Grok My Enthusiasm (10)

By: Gordon Dahlquist
March 16, 2016

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars.

It took a third time seeing Fellini Satyricon to perceive how tight it was, and get my head around what that might mean, in terms of narrative, for a film whose “story” is based on spectacle as opposed to plot or character. Especially when so many responses to the film trot out words like “indulgent” or “excessive” or “decadent” or “depraved,” the point feels worth making. Fellini Satyricon is an incredibly rigorous, patient, and precise (if also loose) adaptation of one of the more unlikely texts in Western History, the Satyricon of Petronius. This text is a coarse and witty satire of Roman society by a crony of Nero’s who eventually slipped off the courtier-to-a-tyrant tightrope, committing suicide before he could be sentenced to death in 66 AD.

We begin with Encolpio and Ascilto (perhaps former gladiators, perhaps students, cast perfectly — no offense to Martin Potter or Hiram Keller — as self-involved Eurotrash) fighting over the affections of Gitone, a winsome and fickle adolescent boy. Encolpio, raging like a tragic hero at his love being stolen away, tracks Ascilto to the baths. They fight, until Ascilto merrily confesses that, post-pleasure, he’s sold the boy to a theatre. We get to the theatre mid-performance… it sounds backhanded to say that none of this matters. And that’s wrong, because it all matters, because the spectacle means nothing without human engagement. But — and the subtlety with which this point is teased and rewoven through every second of the film is hard to overstate — the characters we follow are entirely negligible, they are simply, hungrily, alive.

It’s possible that a few of the shots were on location — when our trio is captured by the pirate Lichas and travel by ship, or the magical final scene — but most of the film is eye-popping proof of what a film studio, properly understood, can accomplish. For Satyricon, Cinecittà provides cavernous baths, enormous banquets, country villas, inner city tenements, a galley ship, craggy countryside, desert shrines, love palaces, art museums, an earthquake, a labyrinth (with Minotaur)… and while none of it looks like the Rome we know from Hollywood epics, Fellini’s vision is entirely persuasive: this Rome is lived-in, hand-made and un-modern, and also, sensibly, consistently intertwined with North Africa and the East. The past — even of our home, as Rome was Fellini’s — is a foreign land.

The film’s set-pieces present a world never before seen on film: the false funeral of Trimalchio, the theatre of Vernacchio, Encolpio’s battle in the labyrinth, the slave girl in the villa whose owners have committed suicide, the doomed kidnapping of the hermaphrodite oracle, Encolpio’s mystical cure for impotence… but what seems most important is how the durational aspect of spectacle creates a particular block of time. By the film’s end, we’re lost less in story than in pure experience. Our eyes have learned to look at new things, our ears to hear new sounds — we’ve eavesdropped our way to an alien world’s reckoning. And, of course, it’s our own.

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Grok My Enthusiasm (10)

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