, darling!”
So much for searching for Maddalena.
*****
Then there’s Emma, who clearly didn’t get the memo about the new post-war social mores.
Emma, freaking Emma.
Emma would be the perfect match … for a man who is not Marcello. One might describe her ideas regarding relationships as stemming from the more simple, conventional tree of thought. She is the protagonist of a Tammy Wynette song emanating from a jukebox in Texarkana at 1:00 am (AKA Rayette from Five Easy Pieces). When I find myself shouting at the screen, “Just break up with him already!,” I have to remind myself that she is exactly the kind of woman who would never break up with him, because such a concept falls outside the realm of her internal belief system.
See Vignette #1, in which Marcello heads to Emma’s apartment at dawn, fresh from his dalliance with Maddalena, only to discover that … oh brother. Emma has attempted suicide. You know what I’m thinking? She shouldn’t be attempting suicide – she should be breaking up with Marcello. But nope, she’d rather bask in his pity.
(Side note: I know I’m supposed to be drooling over Anita Ekberg, who plays Sylvia, but I might actually find Yvonne Furneaux, who plays Emma, to be a bit more to my taste. Those smoldering eyes! Although her mullet-esque hairstyle does make her look a bit like a hedgehog.)
Later, in a quick nighttime scene following Vignette #5 at the decaying villa, Emma really lets Marcello have it as they sit in his parked convertible on a deserted roadway:
“What have I done to be treated this way? Not even a dog gets treated like this. Who do you think you are? If you loved me half as much as I love you, you’d understand some things. But you can’t. Because you don’t love anyone … you’re selfish, that’s what you are. Your heart is locked, empty. You only care about women, you think that’s love … Not all men are like you. Some men are happy to find someone who loves them and they don’t go looking for other women! It’s you. You’re the only one like this … You’ll end up alone like a dog! You’ll see. Who’s going to stay with you if I leave you? What are you going to do with your life? Who could love you like I do? … You always say that I’m the crazy one, that I live in a dream, outside reality. But you’re the one who’s off the road.”
Just. Leave. Him. Oh my Gaaaaaawd.
She even unwittingly quotes the Hank Williams country staple “Half As Much” in her diatribe. Just throw in a “Why don’t you love me like you used to do” and “Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you” while you’re at it.
Emma thinks her problem is that her boyfriend is an asshole, but I think her real problem is that she’s been raised with numerous unrealistic cultural expectations surrounding male-female relationships, so she’s convinced that Marcello has somehow “cheated” her out of the happiness she “deserves,” without being aware of her own role in their dysfunction. “Some men are happy to find someone who loves them and they don’t go looking for other women,” she says? Fine. Then find one of those men! “Who’s going to stay with you if I leave you?” Not her problem! But alas, she goes on:
“Don’t you see that you’ve already found the most important thing in life? A woman who really loves you, who’d give her life for you, as if you were the only one in the world … Marcello, when two people love each other, nothing else matters. What are you afraid of?”
Finally, he’s had enough of her Hallmark clichés.
“Of you. Of your selfishness, of the miserable bleakness of your ideals. Don’t you see that you offer me the life of a spineless worm? You can only talk of cooking and bed. A man who accepts to live like this is a finished man, he’s nothing but a worm! I don’t believe in your aggressive, sticky, maternal love! I don’t want it! I have no use for it! This isn’t love, it’s brutalization!”
Too strong? His use of the phrase “worm” makes me picture some combination of a tuxedoed Mastroianni and the wheezing worm-baby from David Lynch’s Eraserhead lying in bed, waiting for Emma to cook him pancakes, but I digress.
Now, I haven’t taken an official survey, but my guess is that 90% of the viewers of La Dolce Vita would take Emma’s side here, and might believe that Fellini also intends for them to take Emma’s side. Marcello doesn’t understand how lucky he is to be loved by someone so intensely, so permanently – right? And hey, if he rejects Emma, and then subsequently tumbles headlong into a bottomless spiritual void, then he’s only getting what he deserves, no?
Call me nuts, but I’d take Marcello’s side. To me, Emma has merely been spoon-fed a certain view of relationships – one that she’s never bothered to question. She hasn’t wrestled with these ideas on her own terms and come to her own conclusions. Here’s what I say: an idea isn’t a good one simply because “most people” think it’s a good one. To hell with that. I, for one, am into Marcello’s desire to tear it all down, to question the conventional ethos, to spit in the face of accepted wisdom. Fuck yeah. Rock and roll.
