Fellini’s 8½ and whether or not reality matters in either art or life itself

Much like music, a great film can exist purely on an emotional level, as a stream of loosely related and structured consciousness that teases us with symbolism, impenetrable to a complete analysis, and yet filled with meaning all the same.

Federico Fellini’s 1963 surrealistic fantasy about a film director struggling with his love life and creative ambitions, 8½, has long been considered a breakthrough in cinema and a masterpiece of filmmaking.  Directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Guillermo Del Toro, and David Lynch consider it among the ten best films ever made along with many critics, who’ve had it as a fixture of almost every list of the top films every compiled.  Compared to American films at the time, which generally adhered to a traditional narrative structure with defined characters, story arcs, and plots, 8½, seemingly defied any and all conventions – even its title was not related directly to anything in the movie, and yet still contains a means to approach and interpret an exceedingly complex work.  Instead, it was named because it was the ninth feature the Italian auteur had worked on, marking it as a self-referential work, suggesting there will be circles within circles from the credit sequence alone.  The film opens with a man trapped in a strange traffic jam, where cars are packed in together on a seemingly endless road and other drivers leer at him, sometimes menacingly.  This turns out to be a dream where the man flies away, only to find himself strung at the end of a kite, with others on the ground asking when he will come down.  It ends with something that might have been real in parts, a cocktail party for the director’s canceled film, but which could easily be seen as a dream of its own, blending fantasy and reality as much of the movie does so effortlessly.  In between, the traditional narrative world of the struggling filmmaker, charismatically and compelling played by Marcello Mastroianni, his remembrances of his youth, and his fantasies, unfold, mixing and mingling together, making it incredibly difficult to separate one from another, if not impossible.

Ostensibly, Guido Anselmi is a famous director in the real world and he has retired to a spa in Italy to start work on his next picture.  There, he is beset by his producer, who demands to know where his money has been spent over the past five months and when Guido plans to complete the film, his critic and co-writer who feels the script is pretentious and nonsensical, not even suited for an “avant garde” movie, and his actors who question which characters they will play, along with a manic production room that works 24-7 and set construction project to build a massive spaceship, larger than any seen before on film.  We know little about this film within a film, save vague references to a picture about nuclear Armageddon, references belied by the few things we earn as the actual movie progresses.  This aspect has led The Guardian’s Derek Malcom and others to claim, “8½  is probably the most potent movie about film-making, within which fantasy and reality are mixed without obfuscation, and there’s a tough argument that belies Fellini’s usual felicitous flaccidity.” There is certainly some truth to this:  The dialogue and overall dramatic conflicts surrounding the making of the movie are so devastatingly on target they seem they might have been plucked from some much later film, perhaps Robert Altman’s The Player from 1992.  In fact, I turned to my wife about halfway through and noted how amazing it was that Fellini nailed almost every detail of the neuroses that drive the entire industry from 1960s Italy.  The self-referential title and the notion that Guido is an avatar for Fellini himself add another level to this interpretation, suggesting that the film is about itself, a serpent eating its own tail, and the commentary regarding the script and story in particular, or the lack of it, are actually about 8½, not some fictional picture, meaning Fellini is essentially mocking himself and his own artistic ambitions.  As the critic puts it in the film, “You see, what stands out at a first reading is the lack of a central issue or a philosophical stance. That makes the film a chain of gratuitous episodes which may even be amusing in their ambivalent realism. You wonder, what is the director really trying to do? Make us think? Scare us? That ploy betrays a basic lack of poetic inspiration.” In particular, Guido’s figurative suicide late in the movie following a literal suicide in a dream, declaring that he will not make the movie-within-a-movie after all, and his critic’s conclusion that this was the best possible decision given the subpar material re-imagines the role of the artist in general, transforming him from creator to destroyer.  Some things, in this view, are better left un-created because they add no value to the world.  The true artist is then the person that can properly discern between the two, strangling their own creations in the crib before they can pollute the public consciousness. As he puts it, “This life is so full of confusion already, that there’s no need to add chaos to chaos. Losing money is part of a producer’s job. I congratulate you. You had no choice. And he got what he deserved for having joined such a frivolous venture so lightheartedly. Believe me, no need for remorse. Destroying is better than creating when we’re not creating those few, truly necessary things. But then is there anything so clear and right that it deserves to live in this world?”

