La Dolce Vita: Twentieth-Century Man?
Author(s): Bernard Knieger
Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Dec., 1962), pp. 26-31
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/355362
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La Dolce "Vita:Twentieth-Century
dfan?
BERNARD
KNIEGER
office results": "the most talked aboutmost shocked about picture of our years!"
But unquestionably, the illustrations are
intended as the chief fuel. The basic
illustration, one you are probably all
familiar with, is of Anita Ekberg, apparently dressed only in a white stole,
soulfully gazing at a white cat. The one
ad has two additional scenes: the one is
of Anita Ekberg in the Fontana di Trevi,
popping out of her gown from above and
from below. The other scene is of Marcello and Maddalene descending into the
basement apartment of a prostitute, although, to be sure, the customer would
not know this fact until after he had
seen the picture. A second ad also features the scene of Nadia's stripping. Another ad includes the aftermath of Emma's suicide attempt, with Emma popping out of her petticoat from above and
below.
Or separate illustrations of Nadia stripping, complete with moralistic legend,
can be obtained by the exhibitor. Mat
1A has this description:
Federico Fellini's masterful motion picture "La Dolce Vita" is climaxed by a
wild orgiastic party held in a villa at a
seaside resort near Pvome. The "party"
is highlighted by a daring strip tease
which is performed by Nadia, (Nadia
Gary) hostess and recently divorcedbeauty. The party depicts the utter depths
of degradation to which any hedonistic
society can sink and vividly accents a
poignant moral for our times.
Mat 2B has the following legend:
Mr. Knieger is assistantprofessorof EngNADIA STRIPS: At the height of the
lish at Washington State University.
'party' in the villa at Fregene, vivacious
26
THE FINAL COST of the much publicized
film La Dolce Vita was $1,600,000, "'an
astronomical sum' for an Italian production of this type," according to writer
Mario de Vecchi. "That controversial
film spectacle," according to a publicity
hand-out, "already has grossed over $20,000,000 in Europe and South America
and seems headed for a $10,000,000 gross
in the United States." Such a phenomenon in popular culture is well worth
examining for the origin of its appeal,
and for the view of man presented therein.
The La Dolce Vita view of man can
be expressed in three words: man is degenerate. The question then becomes,
we too? To quote a line by the poet
Denise Levertov: "he, you, I, which shall
I say?" That is, he acts that way, but
not us; you act that way, but not me;
or do I also act this way?
Director Federico Fellini said he intended "to reach out far beyond Rome
and its environs and lay bare a world
becoming morally feeble, equivocal and
even sinister." The sign of this moral
flabbiness is indiscriminate sensationseeking. That this is to be the major
motive for luring in box-office customers
is reasonably clear from an examination
of a document entitled "Advertising,
Publicity and Promotional Material for
La Dolce Vita."
On page 2 of this press book is the
basic verbal statement which will assist
to "set the spark for the tremendous box
LA DOLCE VITA: TWENTIETH-CENTURYMAN?
Nadia, (Nadia Gray) the lady of the
house performs a strip-tease by way of
celebrating the recent annulment of her
marriage. Done amid a leaden, flushed
and sordid atmosphere,this scene is one
of the daring masterstrokesof the great
neo-realisticFellini.
On page 5 of "Advertising, Publicity
and Promotional
Material for
LA DOLCE
the reader is told, "This is the
exploitation that set off powerful promotions." What follows are suggestions
for records and sheet music sales, for
sale of the Ballantine Book, and for
"Fashion Tie-ins," "Restaurant, Liquor
Stores, Travel" tie-ins, and "Department
Store Tie-Ins." The blurb for the Ballantine Book has one good sentence: "A
provocative photograph of Anita Ekberg
adorns the cover." But it is the description for possible department store tie-ins
that is a gem, and I quote it here in its
entirety:
The film's title lends itself to countless
tie-ins with stores (in newspaper advertising and in store displays), since there
is a certain snob appeal in a foreign title
(particularlyone that has received such
tremendous advance exploitation) and
the uninitiated discover that there is an
invitation to any number of products in
the English translation.
Sample Copy:
LA DOLCE VITA means THE SWEET
LIFE. An air-conditionermeans a sweeter life for your family, etc ....
LA DOLCE VITA (The Sweet Life) is
not to be missed at ... Theater beginVITA,"
ning ....
The Sweet Life is that much sweeter
Chocolates.
with......
This suggested department store tie-in
is pure opportunism, popularly known
as doing anything to get a buck. The
publicist knows as well as we do that
the title of the film is intended ironically.