He reminds me a bit of Mersault in Camus’s The Stranger, who, when placed on trial for murdering a man, is considered a monster, not because he murdered a man, but because, at his mother’s funeral, none of the surrounding spectators happened to see him cry. Come on. Since when did crying at your mother’s funeral determine whether you should be considered a “good” person or a “bad” person? I just saw O.J. Simpson crying at a funeral last week. Does such a superficial display (or lack of a display) of emotion have any bearing whatsoever on whether Mersault might have genuinely felt sad upon his mother’s death or not? Freaking French Algerians. Sometimes you’ve just got to reject the standard view, wipe the slate clean, and start all over again.
So yeah, I’m with Marcello on this one.
*****
Then again, get too cute with your existential ideals, and you might end up like Marcello’s pal Steiner.
Unlike the carnival of immature, insubstantial, frustrating women he has surrounded himself with, I’d say Steiner is one figure in Marcello’s life from whom he feels he can genuinely gain some proper spiritual nourishment. Steiner is Marcello’s Obi-Wan. He seems to know all and do all.
First off, he’s married to a beautiful wife who, when she opens the door and invites Marcello in to their flawlessly chic apartment, walks with that same “weightlessly graceful and yet nurturing” sense of motion that Claudia Cardinale’s “woman in white” does in 8 ½ (although at least Claudia’s character had a first name).
Steiner is the kind of fellow who can putz around in a cathedral, sit at a pipe organ, and bust into Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” like he’s playing “The Entertainer” in his aunt’s living room. Mainly, unlike most of the company that Marcello keeps, Steiner doesn’t appear to be a complete moron. For Marcello, an evening at Steiner’s apartment is like Frodo’s first night at Rivendell. Steiner is good for him. He’s chicken soup for Marcello’s soul.
“Let me come here more often,” Marcello says to him. “I should change environment. I should change many things. Your house is a real refuge. Your children, your wife, your books, your extraordinary friends … Me, I’m wasting time. I won’t manage anything anymore. Once I had ambitions, but maybe I’m losing everything. I forgot everything.”
Instead of responding “Sure buddy, come over any time you like!” as one might assume he would, Steiner’s response is unnervingly cryptic: “Don’t think that safety is being locked up in one’s own home. Don’t do what I did. I’m too serious to be an amateur, but not enough to be a professional. There. A more miserable life is better, believe me … than an existence protected by an organized society where everything is calculated, everything is perfect …”
I dunno, he seems to be doing all right for himself.
Fellini then shows Steiner touching his sleeping children in a manner that I have never seen, and will most assuredly never see, an American father do with his own sleeping children – gently, but lengthily, as if he’s transferring cosmic waves of love into their craniums (either that, or as if he’s a priest performing Last Rites).
Marcello’s Great Roman Hope rambles on further, and, I don’t know about Marcello, but my guess is that most first-time La Dolce Vita viewers wouldn’t put too much stock into Steiner’s vaguely apprehensive, overly-cerebral musings:
“Sometimes at night this darkness, this silence, weighs on me. Peace frightens me. I’m afraid of peace more than anything else. To me it seems that it’s only an outer shell and that hell is hiding behind it. I think of what my children will see tomorrow. ‘The world will be wonderful,’ they say. From what point of view? When a phone call can announce the end of the world. One should live outside of passions, beyond emotions, in that harmony you find in completed artworks … in that enchanted order. We should learn to love each other so much … to live outside of time, detached.”
Sounds like the usual dysphoria I deal with every five minutes, but whatever.
Well, turns out that Steiner was pretty fucked up, because one morning, Marcello picks up the phone and … Steiner did what? Out of all the desperate, depressed, distraught characters in La Dolce Vita, I’ll tell you the last character I would have pegged as the murder/suicide type: this guy right here. Marcello wanders into the scene of the crime like a man who suddenly cares for nothing and believes in nothing.
“Were you a friend of the Steiner family?” a detective asks.
“I was a friend of Steiner’s.”
“Since when? Were you a close friend?”
The detectives start tag-teaming him. “Did you see him lately?”
“Can you tell us about it?” The questions, the questions!
