I almost thought about placing this film at number “8 ½” on my list instead of 9th, but upon further reflection, I decided that doing so might have been considered too cute by half.
(Alternate first line: I almost thought about turning my essay on 8 ½ into an essay about an adrift blogger despondently struggling to complete his essay on 8 ½, but upon further reflection, I decided, “Naw, that just would be stupid.”)
*****
I’ve heard it said, more times than I care to count, that 8 ½ is “the greatest movie ever made about making movies.” Legion are the articles that will invariably feature some quote from Martin Scorsese along the lines of “8 ½ is the purest expression of love for the cinema that I know of.”
You know what I say to that? Well whoopdie-freakin’-doo.
“Making movies,” in my opinion, is not an automatically interesting topic for a work of art to focus on. That would be like someone painting the greatest painting ever painted about painting, or me writing the greatest blog post ever written about blogging. Aren’t there bigger subjects for films to tackle? Life, death, love, joy, sorrow, interior design, taxidermy … you know, try me.
But – good news! Despite what they tell you, I wouldn’t consider Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ to be a movie that is merely, or even primarily, “about” making movies. (If that’s what you’re really interested in … may I recommend a few choice documentaries?) Although this merely raises the question: if that isn’t what 8 ½ is about, what the hell is it actually about then?
Well, for certain moviegoers, like my father, 8 ½ is about God knows what.
*****
Sometime in the mid-90s, one fateful weeknight, up a little later than perhaps I should have been, I found myself watching Late Night with Conan O’Brien in the company of my biological predecessor. Suddenly, a sketch commenced. The premise of the sketch went something along the lines of “Late Night as if it were a Fellini film.” Without warning, the footage switched to black and white. The camera cut to a frowning clown, a strongman in a striped shirt lifting barbells, a sophisticated European heiress sporting fake eyelashes … you get the picture. A chuckle from my father was followed by a pained groan. “Oh God, Fellini.”
“Who’s Fellini?” I asked with a level of purity and innocence that could have only been rivalled by that of Claudia Cardinale’s Woman in White.
“Ugh. He’s this Italian director, I remember they made us watch his movies in film class, but they didn’t make any sense. There were always these clowns and circus people … supposedly he’s some sort of ‘genius,’ but I never got it.”
A director my father didn’t like? Clowns? Circus people? Well, now I was curious.
Twenty-five or twenty-six moons later, armed with the impatience and ambition that only the young possess, I declared that I needed to view, as urgently as humanly possible, each and every one of the so-called “greatest” movies of all time – whether my father agreed with those films’ place in the film pantheon or not. Well, even after the most cursory amount of research, one non-English language title kept cropping up more than any other: 8 ½, 8 ½, yadda yadda yadda, 8 ½. And so, one summer day, a mere lad of seventeen, rented videocassette in hand, I fed the spooled beast into the VCR and prepared myself for two hours of greatness.
What the hell was this?
Were the subtitles mistranslated? Was my VCR playing the film backwards? Had I accidentally ingested black market quaaludes for breakfast that morning?
As I watched 8 ½ for the very first time, I kept telling myself that I was enjoying it, which might have legitimately been the case, but – I think it’s safe to admit this now – I’m not entirely certain I … understood it?
“Why is he stuck in a traffic jam? Why is the fat woman dancing on the beach? Why does he have a whip in his hand? Whose childhood flashback is this? Why is there a towering collection of metal scaffolding in the middle of a field for no reason?”
And the women – so many women. “One minute he’s sleeping with one woman, and then suddenly he’s sleeping with some other woman, and none of these women are apparently his wife, so … who are all these women again? And then there’s all this Catholic imagery that’s probably supposed to mean something, but, not being Catholic, I’m just going to assume it symbolizes … guilt?”
Fortunately, I was not alone that afternoon, as my older brother bravely chose to view this labyrinthine creation with me. Every once in a while, I would glance in his direction, or he would glance in mine, each of us searching, hoping, begging for any assistance with the surreal dreamscape that was unfolding before our eyes. When it was finally over, he shared his thoughts: “You know, I feel like … individual scenes made sense … but when you try to put all the scenes together … the movie doesn’t make any sense.” Then he added, as if to justify his confusion, “And I think I’m getting a cold.”
And yet. And yet. On some non-intellectually self-serving level, I could swear I was into it. Whatever the hell I’d just witnessed, I knew it was some singular combination of mesmerizing, poetic, exotic, passionate, imaginative, boundless, and mainly just … foreign.