In fact, the following sentence appears
in a prepared review on the next page
of the press book: "The title, translated
'The Sweet Life,' is meant ironically, of
course." Of course.
27
The point I am making is this: in a
commercial society, the values of commerce will generally predominate. That
is, La Dolce Vita is sold as a commodity
and not as a work of art. And what has
been packaged is sensationalism. Still,
something is wrong with our culture
when the appeals of sensationalism have
to be used to attract an audience for a
film which portrays sensationalism as
that which is wrong with our society.
And while the origin of this moral flabbiness is not made explicit by La Dolce
Vita, obviously we should eat chocolates
less and worry about our spiritual health
more. So something seems doubly wrong
if promotion of this film succeeds in raising the consumption of chocolates.
The press book does include the Legion of Decency rating, and quoting it
will afford a bridge from the consideration of the promotional campaign to a
consideration of the film proper:
Observation: Thematically this film is a
bitter attack upon the debauchery and degradation of a hedonistic society of leisure
and abundance; modern paganism with all
its sinful catalogue of pleasure-seeking,hypocrisy, cynicism and selfishness is appallingly and overpoweringly exposed in the
most unflattering possible light. By inference at least the film is also a denunciation
of the creeping paralysis of decadence
wherever it is taking hold in our modern
civilization. Although sometimes coarsely
stated and perhaps exaggerated, this theme
is animated throughout by a moral spirit.
In the cinematic development of this theme
the film-makerhas made use of some highly
sensational subject matter. These shocking
scenes, however, are never exploited for
sensual delight; on the contrary,their shock
value is intended to generate a salutary
recognition of evil, of sin as sin. In spite
of the moral tone of the film the treatment
of such subject matter in a mass medium
of entertainment can pose serious moral
problemsfor the immatureand intellectually
passive viewer. For this reason Astor Pictures, Inc., who are the sole American
distributors of this film, have chosen a
28
COMPOSITIONAND COMMUNICATION
responsible policy of exhibiting it only in
an English subtitle version of the Italian
original and of recommendingit exclusively
to mature adult audiences. Moreover, the
guaranteed advertising campaign for this
film does not and will not appeal to prurient
interest.
I am not sure that I completely agree
with the statement on the "guaranteed
advertising campaign." However, the
assumption that members of the audience will be mature enough to read is
an encouraging one, and the statement
of the theme seems to me to be correct.
The question arises, does the film ascribe an origin for this "debauchery and
degradation of a hedonistic society of
leisure and abundance"? The critic R. M.
Franchi denies that La Dolce Vita does.
In the Summer, 1961, issue of Film Quarterly he writes: "It is too concerned with
the public image of a corrupt society
to penetrate into the subtle and dangerously basic reasons for that corruption."
He later adds that La Dolce Vita is about
nothing: its theme "is merely a vehicle
for sensationalism and a sometimes spectacular demonstration of Fellini's directorial talents."
Franchi seems to me to be essentially
right in his analysis although, to be sure,
the failure of Christianity is clearly centrally involved. Or should one say the
failure of the nominal Christian's relationship to his religion has established
the modern Waste Land? Thus La Dolce
Vita opens with a statute of Christ, the
workingman, being transported to St.
Peter's Square. But instead of this action
producing reverence, it produces a sensation. After spending the evening with
Maddalena, Marcello returns home to
find that his mistress Emma has attempted to commit suicide by taking poison:
that is, Emma is living in a state of
unchastity and attempts self-murder in
spite of being a devout Catholic. That
she is a devout Catholic is dramatized
by her initial behavior at the scene of
the supposed miracle. But what does
this reverence come down to but her
willingness to be taken in by two lying
children. And the scene ends with Emma
and others ravenously tearing the socalled miracle tree to bits, and with the
death of one of the believers. Similarly,
although Steiner, the intellectual friend
of Marcello, apparently is a devout Catholic, he succeeds in committing suicide.
Also, the Roman prince who sponsors
an orgy goes the next morning to mass.
Finally, there is the episode with the
fish at the film's end. Since a colleague
has argued that there is nothing monstrous about the fish, but rather that the
distortion is in the eye of the on-looker,
I quote from the official synopsis of the
film in the press book: "At dawn, a monstrous fish is found on the beach." Since
the fish is traditionally associated with
Christianity, presumably one has here a
final statement of the failure of Christianity to give moral direction to modern
man. This interpretation is supported by
the one comment the fisherman makes
that the fish has been dead three days.
This remark could hardly be for any
reason except to stress the Christian
symbolism: the implication is clearly
that Christianity is dead.