“No. I was his friend, but we didn’t see each other often. I don’t know anything.” Marcello pauses, then adds, with an extra hint of philosophical import, “Anything at all.”
The slow-witted policeman, who clearly doesn’t realize he’s in a European art film, takes Marcello’s answer at face value, but what Marcello’s really saying is that he doesn’t know anything about life, human existence, his place in the world. Geez.
A few minutes later, standing outside with the detective, Marcello picks up where he left off: “Maybe he was just afraid.”
“You’re talking about Steiner? Had he been threatened?”
No, you nitwit, not the “mystery/suspense/thriller” kind of afraid. Silly cop, Marcello isn’t talking to you. Shut your trap.
“Maybe he was afraid of himself … of us all.”
Well look, I’m afraid of myself and afraid of us all too, but you don’t see me committing a murder/suicide.
Still, I understand. Marcello’s worldview, being of the rather rickety variety, simply wasn’t built to withstand this kind of blow. Steiner was the one creature in Marcello’s post-modern hellscape who seemed to “have all the answers,” who seemed to know how to cultivate an existence for himself outside the venal stupidity and spiritual desperation that engulfed everyone else, and then one day, well, the man shoots it all to pieces – literally. The event doesn’t even compute. Marcello has no contingency plan for living in a world in which a man like Steiner could descend to such a course of action. Whatever thin wisp of moral order Marcello felt tied the universe together simply can’t hold up under a gust this violent. I get it.
But … come on man. You know what Marcello’s problem is? His moral foundation depended upon having a hero. But you don’t need to have a hero in your life in order to be a good person. You know what I say? Fuck heroes. Heroes are for idiots. You can find a “hero” at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. Maybe it’s the “hero” mentality that enables “spineless worms” like Marcello to conclude that, “Well, my hero turned out to have been even more lost than I was, so … why even bother?”
I suppose I once had my own Steiner.
Entering my undergraduate years, I naturally had visions of being inspired, galvanized, and invigorated by an endless parade of Steiners – brooding intellectuals who would “change my life,” “enrich my soul,” “make me want to name my kids after them,” blah, blah, blah – but honestly, most of my professors kind of came off like water-treading careerists. Until my third year, when, under the series of courses in my department that focused on one author, I noticed a course being offered on John Steinbeck.
Interesting.
I knew that, despite being widely read and widely taught, and despite 20-year-old me considering him arguably my favorite American author, Steinbeck wasn’t (and I would assume still isn’t) held in particularly high regard by literary scholars. And yet, a professor at my very own university was offering an entire course on his work?
It was, without a doubt, the best class I ever took as an undergraduate, and this professor was, I suppose, the best professor I ever had.
Other professors might have given informative lectures, or assigned interesting texts, but this was the first professor I properly idolized, the only professor who I could see myself wanting to be. I had been unaware, until taking his class, that he was a nationally recognized Steinbeck scholar – not that there was much competition, perhaps, but I can hardly express the tremendous thrill I got when I flipped through the sources listed in the back of my copies of The Grapes of Wrath or Cannery Row and saw my professor’s name there. One week, an episode of C-SPAN’s series on “Great American Authors” featured a well-coifed Mariel Hemingway blabbing on about her grandfather; the episode that aired very next week featured my professor – my professor – strolling through the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, merrily dispensing off-the-cuff insights on Ed Ricketts, the Sea of Cortez, Travels with Charley, you name it.
“I know that guy!” I declared with pride as I sat in front of the TV, Cheez-Its in hand. “He knows me too! He gave my essay on East of Eden an A!”
I wasn’t awestruck by his “fame” (such as it was), so much as his willingness to re-evaluate a potentially overlooked, if well-known, author, and offer a radically new analysis of his work. He was comfortable disagreeing with the consensus and sticking to his guns. In other words, he was doing then what I, on my best days, like to pretend I’m doing now. I saw this professor and I thought, “He’s been able to make a living out of this?”
I used to come by his office hours and debate the merits of various Steinbeck (and other early 20th century) novels until my time slot would unceremoniously end (and there was always, for this professor, a line of students in the hallway). He even offered to write me a letter of recommendation for grad school. I’m not saying I kissed his ass; I just wanted to learn how he’d made it happen, because he was the only professor I’d met who I genuinely wanted to emulate.
One day, about a year after taking that course, I was checking my campus’s website when I saw a story announcing that the professor who’d taught it had suddenly died.