Though I’m tempted to testify otherwise, for many Americans like myself, the whole subtitle thing takes a little time getting used to. And at that precarious stage of my filmgoing development, I still found the mere act of watching a movie with subtitles disorienting. I mean, was 8 ½ this confusing to Italian audiences? For the first time, I was presented with a cinematic riddle I could not truly answer:
Was 8 ½ weird because it was a foreign film, or was 8 ½ simply a foreign film that also happened to be weird? Which came first, the pollo or the uovo?
I must state for the record, however, that there was one notable aspect of this fraction-sporting work of cinema I felt needed absolutely no translation: Claudia Cardinale. My Italian may have been rusty, but I was quite fluent, even at that tender age, in the language of love.
*****
So, the years rolled on, and foreign films and I continued our initially cautious but gradually more complementary dance. By the time I found myself (for better or worse) studying film in graduate school, subtitles no longer made me feel like I was watching a movie with one hand tied behind my back. I knew my Truffaut from my Godard, my Antonioni from my Bergman, my Kurosawa from my Ozu. I had even seen a second (!) Fellini film (La Dolce Vita). I’d been around the block a few times.
It was in this climate that I invited a few of my fellow graduate students over to my apartment one wintry evening to watch 8 ½ together. For some, it would be their first viewing, but for me, it would be a much-needed refresher.
Well, my second viewing went smooth as butter. I grokked the whole thing from top to bottom. I had acclimated. Out of respect for my peers, I kept my mouth shut, but if I’d spoken my thoughts out loud, they would have sounded something like this: “Oh, this is a flashback sequence!” “Oh, this is a dream sequence!” “Oh, oh, this is Guido’s present-day reality!” It was like I was finally driving at night with the headlights on.
You ever have those moments when you’re watching a movie or listening to an album and, despite not being able to see into the future, you just kind of know you’ll be able to revisit said movie or album ad infinitum without ever quite tiring of it? That evening, I had one of those moments. Yes, I was proud of myself for being able to view an acclaimed European art film without getting my neurons in a pretzel, but more importantly, I realized that this was the kind of movie that was sort of like 16 movies in one. I’ve heard it said that entire stipend-devouring film students have become lost inside the cavernous dungeons of 8 ½, never to be heard from again. Did I worry about the bits of symbolism that flew past me, the in-jokes I missed, the characters I couldn’t quite identify? Eh, what was the rush? 8 ½ and I had our whole lives together.
Besides, even presuming that the film made less sense than a Gary Busey interview, I found its look so tasteful, kinetic, and hypnotic that I could have remained entirely befuddled by its contents and yet still have enjoyed the film on a visual level alone. It’s the kind of movie I could put on in the background late at night, like mood music.
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like every French and Italian black and white film that came out in a certain five to six year period has that “look.” (I want to say between about 1958 and … 1965?) I mean, there must have been a few that turned out like hot garbage, but apparently those aren’t the ones that have happened to cross my path. It’s a type of cinematographic style that I find can make otherwise intolerable storylines (or non-storylines) go down like gravy, and otherwise empty-headed films come off as remarkably profound. In other words, never underestimate the power of a film that’s simply pleasing to the eyes.
I’d say 8 ½ arrived at the tail end of this period, right when that Euro-specific combo of lenses, lighting, film stock, and mis-en-scene, or whatever secret stew they were employing (I feel like parts of this film are in deep focus, but I don’t know if all of it is?), would have been at something of a peak, and yet was only a year or two away from falling entirely out of favor. What I’m saying is, you couldn’t go back and “recapture” this look. Three years later would have been too late. By that point, you might as well have been making Raging Bull. Yet in 1963, a film could still be in black and white and that choice wouldn’t have reeked of self-consciousness. I’m telling you, it’s a million-dollar look:
Oh yeah.
That’s what I’m talking about. Hit me baby one more time.
Mmm. So crisp, I can feel it snapping in my mouth like a cracker. Even a random shot of a bedroom looks good in this movie:
But back to the question I’d posed earlier: Is 8 ½ a “foreign film” that is weird, or a weird film that just happens to be “foreign”? Well, after many years of painstaking, in-depth analysis, my deeply informed response would have to be … a little from Column A, and a little from Column B.
