La solita cosa italiana: Tradition and The Great Beauty

Before it's about anomie, sex, death, politics or ennui, Italian film is about Italian film. I've heard this called "an Oedipal struggle," which you can take or leave, but the point is that the upper tier of the film industry in Italy is probably unique in the amount of energy it expends on its ongoing conversation with itself. Every composition, every soundtrack, every personality, every haircut, mustache and pair of glasses is fair game for appropriation, as if every filmmaker were a shade of Robert Altman. The hero of Nanni Moretti's Caro Diario visits the site of Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder. The prostitute protagonist of Fellini's Nights of Cabiria is named after the virginal heroine of Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria. The antihero of Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style, played by Marcello Mastroianni, attends a screening of La dolce vita, whose hero is also played by Marcello Mastroianni. It's a common domain of symbols as much as an industry.

Since the 80s, though, the ouija-like movements of these symbols have inscribed a story of decay—not catastrophic, but definitely pervasive. Both the auteurs and the Auteur are dead, movie attendance is down, and Cinecittà, the studio where Fellini built whole city blocks for La dolce vita, is largely disused. Moreover, the industry has increasingly cut itself off from the domain of symbols to which the auteurs devoted so much attention. Over the last three decades, Italy's international successes—mostly sentimental dramas like Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful and Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room—have been what the Italian film critic Pino Farinotti calls "solitary efforts", disconnected from the tradition. Stirrings of rebirth—Marco Bellocchio's Vincere, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah and Nanni Moretti's impossibly well-timed Habemus Papam have all been critical darlings in the last few years—are therefore met with what might seem like an inordinate amount of jubilation. Everybody, the Italians as much as the foreign press, wants a return to greatness.

It's important to understand this if you want to grasp Paolo Sorrentino's new movie, The Great Beauty, as anything but an arty trip through the lives of the decadent Roman elite, because a return to greatness is exactly what Sorrentino is promising. Sorrentino's breakout movie, Il divo, earned him not only Italy's first Cannes Jury Prize since 1962 (!) but also a strange kind of mandate. The film's resistance to the conventions of kitsch and chamber drama, its treatment of history as a kind of myth, and its frantic editing style staked a claim in the visionary lineage of the great Italian auteurs. Sorrentino had earned access to the same symbolic domain as Fellini and Antonioni; now, with The Great Beauty, we get to see what he's done with that access. 

As you might expect from a movie made under that kind of scrutiny, The Great Beauty is not only a movie in the high old style but also a movie about the high old style. The story of Jep Gambardella, an aging writer from the May '68 generation, The Great Beauty comes on like a The Artist for Italian modernism. The sweeping crane shots and choreographed dolly moves are only the beginning; the movie mimics the Italian classics in realms as cognitively subtle as its sound (voices feel uniformly close to the listener, as if they were dubbed, which was the standard for all Italian movies until the 70s) and its editing (we cut in and out of single gestures and expressions, like Fellini loved to do). Homages to the Italian pantheon are ubiquitous in Sorrentino's Rome: we pan over the Roman skyline as in Rome, Open City, a man jumps into the Tiber like Franco Citti in Accattone, a priest swings on an unearthly swing like Alberto Sordi in The White Sheik.

The writing, however, is less eclectic in its influences; it's fairly clear that Jep is an incarnation of Marcello Rubini, the hero of La dolce vita, and the movie keeps a closer ear on that than on any other resonance. Jep and Marcello are part-time writers and full-time socialites, struggling with cynicism, as they encounter a recurring cast of grotesques on a journey through a Rome whose contemporary vulgarity can't measure up to its beautiful past. Their titles mirror one another and are similarly equivocal, although Sorrentino's doesn't have the same branding potential for gelato places. (A gelato place called La Grande Bellezza had better be pretty fucking good.) Sorrentino is going right for the big one: this is Berlusconi's La dolce vita.

Pertinent differences, however, seep into the movie: Marcello's aesthetic failure becomes Jep's intellectual success and Marcello's weaselly cowardice becomes Jep's weary authority. Jep is a mirror image of Marcello, a version of Marcello who got everything he wanted (although, as Sorrentino shows, it doesn't really matter in the long term). This mirroring carries through to the movie's plot, which starts to feel like the other end of La dolce vita: the death of Jep's first love starts a journey at the end of which he reawakens to a modest kind of hope.