Strange.
He was only in his mid-50’s. I certainly hadn’t heard any rumors of him being ill. The story on the homepage provided scant details. Nevertheless, I attempted to process the unexpected loss.
A week after that, I bumped into another English professor who offhandedly informed me that, uh, it wasn’t merely a death – it was a suicide.
Well then.
My favorite professor in the entire English department, and he kills himself? Just my luck. (Side note: there went my letter of recommendation.) Maybe for some of you out there, it’s a fairly common occurrence, but at that age, for better or worse, this whole “acquaintance I know who commits suicide” thing was a little new to me. Like Marcello with Steiner, I couldn’t avoid mulling it over in my mind over the next three or four days, but no explanation seemed sufficient. My professor seemed to have had it all. His action undercut so much of what I thought I knew about the world and the humans in it. (At least it wasn’t a murder/suicide, so there’s that.)
On perhaps the fourth or fifth day of my not-terribly-successful attempt to process this event, I found myself watching Easy Rider (as one does). Although this was my third viewing of the film itself, it was my first viewing of the glorious “making of” documentary Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage (which a few of my fellow film-inclined friends have suggested is more entertaining, hilarious, and well-made than the Easy Rider film proper, although I wouldn’t quite go that far). I mention it now because one particular moment in the documentary struck me then. It was when Peter Fonda discussed his improvisational acting during the New Orleans cemetery “acid trip” scene:
The whole sequence was not scripted. Dennis saw this statue as the Italian Statue of Liberty with me sitting on her lap, asking my mother why she’d copped out on me – because my mother’d committed suicide when I was ten, and I said, “Dennis, you can’t ask me to do that. Just because you know doesn’t give you the right to go public with it, especially in a film. I don’t feel comfortable doing that.” “No no, man, you’ve got to, I mean, man man, man you’ve got to man, I mean you know man? I mean it’s –” “Dennis I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to go out there and say that, I don’t want to be that public with it.” “No man, you’ve got to – ” And we’re arguing and arguing and … “Give me one good reason, man,” and he said, “Because I’m the director!” I couldn’t argue with that.
So I got up on the statue, and I went for something I’d never done in my life. Barry, who was filming it, could see it through the lens, and I don’t know why Dennis wanted to move the camera, but Dennis wanted to move the camera, Barry wanted to let it roll, but I could hear the argument. And finally, I go “Shut up!” It’s in the film! I was really into it. And I was, it was – forget about making movies, I was into this thing about asking my mother this question.
I wanted it taken out of the film from the get-go, so it’s in there, and history has its own way of working these things well, and it actually played well for me when I tried to convince Dylan to give me the first part of “It’s Alright, Ma.” He had all these reasons why not to do it, “I don’t like my harmonica, I don’t like this …” “Look, Bobby, you might not like your harmonica – I’m the producer of the film. It’s truly my call to say, ‘That’s out.’ But I’m overridden by everybody else who’s involved with this, saying it’s in, and that’s the part where I say to my mother, ‘Why did you cop out on me?’ I don’t like that. It embarrasses me every time I see it, Bobby, it makes me very upset. But because it’s there, and because I was convinced to do it at the moment, and then convinced to leave it in the film, I have to hear “Suicide remarks are torn, from the fool’s gold mouth piece the hollow horn, plays wasted words that prove to warn, that he not busy being born is busy dyin’.” My mother cut her throat from ear to ear, and then to sing a song about it – I wanna hear those lines.” It blew his mind! … and he had no way to argue that.
Yep. Sorry Bob. Can’t argue with Peter Fonda’s mother’s suicide.
(Side note: given that what ultimately appears in Easy Rider is a Roger McGuinn cover version of “It’s Alright, Ma [I’m Only Bleeding]” not the original Dylan version, I assume there’s a bit more to the story here, but whatever.)
Well, let me tell you something. Upon hearing Fonda share this anecdote about taking a searingly painful and confusing piece of his life and courageously, perhaps foolishly, tossing it into his art, a funny thing happened. For the first time in days, I started to see my way past the disillusionment I felt after hearing of my professor’s suicide.
