The Dark Heart of Italy (17 page)

In a culture which is so visual, and which eschews anything written, television has become the crucial source of infotainment. The time spent in front of TVs in Italy is on average, according to ISTAT, around 240 minutes per day (the figure creeps up each year). Which naturally means that, as an instrument of political propaganda, it is unrivalled. It reminds me of something Sofri had said, about how Italians outside prison live the same life as him, as if they were actually locked up and stuck in front of the television. It is also omnipresent: in most bars and even restaurants the noise of a football match or a garish quiz show will accompany conversation. If you walk down any street you will hear the drone of a dozen television sets.

I had expected television to be another example of Italian visual brilliance, a continuation of the enjoyable beauty and erotica. Instead, switching on the television was like introducing an insistent shopkeeper into the living room. Almost all the time, the TV was trying to sell me something. Programmes are interrupted by promotional messages, which are also euphemistically called ‘consumer advice’ by presenters who walk to another part of the studio to chat about a new product. Then a few minutes later there will be an advertising break proper: the volume of the TV, at least on the three Mediaset channels, actually increases during the ad breaks. Football matches, if there’s a pause for an injury or a free-kick, are interrupted and ‘the line returns to Rome’ for more consumer advice. Programmes, after a while, come to seem like sing-along fill-ins between the adverts, rather than vice-versa. (57% of all Italian advertising budgets are sunk into television; in Britain the figure is 33.5%, in Germany only 23%).

Watching the news is barely more engaging. Reports are accompanied by pop-music and proverbs. It’s seemingly obligatory on each day’s news to have a slot advertising a new Hollywood film, a slot on football, another on pop music and
finally a fashion story. During the summer, each edition of the ‘news’ is accompanied by the ‘deck-chair interview’, a slot in which beach-bums can talk about the latest tanning techniques. Or else an investigative reporter is dispatched, microphone in hand, to interview holiday-makers about the latest trend in sand-sports: beach volleyball or frisbee-throwing techniques. And (almost without exception) during the ‘news’ the whole system goes into melt-down, and the newscaster reaches for the phone on his desk. ‘Apologies, we’re having technical difficulties.’

Breasts are ubiquitous, even boringly so. It’s unthinkable to have a glitzy studio show without a troupe of dancing girls dressed up in bikinis, and often even less. During a recent election, one local television debate was hosted by a woman who, other than serving the men coffee, took off an item of clothing each time the political debate became tedious. A friend and I remained glued to the tedious discussion until she was stripped to the waist. A typical stunt from another show will have a woman in a bikini slipping into a glass bath tub filled with milk. To great yelps of delight from the studio, she will then strip off whilst hidden by the milk and pass the bikini to the excited presenter. Each channel has its own little starlet, who introduces the evening’s entertainment, addressing the viewers as
cari amici
, ‘dear friends’, and smiling at the camera as it zooms in on her shapely form (perfectly displayed as, hands behind her back, she swings her shoulders backwards and forwards, her top perforated by a ‘teardrop’ at the intersection of her bosom).

The best programme on Italian television is called ‘Blob’ (on RAI 3, the ‘Communist’ channel). It broadcasts out-takes from the cheapest TV of the previous 24 hours. It has a section called
protette
, a play on words which implies both ‘protection’ and ‘pro-tits’. It works, of course, because it pretends to be taking an ironic view of ‘scorching’ TV, whilst re-running all the best bits: bosoms falling out of skimpy dresses, female presenters pole-dancing to pop music, or else a famous politician enjoying a coy lap-dance. Another lead news item, towards the end of the year, is who is doing which calendar, and with which ‘artistic interpretation’. Actresses are interviewed in
soft-focus, with their twelve semi-naked photographs superimposed. A few weeks later, when you go to the
edicola
there are row upon row of these mildly sexy calendars, hanging up next to the Communist daily and various soft-porn videos.

All of which is nothing compared to the hype surrounding ‘Miss Italia’. Every year in Salsomaggiore, a small spa town near Parma, the most beautiful girls from throughout Italy gather to compete for the prize of becoming the country’s ‘Miss’. For an entire week the contest obsesses the nation: friends bet on likely winners, debate their various attributes. By the time of the gala final on Saturday, there’s nothing else on the peep-show television. Sofia Loren was a competitor in the 1950s, winning the runner-up award of ‘Miss Elegance’. Since the advent of the Northern League, there’s also a competition called ‘Miss Padania’.

