John Parris Springer
English Department, University of Central Oklahoma
jpspringer@ucok.edu

There is a scene over half way through La Dolce Vita (1960), Federico Fellini’s sprawling, picaresque journey through the seamy underbelly of mid-twentieth century Rome, in which he introduces an idea that would become perhaps the central interpretive key to his work: the circus. In the stage show at the "Cha Cha Club," we are presented with a number of circus-like acts: chorus girls costumed as cats mince around the stage to the commands of a circus ringleader while a sad clown plays a trumpet, a reference to Fellini’s earlier circus story, La Strada. The circus is a recurring subject in Fellini’s films, where it often functions as a simulacrum of the real world, revealing its contradictions and paradoxes through grotesque exaggeration and parody. The idea of the circus as a metaphor for life was embraced by Fellini, particularly in La Dolce Vita and 8½, but this was not seen by him as an unambiguously optimistic and happy thought; circuses possess numerous "shocks" and "terrors," not the least of which is an inevitable experience of otherness which can be both profoundly disturbing as well as exhilarating. In La Dolce Vita Fellini fashioned a film structured much like a circus, consisting of a series of "acts" and "set pieces" that continue to dazzle and mystify, shock and outrage viewers to this day.

The master of ceremonies for this Roman circus is a character designed by Fellini as a semi-autobiographical figure embodying essentially his own experience and perspective—Marcello, played by Fellini’s frequent leading man Marcello Mastroianni. Marcello is a would-be writer wasting his talents as a reporter working for the Italian equivalent of American tabloid periodicals such as the National Inquirer, while wasting his life in a series of increasingly meaningless relationships. Working out of an office above a café on Rome’s busy Via Veneto, he enjoys a perfect view of the human carnival unfolding around him. Marcello is a chronicler of the ephemeral and the trivial, a purveyor of celebrity gossip pretending to be "news," and as such he is a figure who increasingly comes to embody the superficial, inauthentic qualities of contemporary culture. When we meet him he has already become cynical and jaded, and he conveys an exhausted, world weary ennui as a result of the constant parties and debaucheries that make up his life. La Dolce Vita is Marcello’s story, and as the center of narrative and visual attention we identify with him even while we feel increasingly distanced from his moral viewpoint in the film.

La Dolce Vita is both a character study and an attempt to depict certain truths about Italian culture and society, and thus it follows La Strada both in its realistic attention to milieu and its interest in the psychology of the main character. The film’s central themes are structured around a series of oppositions which are never fully resolved or explained by Fellini: the sacred vs. the profane; the ancient vs. the modern; the authentic vs. the inauthentic. For example, the film’s famous opening shot in which a statue of Jesus is transported over the city of Rome by helicopter introduces the intermingling of the sacred and the profane when the helicopter pauses to allow Marcello the chance to talk to some girls in bikinis sunbathing on a rooftop. Marcello tries to get their phone number but his voice is drowned out by the sound of the engine, introducing another key idea in this film: the breakdown of human communication in the modern world.

The sacred and profane, ancient and modern, jostle each other throughout La Dolce Vita, most obviously in its depictions of Rome where modern apartment complexes and new building projects exist side by side familiar monuments and crumbling edifices. Rome, "the Eternal City," functions as both a sign of ancient civilization and of a rapidly accelerating modern culture. In La Dolce Vita, Rome becomes a modern Babylon, a polyglot, cosmopolitan symbol of a contemporary culture which has lost its moral compass and in which sexual boundaries and definitions are continually blurred and crossed by the habitués of Roman nightlife: the prostitutes and fashion models, American movie stars and decadent European aristocrats with whom Marcello surrounds himself. La Dolce Vita is about Roman decadence—twentieth century style.

Another memorable example of Fellini’s mingling of the sacred and profane that relates the film to larger arguments about modern society involves the role of the media in creating the mass hysteria and riot that follow the announcement by two children that they have had a vision of the Virgin Mary hovering near a small tree in a vacant lot. As reporters, photographers, and TV film crews converge on the family, the event is increasingly presented as staged and manipulated by the media to incite curiosity and manufacture public interest in what is clearly not a news story. When Fellini permits us to overhear the giggles of the children as they lead the adults on a merry chase for the Virgin Mary, the hoax is revealed and the complicity of the media in fabricating the event becomes clear. La Dolce Vita is, in fact, a bitter portrait of the celebrity driven media culture that has become commonplace in the twenty-first century. Marcello’s best friend in the film is a character named Paparazzo (Walter Santesso), a photographer who follows him everywhere and whose name has become synonymous for a certain type of photographer—paparazzi—which literally means a type of swarming insect. Like flies, the swarms of photographers that swirl throughout La Dolce Vita feed on the dramas of everyday life—the divorces, the extra-marital affairs, the suicides and murders that become the clearest symptoms of an underlying social pathology in the film. And the work of the photographer, no less than the filmmaker, also contributes to the increasing domination of the image over the word in contemporary culture, to the rise of the "society of the spectacle" and the types of visual logic and literacy that it demands.