Sometimes, other human beings make a dark decision or two, and those of us who remain don’t ever get an answer as to why. This happened to Peter Fonda, just as it happened to Marcello, but did Peter Fonda do what Marcello did? Hell no. On the contrary, he took that lack of an answer and used it to add intensity to a work of art that spoke to millions of people (if one considers hippies “people,” but I generally do). After listening to his story, I realized that I could embrace that lack of an answer, and use it to fuel my own art, writing, and zest for life.
“Why?,” Marcello asks. Who knows why?
I suppose he couldn’t handle that. Look, Steiner was on his own trip. Whatever Steiner did or didn’t do with his life, I wouldn’t say it ultimately bore any relation as to what Marcello Rubini should have done or not have done with his life. If his sense of meaning and purpose was punctured by the actions of one guy, then maybe his sense of meaning and purpose was pretty flimsy to begin with.
*****
Which I suppose it was, because in the film’s last scene, we witness a Marcello who has, for all intents and purposes, thrown in the towel.
As I’ve alluded to, up until this segment, I wouldn’t say that he has necessarily demonstrated “maturity,” but I feel like he has demonstrated more maturity than the primordial riffraff surrounding him. While everyone else has been stumbling hither and yon, inebriated and empty-headed, Marcello has often shown himself to be the more clear-eyed one, the more emotionally committed one – always taking his interactions a little more seriously than his companions are. While others have settled, he has dared to expect more.
Until the Steiner business, and then, the next time he appears on screen, attending a late night/early morning soiree, gone is the black suit and white shirt; he’s now wearing a white suite with a black shirt. He’s like the “negative,” inverse Marcello.
Oh yeah. I went to grad school.
Now there’s an outright nastiness, aggression, and nihilism in his behavior that has hitherto been suppressed. After a divorcee performs a spur-of-the-moment striptease (Are those her breasts? I think we can see her breasts?), Riccardo, the rich lothario who is apparently the person who actually lives in this apartment, comes home, and isn’t quite feeling the vibes. “Guys, I’m serious, out in half an hour.”
But Marcello pipes up. “Who cares if you’re leaving? We’re not going anywhere … I propose that our American dancer makes love with someone.” Standing high above her, he points an inquisitory gaze in her direction. “I bet you never made love. Did you ever have a man all to yourself?” Fortunately for her, she doesn’t speak a word of Italian. “It’ll be Tito the Brute who’ll give you the delight of the first screwing!”
But once Marcello starts throwing bottles and breaking shit, Riccardo chews him out, albeit in his own lethargic, emotionally reserved way: “Now you’ve really bored us. What are you trying to do? Who are you trying to hurt? I’ll kick your ass out here.”
Yet Marcello hasn’t quite run out of gas, taunting a singer just for the hell of it: “And you … you’re dying to make love with me because you can’t find anyone who’d come under your sheets. You release your tension by singing on those lousy records.”
“God, Marcello,” she responds, “I pity you.”
His curt reply? A glass of water to her face.
This is what one might call Marcello in his “I just don’t give a fuck anymore” (AKA Sly Stone circa There’s a Riot Goin’ On or Alex Chilton circa Third/Sister Lovers) phase. Life is pointless, so why care about anything or anyone? “I wanted to give a thank-you speech to all my friends for the beautiful career they gave me,” he declares with an attitude resembling something less than sincerity.
And so it is here where he begins riding a woman as if she is a horse. I couldn’t say if she feels slightly abused by this, or is generally enjoying it, but he douses her with water, opens a pillow, then applies feathers to her skin, transforming her into a human chicken. She doesn’t tell him to stop, I guess. “It was a nice party, but that’s enough,” she states as the pillowcase ceases to emit feathers.
The bleary-eyed revelers stumble toward the beach at daybreak and then … how do I explain it? With one majestic tracking shot, the film somehow slips into the sixth dimension.
There’s a shift in the wind. The scope of the scene is no longer confined to a debauched happening of the narcissistic cognoscenti, but rather, morphs into a tale of grander import. Because, from out of the depths of the ocean, a gathering of locals drags onto the sand …
A thing.
What is it? A diamond-shaped blob? A soggy bean bag chair? I do not know, and I do not care. I love this thing. It is hideous. It is disgusting. It is, to quote Steven Spielberg’s initial impression of the E.T. puppet, “something that only a mother could love.” But does Marcello scream? Does he flee the scene in terror? On the contrary – he stares at it in utter fascination, and it, in turn, appears to stare back at him.
“What’s it looking at?” he mutters.
