Transcript
Speaker: Oh, that's broken.
Speaker: My guest today Josiah Gogarty. Josiah is staff writer at GQ, prior to which he was an assistant editor at The Knowledge. He writes mostly on culture and politics, producing highlights such as ah Stop Catching Up, Start Hanging Out.
Speaker: He's contributed to The New Statesman, Unheard, and the Londoner of my parish. ah Most importantly, I once watched him wade through a biblical flood in a northern Albanian town, whilst his shoes floated in the opposite direction, which I think is all the experience you need to sort of display the stamina and perseverance to take apart today's films, which are Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, which is 2013, and The Hand of God, which is 2021. So Josiah, like, why these films? What are the resonances of these films for you?
Speaker: Well, I guess I should start by saying that I think that there's a big quality differential. I'd be interested to know what you both think. The Hand God, I think, is basically a sort of upper-mid film. Like, it's pretty good.
Speaker: It's kind of fine. There were like, some nice scenes in it. Like, the sort of that the family scenes, I think, are really good. Like, the sort of and we can get into this later with the whole grotesquery of these characters. you know Obviously, like it's very well shot. We have like Naples as this kind of mysterious city, even more so given it's through the the lens of someone who hasn't quite lost their innocence yet.
Speaker: You have that. It has its faults. It's kind of sentimental, whatever. But then The Great Beauty is, well, it's in my letterbox top four, which just tells you something.
Speaker: um It's probably among my top three or top two films, and I just think it's kind of um phenomenal. I mean, it's basically about this guy, Jeb Gambardella, who's a sort of 60-something journalist. I believe it's his 65th birthday day where the film starts. It's his 65th birthday. day And, you know, he's a man about town. He's a socialite.
Speaker: You know, he says in one famous, like, voiceover, it was, you know, it's not enough that he goes to all these parties. It has to be that if he doesn't go, the party is a disaster. That is his kind of, his raison d'etre. And he is, you know,
Speaker: He's a piece of glittery flotsam sort of bouncing along on the tide of Berlusconified Italy, you know, Roman high society. We've got people, well, everyone really has got a ton of Botox. We've got people in like nice outfits. We've got people in hideous outfits.
Speaker: We've got priests, we've got nuns, and we've got a priest that really wants to tell you how to cook rabbit properly. um And yeah, it's basically about our boy Jep kind of going around, going to these parties, sort of sort of having an identity crisis and trying to work out what the hell...
Speaker: is is up for his life. You know, it should be said he published a book, a novel, very early on in his career. By all accounts, a great novel. Except by his own. Yeah. Exactly. Except by his own account. um And hasn't done anything since. It has this kind of ah half alluded to writer's block.
Speaker: And part of the kind of the sort of slightly weird ending of the film, um which is, you know, kind of overall like a hammy or genius kind of depending on how you see it intimates that maybe he's got over it and he's sort of found, you know, a new kind of theme of inspiration.
Speaker: But yeah, so it's kind of, it's not really doesn't have so much of a plot per se, it's him kind of wandering around, getting into scenes and and scrapes and stuff. And it's all beautifully shot. There's like wonderful lines, there's wonderful no visuals. And that, I think, is part of the charm of it. And what I think we should dig into later on is... um whether that kind of quite sincere sort of idea of a film, like it being beautiful and whether that beauty is enough, the film kind like challenges you to um accept it on those terms. And you might discuss, I think there's sort of generational slant that as well.
Speaker: You make me want to rewatch it again. ah i feel I should confess that on my initial letterboxd rating, i gave the higher nod to the hand of God. And I think that may have been the deep sickness and cough syrup talking. Because because on on on that read of the film, I think it yeah it's it's a very rich text. So, i yeah. Yeah, I think both films, right? Like, both of these films by Sorrentino are sort of homages to earlier Italian cinema. think, as we were chatting beforehand, like,
Speaker: The Great Beauty is an homage to Elevator Vita from 1960, and The Hand of God kind of feels like an homage to Cinema Paradisio, which I think was in the ninety s And yeah, Sorrentino is sort of like, in his own way, trying to like remake or reappropriate Italian cinema for, I guess, like the twenty ten of 2020s. There's this constant kind of dialogue with these previous films. But yeah, I mean, Chase, because look, Josiah and I have both been like big fans of this film for fucking ages.
Speaker: think we're perhaps like slightly closer to the sort of Euro trash, Euro aristocratic experience. I think we probably both have witnessed that in different parts of our lives. Maybe Josiah school in Milan and me at St Andrews, which is a kind of hotbed for European idiot people.
Speaker: The European idiot, semi-aristocrats, sort of gilays doing ridiculous things. i mean, how do you understand it, Jase? Like, I guess, aesthetically, but also a for our theme of, like, generations at the end of history. Like, what did it punch? Was it like a slow burn, i like?
Speaker: ah this so i mean maybe we should I think this question is best addressed chronologically. What I mean by that is the first 25 minutes of this movie are basically a party montage, which left me deeply confused for a period of time. It sort of opens with this, ah what I would describe as a sonic and sort of visual barrage of different party elements. There are dwarves you later learn it this dwarf is Jep's boss, you you don't know that going in.
Speaker: There's a moment where it cuts from this over-determined party scene where they're doing you know synchronized dances to Spanish like electric music. And then it's the total silence of this stripper in this lake you know sanitarium room, basically, where she's dancing through the glass to show everybody. And so I look at this and I'm...
Speaker: I don't know what to expect. I know the movie's called The Great Beauty. I'm asking myself, is this the great beauty that Italian society? society ah is this the great beauty that is a modern European culture? I don't know. So I guess the first thing for me was mostly shock and confusion.
Speaker: I think when it settled into being this question about one man and his kind of writerly career, if we can put it that way, or maybe his life, Then I started getting these echoes of Italian cinema that made it legible.
Speaker: So I think in ah in a way, i would I would start by just saying, no, it was not immediately legible to me. And it in fact, it was disarming. When did you both first encounter it?
Speaker: i he was probably like 16 or 17. So possibly like the year it came out. Yeah. but it was like peak kind of... um I think it's like like like a lot of the films are like they're like yearning films. I think this is very much like a yearning film. and like If you watch it in your teens, I think that's kind of peak yearning era, so I can understand.
