Cinema: Rome, B.C., A.F.

If I had taken these fantasies of the unconscious as art, they would have carried no more conviction than visual perceptions, as if I were watching a movie.

—Carl Jung

There have been hundreds of Freudian films: Fellini Satyricon is probably the first—and certainly the most important—Jungian one. In the course of two hours and seven minutes, images, totems, and archetypes rise and burst like hydrogen sulfide bubbles from the marsh of the collective unconscious. The unsynchronized sound track has the timbre of racial memory, echoing some eternal dream time. The film’s devices are, in fact, so frenzied and eruptive that they tend to obscure an artlessness of thought or substance. Perhaps it is just as well; the Fellini Satyricon is manifestly made for the eye’s mind, not the mind’s eye. “Faces are my words,” says the film maker, and he manages to make them speak an epic.

Cinema’s greatest living satirist (La Dolce Vita, 8½, Juliet of the Spirits), Director Federico Fellini has always been half in love with his main target: decadence. His favorite gallery is Rome, where the extravagances of the Via Veneto add daily calories to the Sweet Life. The Appian Way leads into the past, into the harsh, lurid revels of Petronius, who mocked Nero’s ancient Sybarites with the first Satyricon. Although only fragments of that manuscript survive, they are enough to reveal a Homeric spoof. The hilariously ignoble hero, Encolpius (sometimes translated as “the Crotch”), is a randy homosexual. His wanderings lead him not to godlike beings but to all too human Romans.

Vulgarian’s Feast. The true Satyricon is shot through with fragments of poetry. The Fellini Satyricon finds visual equivalents—but often at the price of coherence. Scenes are shifted, new ones are added, characters are blunted or sharpened. Still, Fellini has left the Petronian framework intact. Like almost all his social satire, Satyricon is a picaresque journey through the beds and banquet hails of Rome. Now Encolpius skirmishes for the affections of the young invert Giton (Max Born); now impotent, he whimpers about his “blunted sword”; now he overstuffs his gullet at a vulgarian’s feast; now he is a starveling captive aboard a slave ship.

Fellini calls his Satyricon a “science-fiction trip into the past instead of the future.” It blasts off with a scene so brilliant that the whole picture shivers from the thrust. In a masque, a musically flatulent clown capers on a stage, mocking the audience with scatological jokes and gestures. A grinning idiot is carried onstage and led to a chopping block. A headsman mimes a blow with his weapon —then chops the victim’s hand off to a chorus of cackles, while freshets of blood stain the scene. It is a savage fragment of the cinema of cruelty, a death-in-life image, like T.S. Eliot’s perception of “the skull beneath the skin.”

Viewers—and the Satyricon’s satyrs —periodically struggle upward toward the light, as if trying to wake from the sleep of reason. Unhappily, the light fails, for almost all the main characters are inept performers whose unmarked faces cannot register more than satiety and fatigue. The fault lies partly with the director. In the Fellini version, the actors literally performed by saying the numbers. “It was a multilingual cast,” says the maestro. “So instead of having them speak dialogue, I often just had them count one, two, three.” Hiram Keller, recruited from the Broadway production of Hair to play Encolpius’ intimate, Ascyltus, was given instructions of equal subtlety: “You are evil and you lay everything in sight.”

Maestro’s Strength. Yet in so plotless a pastiche, the population matters less than the imagination that propels it. That quality the film has in superabundance. Fellini’s style is less theatrical than amphitheatrical. Colossal grotesques leap from private fantasy to public mind. In a set daubed with indelible cerulean and blood red, an albino hermaphrodite possessed of occult powers is abducted—only to wither pitifully in the desert. A quadruple amputee somehow manages a deep bow.

The catalogue of images is not as unrelated as it seems. At its best, the scenario synthesizes art, moving like music, and spreading out like a suite of paintings. In this, Fellini Satyricon exceeds the original. Petronius could only describe the obscenity of the banquet staged by Trimalchio, the nouveau riche. Fellini could portray it as a vignette of Rome at the end of its parabola of grandeur, complete with elaborate jokes and hoaxes. It is an occasion as bizarre and funny as the film’s conclusion—in which a lady leaves a fortune to friends, with the proviso that they dissect her corpse and eat it. As always, the maestro’s greatest strength is anecdotal. His account of a patrician husband and wife who commit suicide rather than submit to imprisonment is as affecting as the short tales of La Dolce Vita. His story of the adventures of a woman and the corpse of her husband is neoclassic black comedy.

Oyster’s Autobiography. The mosaic of individual insights and adventures never unifies into a single, coherent vision. It is as if the director, sidetracked by the individuals, grew impatient with the crowd. Much of Fellini’s extracurricular career is spent deflecting exegeses of his films, but he seems genuinely anxious to have audiences compare his ancient Rome with that of the Twentieth Centurians. “Rome in its decline was quite similar to our world today,” he insists. “There was the same fury of enjoying life, the same lack of moral principles and ideologies, and the same complacency. Today we are finished with the Christian myth and await a new one. There is analogy in Satyr-icon.”But history, unlike jurisprudence, is not always based on precedent. It is, in Valéry’s term, “the science of what never happens twice.”

The simple juxtaposition of contemporary Angst with a spiritually exhausted Rome Before Christ (and After Fellini) is as facile as it is false. Below the rationale, Fellini seems to sense as much. Encolpius and his colleagues are too obviously fashioned after contemporary faggots; his mourning widow is ominously representative of Jackie Kennedy; his wall friezes seem copied less from Roman basements than department-store casements. The forced modernity denies complexity and does much to weaken the work’s polished irony.

Still, no one else could have brought a tenth of the Satyricon to the screen without the customary lubricity and X-rated smirks. When, in a climactic scene, Encolpius recovers his potency at the thighs of a gigantic black Venus, the viewer feels less a voyeur than an observer of some elemental sexual ritual brought intact from the beginning of the world. To be sure, between such moments, the film proves so personal that it amounts to solipsism. “The pearl,” as the director once modestly observed, “is only the oyster’s autobiography.” Fellini Satyricon, at the end, may even be considered no more than an orgy of self-indulgence. But what a self! And what indulgence!