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Copyrighted Material This material is subject to the copyright laws of the United States. (Title 17. US Code) NIETZSCHE, KRISTIANA, & MAHLER #3 Ten Essays on Psychology Seasons Kristiana 5/02 Ed Mendelowitz I LA STRADA & SOUL MURDER A Sort of Introduction Man with Two Faces Kristiana 3/98 This essay was written as part of a film series sponsored by the Boston Institute of Psychotherapy. The theme of this series changes from year to year but, here, focuses on the subject of crime and psychology. There was some initial discussion about whether Fellini’s early masterpiece constitutes a crime film at all, accustomed as we are to the sensational, lurid, and obvious. I argued, however, that La Strada presents us with the psychologist’s crime story, an exploration of what is going on underneath and within. The Godfather and L.A. Confidential may excite us with epic grandeur or Hollywood panache but cannot match the insights of the deeper artist whose brilliance is of a fundamentally psychological cast. Further, after we had seized upon a title for our series (Beyond Good and Evil: The Villain Within) it was difficult to turn away from a film which points precisely this way. Making my case from here was really quite easy. Still (and for plodding psychologists who have grown up on slide rules and bell curves and, hence, lend no credence to what they cannot measure or count), we have clearly enumerated, albeit parenthetically, the successive offences of the knave. The scaffolding for my essay is all but invisible, for our simple story really stands on its own. We have supported it ever so faintly with William Barrett’s Illusion of Technique (a book Zampano might well have benefited from reading) and Rollo May’s Power and Innocence (with its embrace of the contradictions embedded within) and, of course, with Nietzsche’s overarching Beyond Good and Evil as well. Though fond of Dostoyevsky and Kafka, Fellini was decidedly non-academic and did not frequently read fiction. Still, the extent to which his intuitive genius echoes the profundities of the literary masters is truly remarkable. And so, finally, we have intertwined our reflections briefly, though meaningfully, with that most famous meditation on hobos and humankind, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The Irishman too shared a fascination with vagabonds and existence, solitude and connection, diminution and the divine. Mostly, however, we have remained faithful to a text which speaks for itself, gone to our story to learn what it has to teach. Fellini would surely be pleased and have wanted it no other way. To me life is beautiful for all its tragedy and suffering. I am moved by it. I do my best to share this way of feeling with others. The message is perennial, the audience humanity, the messenger il maestro. Let us pass it quietly along . LA STRADA & SOUL MURDER A Tragicomedy “How should we live?” someone asked me in a letter. I had meant to ask him the same question. Again, and as ever, as may be seen above, the most pressing questions are naïve ones. Wislawa Szymborska, The Century’s Decline I am not a “therapeutic” artist, my films don’t suggest solutions or methods, they don’t put forward ideologies. All I do is bear witness to what happens to me, interpret and express the reality that surrounds me. If, through my films . people come to an equal awareness of themselves, then they have achieved the state of clear-sighted detachment . which is essential in making new choices, in bringing about [change]. Federico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini I believe . that what I care about most is the freedom of man, the liberation of the individual . from the network of moral and social convention in which he believes, or rather in which he thinks he believes, [but] which encloses him and limits him and makes him seem narrower, smaller, . even worse than he really is. If you really want me to turn teacher, then condense it with these words: be what you are . discover yourself . To me life is beautiful, for all its tragedy and suffering . I am moved by it . I do my best to share this way of feeling with others. Federico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini La Strada will remain the crucial point in my life. [It] is really the complete catalogue of my entire mythical world. Federico Fellini We are definitely in the presence of a poet who is like no one else and in whom we should have total confidence. Charensol on Fellini It starts by the sea, as it always does. We see Gelsomina from afar, void of face or personality. She comes from the sea, is identified with it, guileless and fluid. And then the leave-taking, the American-made motorcycle, the man of the world and the lure. “I’ll be an artiste. I’ll