Granted, I wasn’t around in 1963, but I suspect that, to contemporary viewers, the movie would have made a little more sense, only being about as confusing as, say, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. would have been to a general moviegoing audience in 2003. Keep in mind that, in his day, Fellini was almost a celebrity in his own right, a subject worthy of gossip columnists and talk show chatter. So, I suspect an audience viewing scenes of a “famed director” sweating bullets while attempting to live up to the hype he’d created by his prior success … might have gotten the reference. You want a foreign film that genuinely doesn’t make any sense? Try Last Year at Marienbad.
I think a novice filmgoer declaring 8 ½ a movie that makes no sense would only be half right – or perhaps 8 ½ right. Does 8 ½ make sense? Does life make sense? I mean what movie does make sense, when you get down to it?
And it’s rough going in cold. I have now seen approximately nine Fellini films (or more accurately, since I’ve only made it part-way through Fellini Satyricon, let’s say … eight-and-a-half?). So, while this is generally considered to be Fellini’s “best” movie, I’m not sure it’s the movie I’d recommend as someone’s “first” Fellini movie. I mean, it was my first Fellini movie, and I guess I’m still able to button my shirt in the morning. But only by viewing all the Fellini movies that preceded it have I come to appreciate it a great deal more.
To really get the full impact of 8 ½, I’m thinking you should at least watch La Dolce Vita first. Actually, you should probably jump back a few movies earlier and watch La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, then watch La Dolce Vita, and then you’ll be ready for 8 ½. No, scratch that – you should start with I Vitelloni, then watch La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and La Dolce Vita, and then watch 8 ½.
You know what, fuck it, just watch 8 ½.
But my point is, for a film that sits on all these “greatest films” lists without any context, I wouldn’t say that 8 ½ can be treated like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, or The Wizard of Oz can. It is not a self-contained work that exists in a vacuum. A little backstory might come in handy.
The short version: Mussolini, World War II, Italy’s decimated post-war economy, Italian Neorealism, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Rome: Open City, The Bicycle Thieves, Fellini’s first few movies, the international success of Fellini’s next few movies, the sensational, sensual, immortal La Dolce Vita, and … then what?
By the time the ‘60s rolled around, Italian cinema was like the good Catholic girl who suddenly decided to sleep around and smoke pot and give her parents the middle finger. For so long, she’d felt like she’d had to behave. Suddenly the Swingin’ ‘60s were in full bloom and she’d landed a rich boyfriend and was on the pill and owned a Mini Cooper. But … what movie to make next? From Wikipedia:
In an October 1960 letter to his colleague Brunello Rondi, Fellini first outlined his film ideas about a man suffering from a creative block: “Well then—a guy (a writer? any kind of professional man? a theatrical producer?) has to interrupt the usual rhythm of his life for two weeks because of a not-too-serious disease. It’s a warning bell: something is blocking up his system.” Unclear about the script, its title, and his protagonist’s profession, he scouted locations throughout Italy “looking for the film” in the hope of resolving his confusion …
Giving the order to start production in spring 1962, Fellini signed deals with his producer Rizzoli, fixed dates, had sets constructed, cast Mastroianni, Anouk Aimee and Sandra Milo in lead roles, and did screen tests at the Scalera Studios in Rome. He hired cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, among key personnel. But apart from naming his hero Guido Anselmi, he still couldn’t decide what his character did for a living. The crisis came to a head in April when, sitting in his Cinecittà office, he began a letter to Rizzoli confessing he had “lost his film” and had to abandon the project. Interrupted by the chief machinist requesting he celebrate the launch of 8 1⁄2, Fellini put aside the letter and went on the set. Raising a toast to the crew, he “felt overwhelmed by shame … I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make”.
Whuuuuuuuut.
Come on man. That’s cheating. That’s not a movie.
Oh, but just you wait.
*****
Some nights, when I’m lost and lonely, I will watch the first twelve minutes of 8 ½, and only the first twelve minutes.
I’m inclined to describe the opening segments as having a force and magnetism all their own. In other words, by the time Guido’s mistress Carla arrives about thirteen minutes in, the narrative energy dissipates just the slightest bit, does it not? The opening twelve minutes are like a sunrise over the ocean, and the scenes that follow are sort of like … more sunlight, just at a different angle. Still nice, but man, that sunrise.
First of all, who doesn’t hate traffic jams? If any of my readers can find me an individual who says, “Actually, I love traffic jams,” I will personally send that reader five thousand dollars via PayPal. And the only thing worse than traffic jams? Unnervingly silent traffic jams. And the only thing worse than that? Turning your head to the left and seeing the tableau before you freeze almost imperceptibly for a half a second, then turning your head a little more to your left, and seeing the altered tableau freeze again. Look, I don’t know what kind of dreams Fellini used to have, but I’ve never had this happen in any of my dreams.