In this same scene, incidentally, Lisa's
order to get a camera to take a picture
of the monster is quite important, since
it sums up the motive behind all the
picture-taking in the movie: the public
has simply an insatiable curiosity for all
kinds of freaks.
Thus as much as in the early poems
of T. S. Eliot, what is here dramatized
is man's alienation from God and consequently from his fellow man is man
as the living dead inhabiting a Waste
Land. A posthumous essay by George
Orwell entitled "Such, Such Were the
Joys" suggests a second failure in our
culture that seemingly is reflected in La
Dolce Vita, the failure of the cult of
money. Speaking of the pre-1914 age,
Orwell writes that a basic assumption of
LA DOLCE VITA: TWENTIETH-CENTURYMAN?
that time was "not only that money and
privilege are the things that matter, but
that it is better to inherit them than to
have to work for them." He later adds:
After 1918 it was never quite the same
again. Snobbishness and expensive habits
came back, certainly, but they were selfconscious and on the defensive. Before the
war the worship of money was entirely unreflecting and untroubled by any pang of
conscience. The goodness of money was
as unmistakableas the goodness of health
or beauty, and a glittering car, a title or a
horde of servants was mixed up in people's
minds with the idea of actual moral virtue.
To summarize my argument up until
this point: the view of man suggested
by La Dolce Vita itself and by its exploitation is that modern man is degenerate as demonstrated by his sensationseeking. No one is exempt from this
charge. The decadent aristocracy and
nouveau-riche are merely exhibit A. The
public, waiting to be titillated by scandal
sheets and by this film itself, is no better.
The scandal-mongers go about their work
not merely because, after all, they are
satisfying a public need or because a
job is a job (isn't it?). Clearly, they
enjoy the decadent atmosphere for what
it offers them; they even enjoy seeing
suffering and making others suffer. The
comparison which has been made between the photographers and Sartre's
flies is an appropriate one. The intellectuals, characterized by the poseurs and
phonies at the Steiner party, are clearly
counterparts of the decadent rich. Director Fellini himself is not exempt from
the charge of being a sensation-exploiter.
At this point the question is worth
asking if La Dolce Vita makes any affirmations about man and his possible
future on this planet. In a private conversation, a colleague of mine argued
that a work of art need not affirm (a
view supported by the achievement of
say The Blue Angel), but that in fact
La Dolce Vita does, if in a tentative
fashion. The chief evidence for his posi-
29
tion is the film's final scene. As aforementioned, he finds the people and not
the fish to be monstrous. Rather the fish
is out of the sea of life; and the eye of
the fish represents the unblinking eye
of nature which perhaps passes judgment
on man's decadence. The synopsis in the
press book seems to refute this view:
"At dawn, a monstrous fish is found on
the beach."
But then there is the final close-up
of the young girl, the angel as she is
called during the cafe scene. Here the
synopsis supports my colleague's view:
"A symbol of innocence and hope appears in the form of a young girl that
Marcello had befriended earlier. She
beckons for him to join her. It is too
late."
If Paola is a "symbol of innocence and
hope," then she is a most ambiguous
one, to say the least. In the first place,
she is introduced at the cafe as corrupted
by juke-box culture: she resumes playing
the juke box when Marcello cannot work
on his novel. The number she plays, incidentally, is "Patricia," the same music
that Nadia strips to. If the same number
in such different settings heightens the
contrast between innocence and depravity, it also serves to remind us that Nadia
too was once innocent and full of hope.
And if Paola is a positive symbol, then
surely Marcello is supposed to respond
to her beckoning; and in fact, his failure
to do so is the final proof of his loss of
will. But if he had done so, presumably
she would not long remain innocent and
hopeful, if Emma's case is relevant. Also,
Paola wants to be a typist, meaning, I
take it, that she will thereby lose her
intimate contact with nature. And I
remember the typist in Eliot's The Waste
Land, who works and plays with machines, who has become a machine, and
who is mechanically seduced.
In spite of the synopsis, therefore, I
cannot seriously accept the conclusion
as saying that here is innocence and
30
COMPOSITIONAND COMMUNICATION
hope if Marcello would only reach for
it. Rather here is the final instance of
the lack of communication which characterizes the personal relationships in
this film. Thus La Dolce Vita opens with
Marcello unable to communicate with
the sun-bathing girls on the roof-top
because of the noise of the helicopter.
He is unable to communicate with the
poisoned Emma. He calls up Maddalena
from the hospital, but she doesn't answer
her phone. Marcello's interaction with
Sylvia, the Hollywood movie star, consists of a series of frustrated attempts at
verbal and physical communication. The
televised "miracle" is a parody of communication, an impersonal one. Its personal equivalent is the proposal scene
between Marcello and Maddalena. Marcello and his father cannot communicate
with each other. And so on.