Of course, it doesn't really matter whether or not Jep the man emerges from his thirty-year depression; his thoughts are pretty inaccessible anyway. What matters is whether or not Jep the Embodiment of Italian Cinema emerges from his thirty-year depression, whether or not he's capable of imagining something outside his Fellinian gloom. You'd be justified if you thought this sounds disquietingly like Harold Bloom; after all, it's an Oedipal struggle.

Insofar as it dramatizes that struggle, The Great Beauty is an astonishing success, but the movie itself questions to what extent that success is worthwhile. Is it a struggle worth conducting? Is it worth making a movie in the high old style? Pino Farinotti has to write about movies that "make 'Italian cinema history'" in Tao Lin-esque scare quotes, and Jep Gambardella himself laces the human-condition speech that closes the movie with blah-blah-blahs. Working in the tradition of Fellini means employing a received idiom, an old language that may have lost all connection to the real world, and Sorrentino's movie is more an exorcism of that idiom than a vote in its favor.

This preoccupation with period style doesn't excuse the film for its misogyny. Sorrentino treats women like scrollwork, decorative or symbolic elements on the periphery of the text who only influence the narrative when they're naked. People seem to have waved that away as an entrenched problem in Italian cinema, but that seems based on a cartoonish level of misunderstanding—recall that the 60s gave us, to name a few, Mamma Roma, Seduced and Abandoned, L'eclisse, Bitter Rice and La strada, each of which on its own sets a high bar for female characters that Sorrentino has failed to meet pretty disastrously.

In fact there are intimations of another movie, underneath all of the Fellinian stuff, whose style differs pretty wildly from the upper strata. Slow-motion camera, neon colors, low-key lights, and recurring motifs like drunk salarymen all suggest an idiom more engaged with the contemporary world than the one Sorrentino has adopted, an idiom that, while acknowledging its influences, keeps them at defamiliarized distance, like the tourists Jep praises. I loved The Great Beauty, but I'm waiting for a Great Italian Film in that idiom.

The Chameleon Circuit: Doctor Who and Postmodernism Lite

Postmodernism had been around for a while – since Borges, Nabokov, Rauschenberg and Warhol, but awareness of the phenomenon outside of France didn't blow up until the culture wars. The Yale School did most of its publishing in the eighties; campus speech code controversies picked up in the late eighties and early nineties; Harold and Allan Bloom (no relation!) wrote their big, fat books about the problems with intellectual culture around the end of the eighties; Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont wrote Fashionable Nonsense in the middle of the nineties.

This had a Reaganomic effect on culture: postmodernism trickled down from journals to grad schools to undergrad philosophy departments to high school English classes – where students now have to learn about "the other" – and, inevitably, into television. And what this trickling down congealed into, if you ask me, was the revival of a show called Doctor Who.

Doctor Who owes a lot of its popularity right now, I think, to the ways people think it differs from the "average" science fiction show. There's something about it that – speaking from personal experience, before I fell off the wagon – feels a little fresher than your average science fiction show, and I think it owes a lot of that to its adherence to the aesthetic dictates of a kind of Postmodernism Lite, the kind of Readers Digest postmodernism that you can explore in a forty-minute episode without cutting too many of the effects shots. But to explain exactly what that means, it's useful to look at the "average" science fiction show, and for that I'll turn, obviously, to Star Trek.

Marshall Berman defines two dominant threads in modernist expression: "cultural despair," the type practiced by Eliot, Faulkner, Sartre and Stravinsky, which is your average gloom and doom about anomie, alienation and ennui, and "modernolatry," the type found in the International Style and Futurism, which is all about enshrining the machine age, embracing globalism, and the belief that all social problems can be solved by strong central administration and efficient use of resources. This is the big utopian historical-narrative type of modernism that led to Pruitt-Igoe and the moon landings, and I don't think it's a stretch to see Star Trek (or at least the 1960s version) as an incarnation of it.