Besides, for the mysterious man trapped in the automobile, jerky visual perception might be the least of his problems. There’s also that bus that’s jam-packed with passengers, except that the passengers’ arms are all dangling outside the window as if they were handcuffed, with their heads obscured by the roof. Did post-war Italy have some sort of endemic engineering issue regarding proper bus window measurements?
Then Guido (or the man who seems to be Guido) claws against the confines of his car. If there’s ever been a better “fingers against the glass” sound effect in a major motion picture, I have yet to hear it.
Then Fellini cuts to a shot of a sleazy old lothario, cigarette dangling from his lecherous lips, rubbing the bare shoulders of a scantily-clad female (whom, only on sixteenth viewing, did I realize is in fact Carla, Guido’s mistress, whom the viewer will meet shortly in “real life”) clearly enjoying himself a little too much. Nothing like a claustrophobic traffic jam to inspire a little afternoon hanky panky, eh? Moments like these are what I think elevate Fellini above and beyond his contemporaries: the man knew how to counterbalance his self-important pontificating with doses of appropriately comical Eurosleaze.
The camera cuts back to Guido, who’s now crawling out of the roof of his car Houdini-style, and suddenly … he’s free! Now he’s flying in front of … a bunch of stock footage of clouds. (Will I complain that it looks laughably fake? No, I will not.) Then, hold on, he’s floating over the ocean, but two figures from his “real life” film world yank him down against his will, and … he wakes up in a health spa – which, as anyone who’s had a “sweat-inducing traffic jam nightmare” could tell you, would be the scariest possible place to wake up in.
And so Fellini slides gracefully into the classic “It was all a dream” narrative cop-out … within the first three minutes! A critic more heavily steeped in psychoanalysis than I am could have a Freudian fiesta with this opening sequence, but my general take on it is: our humble protagonist seems to feel just a little bit trapped.
Guido stumbles into the bathroom, looking like he’s just been run over by a stampeding herd of either rabid donkeys or angry studio executives. A dim light initially comes on, followed about one second later by intensely bright fluorescent lights. I can just see Fellini on the set now: “God damn it, I said ‘brighter’! What do I have to do around here to get some blindingly bright fluorescent lights installed in this bathroom??” Apparently Guido needs to be confronted with every single decrepit skin cell on his forehead.
Suddenly, a cut to the outside. And now, welcome to 8 ½’s health spa, where everyone, and I mean everyone, is a character:
Lady in a white hat which resembles an upside-down tulip, waving to the camera Queen of England-style:
Lady with pearl necklace and too much eyeshadow, blowing the camera a kiss:
Old man in bowtie furiously conducting an orchestra – with no orchestra in the visible vicinity:
Lady in excessively large sunglasses and requisite dangling cigarette, spinning her parasol:
Nun who sips a glass, giggles, then immediately turns her head (out of coyness, perhaps?):
You thought Lt. Kilgore bombing a Vietnamese village back into the stone age was a scene thrilling and chaotic enough to merit soundtrack accompaniment from “Ride of the Valkyries”? Try Fellini’s health spa scene.
After a soundtrack switch to the more comically frazzled Barber of Seville overture, Guido stands in line to obtain his glass of water, sporting, shall we say, “movie star” sunglasses (AKA not the kind that little old ladies spinning their parasols would be wearing), with a look on his face that seems to suggest, “What the hell am I doing here with these people”? Suddenly, Rossini comes to a screeching halt, Guido tilts his sunglasses over his nose, and glances into the trees.
The Woman in White prances across the pavement like a ballerina. Pure, soft, luminous – “beautiful, young and ancient, a child and a woman already, authentic and radiant,” as the film’s occasionally insightful DVD commentary track puts it. Guido takes one glance at Claudia Cardinale and thinks to himself, “You know, maybe I do want to be at this health spa after all.” Astute viewers (I’m including myself here) might pick up on the suspicious absence of sound during these shots. Claudia bends down, then offers a glass to Guido, who mouths an awestruck “Grazie.”
A pointed “Sir” pierces the silence, the Rossini resumes, and the camera cuts to a woman who is … not exactly Claudia Cardinale.
If the look on Guido’s face could talk, I’m guessing it would say something like “Fuuuuh.” Pushing his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose, he grabs his water and moves along.
