An Existentialist
Interpretation of the Last Scene of
Fellini’s Film, “La
Dolce Vita,” (“The Sweet Life”)(1960)
“It’s a monster! It’s been dead for three days!”—Partygoers shout after discovering a giant bloated stingray fish on a beach.
The dead stingray represents spiritual death, nihilism, alienation, and the state of falleness of a particular state of human consciousness. There are other terms of this mode of human existence the Existentialist philosophers use to describe this shape of consciousness such as the “they,” or “Das Man,” (The ‘averageman’) and as “inauthentic existence.” All these words attempt to name a form of personal consciousness that is not “owned” by itself, but lacking self-responsibility while self-deceptively seeking refuge from the anxious uncertainty characteristic of human freedom in its struggle for complete self-actualization. All of these phenomenological concepts are very abstract and material examples, which this film provides, are very helpful for giving them intelligible content. “Phenomenology” is the science of appearances, or φαινόμενον, the Greek term for “phenomenon” meaning to bring to light, make to appear, to show, combined with λόγος, ”logos” of which one of its meanings is study “of the subject,” as in “anthrop-ology.”
I have written about Heidegger’s philosophy before in a more formal way in the essay, “Dasein Analytic.” Writing about authentic and unauthentic Being requires a different kind of thinking that is richly expressive, which can put living flesh back onto these abstract reductionist concepts that attempt to illuminate the essential structures of human existence. Fellini’s film makes this kind of analysis much easier, fun, and even more relevant.
The film’s main character, Marcello Rubini, is a writer for Italian gossip magazines during the 1960s and is gradually pulled into, but also attracted to, the “sweet life” (“dolce vita”) of wealthy high society circles in Rome. This being one of Fellini’s most famous films, La Dolce Vita, is divided into seven episodes each tracing Marcello’s desperate effort to escape himself ending in the last scene on an Italian beach where he is on the verge of having insight into his own existence. Marcello represents a necessary and essential existential stage of human ‘mind,’ or ‘spirit’ (the German term ‘Geist’ has both meanings) that suffers from the anxiety of human existence. In an effort to escape, he embraces pleasure as an end in itself. Hegel quotes Goethe’s play “Faust” to describe this individualistic hedonistic consciousness aimed at fulfillment of desire as its only purpose in the Phenomenology of Spirit (paragraph 360):
“Instead of the seemingly heavenly spirit of the universality of knowing and doing in which the feeling and the gratification of singular individuality fall silent, the spirit of the earth has entered into it, a spirit to whom the only being which counts as the true actuality is that of the actuality of singular consciousness.
A stingray is sometimes called a devil fish. For Heidegger, the character of Marcello would epitomize the average man, or the public “they” of all other human beings. In, Being and Time (1927)(pdf.), Heidegger wrote, “The ‘they’ has its own ways in which to be. That tendency… is grounded in the fact that Being-with-one-another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the ‘they’ (Being and Time, p.164).” Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of consciousness characterized this hedonistic mind—the spirit of the earth--as the self that allows the average-everydayness of an anonymous public “they” to prescribe “…one's state-of-mind, and determines what and how one 'sees' (Ibid., p. 213).” The concept of “seeing” plays an essential part of the person given over to endless hedonistic search for pleasure in the forms of spectacle, and novelty to achieve some sense of a substantial life; a world in which the subject (person) takes for granted they belong and are freely a part of that world.
Curiosity, Looking, and Seeing of the “They”
“Even at an early date (and in Greek philosophy this was no accident) cognition was conceived in terms of the 'desire to see’.”--(Being and Time, p. 214)
Heidegger uses other words for special kinds of sight or seeing using his clever etymological kinship studies such as 'Umsicht' meaning “circumspection” for example (Ibid., p.159, Footnote 3). Sight (‘Sicht’) is the ability to see, or vision. On the other hand, seeing (‘Sehen’) is the ability to comprehend, recognize, and understand what is seen. In the English language, sight without seeing can mean, “looking” as when one says, “I am looking for the beacon, but do not see it!” or “I saw him, but did not recognize my old friend.”
These distinctions are important for understanding the particular way that the hedonistic self continually seeks seeing, but without comprehension. This particular “I” consciousness relates itself to the world in a mode of Being called “curiosity.” Heidegger describes this comportment of inauthentic human existence:
“The basic state of sight shows itself in a peculiar tendency-of-Being which belongs to everydayness-the tendency towards 'seeing'. We designate this tendency by the term "curiosity" [Neugier], which characteristically is not confined to seeing, but expresses the tendency towards a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered by us in perception (Ibid., p. 214).”
Historically, science is understood as having its genesis in the desire to see, but within inauthentic Being consciousness distracts itself from the issues of its own existential meaning. Seeing is a release from anxiety for inauthentic Being, but it fails to have understanding and comprehension for the person is only seeking sensation, or merely engaged in voyeurism. Voyeurism is one way consciousness abandons the world by superficially embracing the world.
“When curiosity has become free, however, it concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen (that is, to come into a Being towards it) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. In this kind of seeing, that which is an issue for care does not lie in grasping something and being knowingly in the truth; it lies rather in its possibilities of abandoning itself to the world (Ibid., p. 216).”
This kind of seeing is only one form of an idolatry of perception; another being natural-scientific reductionist empiricism in which perception is assumed to be immaculate, or received as purely objective without acknowledging the shaping influence the grasp of consciousness has on our experience. This school of empiricism then attempts to use its credentials as science to become a philosophy of life leading to the violation of human values with disastrous consequences.
One film reviewer summed up the character of Marcello as "detached." I used the term "alienation" to describe him, but Marcello is too detached to be alienated. All of the characters in the movie are ghosts, including two murdered children, in the sense they have an exterior appearance mirroring an internal struggle for spiritual meaning, for a substantial life, for a happy life.