In fact, Star Trek really has it all: a multiethnic, utopian Worlds Fair of a crew who never broach the topic of race, a Futurist fetish for speed and violence, a progressive and omnipresent administration, and, most importantly, a highly self-contained and cohesive universe. It's true that there isn't a real geography in Star Trek (not there is in other fantasy, like Tolkien, anyway) but we know that when we encounter a Klingon, he isn't just a monster of the week; he's part of a faction that has institutions and politics of its own. We know that there's a Starfleet organization; there are things happening on Earth and on every planet that we visit. The crew are just the lens that we view things through; other stories, we can imagine, are being told elsewhere in the universe. The series works very hard to make sure that nothing in the show every breaks the illusion of the coherence of the universe – not the jokes, not the time travel, not even the music is allowed to interrupt the show's universe. Everything works on one register. In other words, it's a utopian, humanist, rationalist approach to constructing a fictional universe – an approach that's colored, I'd argue, by nothing as much as International Style modernist ideology.

Doctor Who, right from the beginning, has taken the opposite tack. There's no effective universal administration, no multiethnic crew members (at first, they're all white; as the show goes on it starts to deal halfheartedly with class and race), and certainly no preoccupation with speed and motion. In fact, there's no real sense of space as such in Doctor Who – the Tardis basically takes on whatever interior dimensions are convenient, and they never rationally fit inside of the phone box; moreover, it doesn't fly off into the stars like the Enterprise, it disappears and reappears somewhere else with apparently no motion involved at all. When characters do talk about "flying" the Tardis, it's abstracted and usually not particularly convincing; one of the show's running gags is how the knobs and levers in the Tardis can't really be assigned specific functions. It seems to move in some sort of frictionless way. The only real analog I can think of for the way the viewer understands the Tardis's motion is the hypertext link, actually: we find it in a new place, without even imagining that there might be intervening space between where it takes off and where it lands. Marinetti would be horrified.

But the real thing that I think sets Doctor Who apart from Star Trek, and from most science fiction shows in that mold, is its utter disregard for a cohesive universe. Doctor Who's focus on travel through time means that literally any character from any time period could potentially appear in any episode. This foregrounds the artificiality of the whole thing, demands that the reader view the episode not as one of many potential stories unfolding within a self-contained universe, but as something that could only happen under the exact circumstances of the episode. Even when the show does linger in one setting for a long time, even when it works at setting up a self-contained universe to inhabit for a few episodes, we're so colored by our experiences of all of the previous episodes and their own universes that we refuse to accept it on any level as absolute. Star Trek's universe has narrative impact because it feels new and fresh; the modernist ideal of art always plumbing new depths. The societies the Doctor encounters ultimately always seem like constructs, backdrops for the episodes, rather than places the viewer could really inhabit; their narrative impact comes simply from their exposure to the Doctor, and not from anything distinctive about themselves. A season of Doctor Who samples a lot of different settings; none of them suggests wider narrative any more than a three-second sample of the Amen Break really suggests the entirety of "Amen, Brother." Doctor Who's narrative avoids the totalizing, rationalist outlook that Star Trek seems so wedded to embraces meaning constructed out of the juxtaposition of elements, and throws in its lot with artificiality, irrationality, fragmentation and playful irony – all things that any freshman humanities textbook will tell you are emblematic of Postmodernism.

But clearly none of the really difficult aspects of Postmodernism come up in Doctor Who. Doctor Who is interested in the Nam Jun Paik/Grandmaster Flash kind of postmodernism, the kind that's fun and colorful and isn't heavy on theory. There's no micropolitics in the Tardis, no infinitely deferred meaning, no exploded subjectivity unless you count all the regenerations. For all its innovation, Doctor Who is ultimately humanist in the same stale way as Star Trek – it's more reductive in its humanism, certainly, but still humanist. Star Trek had the comfortable modernist belief that people, organized by administrators, could solve all their problems. Doctor Who also believes that people can solve all their problems, but legitimizes this, at least in the new series, not by endorsing universal government but simply by letting the Doctor talk about human potential until his face turns blue. It's always unconvincing, and it comes across, I've always thought, as a kind of ideological concession, a way of propitiating the ghost of Star Trek humanism even though Doctor Who, in the twenty-first century, knows a lot more than Star Trek about how insurmountable our problems are.
I read this as a real reluctance on the part of modern culture at large to embrace the kind of pessimistic outlook that Doctor Who's sense of rootlessness, isolation, fear and artificiality could engender. The audience is more than willing to consume Doctor Who if it tempers the threatening parts of its narrative with token humanism and whimsy. So as much as Doctor Who seems like it could qualify as a "postmodern" show on some level, it's really rooted in the same humanistic tradition as any other science fiction show that's on TV right now. It blends in, but it's smaller on the inside than the outside.