And so, here is one of the subjects that I think 8 ½, this supposed “movie about making movies” is actually about: the quintessentially human struggle to come to terms with the painful discrepancy between fantasy and reality. Guido’s constant disappointment becomes something like the running gag of the film. “How come my mind is capable of imagining this, but instead I’m stuck having to deal with that?”
Oh yes, this supposedly trailblazing cinematic exercise in metafiction is actually, in my view, a splendid study of Part-Time Buddhist Noble Truth #3: “One Should Try to Appreciate the Present Moment Exactly As It Is, and Not As One Might Wish It Would Be.” Think of it as sort of like It’s a Wonderful Life, Italian-style.
Here’s another trenchant example, about an hour in: Exhausted from the endless hassles of his disorganized and nebulous production, Guido flops onto a bed littered with various actresses’ headshots (almost like Scrooge McDuck diving into his vault of coins).
Slipping into the realm of implausibility once more, he dreams of Claudia, that same Woman in White. This is where it’s at. She’s tidying up his room, making his bed, kissing his hand, kissing his forehead, nurturing and mothering him, giving him everything his depleted soul desires, and then …
Bzzzzz.
God Damn it. A phone call. Who is it now?
It’s his mistress, Carla, ranting that she’s sick with fever, rupturing into hysterics, rambling on and on about how she’s dying, and fretting about what’s in her will (of all things), and the irony is that, after he rushes over to her hotel, instead it’s Guido who ends up attempting to nurture and mother Carla … but he doesn’t appear to excel in this ill-fitting role. In other words, if you’ll allow me to lapse into ‘90s slacker-speak for a moment: reality bites.
That’s the key to the whole thing here. Perhaps the greatest irony regarding roughly 60+ years of eggheaded analysis of 8 ½ is that, despite all appearances to the contrary, its core strikes me as quite simple. Once I cut my way through the layers of symbolism and Styrofoam and all the post-modern razzle-dazzle, what I find underneath is the rather relatable story of a man who just wants to get away.
The guy wants a break. He wants a break from so many various threatening and bothersome elements of his daily life that I almost have to make a list: 1) his wife; 2) his mistress; 3) his producer; 4) the filmgoing public; 5) his own haunted psyche … in other words, a break from life.
And I feel like each jarring, nonsensical image that Fellini throws in my direction – the giggling nuns, the mist-smothered bishops, the buses with arms dangling out of windows, that one actress who resembles a snail, that other actress who bears an uncanny resemblance to late career Michael Jackson – stems from the one simple desire to get away. To use a circus metaphor (which I suspect would have turned our legendary director’s heart a-flutter), Fellini may be walking one hell of a structural tightrope, but because I think the film remains grounded in this one driving emotion of “escape,” he can let the narrative fly all over the place and somehow the movie still coheres. The bearded lady on the trapeze is waiting below, arms extended, in case he slips off the directorial highwire.
Oh, and did I mention that 8 ½ is funny? Part-Time Buddhist Noble Truth #532: You can be as navel-gazing and self-indulgent in your art as you want to be, just as long as you’re funny.
Fellini apparently taped a note to his camera during filming that said, “Remember, this is a comedy.” And so it is, but not quite of the “Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler” variety. Rather, I might describe it as a comedy that exists on one low, sustained note, like a quiet, twisted cackle. In lesser hands, this could have become one very private joke, and yet, I feel like he’s invited me in with a wink and a nudge. After viewing every one of Fellini’s tongue-in-cheek digs at the little frustrations of the film-making business, I just want to kiss him. Highlights:
1. Guido’s casting director shows him the “old” actors Guido has supposedly requested, but upon inspecting them, Guido gripes, “They aren’t old enough.”
“What?” The casting director can’t believe it. “This one has one foot in the grave. Next time I’ll get three corpses. You asked for a pathetic type … this one makes you wanna cry the minute you see him.”
The trio of senior citizens and aspiring actors stand impassively and listen, apparently indifferent to any potential insults. They say you’ve got to have a thick skin to make it in this business.
2. While touring the “spaceship” set, Guido boasts, “In my movie I have all sorts of things happen. I’m putting everything in. Even a tap-dancing sailor. Sailor, come here! … Dance, and I’ll give you a part.” Surely we’re not about to be treated to the sight of a literal tap-dancing sailor, right? Oh you better believe we are. Behold, my friends, as a random working-class Italian ne’er-do-well, holding a pail in one hand, proceeds to shuffle his feet back and forth in a not-terribly-exciting manner.