Speaker: a So it's is it desirable? I guess this is maybe to get to the generational question. You're watching this, you're 16, you're 17 years old There are women who's, let's just say, maybe you should return to the doctor and consider demanding demanding recompense, ah you know kind of dancing everywhere. a lot of people are very old.
Speaker: is it Is it exciting to you or is it repulsive? That's an interesting question. I think my early watching watchings of the film, it was this incredibly glamorous, exciting thing. But then I think having rewatched it for the first time in maybe two years, a few days ago, it's it's definitely much more of a film that I think is dealing with the repulsive and dealing with the kind of failure of the boomer generation. and like Yeah, like having entered into this discourse around generations...
Speaker: both through the podcast, but also, you know, just generally through social media. It was interesting to look at it in that sort of more historical sense. I think it's a film, and Josiah, you can sort of tell what you think about this. like It's a film that on first watching, it's so sensuous and aesthetic, and you can of like luxuriate in the sort of glory of Rome and the glory of like the party and the art scene.
Speaker: And yeah, I think, yeah, if you've watched it few times, there are subtler narratives around sort of generational disappointment in the film. And yeah, a lot of the characters are, Ejep, for instance, is deeply sympathetic, but at the same time, you know, a failure on all the on most accounts. And I think he does represent yeah aspect of the cause of failure of the boomer generation. So if he represents a kind of the failure of the sensuousness and self-actualization of the boomer generation, someone like Stefania, who is, I think, maybe slightly younger, but still a boomer, she's this kind of like antagonist for Jep.
Speaker: She's a kind of socialite TV, reality TV star, erstwhile Marxist author, who Jep sort of clashes with throughout the film. Author of 11 novels. she kind of represents the failure of ideology, right?
Speaker: And you've got the, yeah, Jeff is like failed in his quest for the aesthetic and Stefania's failed in her quest for the ideological. And yeah, it's, it's, yeah, they are very representative in that sense, I think. No, exactly. And I think, yeah, to the generational point, I mean, it is, I think, really apparent, like, like most people in this film are fucking old. I mean, you know, they're like, how many people with lines in this film are under 40? Yeah.
Speaker: One, I think, by my count. and So the young, quote, quote, young people, youngish people you can really see on screen are either nuns, they're in a convent, they're kind of, you know, they're sort running around because this is where Jepp lives, he lives in the heart of Rome, around all these religious institutions.
Speaker: There's the disturbed son of one of his friends, Viola, who is, you know, eventually commits suicide and his funeral is a sort of big moment in the film, but, you know, he dies before his mum.
Speaker: And then in the second party... you know This is a film of more than one party scene, which is one of its excellent qualities, I think. In the second party scene, um you have like a young kid who you know is coming much more than 10, 12, something like that. There's this really interesting scene where her parents, who are obviously kind of in the art world, kind of she's obviously a sort of artistic prodigy, and they essentially force her to perform that in front of their friends and guests.
Speaker: And so you have this kind of initial sequence where she is like hurling paint on the canvas, sort of scrambling all around, and it ends with this canvas that's completely sort of like muddy brown, and she is covered in paint, and dula and then it cuts to her kind of intricately making this big pattern.
Speaker: The implication obviously being that what she wants to do, what she is worn down to do, a kind of ah very different thing. So, you know, the kind of, in this case, a one the few young people that has significant screen time is basically like a performing monkey.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. and I think it's it's sort of interesting how the art she produces as well in its incredibly performative way. It's just like a sort rehash of like Jackson Pollock. It's like yeah yeah sort of kinetic abstract expressionism that you kind of, I think, implicitly assume that all of these Boomer characters would have been like, it would have been the cutting edge for them in their youth.
Speaker: And it's like just being replayed by this child and like, we we can presume like 2009, 2010, that kind of time. ah Yeah, there's nothing new. like it's It's performatively interesting, as suppose. but There's nothing actually new to it. Well, there's the element of youth, right? that The difference is that it's now being, you know, it's sort of like, how do you spice it up? Well, what if we had a kid do it?
Speaker: you know Yeah, and interestingly, Sorrentino's next film is called Youth, right? I think. has Michael Caine, and it's it's all about being as in a special resort reminiscing on lost youth.
Speaker: But yeah, i mean it's interesting also, like, Josiah, what do you make of the fact that Andrea has no friends when he dies? i mean, that's quite like, he's obviously millennial in age, generationally, but it chimes to the kind of Gen Z thing about lack of socialization, lack of third space, like,
Speaker: yeah A bunch of old men have to sort of carry his his casket out of the church. No, exactly. i mean, I think in this case, it's probably more more to do with the fact that he's clearly severely mentally disturbed and has been for some years. i think um he probably isn't the kind of guy who would make make good use of third spaces if they were available. Yeah. We see him at one point absolutely covered, like naked in the hallway of his house, covered in red paint or blood, like his mum kind of encounters him in that sense. So um I don't know. I sort of don't know if there's much of a kind of socialisation thing with him. i mean, I think
Speaker: what What the age thing really leads into for me is like, it's actually contrasting it with Rome itself, the quote-unquote eternal city, is any as any tour guide will tell you. This idea that you have a single generation who is hell-bent on kind of reliving or maintaining their youth in some way. You could be partying all the time.
Speaker: You have this great scene where um Those are people go to get Botox and slush room and basically like a kind of pastiche like communion. And so you have that.
Speaker: And then you have like, you know, the selfish generation. And then you have like the actual unchanging city, which unlike, you know, a few kind of has-beens will be there forever. And I think that's one of the reasons why the film isn't trying to make you take Rome seriously.
Speaker: Is it like, no, this thing is real. This is unlike these like horrible people. Like this is in all this beautiful old stuff is real and is important. And, um you know, that may be one thing that people buy into or don't buy into depending on what kind of view you are.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because Marinetti, the futurist, in the Futurist Manifesto from, what's that, 19-ish, you know, it said that Rome is a museum, Rome is a graveyard, and that, you know, the young men need to sort of take up motorsports and sort crash into all buildings and destroy statues. So it's like that Italian, anyway, also modernism is huge in Italy. Do you have that sort of Italian feeling towards what we might term the great beauty, the canon, whatever, like the eternal city. And then you have Sorrentino's, think pretty Gen X, understanding of the canon and Italian inheritance, which is like fairly ambiguous. Like he, he looked, he reates. And so this character called the doorkeeper or the doorman who lets Jep and his sort of,
Speaker: love interest Ramona into this kind of like palatial palace with like amazing Baroque statues and sculptures and it's their distraction from the sort of frivolous party that's happening below yeah it's interesting I don't know whether that experience is an empty one or not like it it never really comes down on either side ah So what I wanted to say is that a thing that keeps coming up is Rome is a disappointment from the sort of boomer characters, right? Rome disappointed me. It's not the same as it was. I mean, his ah sort of bespectacled agent, I think, after his one-man show comes up and says like, you know, said what my grandmother said until the day she died. I'm going back to my hometown. I can't take it anymore. ah You know, the sort of immigrants ah idle threat that I think he does follow through on, if I remember correctly, or at least we don't know if he does or doesn't.
