LA STRADA & SOUL MURDERA Sort of Introduction

Man with Two Faces Kristiana 3/98

This essay was written as part of a film series sponsored by the BostonInstitute of Psychotherapy. The theme of this series changes from year to yearbut, here, focuses on the subject of crime and psychology. There was some initialdiscussion about whether Fellini’s early masterpiece constitutes a crime film atall, accustomed as we are to the sensational, lurid, and obvious. I argued,however, that La Strada presents us with the psychologist’s crime story, anexploration of what is going on underneath and within. The Godfather and L.A.Confidential may excite us with epic grandeur or Hollywood panache but cannotmatch the insights of the deeper artist whose brilliance is of a fundamentallypsychological 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 afilm which points precisely this way. Making my case from here was really quiteeasy. Still (and for plodding psychologists who have grown up on slide rules andbell curves and, hence, lend no credence to what they cannot measure or count),we have clearly enumerated, albeit parenthetically, the successive offences ofthe knave.

The scaffolding for my essay is all but invisible, for our simple storyreally stands on its own. We have supported it ever so faintly with WilliamBarrett’s Illusion of Technique (a book Zampano might well have benefited fromreading) and Rollo May’s Power and Innocence (with its embrace of thecontradictions embedded within) and, of course, with Nietzsche’s overarchingBeyond Good and Evil as well. Though fond of Dostoyevsky and Kafka, Felliniwas decidedly non-academic and did not frequently read fiction. Still, the extentto which his intuitive genius echoes the profundities of the literary masters istruly 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 afascination with vagabonds and existence, solitude and connection, diminutionand the divine. Mostly, however, we have remained faithful to a text whichspeaks for itself, gone to our story to learn what it has to teach. Fellini wouldsurely be pleased and have wanted it no other way. To me life is beautiful for allits tragedy and suffering. I am moved by it. I do my best to share this way offeeling with others. The message is perennial, the audience humanity, themessenger il maestro. Let us pass it quietly along . . .

LA STRADA & SOUL MURDERA 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 questionsare naïve ones.

Wislawa Szymborska,The Century’s Decline

I am not a “therapeutic” artist, my films don’tsuggest solutions or methods, they don’t putforward ideologies. All I do is bear witness towhat happens to me, interpret and express thereality that surrounds me. If, through my films .. . people come to an equal awareness ofthemselves, then they have achieved the stateof clear-sighted detachment . . . which isessential in making new choices, in bringingabout [change].

Federico Fellini,Fellini on Fellini

I believe . . . that what I care about most is thefreedom of man, the liberation of the individual. . . from the network of moral and socialconvention in which he believes, or rather inwhich he thinks he believes, [but] whichencloses him and limits him and makes himseem narrower, smaller, . . . even worse than hereally is. If you really want me to turn teacher,then condense it with these words: be what youare . . . discover yourself . . . To me life isbeautiful, for all its tragedy and suffering . . . Iam moved by it . . . I do my best to share thisway 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 myentire mythical world.

Federico Fellini

We are definitely in the presence of a poet whois like no one else and in whom we should havetotal confidence.

Charensol on Fellini

It starts by the sea, as it always does. We see Gelsomina from afar, voidof face or personality. She comes from the sea, is identified with it, guileless andfluid. And then the leave-taking, the American-made motorcycle, the man of theworld and the lure. “I’ll be an artiste. I’ll sing and dance—like Rosa.” Rosa’sinvocation is cryptic and oblique, possibly important. Perhaps she recalls a timewhen Zampano was still open and hopeful, when his mobile home promised

adventure and drama, even love. Long before our film begins, Zampano has lostsomething he will never find again. Do not be misled by the evocativesymbols—the crossed swords, the snake and mermaid. They are smoke andmirrors. For Zampano it is over before it begins. He equates Gelsomina’sapprenticeship to the training of dogs, knows his Pavlov. Zampano is here.