3. During the viewing of a batch of screen tests, Guido’s critic “frenemy” starts prattling on and on about how Guido is trying to “solve a problem from which there is no solution,” quoting Stendahl, and spewing forth all sorts of pretentious academic mumbo jumbo, and then, with one courtly wave of Guido’s hand, two goons summarily execute the fellow via hanging. I’m about 83% certain Woody Allen was thinking of this very scene when he gave Marshall McLuhan his memorable cameo in Annie Hall (“Boy if life were only like this.”)
Another bottomless source of comedy would have to be Guido’s attraction to seemingly just about every variety of Italian woman that has ever existed and ever will exist. The man’s not picky.
In one corner, we have Claudia Cardinale; in another corner, we have Saraghina, a plus-sized woman of “ill repute” with … well … let’s call it “Kabuki”-style make-up, who, in a childhood flashback, crawls out of her shelter like a scruffy sand crab and proceeds to dance the rhumba for the village boys with the confidence of a Broadway chorus girl. In Guido’s memory, at least as Fellini presents it, this is the most magnificent dance in the history of dances. Although the local priests punish little Guido and explain that Saraghina is “the devil,” even at that age, he seems to have figured out that she’s rather comfortable with herself.
And then, somewhere slightly beyond the halfway point in this film of many halves, Guido’s wife Luisa shows up.
Wife? Wait a minute, this guy has a wife?
I hope she’s cool with his … “creative liberties.” See, I’m not personally bothered by Guido’s embrace of an open marriage (quite ahead of his time, that Guido), but then again, I’m not his wife, am I? In my view, the key to a successful open marriage, which is a delicate arrangement to pull off, is that both parties need to be on board with the concept.
I’m endlessly tickled by how, in the “real world,” with each successive onscreen appearance, Luisa only seems to loathe Guido with increasing levels of bile, while conversely, in the “fantasy world,” Luisa only grows more and more gentle, supportive, and forgiving. He just needs to switch the two worlds, that’s all.
Part-time Buddhist that I am, I practically collect definitions of happiness as a hobby. Well, Guido’s got a good one to add to the pile: “Happiness is being able to tell the truth without ever making anybody suffer.”
*****
And all the while, like an ever-present bomb ticking in the background, is that pesky little movie he’s supposed to be making. What the hell kind of a movie is this, anyway? While giving a tour of the partially constructed “spaceship” set, the producer describes the plot like so: “The sequence starts with an image of planet Earth completely wiped out by a thermonuclear war, and the spaceship, our new Noah’s Ark, tries to escape, while the rest of humanity seeks refuge on another planet.” Eh … maybe time to bring in L. Ron Hubbard for a little screenplay help?
Nevertheless, half-baked as the premise may be, I get the impression that there is one thing in 8 ½ that Guido believes he absolutely cannot do: abandon this movie.
I know the feeling – although I know it from perhaps the somewhat opposite angle. You see, unlike Guido, whose problem was that he was attempting to create a work that he found far too impersonal, my problem was that I was attempting to create a work that I found far too personal.
For the majority of my college years, I was utterly convinced that my first novel – the searing work of fiction that would announce my comet-like arrival onto the literary scene – was to be a brutally incisive, semi-autobiographical bildungsroman centered around my teenage years and my unique, if challenging, attempts to navigate my various attractions to the female sex. I was sure of it. I was positive of it. In my mind, it had already become a reality. I spent four years writing 300 pages of “notes” for this alleged work, four years telling my friends how awesome it was going to be, and four years planning out the manner in which its impending publication was going to lead me to fame and fortune.
But then, as I sat down and attempted to actually compose the thing … you know, I was having the darnest time figuring out which semi-autobiographical parts I needed to leave in and which semi-autobiographical parts I needed to leave out. The story expanded to bottomless proportions. Was this a Catcher in the Rye-style novella, or a thinly-veiled memoir of everything mildly interesting that might have occurred to me in my adolescence? Slowly it began dawning on me that I didn’t even know what, precisely, I was trying to “say” to my readers. Nor was I finding the activity of spending long hours dwelling on my most awkward, queasy, sensitive, vexatious teenage moments to be particularly enticing. I soon found that, like a certain panicked director, every time I thought about my “novel,” a little voice inside of me screamed.
Guido knows what I’m talking about: “I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film that could help bury forever all those dead things we carry within ourselves.”