Speaker: But then, on the other hand, right, so that's your boomer generation. We've mentioned the sort of absent young people in the form of the schizophrenic Andrea, who I would like to go back to maybe. But the other age cohort we haven't spoken about is the Sister Maria cohort, this 103-year-old nun who is known colloquially as the saint.
Speaker: And ah you know he does think, he being Sorrentino, does something very interesting with her, which is that she looks like a mummy. i mean, it's played for laughs on multiple occasions. These kind of close-ups of her, you graven face, just standing there while this sort of bald, huckster-looking man seems to speak for her and say, oh, you know, she eats nothing but roots every day. She is going to crawl up the steps on her knees. And this woman looks like she's, if you haven't seen the film...
Speaker: It's sort of like if Jack Skellington were you know drawn by, I don't know, an Italian Renaissance artist or something. It's it's very much not... like She looks like she could break at any moment. But then the odd thing is that Sorrentino gives her something like wisdom. She does end up talking, and the things that she says are at least not absurd in the way we might expect them to be. you know I was sort of expecting her to open her mouth and for dust and flies to come out, like quite literally. She says to Jeff, doesn't she? She says roots are important.
Speaker: but she And she's talking about her food, technically, but, I mean, the double meaning is... Yeah, it's a double entendre. And, like, it's just after... What's the agent called it? Romano. yeah It's just after Romano's left to a presumably small p provincial town.
Speaker: And it's, like, right after that that this nun, Sister Maria, kind of goes roots for important. And I wonder if that's kind of a quite a conservative sort of robust to all this kind of luxuriating and partying and hedonism.
Speaker: it It is an interesting thought. I mean, this just occurred to me now, but you know mostly on this podcast, we've discussed American and and British film up to this point, right? And a pretty common element of Gen X for those two groups has been a kind of anti-consumerism, a breaking with this perceived kind of luxuriating materialism of the boomer generation, right?
Speaker: What's weird is in the context of Italy, and I don't want to speak for the whole country, but I can speak for what I see in this film, There's a similar rejection, but it takes a very, very different form. It's not punk. you know it's um It's yeah wandering around the forbidden sites of Rome and being able to kind of look over the city in particular ways, and nuns who have wisdom who are called the saint but look like they're about to die. It's its a very different relationship to the idea of rebellion, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's ah it sort of makes i guess make sense in this context when you have all that history or whatever, that becomes like the ultimate kind of, as you guys were saying earlier, um this whole thing about how Italy, as Italians, you kind of, um what attitude you take to this that is like unbearable weight of history and all this heritage and whatever.
Speaker: you either kind of, you know, make a light of it or like to do your own thing, do kind of like modernity, which you see like these kind of boomers in this film doing, or like maybe as Sorrentino's camera is doing, you kind of actually go back to it and react against your parents by being more conservative than that. And, you know, that's something, you know, it's obviously around a lot in the discourse now of relating to like, know, try to calf zoomers and all, um,
Speaker: But I think you sort of get an element of that with this. And maybe, you know, it does make more sense in history. I mean, if, you know, old buildings looked as good as they do in Rome, then like, why wouldn't you kind of get into them as a kind of, you know, way of way of rebelling?
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting too, just thinking about the name of his sort of nemesis who he insults at the party. Stefania. Stefania. Right. So, you know, this is made in 2013, but in a lot of ways for, you know, Italy, there's this huge shakeup in the nineties politically where, you know, the communist party sort of stumbles, falls apart and breaks into all these other things. And basically what I'm getting at is there's a sense in which every stage of what the boomers could have represented, not just ideology writ large, but
Speaker: you know sort of ah enjoyment, the political project of communism, the political project of even Christian democracy or something like this, all of that seems to be off the table. So it sounds to me like what you're saying or or thinking here, Josiah, is maybe, well, what's left is the stuff in front of you. And so you at least can sort of bask in that, if nothing else.
Speaker: Of course, It is, as Sam says, ambiguous because i think, and we're not at the second movie at the hand of God, but Rome occupies a certain a certain ambiguous status in that film too. So I don't think Sorrentino is like fully on board with this, but he's giving voice to a certain kind of discontent that the generation doesn't seem to know what to do with.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's important to remember that most of the older characters in this film, so sort of anyone at the age of about 50, will have gone through the years of lead. Oh, yeah. and remember them. So they would have lived through this period of like terrorism. know, the prime minister, literally like the Christian democratic prime minister gets kidnapped by a radical left faction. Rest in peace, Aldo Moro. Yeah, pour one out. Yeah, exactly. know, you have full flag operations, NATO stay behind forces, you know, like almost on the verge of war. So it's an incredibly ideologically charged moment. And yet these same people, what, like 10, 15, 20 years later, are deeply anti-political or apathetic, right? Like, it's much more interesting to be doing a conga line and like snorting coke off your friend's kitchen. Yeah.
Speaker: It's counter than it is to yeah know really do anything with Marxism or fascism. And only character who still has any sort of ideological artifice left is Stefania. And she's made up to be a complete fucking idiot.
Speaker: She's made up to be the most vacuous, the most illusioned person in the film. It is funny you mentioned the the sort of stay behind years of lead stuff because I was thinking like a generation prior wouldn't these guys have been like in the P2 lodge like running NATO or something? You know, like there is this this odd feeling of, um I don't know, the sort of, not just the political impotency of the generation or the giving up on politics, but I suppose this idea that you, you know, in in the mid-century, you have the politics you do so you can have the parties in a certain way. You know what I mean? Like you ah appropriate to yourself the resources so you can do the,
Speaker: you know I don't know, Hellfire Society. you know blood i don i'm I'm sounding like an insane person. I just mean you know to have fun. Whereas here, yeah really like yeah it's it's like Linote in in its portrait of like what people get out of these parties. right there's ah There's a deep listlessness that only Jep seems to be willing to talk about. I don't know. Although, doesn't he say at one point in the movie something like,
Speaker: maybe this is just, Stefania, like, you've sort of violated the unspoken code, which is that we're all unhappy and we just make jokes. And, you know, that's sort of how we keep each other entertained, but we don't talk about the real problems. I think that's...