Guido’s struggles making the film are further compounded by his love life, where a history of philandering has estranged his wife and family, perhaps past the point of no return.  Here, Guido is typically his own worst enemy.  He invites his mistress, Carla, to the spa, only to banish her to an inferior hotel, where she pines for him and falls sick from some mysterious illness.  For reasons that remain unexplained, he also invites his wife, Luisa, and her best friend to join him, fully aware that it will be impossible to keep the two apart.  Even so, Guido acts completely and totally shocked when wife and mistress encounter one another in person at a cafe, as though the occurrence was impossible to imagine.  This plotline reveals two things about Guido’s overall character, both of which are reflected back in the film-within-a-film.  First, he is an incorrigible liar. Confronted with the truth by his wife, a truth actually standing there in the flesh, he still insists upon his innocence in the matter, pretending he had no idea Carla was staying at the spa long after it made any sense to do so, bizarrely claiming he ended the affair a year ago.  This theme is soon reflected in the filmmaking narrative as well, where screen tests of various auditions reveal the dialogue to be much the same as that between Guido, his wife, and his mistress, art imitating life in art itself.  Ironically, Guido insists that his goal for the movie is to say something completely honest, while using dialogue from his own life where he is clearly lying.  Second, Guido’s challenges with his love life are insurmountable for him.  Late in the film, he fantasizes about being the master of a harem, where he exiles women over thirty to some room upstairs, and lives out erotic adventures with younger women in the primary suite. His wife, in this sequence, is the caretaker of the harem – cooking, cleaning, and providing for all of the other women’s needs.  In this fantasy, he is so overpowered by desire from so many women, that he needs to use a whip to keep them at bay.  This might also imply that his challenges with the film are equally so – the harem sequence could be seen as an actual scene in the movie-within-a-movie when the same actresses also appear in the screen test.  An exchange with a beautiful film star further illuminates this possibility.  Claudio questions the motivation of her character, “I don’t understand. He meets a girl that can give him a new life and he pushes her away?” Guido replies that he does so, “Because he no longer believes in it.”  Claudia insists that it’s “Because he doesn’t know how to love.”  Guido replies, “Because it isn’t true that a woman can change a man.”  “Because he doesn’t know how to love,” Claudia says again.  “And above all because I don’t feel like telling another pile of lies,” Guido protests.”  “Because he doesn’t know how to love,” Claudia ends the conversation.

Fellini mixes these two plotlines with a third series of flashback’s to Guido’s childhood, where we understand he was raised as a Catholic in the traditional Italian way, but was never able to conform to the dictates.  (At least part of the film is supposed to involve the Catholic Church and a Cardinal, continually suggesting the circles within circles, the serpent eating its tail).  In one sequence, Guido and his friends pay a stout prostitute, La Sarghina, to dance for them on a desolate beach.  She obliges, performing a routine at parts erotic and downright strange, suggesting that the interest from Guido and his friends is more than simply sexual, that they have some desire to see the unknown, the forbidden.  He is found out by the parochial school, forced to don a dunce cap, and accosted with shouts of “shame.”  In another, he plays with the other children in his childhood home at witchcraft.  After bathing in wine and being wrapped in a towel before bed, an older girl informs him that if he chants the right words, the eyes in a painting in the room will move, “ASA NISI MASA.”  The audience has heard this phrase before in one of the less easily explicable sequences, when a mysterious mind reader appears at the spa to perform for the guests.  The mind reader is part of a duo, where a strange, thin man is said to transmit the thoughts of a person to a woman.  When Guido’s turn comes up, the man informs him that his thoughts cannot be spoken aloud, and must be written down.  “ASA NISI MASA” is written on the blackboard.  The duo also appears at the climax of the movie, when Guido announces that he will not make the film and everyone lines up in a bizarre dance number, forming a circle in the shadow of the semi-completed spaceship, yet another image of wheels within wheels.  In some sense, the film ends where it began – the wheels of the cars trapping Guido are now the wheels of life, circles that rotate without ending everywhere around him.  On this level, 8½ is almost amazingly accessible for a surreal venture where we cannot say for sure where real life ends and fantasy begins.  The driving force for all of these plotlines – creative and sexual disillusionment – are all readily understood as Guido’s (or Fellini’s) midlife crisis made real.  In the harem sequence, he banishes women after 30, but he is now 43 and combined with his failure to make the film – figuratively to climax artistically – we might simply say the entire thing is about the aging process and be done with it.  Guido has found himself in a dark wood like Dante himself hundreds of years earlier in the opening of Inferno.