It quickly becomes clear that Italy is the land that feminism forgot. It’s not that there aren’t many successful women in Italy, it’s that they’re never in the hungry public eye (unless they come with heaving cleavages). It’s hard to think of any female role models in Italy other than those confined to the role of television confectionery. With a few notable exceptions, the Italian parliament is a famously male domain. In one survey taken recently, it was analysed how much television time was dedicated to male and female governmental ministers: for every four hours of masculine chat, seven minutes were spent interviewing women ministers. On Berlusconi’s Mediaset channels, women were granted 57 seconds of air-time for the entire month of June (one half of one percent of the overall coverage). If they’re not tinsled starlets on television, lay women are simply famous for being mothers or relatives: women are rarely famous in their own right, but instead by virtue of their (virtuous) relationship to their men. Berlusconi often quotes his mother (‘as my mother once said about me – I’m a kind of wizard’); Cecchi Gori, president of Fiorentina football club, always used to sit next to his during Fiorentina football matches. To be close to a mother gives off an aura of goodness.

‘How on earth can you put up with all this nonsense?’ I once
asked one of my female students, noted for her firm, feminist opinions.

‘That,’ she said smiling, ‘is exactly what we ask of British food: how can you possibly swallow that rubbish?’

‘Fine. But the difference is that we don’t spend a third of our waking lives watching TV, consuming what’s been put on our plate by the country’s most powerful politician.’

‘Fine. But I would rather have crap television than crap food,’ she laughed.

Another instance of the importance of television in Italy is the fact that the country boasts a quarter of the world’s terrestrial channels: 640 of a total of 2,500. Most local channels have a sexy, middle-aged lady talking on the phone to a viewer as she displays her tarot cards on the carpeted table and narrates how much money you can win if you put the following numbers down for this week’s lottery. Others are dedicated solely to reading horoscopes or dispelling an amorous curse cast by a rival in love (there will be a mage, complete with aluminium foil mitre). Much the most common, though, are the channels selling dubious beauty products: for half an hour there might be a close-up of someone’s buttocks as little pads send electric shocks into the flesh. On other channels there will be a man, pretending to be outraged that he’s selling so much jewellery for so little money, placing plastic necklaces on busty girls.

As usual, I went to Filippo for an explanation. ‘What you don’t realise,’ he said, ‘what none of you British realise, is that Italy’s a cultural desert. You come here to gawp at buildings and chipped statues from 500 years ago, and imagine that we’re still at that level of cultural production. Which is, of course, absolute balls: Italy’s now, culturally, completely arid. If I were you I would go back to the 50s and 60s. Switch off the television and watch some old films instead …’

‘Italia, Oh Italia,’ wrote Byron, ‘thou who hast the fatal gift of beauty’.
It’s a line that could serve as the leitmotif for much of Italian cinema.
During their golden era in the 1950s and 1960s, Italian
auteurs
maintained a very ambiguous attitude towards the country’s pathological
need for beauty and eroticism. A series of self-reflective films
appreciated both the magnificence and dangers (the ‘fatality’) of
Italy’s visual culture
.

Visconti’s
Bellissima
is the prime example because it cuts both
ways: it is, as the title suggests, lush and stylish cinema, but the plot
is about the threat to society posed by the cinematic need for shallow
beauty. A film crew are holding auditions to find a child actress, and
one mother bankrupts her family and almost her morals in the
desire to see her child on the screen: ‘You don’t get if you don’t give’
says one of the film crew to her, seductively asking for either money
or sex. She does eventually see her child on screen, but only by spying
on the screen-tests where the film crew are ridiculing her daughter
.

It’s the same with Michelangelo
Antonioni
. ‘Beauty really is discomforting,’
says one of his characters in
La Notte,
as he pours himself
a death-bed glass of champagne whilst admiring the nurse. ‘Life would
be so much easier if there weren’t pleasure,’ says another character, the
writer, Giovanni
Pontani
, as he watches an erotic dancer whilst seated
next to his wife. The settings of
Antonioni’s
films could hardly be
more luxurious: the Aeolian islands and Sicily in
L’Avventura
(a
title which is also a euphemism for a fling), or the opulent party outside
Milan in
La Notte.
In both, the erotic temptations, the frisson of
sexual infidelity, cause excitement and agony. In both, the shadow of
disappearance and death falls across the frivolity, evoking the idea of
‘Eros and Thanatos’ where eroticism goes hand in hand with death,
the dissolution of the self. The very thing which makes his films so
beautiful to watch (languorous, moody women and their modern,
worldly men) is the same thing which makes them tragic and
emotionally depressing: human relationships don’t last, all pleasures
are ultimately hollow
.