Speaker: Your life is in tatters just like ours. like yeah Yeah, yeah. Why are these big grand pronouncements and sort why can't we just make small talk and type about things? And yet, Jep, I think, has this deep existential need for something bigger, right? Like he's constantly peppering this cardinal with a kind of existential question or trying to ask the existential questions like, what's my life for? Who am I? And like like Josiah said, all the cardinals to talk about is like recipes for like braised duck.
Speaker: but That's what made the nun character so interesting to me is because on the one hand, obviously the cardinal represents this sort of traditional Italian character of the the hedonistic churchman, you know, who's ah incapable of actually helping you with anything except for, you know, a recipe.
Speaker: But then he does introduce this character who, you know, while she's certainly no, you know, i don't know, Lacanian Big Other or something, she does have the closest thing to an answer we get in the film.
Speaker: And she is... called by everyone sort of at times tongue-in-cheek the saint. So mean, what what is what is going on there? Because in none of the other films we've watched for this so far that I can think of, does religion, even just as an institution, right? Like not even the Catholic faith or something, but just does a religious character enter in in in this sort of like even semi-authoritative way?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I don't know about like religion specifically. I mean, I think with this, i mean it's it's hard for it to work like work as a film if you don't take it to kind of be like sincere about the quote-unquote great beauty, like the thing that Jeff is searching for. i mean, like...
Speaker: If you take it ultimately, obviously it's, you know, satirizing a lot of its characters. But if you take it to be satirizing everything, like including, you know, this beautiful city that the camera shots linger over again and again, it just can't work because, like, that is all it is. Like, it is it is that.
Speaker: And so I think it's ah it's a film that, like, dares you to, like, take it seriously. And maybe this is... So this is like Sorrentino's big kind of and generational fuck you. Well, he's telling this completely unsincere generation who may be unsincere because of um some stuff, obviously some brutal stuff before, but anyway, they're unsincere now. And he's telling them, no, like take this seriously. And I think...
Speaker: For me anyway, of the really telling scenes is when he goes to watch that sort of performance artist who like you know basically um runs headfirst into the um tower of ah of a viaduct.
Speaker: you know Later we learn there's some trickery that has prevented her concussing herself. but he like interviews her afterwards and she talks at one point, Oh, like, you know, I get inspiration from these vibrations, whatever. I'm like, he latches onto this and he keeps asking, what are these vibrations? Like, what are they?
Speaker: And tell me how they work. And like, she's obviously just like said it as like random and speaking, like essentially gets terrified and wants to be like, no, like, ask me about my love affairs, ask me about life forever.
Speaker: He just wants to hear about the vibrations. He wants to hear about like her theory of art. He takes that stuff completely seriously. And it's interesting. It's just in a sense that like, sort of so much of the film is Sorrentino beating up the on the boomers.
Speaker: And yet in this, in this particular bit, I feel like it's Sorrentino beating up on his own generation. But Tyler concept supposed to be like maybe 38, 39 in the film. So she's like Gen X. Yeah. um And she even like slips in this bit where she's like, you know, like interview me about how my like mother's like boyfriend abys me, which is like in, in our grand sort of journey for Gen X is like a very Gen X thing to say.
Speaker: And also, like I wonder what you think, Josiah, of the fact that she's got a a hammer and sickle spray-painted into her pubic hair. I forgot about that. So she's naked. We should clarify she's naked on stage. Yeah, I mean, I guess what... um it's It's the chain shirt, isn't it? I mean, not to... But it's, you know, what what is the hammer and sickle at that point but ah another means to provocation in the same way that a movie I will not stop bringing up, Fall of Western Civilization, Volume 1, or Decline of Western Civilization, Volume 1, where the punks use Nazi symbolism, not because they're genuinely Nazis, but just because it's transgressive. And so I would suppose in 2013 Italy, even if it's a bit passe, if you want to make people look, you know, spray paint and cut a hammer and sickle into your pubic hair.
Speaker: Why not? It feels very Gen X to me. Almost like on the nose. so And also, Talia Concept, like that's a Gen X Twitter user's name. I mean, it just is. like He's ahead of the game on that.
Speaker: so We must agree. Her substack would be going crazy. yeah well And we we neglect to mention that she refers to herself in the third person, right? So she sort of codes very immediately as this ah The kind of wrong kind of seriousness, I like what you were saying, Josiah, about the sincerity of the film. Because one thing we keep coming back to in these discussions is the Gen X relationship between sincerity and irony that obviously someone like David Foster Wallace is going to talk about. But that you know in the popular conception of Gen X is very often lost. you know They're seen as this sort of disaffected, highly cynical, highly ironic generation when we found a greater degree of sincerity than maybe that narrative would suggest.
Speaker: And I think maybe one scene where we can think about that that was sort of briefly touched on earlier is the funeral. So he is giving advice to his new love interest and saying, kind of telling her how to perform at a funeral.
Speaker: And he says, make sure to wait till everyone sits down so that everyone will see you. Go over to the grieving party, whisper something in their ear with you know great gravitas. And he says something like,
Speaker: I couldn't decide if I was going to do a shitty a Italian accent or not. wait when you When you feel the void deep inside you, know that you can count on me. You know, something like this. And everyone's supposed to go, what is he saying? What is Jeff Gumberdella saying? What's Gumberdella saying? And the idea is to make yourself sort of the center attention, then he says, don't cry. You know, it's the one thing you don't want to do.
Speaker: Don't attract attention to yourself in that way. Be elusive, right? And this is the perfect sort of cynical view of a funeral. It's a social occasion. I treat death with no sincerity whatsoever. i used as an opportunity to build my profile, more or less. right Then, at the actual funeral, when he goes through it this ritual— We get this quick cross-cutting of him crying back to his love interest face as she looks up at him back and forth. And it's this kind of, i mean, in in a kind of etymological sense, ecstatic moment where he obviously has exceeded the bounds of his own ability to control his relationship to death, which is, you know, the absolute is the thing that he's up against and trying to figure out what to he do with his life.