Fellini’s masterpiece is not so simple, however.  Who are we to say what is real and what is not?  Because of the way our mind’s process a narrative work, we assume that Guido’s struggles making the movie and his infidelity constitute the “real” events of the film whereas his childhood memories and his fantasies are the fictions he tells himself, reflecting one off the other, as I have done so far here, but there is no reason to logically do so.  Many of the real events are tinged with fantasy, things that make no rational sense like the mind-reader or a movie that is supposed to feature a spacecraft having dialogue culled from Guido’s love life.  In truth, we cannot easily separate the fantasy from the reality – some scenes seem to start as fantasy then become reality, others as reality that descend or ascend into fantasy as the ending sequence.  We only attempt it because our experience is organized around what is real and what is not, and we naturally look for those categories in nature and art.  The film itself, however, gives us no means to separate the two upon closer inspection, much less to value one over the other.  For all we can say for sure, none of it is real or supposed to be real.  All of it is a fantasy, perhaps the dream of someone before dying, a child’s vision of their future life, the rantings of a madman in an insane asylum, or perhaps even some shared delusion.  This, of course, is going to prove to be a rather unsatisfying, quite frustrating answer to many, who feel the almost irresistible human need to tease meaning out of something, who, confronted by a puzzle, simply have to solve it, assuming there is a single right answer.  Many have criticized even Shakespeare for failing to have a consistent moral point of view. Fellini, instead, leads us all to a potent question:  What does it matter what is real and what is fake so long as we experience it fully?  Why is it that we insist on movies that lead to some logical conclusion, that represent real events or mimicries of them, and even in fantasy and science fiction conform to some rational notion of how things work?

Upon closer inspection, this is not easily explicable.  We watch movies, read books, listen to music, etc. to be entertained and transported, perhaps to learn something, and yet most of us – myself included to a large extent – insist that entertainment outside of music need to be confined to our sense of reality, need be reduced to what we expect, what can be explained. Personally, I’ve often remarked to my wife how much easier it would be if I had any talent for music.  The singer needn’t make rational sense – a chorus can consist of simply a sung melody, sounds without meaning.  A filmmaker and author, however, needs to have each word follow the next in some kind of logical sequence.  Fellini asks us:  Why?  Why do we insist on what the critic said, that we need “a central issue or a philosophical stance” rather than a “chain of gratuitous episodes which may even be amusing in their ambivalent realism. You wonder, what is the director really trying to do? Make us think? Scare us?”  Fellini answered the question by creating a beloved movie that doesn’t make logical sense, proving that the normal trappings of a film, consistency of narrative, a logical coherent story, relatable characters, and some kind of climax at the end are not truly required.  Instead, much like music, a great film can exist purely on an emotional level, as a stream of loosely related and structured consciousness that teases us with symbolism, impenetrable to a complete analysis, and yet filled with meaning all the same – much like life itself in the final grand imitation, the circle devouring itself from fantasy into each of our own real worlds, a shared delusion if ever there was one.

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