La Dolce Vita

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.

Religion in Film: Resisting the Formulaic

Historically, meaning in the history of cinema, perhaps too much effort or attention initially went into fidelity to doctrine, especially in Christianity. Heavily stylistic, unrealistic epics could be said to merely illustrate doctrines. Then as filmmakers began to think in an open-ended way concerning how to depict the transcendent both visually and ideationally (i.e., as an idea), the dominance of the earlier control-orientation slipped away to be replaced by innovative ways of understanding how the transcendent may relate to the realm of our daily mundane existence in the world. The extraordinary potential of filmmaking to tap into the human imagination without necessarily providing definitive answerers could be seen. I submit that this historical trajectory is a positive development. This does not mean that heterodox belief has or should win out; in fact, religious practitioners, including the clergy, can help filmmakers to depict the transcendent and its relationship to our existence in novel ways that do not seem so formulaic as to be easily brushed aside as less than credible. Old wine can indeed go into new jugs, and even new wine may be tasted without the world collapsing as a result.

Let’s begin with the old approach. “In his 1936 encyclical Vigilanti Cura, Pope Pius XI argues that, insofar as ‘the motion picture has become the most popular form of diversion which is offered for the leisure hours . . . ,’ it is crucial that Catholics pressure ‘the industry  [to] produce motion pictures which conform entirely to our standards.’ Only in this way can ‘the motion picture be no longer a school of corruption’ but ‘be transformed into an effectual instrument for the education and the elevation of mankind.’”[1] But what standards?  Are they moral or theological in nature, or both? Are the standards moral only that can be derived from theological doctrines? If not, on what basis are the extrinsic moral standards legitimate for the Church to enforce on Hollywood? The very notion of standards, moreover, connotes the negativity of prohibition, whereas teachings instead would imply that films are made proactively to illustrate through narrative principles and values found in Christianity. Rather than fixate on Hollywood as being corrupt, the pope could have pictured it as an opportunity full of potential, ignoring the decadent films. For beyond educating people, films can elevate us, as the pope admits. In short, rather than viewing the glass as half empty; it can be viewed as half full. Rather than concentrating on emptying out the stale brew, the focus can be on that which is added that is salubrious from a distinctly religious standpoint. What does it take to do so?

Going from the mentality of slapping a ruler on a wrist to helping filmmakers to render the transcendent through narrative using visuals and sound entails eclipsing the subjectivity of the filmmakers as well as “’the immanent frame’ of technological modernity,”[2] which includes not only the techniques but also the business of filmmaking.

Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), for instance, eclipses Polanski’s own subjectivity (or secular bias) in leaving it to the viewer whether Rosemary is dreaming or really is raped by Satan, although the short cut-away later briefly showing the baby’s face in the crib provides an answer that the supernatural realm that is transcendent of our world is indeed real. Furthermore, showing the animal raping Rosemary hardly fits with modernity, including the business interests of Hollywood. In short, Polanski took a risk, and he was not out to superimpose his own views of the supernatural onto his audience. That is, Polanski resisted what Heidegger calls the “culture-industry,” wherein, according to Barnett, “cinema merely discloses the rich subjectivity of the artist rather than any truth conveyed by the work itself.”[3] Instead, Polanski allows Heidegger’s “letting be” to occur by not trying, as Barnett puts it, “to wrest determinate meaning” from the work.[4] Polanski creates the openness in which viewers can be open to transcendence in a metaphysical sense.

Barnett points to The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) as being an example of what to avoid in this regard, as “the thematization of Christian doctrine or dramatization of Christian conversion” in the film “is most likely to elicit eye rolls and snickers.”[5] The characters are so stylized and idealized as to please not only the camera, but the financially-inclined producers as well. Nothing offensive. Nothing challenging. To be sure, at the time, as the first film to show Jesus’ face, the film could have been reckoned by some people as controversial. Even so, merely illustrating a Biblical narrative visually and with sound goes only so far.  The Ten Commandments (1956) too, goes only so far. Both films are “safe” in that they follow well-established doctrines exquisitely and present the Bible in the modern medium.

To be sure, over-stylized, non-realistic illustrations of Biblical narrative can contain allusions to the holy that seem genuine or real. In the television miniseries, Jesus of Nazareth (1977), for example, an eerie scene takes place in which other-worldly instrumental music plays as Jesus silently walks, with bright back-light behind him highlighting his meager, weak (yet paradoxically strong!) form, toward Pontius Pilate, whose facial expression intimates that something wholly other is going on in the case of Jesus. We see something similar in the realistic reactions of the disciples witnessing Jesus recusitate Lazarus in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Both scenes resonate with the qualities of the holy described by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy. So the phenomenon of the holy can be depicted in a catching way even in heavy-stylized (i.e., unrealistic) films whose primary orientation is to present established Biblical narratives in an orthodox way. 

It would take perhaps until The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) for the transcendent itself to again be raised as a question rather than an established fact with respect to Christology, or Christian dogma. The Exorcist (1973) explicitly raises the question of whether the supernatural demon really exists, though the psychological bias of modernity is eviscerated by supernatural feats that cannot possibly be explained as mental phenomena.

Of course, the very existence of the transcendent need not flagged and left up in the air for a film to represent religion in a way that resists the easy and convenient stylization of modernity.  The Others (2001) resists simple movie technique by turning the tables on the viewers without questioning the reality of the transcendent. Ghost (1990) also provides an innovative way into there being another realm, though with the familiar bipolar trappings of heaven and hell that ironically give the film the veneer of established doctrine—such easy formulaic being used by the modern industry of film to sell.