Speaker: That's really interesting because I read it. He was just like, I read it that he was crying because the coffin was too heavy. i I mean, that i had read it sincerely. I could be, again, you know, listen. yeah I read it as sincere also. I think that would be, um Jeff would really be playing 3D chess if he could, um if he was like sort of Yeah. oh Oh, you mean like he was literally the coffin was too big and he was crying of like frustration? That's how I've read it. is that like he He like, an act of sort of selflessness, picks up the coffin and he's punished for it because he's too old. They're all too old to be carrying this coffin of this young man.
Speaker: I think one of the other characters, the toy salesman's wife, kind of, you she goes up to the the coffin. She goes, you're back, you're back. and I don't know, yeah, I just always read it as a kind of like a sort of poetic justice for these old men sort of playing younger men. You view this as a movie in which God exists, is basically. You know, in other words, he you know there's sort of a a divine force that punishes Jep for being you know insufficiently ah you know ah sentimental about mortality or something.
Speaker: shaar What do you make of Jet's love interest, Ramona? Because she's like the one, she's like the main Gen X character in the film, right? Like she yeah if we're thinking generationally, she is sort Sorrentino. I am thinking of weird where that Sorrentino is standing.
Speaker: She's probably born the same sort time as Sorrentino. She's very Gen X in some ways. Like she um the first time she meets Gran Modella in the strip club, she says, you know i'm not cut out for beautiful things, which sounds like something straight out of like Daria.
Speaker: And yeah she has this kind of like aged boomer father who's a strip club manager and she's a stripper at like 40. um I think she's a tricky one. I think it is.
Speaker: You're probably right that there's some kind of identification with Sorrentino here because like she sort of almost, like, doesn't, like, fully, um, like, the movie's, the film's gravity, like, doesn't fully apply to her. Like, she is not, like, it sort of floats into it and floats out of it quite quickly.
Speaker: as As you say, she is this kind of, um, almost like supremely cynical figure, but then also kind of like a bit romantic as well. Like, like Jep goes and sees her in a kind of like little dinky house, like in the suburbs where she has a dog and a swimming pool and she's in her armbands.
Speaker: They have this kind of like affair that's like, clearly not, you know, like not physical first. Like obviously she's a catch for him, one would assume, but like he's sort of like more interested in like like going around with her and stuff and like showing her stuff. But like, I mean, the the bit where he's lecturing her on the funeral, he's like also choosing her outfit for the funeral. So there's very much like he's kind of making her into something. Yeah.
Speaker: It's a great scene. yeah And then it's a really great scene. And then um actually the scene of him in that yellow blazer on that marble seat has been my Twitter background for for many years now. that sure That shows you the kind of relationship with this film.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, and then that's the thing, like they sort of sleep you over a bit and she sort it's sort of like done very quickly when she tells him, oh like I've got this like incurable disease. That's fine. That's why I'm still stripping. That's why I'm and spending my money on. Or like I'm trying to get treatment of this, this disease. And then she kind of just leaves and sort of dies, like very abruptly the film. Like I guess the assumption is she has died.
Speaker: and isn't really kind of a alluded to since. She's kind of like, when one of the first, even the second time i watched the film, I sort of really struggled to kind of work out what what she was for. think one of the really striking things with her is that at one point we see Jep lying on his bed and he sees the the sea on his ceiling. Like the camera cuts the ceiling and there's the the sea is superimposed. on it He's daydreaming whatever.
Speaker: And then when he's in the bed with her, the camera cap's the same thing and we just see a blank ceiling. It's almost like he, in that moment, is given this kind of element of privacy. Like he is with her and they are kind of sharing a kind of subjectivity, which which we are for once not allowed into.
Speaker: um I think she's a bit of a puzzle. I think this is a ah film that is full of kind of MacGuffins. I think she's won a bit, I think The Nun is won a bit. And I think you sort of have to kind of take it as that. I think this is fundamentally like a visually visual first film and that's the way it operates with these elements rather than them sort of being quite um symbolically kind of locked in.
Speaker: But yeah, I think her is a as a sort of this this younger figure who is at once more innocent and more um cynical than those older than her, like her as this kind of consequence in a subtler but no less drastic way than Andrea is quite interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's interesting that they both die. They both die before their parents. And it's kind of interesting their parents, right? So, like, you have Viola, Andrea's mother, who is this kind of, like, Ursula von der Leyen style.
Speaker: Angela Merkel style, bourgeois Italian woman with, like, twin set pearls and, like, short, neat hair. And then you have um Ramona's father, who I don't think is ever named. He might have been named, but im not sure. but Anyway, he's a sort of...
Speaker: Rolling Stone-esque, you know, like pickled in in his own sort of alcoholic juices, heroin addict, sort of i maybe 80-year-old strip club owner or strip club manager. i think he loses. He sells the strip club. He's just the manager.
Speaker: And then he sort of bitches to Jep that he has to work until 6 a.m. So you have these two different boomer and it's sort of like People who are probably young in the 60s, two different life trajectories, one of like respectability in the establishment and one of the counterculture and post-hippiedom.
Speaker: and At least for Sorrentino, both of these are failures. Both of these lead to the death of children. They're both effectively empty. and yeah It it sort of makes me wonder like what the way out is. so I mean...
Speaker: A couple things. First of all, there's a great line with ah the strip club manager where he says he traded coke for heroin at like 60 or whatever he says, right? So that itself is this wonderful indication of you know the the fast the life of the fast times leads to the kind of slow death of the heroin addict, right?
Speaker: he He becomes basically too old for cocaine and wants to go softly into the night, I guess. But on the question of Ramona, and again, this is my first viewing, so I guess I found her very interesting as a... Josiah, think it was you who said that initially it's not a sexual relationship, right? And it's very telling. It begins where she comes from behind this silhouetted dance where you can just see her body, right? And it's the... father talking about how, oh, I wish she'd stop. I wish she would not do this anymore. She needs to do something else. She's in her early 40s.
Speaker: It's all about the young Polish girls now. don't know, maybe that's an EU thing or something. So she comes out and clearly thinks that the dad is basically trying to pimp her out to this you know very old man, right? And she's kind of verbally jabbing at him in this way. And he basically goes like, I'm not here for a date or I forget what he says, but it basically is an attempt to tell her like, that's not what this is about. He's actually trying to get me to find you a husband. And then she says something like, well, he never stops with that, right?