Fellini has described La Dolce Vita as "a journey through the inauthentic" (in Federico Fellini’s Autobiography, a documentary by Paquito del Bosco available on the Criterion Collection DVD, La Strada). The film displays an almost palpable anxiety over the question of distinguishing the authentic from the inauthentic, the real from the simulated; and it is because of Marcello’s inability to make reliable distinctions between these categories that the film steadily moves towards a sense of chaos and disorder. The pervasive superficiality and artificiality of the characters Marcello encounters suggest a psychology in which identity is always concealed behind a social mask, and masquerade and performance have become the key elements of self. Such a view of human psychology inevitably forces us to confront the irreducible distance between self and other, a distance that is most often represented by Fellini as a breakdown of human communication. La Dolce Vita contains numerous variations on this idea but I will focus on two notable examples.

First is the sequence in the castle Bassano di Sutri where Marcello has joined a party of dissipated aristocrats in their nocturnal cavortings through the ruined villa. Here he encounters Maddalena (Anouk Aimee), a beautiful heiress with whom he is having a casual affair. She leads him through the labyrinthine castle to a secret room where, because of specially designed acoustics, she can speak to him from a distant corridor in the house. Separated in different spaces, only Maddalena’s voice drifts down to Marcello, pleading with him to marry her while she, in fact, makes love to another man. Marcello, unaware of the trick, declares his love for Maddalena, but later on in the evening he ends up making love to another woman. The disembodied declarations of love amount to nothing more than a moment’s amusement made possible by acoustical trickery and the moral decadence of the idle rich.

La Dolce Vita displays a characteristically ambiguous sexual politics, and Marcello’s numerous relationships with women constitute the central narrative line of the film. In this regard Marcello is a womanizer and "ladies man," unfaithful to all of his many lovers. But he is also easily manipulated and controlled by the women in his life, all of whom manage to saddle him with demands and expectations which he is unable to live up to. His relationships with the three central female characters are defined by the various levels of mutual control and domination which they permit.

We are first introduced to Maddalena when she picks Marcello up at a nightclub, clearly the sexual aggressor in their affair. The two hire a prostitute who provides them with a room for their lovemaking in a seedy Roman apartment building. Maddalena and Marcello are separated by class differences: "Your trouble is too much money," he tells her. "Yours is not enough," she replies. Nonetheless they are attracted to each other and Maddalena is the only one of Marcello’s lovers who seems to be his intellectual equal. But she is, as well, a spoiled heiress accustomed to indulging her every desire. At one point she confesses to Marcello: "I want to be your wife and be faithful…and at the same time I want to amuse myself like a whore." Maddalena finally represents nothing more than a sexual dalliance, and thus she is a part of the inauthentic and unreal world that is slowly eroding Marcello’s sense of purpose and vocation.

La Dolce Vita’s most hyperbolic representation of the feminine appears in the character of Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), a Swedish movie star and "sex goddess" who possesses a buxom, Nordic eroticism performed to a turn for the adoring paparazzi. Sylvia is almost wholly a creature of fantasy, of male wish-fulfillment—an archetype of female sexuality. She is a creature of impulse and emotion, vaguely aligned with nature against the sexual pretenses of civilized life. Her apotheosis as sexual goddess seems complete in one of La Dolce Vita’s most famous scenes: her midnight dip in the Trevi Fountain. Yet, as the entranced Marcello approaches her with trembling expectation, the waters of the fountain are suddenly switched off and the two rather sheepishly wade out of the pool. The scene becomes an ironic parody of a baptism, in which Marcello is not quite granted the blessing of Sylvia’s liberating sexuality.

