Thus says the LORD: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts run away from the LORD. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream." Jeremiah 17:5-7
Levi Strauss theorized that
the function of a myth lies in reconciling basic contradictions, whether they
are felt within a person or at the societal level. Such contradictions, and
even dichotomies, can be used to energize a story’s dramatic tension and for comic
effect, such as through misunderstandings. Typically, contradictions are
reconciled in the denouement of a narrative; if so, the audience gets a psychic
payoff. Otherwise, the audience is left with the uneasy feeling that the world
is somehow not in order. I don’t believe that Fellini reconciles the
contradictions in his film, La
Dolce Vita (1960). The last scene, in which the film’s
protagonist, Marcello, a young and handsome single man who is a tabloid
columnist, turns back to follow his high-society drinking friends, who are
leaving the beach. He makes the choice to return to his life of late night
parties with empty socialites rather than to walk over to the only sane,
available woman in the film. Marcello
does not find or establish an equilibrium, but goes on as a lost soul. Although
religion is not much discussed by the characters in the dialogue, the film’s
structure can be described in terms of going back and forth between two
contradictory basic principles—one represented by the Roman Catholic Church and
the other by the Devil. In spite of the back-and-forth, which even includes the
visually high (overlooking Vatican Square) and low (in the basement-apartment
of a prostitute), the main characters remain as if in a state of suspended
animation between the dichotomous and contradictory relation between God and
the devil. If commentators on the film haven’t highlighted this axis, the
verdict could be that film as a medium could go further in highlighting
religious tensions and contradictions than it does—not that going beyond
religious superficialities to engage the minds of viewers more abstractly
necessarily means that the contradictions must always be resolved or sublimated
in a higher Hegelian synthesis and the dichotomies transcended.
In La Dolce Vita,
Marcello parties the nights away for seven days while contending with an
emotionally needy and suicidal fiancée. His hero of sorts, Steiner, seems like
a pious man but ends up shooting his kids and committing suicide. Marcello
realizes that he has barely known his father, but is not able to turn that
around. The utter lack of emotional intimacy in his life is clear, and he goes
on as a lost soul, with God being suggested as very distant—the Virgin Mary’s
appearance to some kids amid lots of hype being dubious at best. Steiner’s
piety turns out to be dubious as well. So too, Jesus, or at least the statue,
is literally distant as it is up in the sky being taken to the Vatican by a
helicopter in the film’s first scene.
A prostitute and a crept are
much closer to Marcello, though he does not succumb to either. Although he hits
on beautiful young women, including a movie star from America, he does not have
enough sex to label him as a male slut. That he returns in his sports car at
dawn to pick up his fiancée, whom he had stranded during an argument,
distinguishes him from the empty, promiscuous women at the parties. Yet he is
interested enough in other women that he realizes that at least for now, he is
not the marrying sort. I submit that this, and even Fellini’s comedic satire on
Rome’s contemporary party scene, can be situated within two polarities in which
religion is salient in the film.
The lack of resolution or
higher synthesis in the film’s narrative is epitomized by the continued
back-and-forth between religious and devilish themes through the film. In the
first scene, the flying statue of Jesus sets the tone for the film in the sense
that religion will have a role. The scene picturing the idyllic Jesus is
followed by one in which Marcello and a woman he has met at a party go to a
prostitute’s flooded basement apartment to have sex. This is followed by a
visual overview of Vatican Square, after a climb up a staircase, vicariously
from the dark basement. This scene is followed by a night-time party outside,
with large mounted torches in the background—whose fires connote hell. Then
Sylvia, the movie star whom Marcello is after for sex, goes into one of Rome’s
huge fountains. Both that she is wearing white and water connotes purity and
even baptism brings the viewers back from hell. The purity doesn’t last, for in
the next scene a jealous boyfriend slaps his girlfriend who has been hanging
out with Marcello and beats him up. Then Marcello is in a church, where Steiner
makes the film’s main dichotomy explicit in saying, “Priests aren’t afraid of the
devil.” Then, just in case the audience has missed this point, Marcello says,
“Where the devil is this place?”
Not only do the devil and
Jesus have roles in this film, the Virgin Mary ostensibly puts in an appearance
for two children (and their father, who takes tips). The people at the site are
so desperate to see or be healed by Mary that that the viewer is able to take
stock of the mob itself as if it consists of rabid wild animals. Why would the
Virgin deign to make an appearance among a pack of hungry wolves? Marcello, and
a priest who is there too, are skeptical as to the veracity of the two kids,
especially when they whip up the crowd into a frenzy by saying, “She’s over
there,” then, after sprinting to another area of the field, exclaiming, “She’s
over there!” It is significant that there are no supernatural visuals in the film’s
story-world. Ironically, if the reports of the “Sun miracle” associated with
the Virgin’s appearance to three children in Europe in the twentieth century
are empirically valid, then the non-supernatural, secular story-world that
Fellini constructed may be regarded as partial, and even biased. Even in the
seance in which a woman is seemingly possessed by the soul of a dead person,
Marcello is not convinced that ghosts do in fact exist. The dichotomy between
the Virgin Mary and the possessed woman is yet another instance of the
back-and-forth structure of the film. If there is a metaphysical realm of the
sacred, it is not in Fellini’s story-world. Marcello and the rest of the main
characters are on their own, and there is scant any character arc in the film,
even after Steiner’s suicide and murder of his kids, which would be enough of a
shock emotionally to motivate Marcello to find peace and meaning.
The audience is left on its own too, assuming resolution and synthesis are naturally sought by the human mind when faced with contradictions and dichotomies, as exist in the case of the realms of the devil and that of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. In terms of religion and what is typically associated with the devil (e.g., suicide, orgy-like parties, prostitution, sex), the film shows first one then the other, und so weiter. The utter futility in transcending the dichotomy and resolving the contradiction between God and evil while in the secular world of socialites and fame may have been Fellini’s (at least unconscious) point in making the film. It is no Rosemary’s Baby, in which, by the way, the contradiction in having sweet Rosemary give birth to a creature fathered by the devil is finally resolved when she finds that she can love the baby without becoming a Satanist because her mother’s instinct is healthy.
Fellini’s protagonist does not “find” religion; nor does he leave his party-circuit socialite friends and the world of hollow fame. Presumably Marcello goes on, after the last scene, with alternating views that can connote religion and hell, respectively, while he is a static entity wandering somewhere in between. The interior settings are hard, with bland walls that do not exactly connote warmth or emotional intimacy. Perhaps that world is none other than modern secularity, wherein meaning is futilely sought in drinking, sex, and our careers. Were Marcello to say, for example, "I am a tabloid journalist," would that capture the essence of his self? An affirmative answer wherein functionality is definitive would, I submit, be worse than chasing the gossip of the famous. Therefore, Fellini's masterpiece can be understood as going well beyond a critique of the debauchery of the socialite Roman society of his day.
