La Dolce Vita

I actually really liked this movie and found it to be a visual enjoyment. I thought it had a lot to work with through its complex characters. At first, I found the characters exciting but the plot a bit confusing in grasping the time frame of the events surrounding Marcello. La Dolce Vita means the good life, full of pleasure and indulgence. As the viewer, you are watching the protagonist, Marcello, slowly being consumed by the high life of wealth, frame, and self-indulgence (la dolce vita). His career as a reporter reveals this life-style as lavish and that people want you and want to be around you. The closer he gets to these upper class people, the quicker he comes to realize either just how depressed, crazy, unstable, or soulless they all are. The more Marcello surrounds himself with them, the faster we watch Marcello fall into their holes of life without meaning. We watch him lose himself in his hunger for promiscuous sex. I couldn't stand the fact that he sweet talked his way into the almost every girl's pants. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear and they bought every word. It annoyed me how he didn't ever care to know them, it only mattered on what they could give him...sex! Sadly we watch as his search for both happiness and love never come because he never really appreciates people for who they are. As we learn from Marcello, his father was never really around much, that he left him just as he leaves his possessive girlfriend Emma.

In the reading, Pasolini states that the ideology of Fellini is identifiable a Catholic kind of ideology, the non-dialectical relationship between sin and innocence. I feel this movie was based on portraying a world of sin and loneliness in contrast to innocence. We watch as innocence becomes trampled by sin as Steiner murders his children and himself. Throughout the film you feel as though you are in a kind of hell in which people don't care to know you as a person, a friend, you are only a mean to an end. In this world of sin you only get glimpses of innocence, the kitten, the children, and the young girl seen both at the end and in the cafe. I felt that the final scene in which she is waving to him and shouting something Marcello can not hear, represented their final separation between worlds.

It took me awhile to formulate an interpretation on the statue of Jesus Christ, flying suspended in the skies of Rome from a helicopter, on its way to Vatican. I understood the meaning of this as a degrading change in times/morals. Jesus is flying with his arms open as if reaching out to bless Rome and its people. This camera shot quickly changes from Jesus to girls in bikinis with men googling them. I feel this is showing the shocking change in modern day, as if we need a blessing to save us. People used to be and dress in a more conservative fashion however this modern lifestyle seems improper and offensive to the Catholic religion/church. I feel like there is a deeper meaning to this image but I can't fully reach it. I feel it but I can't find the words to express it. On another note, the monstrous fish at the end left me thoughtless and confused. The line quoted in the movie kept playing through my head "Poor thing and it insists on looking." Poor us! We are watching these people drive themselves into the ground with late night orgies and drinking trying to fill their voids. In the second to last scene, the late night party at a man's house, made me feel uncomfortable yet I couldn't look away. The image of Jesus at the beginning and a monstrous fish at the end symbolizes that evil keeps washing up on our shores, our streets, our homes, and our society. As a society we have lost meaning and morals.