Speaker: So even though it becomes this romantic relationship in a sexual sense. I really did see it, Josiah, building up what you said, as this kind of brief moment of escape.
Speaker: You know, this, even if it ends, this indication that there could be something else, a sketching of the idea of something beyond the boundary of partying in Rome until you die.
Speaker: And in that case, it's about an actual relationship that involves a connection ah In other cases, as with the nun, it seems to be about this kind of like either going back to your hometown or spiritual surrender or appreciation of the beauty of something. But these all seem to me to be different, the kind of curvature of different shapes that exist just beyond the horizon.
Speaker: of the party we see at the beginning, if that makes sense. they're They're not fully sketched out because no one can quite get to them all the time, it doesn't seem like. But they're there and you have to see the trace of them. yeah the other One of the of real human connections that Jep has in the film, of aside from Ramona, is his ex-lover. He has this like forgotten, long-lost love called Elisa,
Speaker: who I think he meets in Naples as a young man. And then she dies maybe a quarter of the way into the film. And Jep meets Elisa's husband who's been with her for 30, 40 years. And initially it's quite an awkward meeting because Jep finds out that Elisa has never sort of stopped loving him. She sort only ever saw this unnamed husband as a sort of utilitarian placeholder for Jep.
Speaker: And yet, as the film progresses, they sort of, yeah, they build ah something like a human relationship. And think right towards the end of the film, Jeff goes to visit his old love interest's husband. I think presumably it's like an exurb of Rome or it's like a provincial town just outside Rome.
Speaker: And he's got a new girlfriend who's like decked out in like a pink tracksuit. They're like presumably pretty working class, like Italians. And he's like, what are you going to do tonight? And they kind of go, we're going to smoke some cigarettes, smoke some spaghetti, watch TV.
Speaker: And he his reply is like, you wonderful, lovely, lovely, lovely people. I mean, it's not sarcastic. It's incredibly earnest and well-meant in good faith. And yeah, I think it's interesting that the sort of the two people that Jack connects with aren't in Hawaii society. They're not in literary society.
Speaker: they you know They're a sort of suburban stripper and this kind of like bereft, grieving, working-class guy from a provincial town somewhere on a sidebar. And I wonder what Sorrentino is doing with that. I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, maybe, you know, I don't know when you wanted to pivot to talk about Anne of God, but maybe that's a good way of doing it because it's obviously part of this film is like, you know, Rome is this kind of, well, obviously it's double-edged. Like he, I mean, he, you know, sincerely, sincerely is saying Rome is beautiful and great, but obviously the people that live there are kind of an issue.
Speaker: And um we obviously have a line um from that director character in um The Hand of God when he he's talking to the Sorrentino stand-in, the kind of young guy who like wants to make films.
Speaker: This guy says, oh, I want to have an imaginary life. I want to be like this sort of enchanted figure, blah, blah, blah. The director says, um only souls go to Rome. So, you know, there's already this thing that's like, you know, you're a kind of... um true-born Neapolitan, like, know, what the hell are you doing going to Rome? I mean, we haven't got into the kind of regional politics much, which is like a huge, huge thing in Italy. um But I think, obviously, see that's interesting, you know, Sorrentino being this Southern Italian and kind of, you know, I mean, I think so, you know, the context, I mean, the the simplest way to talk about it is that Northern Italians think Southern Italians are Arabs and Southern Italians think Northern Italians are Germans.
Speaker: Maybe that's a good place to just talk about what the hand of God is, you know, so ah maybe a brief overview and then we can spark out from there.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I'm interested to know how much you both enjoy this film. like For me, this is like a a solid, unambiguous 7 out of 10 film. like It's a good film. It's worth watching. There's some good stuff.
Speaker: It's not going to change your life. And you know it's basically Sorrentino, from what I understand, doing like a fictionalised version of his own childhood, right down to the fact that his parents, as is quite effectively me portrayed in this film, and died from a gas leak at their, you know, kind of holiday home in the mountains. um But, you know, it's kind of this, like, young kid is going around Naples, like, and I've got, obviously, reference to um Melalona and um who, you know, a big part of the ambient plot. The first half of the film is...
Speaker: Can Naples afford Maradona? Can they buy him? Turns out they can. And then the rest the film is like him kind of he the the he kind of crops up in on the TV a lot and there's a scene where they're watching that famous Argentina-England game where Maradona infamously knocks a ball in to the girl with his hand and then later scores this kind of sublime goal with his feet, which is you know obviously a big part of European football law and cultural law in general.
Speaker: um i can recuse myself from the rest of the conversation. Yeah, I just... As a three-one Englishman, or maybe Sam a different view as a nominal Scotsman. As a three-one Englishman, you know, I think you can't, and you can you always have to withhold some amount of praise from Maradona. You need to put nominal Scotsman in your Twitter bio, I think, Sam, is the most important thing.
Speaker: a ah I'd never go back to Glasgow ever again. LAUGHTER no it's It's definitely a thing. i mean my ah It's such a Gen X touchstone, the hand of God. my My dad, who is deeply uninterested in football most of the time, you know you you bring up Maradona and he's like of weeping and blushing and giving senilequies.
Speaker: I need to be clear. I had no idea that this was a significant event. i was just like, ah, these Neapolidans, they're interested in soccer, whatever, who knows? So this is an event. I think it really is like a generational event. It's like up there with like, I don't know, like the death of Diana or something. um And I think it's, it's, it's transcontinental in that sense.
Speaker: And um yeah, this is also four years off. This is 1986, four years after the Falcon's war. So, um, you know, there were some resonances. But I think Stratina is like genuinely obsessed with Maradona. Like if you watch Youth, which is comes out before the Hand of God and after the Great Beauty, there's a kind of cameo from someone playing Maradona.
Speaker: It's a sort of imaginary Maradona that's at this health spa who has a huge, a huge tattoo of Sheikha Vara on his chest and a huge tattoo of Karl Marx on his back. um I think Maradona represents for Gen X like a kind of,
Speaker: like third world-est working-class rebellion. Like Maradona is from this sort of like, you know, banally, that's the wrong term, but you know, a barrier even. of um You know, Buenos Aires, he's like this working-class mystizo kid.