In this mode of Being existence is “ambiguous” making it “…impossible to decide what is disclosed in a genuine understanding, and what is not (Ibid., p. 217)." Ambiguity is the inability of the self to distinguish between the authentic and unauthentic, between the substantial and unsubstantial in one’s own life, Others, and the world. Ambiguity is ignorance that signifies modal confusion. Like the dead devil fish monster on the beach, Marcello can look, but he cannot see.
Chatter and Idle talk
Heidegger describes as inauthentic the hedonistic individual consciousness oriented toward pleasure, superficial seeing; insincere averageness lacking depth; and endless curiosity that divides itself into infinite individual moments in which the fractured self loses its identity. These attributes are named “existentials,” and refer exclusively to the essential structures of human existence, and not to objects. Heidegger adds yet another existential,” named, “chatter” as a particular degenerated form of human discourse that has no understanding, and is just “Idle talk” based on conventional uncritical opinions functioning as yet another escape mechanism to avoid thinking, risk, and responsibility. Chatter filibusters any real commitment to a meaningful life such as this gossip columnist’s endlessly journey skipping from disconnected media event to media event:
“Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one's own. … Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer…idle talk discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in a peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back (Ibid., p. 213)."
The Second, “Second Coming”
"The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own (idios kosmos)." "Hearing they do not understand, like the deaf. Of them does the saying bear witness: 'present, they are absent.’ “--Heraclitus
For the Greek word “idios,” the term “idiot” is formed to mean a private “individual,” and “kosmos” meaning “cosmos” or “world.”
Marcello and his party crowd stumble out of a beach house after enduring a boring night-long half-hearted orgy—I just hate those! They spill out into the beach parking lot and hear men calling out in surprise as they pull a giant string ray fish onto the shore. One fisherman suggested to the exhausted orgy partiers the fish could be sold for a large profit. This last scene’s “Second Coming” of the Devil Fish is as sarcastic as the first scene’s return of Jesus as archaic symbolism.
At first, the party mistake the stingray dragged up in the fishermen’s net as being alive, but the fishermen knew it had been dead for three days. Dead for three days: Lent fasting is during the six weeks before Easter, after the Carnival orgy. This moment carries for Marcello only the possibility of insight into authentic existence: an Either/Or moment of existential decision.
Marcello displays utter disgust and contempt for the alien creature which in turn encourages the others to mock the rotting inhuman corpse with its eyes wide open staring at the crowd; without any empathy, a smirking Marcello takes great pleasure speaking for the crowd declaring, “And it insists on looking.” Marcello is smirking at himself while summing up his own spiritually dead meaningless life.
The hedonistic nihilist mode of Being, “…experiences the double meaning implicit in what it did, viz. when it took hold of life and possessed it; but in doing so it really laid hold of death.”--Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph, 363.
The hung-over and exhausted Marcello wanders to the side of the crowd, and as he sits down on the beach, he hears a voice calling; a voice in the distance across an estuary where a river divides the beach and pours out into the open ocean. But Marcello is unable to hear the young girl, or understand what she is trying to say to him as the ocean waves drown out her voice.
For Marcello the “…pleasure enjoyed has indeed the positive significance that self-consciousness has become objective to itself, but equally it has the negative one of having reduced itself to a moment…its experience is of a contradiction in which the attained reality of its individuality sees itself destroyed by the negative essence confronting it, which is devoid of reality and content, and which yet is the power which destroys it…the poorest form of self-realizing Spirit….(Ibid., para: 363).”
Marcello is kneeling on the beach facing the angelic young girl as she calls out to him. He does not recognize her as the young waitress named Paola he encountered in a seaside restaurant days earlier. Marcello was working on a book while Paola hummed along with the jukebox. Marcello told Paola she reminded him of an angel in an Umbrian painting. Painter Raphael is the most famous painter of the High Renaissance Umbrian School of Art. “Paola” (Pow-la) is the Italian and Spanish feminine form of the name “Paul” which in this context has a religious meaning pointing to the appearance of Christ symbolizing the Substantial Life.
Scientific and unscientific symbolism shares a common ground in a wonderful synthesis of thought and existence, of Being and consciousness. The two different elements of Language that bears the power of logic, and Mythic-Symbols are unified by metaphor (Language and Myth, Ernst Cassirer, 1948). However, for Marcello all symbolism has lost meaning having been reduced to curious isolated images, and odd trinkets unable to point beyond themselves to truth: without truth, Marcello has no possibility of freedom. This is not a tautology. A person is not truly free if rational decisions of choice cannot be made by independent knowledge. Marcello’s consciousness makes it impossible for him to achieve any Great Awakening.
Marcello suffers forgetfulness, of a sense of loss, and the sense of having a debt outstanding. He is on the spiritually dead side of the mythological river of λήθη (Lethe) meaning “forgetfulness,” or “oblivion.” The souls entering the mythic Underworld of Hades drank from the river Lathe to forget they were dead. The letter ἀ is a negative prefix, or alpha privative. The Greek word for "Truth" is ἀληθείᾳ (a-lethea) that means the negation of forgetting, or “remembering.”
According to Johannine Christology the Logos has a face. Marcello is unable to recognize a substantial life even as it is disclosed to him as the face of the Other.
Parody only reinforces the Holy. This film was understandably criticized by the Vatican, and unfortunately banned in many states for parodying the second coming of Jesus; but below the surface of cultural symbolic imagery the film is actually very religious in its attempt to reach for a spiritual dimension in a negative way; however, it may not have been intended by the film makers. The first words for religion must be words against religion the Christian Theologian, Paul Tillich, counseled religious thinkers.
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