Let me tell you something. If I came across a dead sea monster on a beach, I would have many thoughts, but you know what I probably wouldn’t be thinking? “What’s it looking at?”
Marcello, however, is fascinated by its seemingly lifeless eyes. “And it insists on looking.” Perhaps, despite his descent into apathy, for one last moment, he can do what his peers are unable to do: not merely admire God’s ugliest creation, but confidently return its gaze. He wanders away, and then sees the girl.
Girl?
Rewind, hold on, slow down, step back.
*****
Approximately 80 minutes earlier, somewhere within the knotted threads of this convoluted narrative patchwork, during another of the film’s many fabulous, four-minute, “Wait, why exactly am I watching this again?” scenes, the significance of which only becomes clear at the very end of the movie, Marcello has found himself at a seaside café, shouting into a payphone (presumably at Emma?), the swinging sounds of Perez Prado blasting from the jukebox (side note: Mondo Mambo: The Best of Perez Prado & His Orchestra is an impulse download I do not regret and one I suspect you would not either), then turns to a pre-teen girl who’s working there and shouts, “Miss, could you please shut off that music?” before promptly resuming his telephone harangue.
“No, I won’t tell you where I am. I don’t know when I’ll be back! Go to hell!” After hanging up, he can’t resist grumbling “Wretched madwoman …” to either himself, the girl, or perhaps the nearby Tyrrhenian Sea.
Unperturbed or unconcerned, the young waitress starts humming the Perez Prado song herself, which annoys Marcello further, but yelling “Shut up and stop humming, you wretched madwoman!” would probably be a bit much, even for him, so he simply asks, “Quit it with that little voice, will you?” And yet, there’s something he likes about her. “You’re a pretty girl, you know?”
She doesn’t quite buy it. “Pretty, you’re exaggerating!”
“Come on, you know very well that you’re pretty … you’re not from Rome. Where are you from?” She’s from Umbria, apparently. “You look like one of those little angels from the paintings of an Umbrian church.”
The girl has somehow calmed the beast. She asks if she can turn the music back on, to which he says yes. Sitting at this café, chatting with this girl … somehow his problems have grown a wee bit smaller. He saunters back over to the payphone, and Emma picks up. (To anyone inclined to deem Marcello’s calling this girl “pretty” a bit on the sketchy side, allow me to suggest a viewing of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice for a true taste of Italian cinematic sketchiness.)
Where was I? Oh, right, fast forward 80 minutes, and Marcello is, well, a drunken, tattered shell of himself, unable to comprehend why a dead sea monster insists on looking at him. Now, if I wrote, “The girl sees Marcello and tries to remind him who she is and where they met, but he can’t hear her, doesn’t recognize her, and walks away,” you might say, “Well … so what?” But it’s not so much the “what,” but the “how.” And the way Fellini films this potentially insignificant moment almost legally requires me to add a phrase like “and how.”
Because the way I see it, this girl suddenly becomes the key to Marcello’s very last chance at remaining connected to the most admirable side of himself, and he fails to grasp it. As she waves her serene, curious goodbye, it’s like she’s waving a permanent goodbye to the last remnants of decency in his soul. I, for one, get little sense that he will ever be “coming back.” In the film’s closing moments, on that eerily menacing beach, this “young girl” takes on the presence of a fully grown adult, as if she were the human incarnation of Krishna, or the Ghost of Christmas Future, or Clarence the Angel from It’s a Wonderful Life, or some other avatar of divine judgment.
In the last shot, she slowly turns her head, and turns it, and turns it, until she’s no longer looking at Marcello, but staring directly into the camera, and Fellini fades to black at what strikes me as the most judiciously timed moment – just long enough to let her gaze hit the viewer, but not long enough to let the weight of her gaze truly sink in before the credits appear. I can see him in the editing booth now: “Not quite haunting enough, not quite haunting enough … just a little more haunting … a little more haunting … THERE. Right … THERE.”
I think a bylaw must have been written into the contracts of every European art director circa 1959/1960 that read something like: “Last shot of film must be soul-crushingly enigmatic.” Pickpocket, The 400 Blows, Breathless … La Dolce Vita certainly wasn’t about to be left out of that party. It’s haunting in that “A Day in the Life” sort of way, or that final page of Moby-Dick sort of way, where I feel like the film has just burned a hole in the universe and I can’t figure out whether I’m elated or terrified … but mostly I think I’m elated.
