by Tobias Jones
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.
The irony is that the two humanists who have most often been the scourge of the Catholic church, Dario Fo and Pier Paolo Pasolini, have often used religious material – or at least moral criteria – to criticise the dehumanisation of modernity. They were endlessly accused of degrading Italy with their plays or films (even today there is usually a great sucking of teeth when the name Dario Fo, Nobel prize-winner, is whispered in Catholic circles), but they recognised what was happening long before anyone else: cinema and then television had unleashed the genies of eroticism and consumerism, and the country had somehow, according to the critique, lost its soul and its piety, even its politics, along the way. ‘Consumerism,’ wrote Pasolini, ‘has cynically destroyed the real world, transforming it into total unreality where a choice between good and evil is no longer possible.’3 He called it ‘cultural genocide’. Dario Fo, in his play Big Pantomime with Flags and Puppets, foresaw a world in which viewers are hypnotised by a televisual diet of football and advertisements.
Witnessing an industrial revolution in the space of a few decades, various intellectuals argued that Italy’s new-found obsession with possession (carnal or consumer) had eroded the moral fibre of the nation. Either that, or consumerism was a disguise, an attempt to pretend that poverty no longer existed. Italo Calvino wrote of ‘the suspicion that all our ostentation of prosperity was nothing but a simple varnish on the Italy of mountain and suburban hovels, of emigrant trains and the swarming piazzas of black-clothed towns’4; with strikingly similar diction, Pasolini asked ‘You know what Italy seems like to me? A hovel in which the owners have managed to buy a television.’5
And it’s television that is now at the critical inte
rsection of erotica and politics. The story of the ‘new wave’ of Italian broadcasting, coinciding with the end of the golden era of Italian cinema, began in July 1976. The Constitutional Court decreed that the state RAI channels would retain the monopoly on national broadcasting, whilst at the same time allowing unlicensed, private channels to broadcast as long as it was on a ‘local’ scale. In 1978 a new, local channel sprang up: Telemilano. It served the residents of a suburb of Milan called Milano 2, a residential complex of some 3,500 flats which had been built and sold during the previous decade by Berlusconi and his anonymous investors. By 1980 there were 1,300 private television channels; three years later, despite buy-outs and mergers, there were still more than 700. In 1980 Telemilano became known as Canale 5. In 1983 Berlusconi bought Italia Uno, and a year later he bought Rete 4. Those three channels eventually bought out almost all their rivals, such that the entire private sector broadcasting was unified under the Mediaset umbrella of Silvio Berlusconi.
The smaller the enterprise, of course, the more important the advertising revenue. Thus Berlusconi’s nascent television channels were the early models for today’s television. Programming was seamlessly integrated with advertising in the same way that now a programme is interrupted for a ‘promotional message’ and news items are there to plug a product. Rather than being ‘alternative’, the new private television channels and their low-budget programmes survived by becoming advertising vehicles. Often the advertising arm was barely distinguishable from the broadcasting business. The advertising revenue of the Mediaset channels was looked after by Publitalia, Berlusconi’s advertising company which, by 1990, was responsible for 24.5% of the entire television advertising market (the figure is now nearer 60%). It was an arrangement that was to become a leitmotif for Berlusconian business: the buyer and the seller incarnate in the same person, the left hand closing a deal with the right.
The Mediaset studios are still based at Milano 2. If you go there, the whole place feels like something from The Truman Show: it’s a kind of unreal, bourgeois bubble. No one need ever leave the million square metres of the estate: there’s a chemist, a school, a police station. There’s a strange combination of concrete and greenery: all the blocks are a rusty red colour, and are linked by bridges and paths which weave over lakes and roads. It all feels slightly 1970s, not least the names of the blocks: Palazzo Aquarius and so on. The manhole covers have a simple M2 imprinted, along with Edilnord, the name of Berlusconi’s construction company. At the centre of the complex you can see a tower of satellite dishes and the symbol of the Mediaset empire: the snake.
Those three Mediaset channels, owned by Silvio Berlusconi, are even worse than the rest of the channels. Watching Mediaset is like watching out-takes from Sesame Street without the clever bits. There’s a merry-go-round of about twenty personalities who seem to be on television rotation duties. The same VIPs (pronounced to rhyme with ‘jeeps’), footballers and ageing compères appear on different shows on different channels, so that in the end each programme ends up looking like the last. Invariably the band strikes up half-way through the show, and everyone jumps to their feet to sing a syrupy song from the 1980s as the studio audience claps in unison and sings along. (Another of the favourite musical genres is ‘cartoon theme music’.) Horoscopes are minutely discussed on the hour, and magicians and wizards and sexologists often sit alongside the panel of ‘political experts’. The mawkishness of these programmes is amazing. If you try and keep count of the number of times someone on Mediaset says bellissimo you’ll be in triple figures after half an hour.
Other than adverts and Europop singalongs, programming is reliant upon films. In one of his many masterstrokes, Berlusconi bought the Italian rights to hundreds of American films and miniseries, beginning the era in which Italy became a mass importer, rather than exporter, of ‘culture’. The trend has continued, so that Mediaset broadcasting is now like one long cinema screening of snuff films and B-movies. They’re broadcast, of course, under the title Bellissimi and by now it’s very rare to see a film on Italian television which hasn’t been imported from America, occasionally Britain. It’s rare to watch a film in which the lips move when the words are spoken. (Italy’s most famous actors are now its dubbers.) And those who are fed up with incessant advertising breaks can, since the growth of video rentals, pop out to rent a video, probably from Blockbuster (also owned, in Italy, by Silvio Berlusconi).