Gelsomina is Zampano’s antipode. She is infused with childlike wonderand intelligence, sees in the virginal road the possibility of path and vitality,dimly perceiving that her journey begins with a monetary transaction that willcome increasingly to define the utilitarian nature of life on the road. As she bidsfarewell to sea and family, she drops her bundle of brushwood (gelsominameans “jasmine” in Italian, with its intimations of sunlight and earth) and bidsunwitting farewell to the harmony of nature. She climbs into Zampano’s vanand embarks, unknowingly, upon a treadmill existence of linearity,subordination, rote and routine. As she disappears behind Zampano’s blackcurtain 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 thrashesher with a switch when she shows too much ingenuity (refuses to learn her lineand place) and takes her by force on the first night (crime #2: rape) but dodgeseven the most pedestrian questions about himself, ridicules her desire for moremeaningful contact. “Where are you from? Where were you born?” Themuscleman is beyond encounter. The scene in which Gelsomina tries on varioushats is laden with poignancy: she is becoming acquainted with the tedium of themundane (which may inhere, she discovers, even in show business), begins toidentify freedom with imagination and escape though these too will be quashedby 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 oughtlook away. Zampano’s appreciation of the woman is measured in instrumentalterms, what she can do for him. The gun-and-duck routine is a big success (a rareexpression of the simple merging of love and work) but quickly followed byZampano’s abandonment of Gelsomina for a prostitute. Gelsomina’s cape (itswings suggesting flight and fancy) is replaced by drab and oversized militarygarb. There is no place along the pedestrian trail for Daedalus flights orlighthearted 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 quotidianworld. Frank Burke elaborates astutely the mounting tension between head andbody, spirit and matter, angel and beast which Fellini so deftly sketches duringthat hallowed scene in which ineffability and the holy are glimpsed:

Oswaldo’s name means “the power ofgodliness”; Gelsomina must ascend a flight ofstairs to reach him; he is guarded by a religious

representative2 . . . Gelsomina’s encounter withhim is profound, numinous . . . awe-inspiring. Atthe 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’sintelligence develops and as Zampano continuesto repress his own, they begin to live their liveson separate levels. In this instance—andindicative of what will recur throughout thefilm—she ends up back down on his . . .defeated by his unfeeling behavior.

Zampano, in short, is one of the multitudes for whom, as William Barrettobserves, “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 onceheard on the radio first enters into Gelsomina’s mind. It is the projection ofmeaning out of the immanent world and into the ether, a foregoing of realityfor substitute consciousness. That ironic wink exchanged between Zampano andGelsomina says it all: the moment of seeming communion signals nothing butdeceit. Sex for a pinstripe suit. (Crime #3: prostitution.) Gelsomina’s song—theplaintive voice of an atrophied soul—comes, like the sea, from afar (surrogateharmony), rushes in to fill the void left by loneliness and shrinkage. “Rememberhow nice it was, Zampano, that rainy day by the window?” Zampano hasn’t aclue.

When Gelsomina tries to run off, she makes it clear that it is because ofthe failure of love and not work. “I’m fed up,” she complains; “It’s not from thework. It’s you I don’t like.” So she steps back to the road, soon lost for direction,until she hears the call of music once more, dances off in pursuance of muse onlyto find herself lost in the provincial town and crowd and the narrow streets andoverwhelmed by the Church’s solemnity, pomp, and gravity. Introduce now IlMatto and our dialectic is fully drawn. Il Matto, “the Fool” and angel whomaterializes from a shadow, suspended in air (high above and ungrounded),ethereal in his essence and calling yet foreshadowing his own crucifixion with hiscrossbar and rope; and Zampano, the strongman and beast who remains low tothe ground, moves with leaden feet but discloses few signs of life above the neckand the chest. Such normative conceptions of good and evil bring to mind thewords of the philosopher who informs our central theme. In Beyond Good andEvil, Nietzsche decries a psychology “stuck in moral prejudices” and “has notdared to descent [to] the depths,” pointing instead to one which might trulyfunction as “the queen of sciences”—one proceeding with subtlety and nuance.For the moment, however, all is weight and travesty. The reunion of Gelsominaand Zampano is ungraceful: she resists and he beats her. (Crime #4, we are sadto report, is battery.)