Upon discussing these concerns with my therapist, I could sense her respectful attempts to gently hint that I was possibly not at the most stable and mature stage of my life to be mining painful aspects of my recent past for fictional consumption. “Instead of writing about all these girls you knew in high school, maybe you should be trying to, you know, meet a few girls in the present?”
Touché.
Seeing the wisdom of this advice, I put my coming-of-age monstrosity on hold – where it remains to this day. After taking a two-year break, I eventually came up with an entirely separate idea for a novel, one that would manage to couch my inward struggles within a more clearly surreal, abstract narrative arc, which meant that I wouldn’t hear a little voice inside me screaming every time I attempted to work on it. Granted, I haven’t completed that one either, but … look, one writing project at a time, OK?
There’s always that dilemma, not just for artists, but for any human being. When does perseverance turn into stubbornness? When does a vision become an albatross? When is it time to battle through an obstacle, and when is it time to simply, in the words of one Stephanie Lynn Nicks, “pick up the pieces and go home”?
Anyone else amused by the lengths to which perfectly rational people will go in order to preserve an inflexible idea of what is “supposed” to be happening in their lives? Take certain characters from doorstop-sized 19th century novels, such as Inspector Javert or Anna Karenina, who couldn’t conceive of an alternate reality in which their lives did not revolve around their notion of themselves as “X.” Sitting there in my dimly lit study, absorbing these fictional creations’ seemingly impossible dilemmas, I just wanted to plop into the page and shout, “Hey! It’s OK! Just move to another country, ride the rails, get a job as a dishwasher, make some new friends.” The concepts that these characters were wholeheartedly convinced defined their lives … could have been tossed into the recycling bin. Having plans and a worldview and a set idea of one’s “purpose in life” is perfectly natural, of course, and yet sometimes … it just ain’t happening.
Fittingly, at the final, sanity-snapping press conference (where he’s bombarded by laughably heavy questions such as “Are you afraid of the atomic bomb?” and “Do you or don’t you believe in God?”), Guido imagines escaping his predicament by blowing his brains out with a revolver. But in the end, the man grasps the larger picture: canceling a movie mid-production is not a tragedy devastating enough to merit a bullet in the brain. Finishing and releasing a movie that turns out to be bad, on the other hand …
But back to Guido’s vast army of Italian women for a moment. In the scene immediately preceding the ill-fated press conference, the “real life” Claudia finally makes her entrance, but … dressed in black? No, no, no, she’s supposed to be wearing white! Didn’t she do her research and plunder Guido’s daydreams properly?
Turns out that this “real life” Claudia actually speaks and has, like, a brain of her own. Screw this. Instead of silently washing all his troubles away, she cuts a little too close to the bone. “A guy like your character, who doesn’t love anybody, is not very sympathetic, you know … It’s his fault. What does he expect?” Hey man. This isn’t the Claudia he paid for.
“You’re a bit of a bore too,” Guido retorts.
“Ah, you really can’t take the least bit of criticism,” she states with bemused glee. “You’re so funny with that big hat, made up like an old man. I don’t understand. He meets a girl that can give him a new life and he pushes her away?”
“Because he no longer believes in it.”
“Because he doesn’t know how to love.”
“Because it isn’t true that a woman can change a man.”
“Because he doesn’t know how to love.”
Or does he? What darkly-dressed Claudia describes as “love” I’m more inclined to describe as “acceptance.” Guido doesn’t know how to accept. I suspect that he, like perhaps 97.5% of humanity, thinks that what’s coming between himself and his inner happiness is the mis-matched external goings-on all around him, but what he can’t come to terms with is that maybe his life is meant to be exactly as it is, and that perhaps it is his preconceived idea of his life and the disconnect between that idea and his reality that is bringing him unhappiness. The power is inside him. He’s been wearing the freaking ruby slippers the whole time and he can go home any moment he wants to, but no, all he’s been doing is darting around the halls of Emerald City frantically looking for the wizard.
Alas, Guido does the absolute worst thing in the world.
He calls the movie off.
Vesuvius erupts, Sardinia tumbles into the sea, a plague of locusts descends upon the rickety jumbo-sized jungle gym masquerading as a film set.
No? None of that happens? His world doesn’t come crashing down on him? Oddly enough, despite his very worst fears having come true, in a strange, twisted way … he feels kind of good! Huh. He’s touched the third rail, hasn’t become electrocuted, and doesn’t have anything to be afraid of anymore. It’s kind of like getting fired from a job you hated; sure, you’re still going to need to find a new way to pay the bills, but that’s a problem for another day. He’s finally cast this monstrous, menacing one-eyed beast of an idea back into the ocean where it belongs.