Speaker: And he obviously comes of age like during the dirt Argentines, like Argentina's dirty war. He's very like anti-authoritarian, anti-junta. ah And yeah, I think like he's up there in that kind of pantheon Gen X icons of like, I don't know, Nelson Mandela, right?
Speaker: Like he's he's a sports version of Nelson Mandela. Well, the movie opens with an epigraph from him, and it it tags him as the greatest of all time, explicitly in the epigraph, right? so yeah yeah Yeah. Which is, I guess, one reason why this movie is just is quite an indulgent movie in some ways, you know?
Speaker: It's interesting that because it seems so, you know, just talking with friends coming into this particular conversation, i found more of them had seen The Hand of God than The Great Beauty. And it seems to me because I guess Hand of God got nominated maybe for Best Foreign Language Oscar or International Oscar or whatever it is. Yeah. So I guess it got buzz in that way, which is... He did win the Foreign Language Oscar. Yeah.
Speaker: No, I think the reason people threw the hand of God is it it was a Netflix-only release, pretty sure. Oh, that's probably why. It's during COVID, too, right? So that's going to... Yeah, it was very heavily advertised on the Netflix front page. so I do have to make a ah minor confession here, which is that between the two movies, I went over to his Wikipedia page just to check when the films had come out you know relative to one another. And the only line or the beginning or whatever of his early life section is just the fact that his parents died of a carbon monoxide leak at 60. So when it happened to the movie, I was like, God damn it. like you know I had found out maybe 45 minutes earlier that was the case. And it does remove... you know it's it's not The movie's not a i mean movie's about that in a kind of spiritual, psychological sense, but it does remove whatever narrative momentum the film has because that really is the volta for the movie. And then...
Speaker: Otherwise, it is just kind of him figuring it out, for lack of a better way to put it, you know, after that tragedy. I mean, I think the movie's strength, such as it is, that it's quite good at seeing things through the eyes of a child. I think in The Great Beauty we have this quite fun, smart satire with all these characters, whereas I think I mentioned this at the top, I think one the things I really like about it is the big family scenes. This is big family lunch, and this morbidly obese relation has got a new man, and everyone's wondering.
Speaker: it will be. and um, well, first of all, before we get to this, we, we see this like matriarch who has got through some illegitimate means, his fur coat and is sitting away from the big table on her own stool, wrapped in a fur coat on a blazing hot day, eating this like ball of mozzarella with a white liquid, like dripping down and you see it.
Speaker: And then, you know, there's a couple arrive and the guy is, he's from like Venice or like or something. he's like a retired police captain. He like introduced his very formal way, but he, um he speaks via, he obviously has a speech issue and speaks via this microphone which he holds to his throat and then he speaks in a kind of Almost like a sort of Stephen Hawking kind of two robotic way. And so you have all these like, like almost like Roald Dahl-esque kind of like like with class characters. And I think that's really makes sense in gels when you're sort of seeing stuff from like a young sort of a boy's point of view.
Speaker: One of the details in that scene that really got me is just that they all really want to see him, right? And they're sort of peering, you know, they they've got lookouts in position for a period of time. And then they're sort of like, he's ugly, he's ugly. know, this sort of celebration that he's disgusting or whatever. There is there is a ah real feeling of... um I don't know, maybe this is telling myself, but my own family maybe shares in some of this both closeness and just ah utter cruelty to one another at the same time. Maybe it's a Southern Italian trait of some kind that I'm a only now being made aware of. But but you say you family from Southern Italy.
Speaker: So, well, my family came from Sicily, but I lived for a summer in Reggio Calabria. So, you know, just sort of over into the into the boot part. And it was it it it had sort of similar a similar feeling in certain respects. I mean, obviously, people are speaking Italian dialect. I have no idea what's going on. But I remember visiting with a friend's family, and they sort of just emerged with this some sort of endangered rodent that you're not supposed to poach, but they had poached it.
Speaker: And a they bring it out. And they're like, oh, the great honor is for you to eat the heart. And my friend, who's you know American, but is you know of Italian extraction, is sort of like looking at me, sort of like, what do I do? And of course, he takes a ah bite out of the heart and everyone sort of cheers. But they're you know hanging in that moment ah was, I guess, to a certain extent, the kind of social pressure I felt at a lot of the gatherings in this movie. This ah closeness, but also a certain fun viciousness, for lack of a better way of putting it.
Speaker: I'm just wondering about how the 80s and Naples function the film in the sense that Italy is still in turmoil. like This is still the age of like ideologies for Italy. And it's it's kind of there in the background. like I think there's a part where Sorrentino's standing. His dad sort of... Does he go to a course for communists or something? but His yeah he dad's like a communist, isn't he?
Speaker: Yeah, he says, we're not going to get a remote because we're communists. Yeah. Yeah, but yeah we should like know this is a very sort of like, I but suppose like lower middle class suburban Neapolitan milieu that we're in.
Speaker: And it's it's it's the opposite of the great beauty in that sense, right? Like it's, everyone is like incredibly unglamorous. every character is sort of like deeply like intimate and sort of like comfortable prosaic almost like Rabelaisian right like that's all seen in nature like well quite fat my and yeah I wonder if there's an element of nostalgia to the film like the great beauty is constantly like dealing with nostalgia right like it it doesn't really come down positively or negatively on nostalgia but all the characters are in some way nostalgic and I wonder if this is like Sorrentino giving into that nostalgia yeah like is the sort of lower middle class ideological, you know, sort of cold war era, nineteen eighty s Neapolitan Italy better than the sort of post political, know, hedonistic Italy of sort of the late 2000s in Rome. yeah Like these are two very different visions of Italy.
Speaker: I don't know, like, because the the main character is constantly trying to escape. boom Is that just a function of him being a teenager? Yeah. You know, like Cinema Paradiso, which comes out in the late 80s, which is also about a filmmaker wanting to escape his small sort of Italian town.
Speaker: There's a really big invocation in that film to never come back. don't know if either of you have seen that film, but the end, the cinema photographer, the camera operator sort of tells the young aspiring director, like, don't ever come back. Go to Rome, make a fortune.
Speaker: Don't come back. Don't like forget us. Don't don't come back. And this film is very much the opposite, right? Like, it's a return to something. Or it's at least more ambivalent. I mean, a lot of the films we've talked about, but also outside of what we've spoken about, in American movies especially, is very opposed to remaining in the suburbs. That's sort of the worst thing you can do in most of 80s and ninety s American cinema, right?