Because, during that last shot, you know what happens? I come to a funny realization. For the first time in three hours, I am watching a film without Marcello Rubini in it. It’s a nice film. I quite like it, in fact. I don’t miss him. Is it possible that … my life is better off without him? Why did I just spend three hours watching a movie about that soulless prick? I should have been watching a movie featuring kind, decent people, like this young girl, instead. My God. I’ve spent this whole time watching the wrong movie.
My mind scrolls back through the entire film, like Tyler Durden at the end of Fight Club, wondering what little clues I might have missed. This is what I meant earlier when I suggested that the “real” plot of La Dolce Vita might be hiding in plain sight under the viewer’s nose.
I think back to the prostitute in Vignette #1, who loans her apartment to Marcello and Maddalena so that they can “do the deed” in private. While the latter two are stuck in their existential ennui, the prostitute doesn’t seem terribly hung up about much at all. Leaning over the back seat of Maddalena’s convertible, she inquires, “Whose car is this? Is it yours?”
“Yes,” Maddalena replies curtly.
The prostitute turns to Marcello. “Did you buy it for her?”
Marcello shakes his head no, then answers, “Her father.”
“My goodness! All my father gave me were beatings.” At last, a realist in the crowd. All right, so her life’s probably not so hot, but at least she isn’t pretending to be some modern-day Plato like Steiner is. Maybe the movie should have been following her, you know?
And then there’s the obligatory circus/carnival/cabaret flourish, in Vignette #4, that no Fellini film could be without (perhaps also written into his contract?), when Marcello takes his semi-estranged father to an old nightclub, Paparazzo tagging along. After a gang of leggy showgirls make their exit, a clown playing a trumpet pops out and proceeds to serenade an impressive array of balloons. But as he leaves the stage, the balloons appear to … follow him?
How do the balloons follow him?
And yet, no one bothers to comment on this unusual bit of sorcery – not Marcello, not his father, not Paparazzo … the moment merely hangs in the air. Maybe Marcello should have been asking the Balloon Pied Piper for the meaning of life instead of asking dilettante poseurs like Steiner.
But nope. Without offering much of a hint that it will be heading in such a venomous direction until the very end, it turns out that, with a quick narrative pirouette, La Dolce Vita becomes a classic example of one of my favorite types of part-time Buddhist narrative arcs – what I like to call “the protagonist who leads by negative example,” also known as the “Corleone.” And while it’s not exactly a damnation on the level of Michael Corleone’s at the end of The Godfather, I’m always taken aback by how swiftly and irrevocably the movie appears to render its final judgment onto Marcello.
Has Marcello even “failed” though? Here is what I would say: He is a man who possesses a dim awareness that he could potentially serve as a giver and generator of happiness regarding other members of his species. Let’s think of him as “pledging the fraternity” of part-time Buddhism. Most of the jaded and hedonistic fools surrounding him? Forget it, they don’t have a shot. But Marcello is … in the running? The thing is, serving as a giver and generator of happiness can be hard. One has to be willing to buck trends, ignore the crowd, undergo discomfort. It takes a little fire, a little guts.
Which is why I find 8 ½ to be such an invigorating follow-up film and rich companion piece to La Dolce Vita, because I sense that Fellini, disgusted by Marcello Rubini, became determined to show his audience that he was not a Marcello Rubini, that he would not back down from that sort of philosophical struggle, that he was willing to cut through the bullshit of petty interpersonal bickering and creative paralysis and leave behind works of art that would generate connection and understanding and deeper insight and all that good stuff. He was prepared to stare back at that diamond-shaped blob, not once, but every day of his life. He wanted to show everybody what team he was really on.
There is a character in the opening minutes of 8 ½ who asks Guido, “So what are you cooking up? Another film without hope?” This, I imagine, is a dig at many viewers’ response to La Dolce Vita, but I say the joke’s on them, because I’ve found the unexpectedly harsh and scathing ending of La Dolce Vita, in some bizarrely roundabout way, to be one that fills me with hope. It’s not hope for Marcello, but hope for the rest of us, who have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to view Marcello’s spiritual arc from a distance. His fate may be sealed, but ours is not. The young girl is out there, waiting on that beach, but she’s no longer looking at Marcello. She’s looking at you and me.