sing and dance—like Rosa.” Rosa’s invocation is cryptic and oblique, possibly important. Perhaps she recalls a time when Zampano was still open and hopeful, when his mobile home promised adventure and drama, even love. Long before our film begins, Zampano has lost something he will never find again. Do not be misled by the evocative symbols—the crossed swords, the snake and mermaid. They are smoke and mirrors. For Zampano it is over before it begins. He equates Gelsomina’s apprenticeship to the training of dogs, knows his Pavlov. Zampano is here. Gelsomina is Zampano’s antipode. She is infused with childlike wonder and intelligence, sees in the virginal road the possibility of path and vitality, dimly perceiving that her journey begins with a monetary transaction that will come increasingly to define the utilitarian nature of life on the road. As she bids farewell to sea and family, she drops her bundle of brushwood (gelsomina means “jasmine” in Italian, with its intimations of sunlight and earth) and bids unwitting farewell to the harmony of nature. She climbs into Zampano’s van and embarks, unknowingly, upon a treadmill existence of linearity, subordination, rote and routine. As she disappears behind Zampano’s black curtain so do our own souls recede. Zampano, true to his word, trains and treats Gelsomina like a dog. (Crime #1: behaviorism.) “Do only what I tell you. Zampano is here.” He thrashes her with a switch when she shows too much ingenuity (refuses to learn her line and place) and takes her by force on the first night (crime #2: rape) but dodges even the most pedestrian questions about himself, ridicules her desire for more meaningful contact. “Where are you from? Where were you born?” The muscleman is beyond encounter. The scene in which Gelsomina tries on various hats is laden with poignancy: she is becoming acquainted with the tedium of the mundane (which may inhere, she discovers, even in show business), begins to identify freedom with imagination and escape though these too will be quashed by authority. Zampano needs a drumbeater, not a human being or, God forbid, spontaneity. Do only what I tell you, Zampano is here. A quarter of an inch thick, stronger than steel, the faint-hearted ought look away. Zampano’s appreciation of the woman is measured in instrumental terms, what she can do for him. The gun-and-duck routine is a big success (a rare expression of the simple merging of love and work) but quickly followed by Zampano’s abandonment of Gelsomina for a prostitute. Gelsomina’s cape (its wings suggesting flight and fancy) is replaced by drab and oversized military garb. There is no place along the pedestrian trail for Daedalus flights or lighthearted souls. Institutionalized experience, uniforms and uniformity, repetition compulsion, the child Oswaldo (like Gelsomina herself, “strange” and “hidden,” “not like the others”1) quarantined far from the gaze of the quotidian world. Frank Burke elaborates astutely the mounting tension between head and body, spirit and matter, angel and beast which Fellini so deftly sketches during that hallowed scene in which ineffability and the holy are glimpsed: Oswaldo’s name means “the power of godliness”; Gelsomina must ascend a flight of stairs to reach him; he is guarded by a religious representative2 . Gelsomina’s encounter with him is profound, numinous . awe-inspiring. At the same time, Zampano is on ground level, gulping down food, talking with the self-assertively physical Theresa . about to descent [to] the cellar [for] sex. As Gelsomina’s intelligence develops and as Zampano continues to repress his own, they begin to live their lives on separate levels. In this instance—and indicative of what will recur throughout the film—she ends up back down on his . defeated by his unfeeling behavior. Zampano, in short, is one of the multitudes for whom, as William Barrett observes, “the sense of mystery simply [does] not exist.” It is here, in the moment of love’s defeat (which takes place, paradoxically, on the occasion of a wedding3), that the memory of a song once heard on the radio first enters into Gelsomina’s mind. It is the projection of meaning out of the immanent world and into the ether, a foregoing of reality for substitute consciousness. That ironic wink exchanged between Zampano and Gelsomina says it all: the moment of seeming communion signals nothing but deceit. Sex for a pinstripe suit. (Crime #3: prostitution.) Gelsomina’s song—the plaintive voice of an atrophied soul—comes, like the sea, from afar (surrogate harmony), rushes in to fill the void left by loneliness and shrinkage. “Remember how nice it was, Zampano, that rainy day by the window?” Zampano hasn’t a clue. When Gelsomina tries to run off, she makes it clear that it is because of the failure of love and not work.