On La Dolce Vita and the Floater in My Eye

It was 1960 and I saw La Dolce Vita for the first time; it was the only movie in my experience in which patrons got up and left their rows. The movie was complex to my mind. I didn’t get it, nor did I understand that Fellini was educating us all in how to see without a straight narrative. I sat through it once more because I was challenged by it; when I had seen it twice I realized how it held together and mostly what it was all about. Since that time audiences are used to discontinuities, rapid editing and all the artifices of disjunctures introduced in the 60s and on MTV. I saw the movie last night. I wanted jane to see it. And I saw new things in the film that I appreciated. A cut was also made in the film which irked me but did not detract from the total treasure before me. I remember it well.

In one scene at Marcello’s friend’s home, the intellectual played by Alain Cuny, the poet, who later commits suicide and slays his two children as well (I just detest that lunancy in real life; kill yourself, leave the kids alone), all kind of ideas and behaviors are portrayed in front of the viewer, as the camera stays pretty fixed. In two sets of windows that are on one wall searchlights cross the skies at night. And then I realized that our auteur put that in as a metaphoric touch about the inner searchings bruited about in the scene. If you have never observed that and made the connections as I did not at 20, the movie in no way suffers. It only enriches it now. It is movie candy like knowing the stats for Honus Wagner.

The movie is notable for what it contains — the introduction of paparazzi for the first time in cinema; savage depiction of a “miracle” ( children see the virgin mother) in which the herd tears apart a tree in which she supposedly appeared, down to its leaves for relics — the nauseating spectacle of the “religious”; a rather sedate but at that time provocative orgy; nymphomania; the use of spatial distance to delineate alientation, disaffection, loneliness( think Kane with Susan Alexander as she works her puzzle); depictions of outlandish gays, nymphomaniacs, the morally decadent and others on the way to hell. However, as I look back at the film it does leave me cold; perhaps that is its point. The only moving scene, for me, is the one involving Marcello and his father, for the sadness and alienation is evident, for they have nothing to talk about; they are running on two different tracks.

The ending had me confused as a young man/child. It involves a grotesque sea fish pulled up on the beach by the very same aristocrats who had spent the night in orgy and an angelic young girl who Marcello had spoken to perhaps a few months back. Clearly the fish is his own decadence, but what is clever is her calling out to him over some water and his inability to hear what she says or to understand; Fellini makes his point and Marcello is off to whittle his penis for the next conquest.

For me the test of a movie’s greatest is to move me emotionally, at least psychologically. It is that old Aristotelian catharsis I’d like. La Dolce Vita is a savage indictment but given the decades since I have become desensitized. I might rally to action if Dick Cheney is discovered eating human flesh. Suprised no, for he has done so metaphorically. Neither great novelist nor great auteur has stepped forth to satirize this bloated whale we are. Ironically, Citizen Kane has been labeled a “cold” masterpiece (Pauline Kael). Perhaps. What is infallibly magnificent about that film to me is that I feel for the sled itself. As Rosebud burns in that furnace what it symbolizes, what it has so condensed in a psychologcal way (like a dream), is the total life of a man. In that way I ache, more than i did when I saw his life march before me as it did in the newsreel.

I went on to see Amaracord which is Fellini’s charming and rustic film memoir of his own growing up in Italy. It may be his masterpiece; one feels, and one laughs one’s head off.

As to the newly discovered floater in my eye (oh, dear, how precious!), I will write about that next time, for Fellini has shoved it off the screen.