Fellini’s
cinema shared the same themes and often the same
actors.
La Dolce Vita
was, like
Bellissima,
a self-referential film:
both a celebration and a critique of the new, glamorous world of
the cinema. And, like
La Notte,
it was a film about the thwarting
of literary ambition (even about the way in which the visual had
superseded the verbal). The film was denounced as ‘obscene’ by the
Catholic hierarchy when it came out. The
Vatican’s
mouthpiece
publication,
L’Osservatore Romano,
called it ‘disgusting’. The
intention of Fellini, though, was a moral one: ‘There is,’ he wrote,
‘a vertical line of spirituality that goes from the beast to the angel,
and on which we oscillate. Every day, every minute, carries the
possibility of losing ground, of falling down again toward the
beast
.’
2
La Dolce Vita
was an attempt to distinguish angelic
humanity from the bestial, and it duly became more than merely a
cheap take on loose-living. Thus the sexuality of the film is invariably
derided: the diva
Sylia
is simply a ‘kitten’ (she even places a
cat upon her head before the famous Trevi fountain scene). In that
bestial atmosphere, Marcello
Mastroianni’s
character concludes
‘morals aren’t right’. The result is a film that is both erotic and
numbing at the same time. Its scenes are, like
Antonioni’s
, a modernist
mixture of titillation and ennui. Everything, especially the
media circles Marcello moves in, seems exciting and yet soulless
.

Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s
most famous film, certainly the most brutal,
was an attempt to identify those fetishes of the flesh with Fascism.
Salò, a reworking of the Marquis de
Sade’s
120 Days of Sodom,
was
the story of young boys and girls selected for an orgiastic sojourn in
the dying days of Fascist Italy. It’s eroticism at its most obscene and
animalistic
. Characters don’t have names, only rank (the masochistic
Fascist is only ever referred to as
Il Presidente
). One boy is derided
as a ‘weak, chained creature’. The process of selecting the sexual
slaves is presented like a cattle market, as officers from the regime
compliment and criticise. ‘Little tits to give life to a dying man’ is the
observation on one girl; the lips of another are pulled back to reveal
imperfect teeth, and she’s rejected. The film is a litany of vices, sexual
and otherwise. Acts of religion are punishable by death; the eroticism
is legalistic, so that the sex represents obedience rather than
transgression. Against the soundtrack of lounge jazz, there’s also
pomposity. One Fascist reveller proclaims languidly: ‘I’m provoked
into making a certain number of interesting reflections …’ The only
possible conclusion from the film is that the path of pure hedonism
leads to a new kind of Fascism
.

The connections between Fascism and erotica were also made by
Bernardo
Bertolucci.
The Conformist
(adapted from Alberto
Moravia’s
novel) was, like all Italian cinema, a work of breathtaking
style. It was a film that influenced a generation of American
film-makers. Various scenes seem as immaculately posed as a painting:
the long white benches of the mental asylum, the enormous, empty
rooms of the Ministry where one of the
regime’s
officials is seducing
the woman sitting on his desk, hitching up her skirt and stroking
her thighs. Against the backdrop of a murder plot there’s the latent
lesbianism in Paris, the brothel in
Viareggio
, such that Fascism, at
least seen cinematically, appears highly
aestheticised
and eroticised.
Like Pasolini (with whom Bertolucci had worked on
Accattone
)
Bertolucci was deconstructing fetishism and Fascism, and tracing
the links between the two. Fascism, in fact, was a subject-matter
which produced probably his greatest film:
The Spider’s Stratagem.
It’s told in flashback: a young man has returned to his
father’s
village
to unveil a statue to his memory. He is set on unmasking the
murderer of his father, a famous anti-Fascist, and returns to the
village (in the flat
Emilian
plain) to visit his
father’s
mistress and
former friends. Only at the end does it become obvious that the
whole narration has been a lie, and that the hero of the story isn’t
quite what everyone thinks
.