The law, however, maintaining RAI’s national broadcasting monopoly was still in force in the early 1980s. Eventually, though, the law was changed because it had already been blatantly broken. Berlusconi wasn’t broadcasting nationally, he was simply broadcasting the same programmes at the same times across the country, albeit on local channels. It was national broadcasting in all but name. Someone could watch the same imported film at the same time in Palermo or Parma, where different stations would coincidentally have a co-ordinated programme schedule. At one point, since such broadcasting was illegal, the programmes were taken off the airwaves; the ensuing outrage from viewers who needed the next episode of Dallas or Dynasty enabled Berlusconi to present himself, as he would often do in later years, as the man representing ‘freedom’ against ‘oppression’.
The legislative sleight of hand by which Berlusconi’s broadcasting scheduling became legal was known as Law 223 or ‘the Mammí law’ (named after the Minister for Telecommunications). It was proposed in 1984 and passed, eventually, in 1990. It sanctioned the de facto national broadcasting by Berlusconi, ending for all time the monopoly of RAI and creating the RAI-Mediaset duopoly. Five government ministers resigned in protest at the legislation, already wary of Berlusconi’s omnipotence. The then Prime Minister was Bettino Craxi, who had been best man at Berlusconi’s second marriage and was to become godfather to Berlusconi’s daughter. Craxi’s offshore accounts later received a 23 billion lire injection from an obscure part of Berlusconi’s Fininvest empire (called All Iberian).6 Berlusconi was sentenced to two years and four months for the alleged bribe, though on appeal he was acquitted because of the statute of limitations. The crime, as so often, had passed its crime-by date. Berlusconi had become ‘His Emittenza,’ an ironic play on words which evoked both his ‘eminence’ and his broadcasting ‘emittance’. Not only did ‘the Great Seducer’ (another nickname) own the means of production, he owned something much more important: ‘the means of seduction’.
The tactic is blissfully simple. It requires a small box in the corner of every room, plugged into the wall. It requires an aerial to receive the right broadcasts. (Eventually, the notion of ‘the right broadcasts’ might become irrelevant; if the owner of the ‘right’ channels should also head the government, the rival state channels – rivals politically and economically – will also be his.) That benevolent media tycoon pays himself for advertising space on his own channels in order to promote his own products. As he becomes inexorably richer, he also becomes the consumers’ most trusted entrepreneur. They recognise and agree with his Orwellian mantra ‘old is bad/new is good’. Eventually, the mores of millions of viewers will be so familiar to him that they can be turned into faithful voters, guaranteed to be receptive to any slick promotion by a new political party.
By now the most convincing explanation, albeit the most mundane, for Berlusconi’s political appeal is the simple fact that he controls three television channels. Having a politician who owns three television channels turns any election into the equivalent of a football match in which one team kicks-off with a three-goal advantage. Victory for the other side, even a draw, is extremely unlikely. Certain programmes, like the parliamentary programme on Sunday, Parlamento-in, are like long party political broadcasts. Some Mediaset channels are worse than others. Rete 4 has an anchorman – Emilio Fede – nicknamed ‘Fido’ because he’s so sycophantic to his boss. He’ll introduce a news story with a comment like: ‘These stupid commies!’ Rete 4 is the channel that anytime Berlusconi is making an important speech will beam it live, without comment or criticism, i
nto millions of homes across Italy. The other two channels are only minimally more balanced. Even there journalists, like referees walking into the San Siro Stadium, appear overawed. Asking hard questions of Berlusconi is akin to criticising not only the politician, but everyone in the television studio who are employed by him, and so it’s simply not done. The partiality, as with referees, might be accidental, subliminal, but it’s very obvious.
Thus Berlusconi has been compared, not unfairly, to Mussolini: both had a balcony from which they could harangue, cajole and persuade adoring viewers. Berlusconi, being the head of Italy’s ‘videocracy’, is only different because he owns an electronic balcony. The defence is that such partisan broadcasting is actually democratic: RAI is so riddled with left-wingers that Mediaset guarantees, not objectivity, but at least democratic pluralism. Without Berlusconi, the thinking goes, we would only be at the mercy of political henchmen.
But more than just painfully partial towards its boss, Mediaset television has achieved something even more disguised. It has seduced a society to the extent that politics and ideas don’t seem to exist. Italy’s noble visual culture has been reduced to endless erotica, and the small screen is now a cheaper, bittersweet version of La Dolce Vita: a world obsessed with celebrity and sexuality, to the exclusion of all moral values (Fellini, not surprisingly, for years objected to his films being shown on television). In many ways, the real problem with Mediaset isn’t that it’s political in the purest sense; it’s that it’s not political at all. The only thing on offer are bosoms, football and money. Even someone who enjoys all three eventually finds it all boring. ‘Panem et circenses,’ says Filippo, ‘that’s what the ancient Romans called it: “bread and a bit of a show”. Give that to the masses and they’ll be happy’. An American friend, quoting Pynchon on paranoia, is even more dismissive: ‘If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers!’