Our motley trio now find themselves thrown together into the GiraffaCircus, its very name underscoring (with unnatural separation of head and body)

our essential conflict: angel and beast, mind and body, good versus evil. Thepressure mounts as the mercurial Il Matto cannot resist mocking thevainglorious strongman who survives to survive, without imagination or joy.“Such a variety of numbers! A circus needs animals!” Zampano can only provethe Fool’s point in tiresome reenactment of his timeworn performance. (“Habit,”says Beckett’s Vladimir, “is a great deadener.”) Zampano’s dumbly repeatedroutine (without imagination, evolution, or awe) is not so different from theway many of us live our lives (what are standardized and “managed” notions ofmental health, in the end, but the diminution of possibility and experience?), thegesture thus underscoring the bankruptcy of the isolated ego and act. Fellinidescribes this as a sort of “monadism” which “permeates the very essence of our[lives] . . . the world of atoms here carried to extremes.” “You may not beprofessors,” boasts Zampano, “but any intelligent person knows you need threethings—healthy lungs, ribs of steel, and superhuman strength.” And we whoknow the world and road too well can only nod in abject concession to the self-sufficient man who acts, like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, “for myself, for myselfalone.” “Magnifico!” taunts Il Matto even before Zampano completes hishackneyed performance, and then the knife-wielding pursuit. (Crime #5: armedassault.)

Zampano’s unspoken crime lies in his inability to survey the innerlandscape, the higher path—“to see life clearly and see it whole” as Sophocleshas said. Time and again, he misses those roadside possibilities without whichthe journey is void of all human meaning. And if Il Matto errs in an opposite way(his affected manner and ridiculous laugh let us know that he, too, is deformed),he at least still believes in those moments of grace which occur just to the side ofthe inexorable trail. In a world of strong-arm tactics and high-wire acts anddelimiting institution, it is the Fool who is still able to respond to Gelsomina’syearning. “What a funny face you have, like an artichoke.” “I’m no good toanyone and I’m tired of living. What am I here for on this earth?” “Maybe heloves you. A dog looks at you and wants to talk but only barks. If you don’t staywith him who will?” When Gelsomina concludes, however misguidedly, that herdestiny is to remain with Zampano, Il Matto makes it clear (albeit travelingupward in opposite direction) that he, like the muscleman, has become inured tothe solitary way. “I don’t need anybody. That’s how I am. Addio, Gelsomina.Ciao.” He leaves Gelsomina with a stone and philosophical abstractions he hasread in a book as she continues to lose touch with her own spontaneity and self.Rollo May teaches aptly, “powerlessness corrupts.”

Weary and disillusioned, Gelsomina now finds a last vestige of peacedeep inside the convent. “It’s raining, it’s nice here,” she sighs. It reminds her ofthe day by the window. “Don’t you ever think about anything?” she asksZampano. “There’s nothing to think about,” he rejoins; “Go to sleep.”4 WhereasGelsomina finds here momentary respite Zampano sees only another chance toindulge opportunism as he tries to make off with silver hearts. (Crime #6 is

larceny.) The offense here is one more demonstration of Zampano’s self-encapsulation. He cannot open up to anyone or thing in any genuine way,neither person nor ideal. “She helps a little—beats the drum, blows the trumpet,”he concedes to the nun. Anything but acknowledgement of bond or affection.5 Itis, we may say, a protest from the shorelines of oblivion.

And make no mistake, Fellini’s church is not Lourdes. “We too travel,”says the nun, “so we don’t get attached to worldly things, like the place whereone lives or a plant even, thereby forgetting the most important thing. We bothtravel—you with your husband and me with mine.” Normative, thoughtouching, theology. Fellini treats schematic conceptions of belief and deity, faithand existence with skepticism and irony. He seeks “emancipation fromconventional schemes . . . [a retrieval] of an authenticity of life rhythms, of lifemodes, of vital cadences”—the idea, he says, found “in all of my films” and, wemay add, not merely in a book. The filmmaker points us beyond ordainednotions of good and evil—conceptions, says Nietzsche, “without nuance.” Heaims toward “a way of living without prejudice . . . [or] preconceived ideas”pointing us thereby toward a dialectic within. “When someone says ‘God isdeath,’” writes Fellini, “it means merely that the demand for God is seen in apurer, more uncorrupted form . . . Man is not just a social being, he is divine.”The filmmaker espouses a “romany” (gypsy-like) spirit of “companionship anddaily discovery and constant moving on.” Such romany spirit is precluded byinstitution and system no less than by ego. As Gelsomina departs, we see thenun standing in the shadow of an overarching cross: another crucifixion ineffect.