To draw out the transcendent in a way that does not seem trite or already well-groved, “Filmmakers must uncover the tensity between beings and Being, between the systematized habits of the human world and the raw primitivity of non-technical existence. Thereby, the mystery of being-in-the-world is manifested, and with it, the possibility of a truly poetic encounter with Being itself.”[6] Overstylized, too-conventional depictions of Biblical narrative can fall short in terms of showing the human “struggle to discern the divine presence.”[7] To manifest “the ineffable and invisible” beyond “normal sense experience,” “a fundamental incongruity between human everydayness and the transcendent world is expressed” even as both are contained within a oneness.[8] This incongruity must burst through preconceived notions, as are in heavily stylized Biblical epics, or the depicted transcendent will not seem real to viewers. Put another way, raw Being should challenge the viewer, yet not be so different or new that it is not believed to possibly represent something real beyond the movie theater or living room.

The subtle, almost-invisible cascade of ghosts going down the stairs in Poltergeist (1982) and the human’s facial expressions of simple wonder are much more suggestive of another realm than is the over-fabricated, almost sensationalistic hole in the bedroom closet heading to the other realm. The liminality of the numen, which lies between realms in at least the human imagination, is difficult to capture visually, and is thus too susceptible to being done up in a meretricious or gaudy way by filmmakers in line with modern sensationalism and cinematic technique.

There are of course new ways of telling old stories. The Chosen, a television series made in Texas of Jesus and his disciples, is a case in point. They are all presented in a realistic way, as are the Romans. Matthew is mildly autistic. Jesus has some very human reactions to everyday situations. Yet the world depicted is one in which miracles take place. The transcendent is real even as the characters are portrayed realistically. So while some stories, such as The Others, may do away with conventional notions of a heaven and hell, other stories are quite conventional yet they resist easy formulation repeating oft seen epics. There is indeed so much potential in filmmaking to depict transcendence in a myriad of ways that the old way of controlling the medium so that it conforms with doctrine in a conventional way has thankfully been defeated.  Nevertheless, the danger of an over-reaching subjectivity of a filmmaker imposed through the medium is still with us, given human nature, and it may still be too tempting for filmmakers to turn to heavily stylized Hollywood props and well-trodden plots instead of thinking outside the proverbial box. I am convinced that the human imagination applied to religion in film has not come close to having been exhausted.  

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1. Christopher B. Barnett, “Can Cinema Be ‘Religious’? Heidegger, Technology, and the Transcendent,” Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary, 139, No. 2 (Spring, 2024): 19-23.
2. Ibid. Barnett is quoting Charles Tayler, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539-93.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Michael Bird, “Film as Hierophany,” in Religion in Film, John R. May and Michael Bird, eds (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1982), p. 4.
8. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1972), pp. 3-13.

Rosemary’s Baby

The film narrative centers on Satan impregnating Rosemary, a married woman in New York City. According to Roman Polanski, the film’s director, the decisive point is actually that neither Rosemary in the film nor the film’s viewers can know whether it was the devil who impregnated her. Beyond the more matter of being able to distinguish a psychosis from a more “objective” or external religious event, the importance of the supernatural to religion is also, albeit subtly, in play, according to Polanski.

“Nothing supernatural is in the film,” Polanski says in an interview that comes with the DVD, so the intrusion of religion into Rosemary’s pregnancy could all be in Rosemary’s head. Given the paranoia “over the safety of her unborn child [that] begins to control her life,” Rosemary may unjustifiably fear that the Satanic couple in the next apartment hosts a coven that plans on sacrifice her baby; Rosemary may hallucinate the devil’s face during the sex scene and the devil’s likeness in her baby after his birth. As for the first hallucination, however, Rosemary does not eat much of the drugged chocolate dessert furnished by Minnie Castevet from next door. Whereas the sequence through the boat scene looks hallucinatory, the fact that Roman Castevet’s painting red lines on Rosemary’s naked chest and abs as she lies on a bed is in the same scene as the sex, which crucially includes a camera shot of part of the devil’s body—a shot not from Rosemary’s point of view—followed by a very brief shot of the devil’s face from Rosemary’s point of view, the supernatural presence of the devil is indeed in the film. A dream or hallucinatory sequence in life as in a film does not maintain a “scene” for long, yet the one of the painting and intercourse is sustained long enough not to be dreamlike. So I cannot agree with Polanski’s claim that nothing supernatural is in the film. He later admitted to being an agnostic, yet he did not keep to his personal beliefs in the making of the film—which is a good thing.

Only one very brief look at the devil having intercourse and another such glimpse of the baby’s face struck me most in my first viewing of the film. Genius! I thought, as the viewers would only get a glimpse of the central character—and one that is distinctively religious. By showing us less, in other words, Polanski actually raised the significance of the supernatural to religion. This raises the question of whether the supernatural really is so important in the phenomenology of religion. Perhaps supernatural additives have been placed in religions to gain adherents. In Christianity, perhaps it is easier for people to focus on an image of the resurrected Jesus than the invisible Kingdom of God, even though Jesus in the Gospels claims he came to preach the mysteries (i.e., what is hidden) of his Father’s Kingdom. It is easier to call the prince of peace the king in that Kingdom, with not much attention going either to the invisible Father or the Kingdom. In his book, The History of Natural Religion, David Hume argues that the human brain has an innate tendency to posit human characteristics on inanimate objects (and animals). As we do so in a given religion, it becomes overladen, human all too human, such that the original divine simplicity is covered. The human mind has trouble holding onto such divine purity as Plotinus’s the One; it is much easier for us to envision the supernatural. That which catches our eyes is irresistible even to an agnostic director, as well as to the viewers. We crave even just a glimpse of Satan in the film, and the provision of just a glimpse actually validates how important the supernatural is not only in the film, but, moreover, in religion itself. But is the supernatural in religion itself, or do we humans bring the supernatural images to religion?