In sharp contrast to the sexual fantasies mobilized by Sylvia, which are entirely the product of her media performance as a movie star, Fellini offers the very real emotional and sexual demands of Emma (Yvonne Fourneaux), Marcello’s long-suffering fiancée. This is the only relationship that would appear to offer Marcello any kind of emotional stability and long-term support, yet it is shown to be in steady disintegration throughout the film. Marcello rejects the "possessive, clinging, maternal love" that she desperately seeks to impose upon him and feels confined by the rigid monogamy of Emma’s Catholic notions of marriage. We are first introduced to Emma when her jealousy for Marcello has led her to attempt suicide. Later, they reconcile and Marcello takes her to the gathering of artists and writers at his friend Steiner’s apartment, where they both glimpse a vision of domestic harmony and fulfillment.

If La Dolce Vita has any moral center it resides in the character of Steiner (Alain Cuny), a fellow writer who encourages Marcello and invites him into his circle of intellectuals and artists. Here Fellini gently satirizes the self-consciously "modern" opinions of those gathered, who rail at Civilization because "its sole result is that you can’t make love." "Speak for yourself!" one woman replies, and the entire scene can be understood "as a dialogue between feminine wisdom and masculine uncertainty." Basking in the apparent domestic bliss of Steiner and his wife and family, Emma announces to Marcello, "Someday we’ll have a home like this." But Marcello’s response is less certain: "I’m wasting my days…uselessly." Of course, the truth of Steiner’s personal life is revealed later by the discovery that he has murdered his two children and taken his own life. The ideal of an existence devoted to artistic expression and the well-being of loved ones is shattered for Marcello by Steiner’s actions, the real motives for which remain unexplained in the film.

Marcello’s failure as a writer is simply another version of the film’s larger theme: the failure of communication understood as an essential feature of the human condition in the modern world. The full measure of Marcello’s moral and spiritual fall resides in his loss of purpose and discipline as a writer, and the bitterness it engenders within him corrodes his self-esteem as well as his ability to relate to others. By the time of the final, degrading party sequence in the film he is no longer even a reporter: "Weren’t you once some sort of writer?" he is asked. "I do publicity now," he replies, and his tone of voice conveys his own conviction that publicity is the most degraded form of rhetorical art.

The final sequence in La Dolce Vita refers us once again to the breakdown of human communication. In the aftermath of the wild party that concludes the film—significantly, the celebration of an annulment, and thus of the dissolution of marriage—the real viciousness and self-destructiveness of Marcello are fully revealed. Stumbling out into the morning light like a kind of circus parade, the revelers come upon a group of fishermen who are pulling a monstrous creature out of the ocean. This mysterious "sea monster" horrifies yet fascinates those gathered on the shore around its body. The blank, staring eyes of this creature look directly into the camera—and at us. Its enigmatic stare renders a kind of mute judgment against the folly and cruelty of human beings, our superficiality and materialism, our hunger for novelty and amusement, our preference for the trivial and inauthentic in art and life. The creature, like some ancient sea monster cast up in the modern world, evokes a feeling of corruption that links a primordial sense of evil to the banality and superficiality of the contemporary scene.

From this disturbing encounter with the "monster" an exhausted Marcello wanders away from the group. Sitting down on the beach he notices the young girl with a face like an "angel" whom he first met at a seaside café where he had gone in an attempt to write. Waving to him from across a small inlet of water, she gestures and tries to communicate something to him which he is unable to understand. Once more Fellini confronts us with the difficulty of human communication, but in this scene it is tempting to see the young girl symbolically. Waving a sad farewell, she becomes emblematic of Marcello’s literary muse, of his own abilities and potentials as a writer which he has squandered and now abandoned. The film ends as Marcello is dragged out of the frame by another woman, returning to the endless party of "la dolce vita."

La Dolce Vita is a dense, complex portrait of modern life; a scathing critique of media culture, of its artificiality and sensationalism, its squandering of social energy in pursuit of the trivial, its insatiable appetite for scandal and the thrill of "the new. And it is equally an analysis of the "modern" self, of the narcissism and vanity that underlie sexual desire and which inhibit any meaningful communication between human beings. La Dolce Vita is about the emotional and spiritual cost of embracing such values. And it is also an expression of Fellini’s own anxieties as an artist, his concern that as a filmmaker he is like Marcello, a chronicler of the trivial and the unimportant. The crisis in Fellini’s conception of himself as an artist and filmmaker would find its fullest fictional treatment in his next solo film, 8 1/2.