And then it is back to the road for the final travesty. “Zampano! Stop it!He’s hurt, he’s hurt!” “Shut up! Shut up, I said!” (Crime #7 is manslaughter.)With his flattened tire, our high-wire Icarus is brought low to the ground, theclump of earth and grass in his fist chiding his very presumption of unmodulatedflight: Zampano simply finishes off the job. With this final blow, Gelsomina nowretreats utterly from the world in sympathy with the fallen aerialist. She hasbeen called “matta” (feminine form of “matto”) at several points in the film inanticipation of this moment. With only her song as solace, Gelsomina driftsresignedly upward, the possibility of inner balance now in utter forfeiture. AsMelville says of Billy Budd, “innocence was [her] blinder.”

Zampano at times seems on the verge of awareness as he observesGelsomina’s heartrending dissolution but lives too much on the surface and inthe ego, cannot penetrate the heart which lies embedded beneath those idioticpectoral muscles of his. “I just want to work in peace. Haven’t I that right?”Work without love, the yoke and the road—the modern-day ethos we all knowquite well. Gelsomina herself is no longer among the living and hears now acelestial sound. “It’s alright here. The Fool is hurt.” “This can’t go on! I’ve got tomake a living!” shouts Zampano; “You’re sick! You’re sick up here!” “You killedhim. It’s all right here. I wanted to run away but he told me to stay. We need

more wood. The fire’s going out.” Zampano’s inner light was extinguished longago. As Gelsomina drifts off into sleep and Zampano steals back to the road, theverdict is rendered with fateful solemnity: good and evil, angel and beast, at lastirreconcilable.

Fellini is one of our master psychoanalysts. He is forever concerned withthe nature of things, the ways in which we human beings live and mostly donot—the manner in which we are blinded by illusion and pretense, cut off fromthe very connections (within and without) that might offer reprieve. From theearliest points, he is meditating on the nature of good and evil, dream andreality, illusion and life. The real crime in the end is one of soul-murder, tooubiquitous a transgression to be prosecuted by external agency. Assault andbattery, murder and rape, theft and behaviorism—these are outwardmanifestations of an inmost offense. “Violence,” writes May, “is a symptom.”Here, too, the Italian director shows uncommon perspicacity when he writes of“two psychological aspects—one which aims upward, the otherdownward—“two divided, separated instincts”:

There is a vertical line in spirituality that goesfrom the beast to the angel and on which weoscillate. Every day, every minute carries thedanger of losing ground.

Moving beyond good and evil implies getting back to the heart with insight,perhaps, as midwife and guide. Evident here is the salience of the feminine(what Fellini calls the “poetry of woman” or “feminine affectiveness”), an inwarddynamic and tension leading to “a reconciliation of opposites, unity of being”—aprocess Martin Buber had called “heart-searching.” From here the return toworld and relationship would be easy.

Quoting an ancient Chinese saying, the physicist Werner Heisenbergreminds us that dedication to mechanistic pursuits makes one act

in a machine-like manner. Whoever does hisbusiness in the manner of a machine develops amachine heart. Whoever has a machine heart inhis breast loses . . . simplicity. Whoever loses . . .simplicity becomes uncertain in . . . impulses of .. . spirit. Uncertainty in . . . impulses of . . . spiritis something . . . incompatible with truth.

“Technique,” writes Barrett, “has no meaning apart from some informing vision.”Fellini echoes:

We live in an age that has made a cult ofmethodology, that makes us weakly believethat scientific or ideological [concerns] have theedge over reality . . . [One] is suspicious offantasy, of . . . originality, in other words ofpersonality.

Would that Zampano knew Lao-tzu, read a few verses from the Tao te Chingevery day. There he would find instructions for a more subtleway—endorsement of the supple and soft, the flow of the time and existencerather than the solitary yoke of the road.

Fellini himself suggests a work ethic quite different from Zampano’s.“[W]ork, to me, is a complete part of life,” he writes; “I cannot do it in detached,professional way”:

A film is a living reality . . . I don’t want to makea mystery of my work, but I would like to saythat my system is to have no system: I go to astory to discover what it has to tell me.

Applaud the great Zampano, the man with iron lungs. We hear it every daywhile heart and soul go wanting, subsist on glimpses of reality dimly perceivedin snatches of song and fleeting encounters along the way. Zampano’s road isevery pragmatist’s road, Gelsomina’s retreat every innocent’s ascension, goodand evil emblematic of every unsubtle dichotomy.