Previous to the film's ending, Fellini
has made clear that the intellectuals of
this world will not secure its salvation.
Steiner apparently represents the "intellectual" carried to the logical extreme:
the man of letters, or at any rate of publishing, who plays back nature's sounds
on a tape recorder and even there obliterates them with the voices of his
"friends"-and his own, for that matter,
in a statement of (mock?) humility. His
consideration of the uncertainty of his
children's future is certainly representative of the fears of parents, but his act
of murder signifies a total despair which
is insanity or a major loss of reality contact. For in order to save them from
an uncertain future, and not a conclusively-doomed one, he himself dooms
them to an irrevocable death.
It is at a pervasive, partly self-induced
despair (well exemplified by the emotions of Steiner) that the whole film
strikes at. That dead fish on the beach
not only scrutinizes, with its horrible
eye, degenerate man, but it too exemplifies hopelessness, entrapment, the futile
end-the fox run to earth, the white
whale killed, the illegitimate baby's body
decomposing in a package checked at a
railway station. It takes toughness to
confront current reality, and Steiner was
not tough, nor Marcello, nor Emma: they
all lack what is commonly called "moral
fiber," a kind of courage which enables
the sensitive to endure. There are different sources for this kind of endurance:
religion, pride, humanitarianism, sometimes pure egotism. Not all of them are
available to and/or "work"for all people.
La Dolce Vita dramatizes the failure
of all of these methods to give a direction to the lives of the characters in
this film.
Or the motive for Steiner's death and
the symbolism of Paola-and their relevancy to the central vision of La Dolce
Vita-can be analyzed in the context of
modern man's alienation from nature.
This view is developed by Professor
Warren French (in private correspondence):
It is surely never clear what drives Steiner
to suicide, but I think the only useful clue
is found in the strange tape-recording of
thunder and other natural sounds. He kills
himself, I think, not out of a kind of despair
at the degeneracy of the world, but because
he has lost contact with nature (in the
Wordsworthian sense), and he feels that
his children will drift even further out of
contact with it. Now I think Fellini's point
here is simply that the further one gets
from nature, the worse one gets-without
exception. Thus Paola's superioritylies not
in the fact that she is incorruptiblebut that
she is still closer to nature than the others.
In time, she will be corrupted, too; but
Marcello is too far gone even to go back
to where she is. Fellini's vision seems to
me to be much like that of Pound's in his
poem about the happy fishermen and the
even happierfish, "Salutation."The happiest
people are closest to nature. The further
one gets away from nature, the worse one
gets; but eventually, the decadent will be
destroyed, and new people will arise who
are close to nature. The picture seems to
me to be based on a concept of uncivilized
LA DOLCE VITA: TWENTIETH-CENTURYMAN?
people constantly rising up out of a fecund
nature and overcivilized people constantly
degenerating and disappearing. Much the
same notion also underlies Rocco and his
Brothers,and I suppose much can be found
in the nature of the Italian peasants and
aristocratsto justify such a thesis, although
I personally find it rather childish. By
implication, I think Fellini's point is that
Christianity has gone through the same
process. It began as a peasant religion,
but it has become aristocraticand decadent.
Christ,the laboringman, is now just a hunk
of concrete-as lifeless as the ruins of the
Roman Aqueduct. What Fellini calls for
is-like Yeats-a "Second Coming." Paola
is a sign of hope not because she will not
become corrupted some day-everything
does-but because she is still alive and vital,
whereas the fish is dead.
How valid is this La Dolce Vita com-
ANTON
CHEKHOV
to
ALEXEI
31
mentary on twentieth-century man? We
can agree with the Legion of Decency, I
think, that "modern paganism ... is appallingly and overpoweringly exposed."
That the mass film-going audience is
also out for "kicks" is the basic assumption underlying this film's American exploitation, as I have demonstrated. That
this view represents the total reality, I
cannot believe: there are creative people
who establish meaning in their lives
through their creativity in the family,
in commerce, in government, in the arts,
and so on, people whose lives are nowhere reflected in this film. However,
a work of art need not reflect a total
truth: La Dolce Vita does strike at the
pervasive, partly self-induced despair
which characterizes the orientation of
all too many in our time.
PLESHCHEYEV
My holy of holies are the human body, health, intelligence,
talent, inspiration,love, and the most absolute freedomfreedom from force and falsity, in whatever form these
last may be expressed. This is the programI would maintain, were I a great artist.
-October 4, 1888.