Indeed, only mere moments in, Guido seems to be taking his failure in stride, spotting the same working-class fellow he’d declared to be the “tap-dancing sailor,” who proceeds to perform his mesmerizing jig once more. With a wave of his hat, Guido laconically mutters, “So long, sailor.”
The older I get, the more I find a certain eerie beauty in failure. In those moments when everything “falls apart” and I’ve been stripped to the bare essentials, I reach a point where, instead of feeling upset, I almost grin with maniacal glee at the sheer absurdity of life and my inability to mold it to my liking. Failure and growth are like peanut butter and jelly. In a confounding paradox that doesn’t bother me one bit, I feel like there are times when “failure” finds itself almost interchangeable with “success.”
And it is here, as Guido sits in a car while his critic “frenemy” yaps away, where failure and success proceed to meld into one. Remember that opening dream sequence, where Guido imagines he’s trapped in a traffic jam? All of a sudden, right when he least expects it, when it appears to be as bumper-to-bumper as it could possibly be, Guido climbs out of that stuffy, cramped automobile and proceeds to fly.
An eerie trickle of images gather force as Guido sits in the car, a “megamix,” if you will, of all the characters who’ve dared to romp through this narrative hodgepodge (Saraghina, Guido’s parents, those nurses from his childhood, Claudia once again in “white”), all magically standing in this same field by the collapsing rocket ship set, paired with the sound of blowing wind.
It’s like that that moment in Pink Floyd’s “Echoes,” right around the 15-minute mark, where the sonar pings and subway car screeches are finally starting to fade, and the plinking piano, humming organ, and droning guitar are gently, gracefully, gradually re-emerging, building and gathering force, slowly and methodically preparing to fill the speakers with cymbal crashes and shimmering guitar arpeggios and that descending chord progression that Andrew Lloyd Webber presumably ripped off, and just generally gearing up to blow your mind.
Suddenly, in voiceover, Guido has an epiphany or two. I shall quote it in full:
What is this sudden happiness that makes me tremble, giving me strength, life? Forgive me, sweet creatures. I hadn’t understood. I didn’t know. It’s so natural accepting you, loving you. And so simple. Luisa, I feel I’ve been freed. Everything seems so good, so meaningful. Everything is true. I wish I could explain. But I don’t know how to. So. Everything is confused again, as it was before. But this confusion is … me. Not as I’d like to be, but as I am. I’m not afraid anymore of telling the truth, of the things I don’t know, what I’m looking for and haven’t found. This is the only way I can feel alive and I can look into your faithful eyes without shame. Life is a celebration. Let’s live it together! This is all I can say Luisa, to you or the others. Accept me for what I am, if you want me. It’s the only way we might be able to find each other.
Now we’re cookin’.
If I ever decide to make collectible part-time Buddhist refrigerator magnets as a blogger marketing ploy, I think I would stick the one quoting Guido’s voiceover from the end of 8 ½ right at the top of my fridge. His confusion … makes sense somehow. Not having found the answer … is a kind of truth. He doesn’t know how to explain it … and yet, he just has.
A round of applause for Guido’s use of the word “might” here. He can’t even feel confident that the people in his life “accepting him for who he is” will allow them to find each other. But it’s the only way they might be able to find each other. He’s abandoned the search for certainty – but that search was merely driving him batty to begin with.
Indeed, what I find uplifting about the ending of 8 ½ is that it doesn’t promise too much. Guido can only come to terms with his artistic paralysis and personal failings by traveling, if only momentarily, into an alternate dimension of fanciful reverie. This glorious vision in his head, where all his friends, colleagues, and acquaintances hold hands and dance in a celebratory circle, is a vision that will quickly fade. Once he snaps out of it (Perhaps in a few minutes? Perhaps in a week?), his beleaguered wife will still hate his guts, his not-too-charitable producer will still be screaming in his ear about the financial hit he’ll be taking, his snotty film critic buddy will still be dropping quotes from Mallarme and Rimbaud to explain why Guido’s ideas are terrible … all of life’s little agonies will still be waiting right there for him.
Guido cannot wave a magic wand. But an epiphany can still be beautiful and powerful even in its fleeting impermanence. Those moments of inner tranquility come and go. But I think that’s OK. To bask in that sort of mental and emotional harmony, even for just a moment, is maybe the best a person can do. Sometimes, I feel like that’s enough.
Still confused? Ah, but who isn’t?