Yet there is atonement at last and in precisely the way in whichpsychology would have it. Zampano evades authority but ends his life backwhere it began, as it always does, by the sea. “I have no friends. I don’t needanybody. I want to be left alone.” The final time we observe Zampano’sperformance the image dissolves before the strongman even breaks his chain.From the start it has been an anticlimactic charade, another impotent protestfrom one of life’s roadside casualties. In his drunken stupor (crime #8—if anyoneis still counting—is disorderly conduct, substance abuse), Zampano turns hisgaze heavenward to the fathomless expanse and the mystery of things, discernshis destitute failure in identification with those vast empty spaces reflecting anirredeemable poverty within. The beast now collapses in utter defeat and, asFitzgerald would say, the holocaust is complete.

Zampano does not say a thing but if he would and could it might soundvery much like words uttered by Beckett’s Vladimir, for whom epiphany alsocomes in the midst of solitude. Let us read them together:

Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am Isleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or thinkI do, what shall I say of to-day? That withEstragon my friend, at this place, until the fallof night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed,with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? . . Butin all that what truth will there be? (Estrogen,having struggled with his boots in vain, isdozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.) He’llknow nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows hereceived and I’ll give him a carrot. (Pause.)Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down inthe hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts onthe forceps. We have time to grow old. The airis full of our cries. (He listens . . . He looks again

at Estrogen.) At me too someone is looking, ofme too someone is saying, He is sleeping, heknows nothing, let him sleep on.

Speaking of his early masterpiece, Fellini had written:

Our trouble, as modern[s], is loneliness, and thisbegins in the very depths of our being. Nopublic celebration or political symphony canhope to be rid of it. Only between man and man. . . can this solitude be broken, only throughindividual people can a kind of message bepassed, making [us] understand—almostdiscover—the profound link between oneperson and the next.

Thereby might we achieve a transition, again in Barrett’s words, from “closed toopen worlds.”

Our black-and-white story (the intimation of makeshift dichotomyevident in its very presentation) is relevant to these postmodern times of colorand speed and technological advance and shows the artist’s insight into theprompting of the heart and machinations of the head, into the virtuosity whichwould be required by their all too infrequent synthesis. The psychoanalyst-director points us back to a breach within which underlies the punishableoffense, highlighting thereby a reconciliation that might offer reprieve. Lastrada at last is a tale of everyman and everywoman, of the struggle to findconnection and meaning far beyond everyday norms. Gelsomina drifts upward,Zampano tumbles downward. It will not be until Gelsomina’s return in Fellini’snext great masterpiece that the chasm will be broached once again and thewound finally healed. There we will know her as Cabiria, a streetwalker Fellinihas already introduced in a film called The White Sheik. For the moment,however, we are left with the ravages of error—heavenly retreats and seasidecrashes—as we await a maestro’s surefooted progress down what was tobecome the most inspired of paths.

La strada—the man and the woman, the chain and the pretense, thesong and the trumpet, the journey, the people, the road.

Endnotes:1 Indeed, Fellini spoke of his wife, Giulietta Masina, as “a special case,” the “truesoul” of the films in which she acted. 2 One who nonetheless admonishes starkly, “Beware my stick.”3 Our director finds no comfort in blithe institution.4 “Ah the old questions, the old answers,” says Hamm (“with fervor”) in Beckett’sEndgame, “there’s nothing like them.” “The familiar,” comments Eugene Webb(1972), “though monotonous, provides a feeling of security”(p. 61).5 Pozzo, we recall, still refers to Lucky as his “menial” long after there is anysubstance to his claims of authority or import.

References:

Barrett, W. (1978). The Illusion of Technique. Garden City: Anchor Books.Beckett, S. (1954). Waiting for Godot: a tragicomedy in two acts. New York:

Grove Press.Berke, F. (1996). Fellini’s Films. New York: Twayne Publishers.Fellini, F. (1954). La Strada. Rome.Keel, A. and Strich, C. (Eds.) (1976). Fellini on Fellini (I. Quigley, trans.). New

York: Dell.May, R. (1972). Power and Innocence. New York: Norton.Nietzsche, F. (1885/1968). “Beyond good and evil.” In The Basic Writings of

Nietzsche (W. Kaufmann, ed. & trans.). New York: Basic Books.Webb, E. (1972). The Plays of Samuel Beckett. Seattle: University of Washington Press.