Speaker: it's It's the place where creativity goes to die. Here, and and those do tend to be kind of Gen X movies, even if made earlier, Whereas here, I mean, obviously we haven't said this, but he states multiple times, it's you know it's not a biographical movie, that he wants to be a filmmaker, right? That that's what he wants to go on to do, right?
Speaker: And he says at one point to this filmmaker who's already working and is kind of at the outskirts of the movie for a lot of it, that he wants to go to Rome. And that's when the filmmaker tells him that only assholes go to Rome. So it's...
Speaker: I think it is more ambivalent than just Rome being like a bad place to go, because it is where the film industry is. And it is you know and he goes to Rome. like the the The end credits are him on the train to Rome.
Speaker: that But at the same time, I think Sam is right that there is more You know, Naples, even if it's made fun of in in a lot of ways, i mean, my wife literally said, I didn't know they made people that fat in Italy. And that's sort of an American's response to some of the things you see in this film.
Speaker: You know, it does have its charms in a way that the American version of this film, like if I put myself into the mind of a Gen X movie from the United States about leaving behind a small town to go to a city to pursue music or film or some equivalent creative undertaking,
Speaker: The suburbs are going to be coded. like i'll give you an example. it's It's a movie called Pieces of April from 1999, I think it is. and It's a movie that's almost entirely about like the relationship between the suburbs and the city and how you you know try and disentangle or reconnect those worlds. and It's a movie that starts from the premise that they cannot be combined and that the attempt to combine them is going to result in all sorts of trouble for all parties involved, basically.
Speaker: This movie seems more willing to sit in the ambiguity between the two, that there is an appreciation for roots, as we saw in The Great Beauty, but also a recognition that Rome is sort of, the you know, has the eternal clarion call for the Italian creative. it's where you have to go. Yeah.
Speaker: But also I think like, like overall to the film's detriment, like Sorrentino does really like kind of like lean into the like enchanted, like Southern Italy kind of stereotype here. Like the first sequence is like this woman who like goes to find this um Saint San Gennaro and um it's like real to be real. And then we have, um you know, this car pull up at one point, which apparently has Maradona in it. I think,
Speaker: I think it's ah it's a trait that like really works in the great beauty, because but the less so here, where like he like kind of believes the Kool-Aid. by address or He believes the Kool-Aid? He's drinking the Kool-Aid. He but you know believes that like Italy is like a wondrous magical place like full of history, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And I think his treatment of Naples, particularly like the old bits of Naples in this, kind of really fall into that, don't they? Well, so San Gennaro is, a i think he's associated with Benevento, not with Naples, but in either case, like not the north of Italy, right?
Speaker: And his whole miracle is ah whether or not the, are you all familiar with this? not familiar. Every year, they do this parade on his feast day. i i Somewhere in Italy, I don't know where his relics are kept, but in any case. And the miracle is that the blood in this reliquary liquefies. It sort of decoagulates, and that's almost... um Groundhog Day style, a prediction that it's going to be a good year. Like this is one of these many sort of charming Italian traditions, or you could say maybe Catholic old world traditions.
Speaker: And so, I don't know, there felt like something saying very interesting about making San Gennaro be this person who is the stand-in, right? Who we haven't said is just a guy in a limousine who touches her ass and makes it so that she could become pregnant again from her husband, right? like that's So even the desire expressed is ultimately the desire of... um almost like folk magic. you know like the The levels of of ah Italy as an enchanting place is not just the creativity of the cinema and the power of it. It's you know literally like medieval herbalism or something where it you know makes it so you can... And you know just to add to that, I don't know that we've really brought that character up, but that is the Sorrentino stand-in's aunt who is eventually committed to a sanitarium, but who also becomes his sort of
Speaker: confidant in the fact of his wanting to be a director and in some ways inspires him to you know do what he's going to do and go on. So she is this interesting... exception to Naples society. Like on the one hand, she has, she's really in it, right? She wants to have this child. She wants to be a part of society. On the other hand, she is committed because she loses her mind for reasons we can go into if we want or what happens to her. But anyway, San Gennaro, the blood's liquefying.
Speaker: There is a magic there. No, exactly. And like it does link like heavily to like the Maradona stuff. So if you look at like, like photos of Naples, like like when he, when he died a couple of years ago, whatever, like, They're like Catholic shrines to Maradona. He's like, to all intents and purposes, a saint in Naples.
Speaker: you just You made me realize something, and that there is something maybe interesting in the fact, and I've only seen these two movies and parts of The Young Pope, so I can only speak from that relatively limited filmography when it comes to Sorrentino.
Speaker: But his reliance on the deus ex machina as a sort of as a device in both of these movies does seem interesting insofar as much of what we've discussed comes back to these kind of irresolvable contradictions. you know The contradiction of, I need to go to Rome, but I have to stay rooted in Naples. The contradiction of, Rome is the eternal city, but it's also this you know gross cesspit where ah people with too much plastic surgery go to bleed themselves out at 75 years old right?
Speaker: He himself, as far as I understand, is not like a religious person, and a believer, or anything like that. But in the world of his movies, he seems to need something, whether we call it Italy, whether we call it God, whether we call it, ah you know i don't know, Western civilization or something. Something has to come in and affect the change necessary for things to move forward. And that, to me, seems kind of revealing of maybe...
Speaker: the difficulties presented by resolving the sorts of contradictions he's interested in exploring. like He has to find a way from outside to make that work rather than have it be a sort of narrative dimension, if that makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah. No, that does make sense. And I think don't think people dispute he's quite a like romantic filmmaker, you know? And, um you know, the idea of some greater power coming in and sorting stuff out is kind of...
Speaker: all part of that deal and ae can be charming or frustrating depending on how it lands. i mean How do we see the deus ex machina in the hand of God? It's kind of a negative deus ex machina in a sense. The first deus ex machina is his parents.
Speaker: dying of Is it supposed to like a carbon monoxide leak? Yeah. Effectively. Which, in a way, is obviously incredibly traumatic for the main character who's a stand-in for Sorrentino, but also kind of liberates him to, one, it's a kind of build-on-throw-man style thing where he's going finally grow up or like leave the shadow of his parents and he's sort of domineering, like huge Neapolitan family. And it also often policy opens up the opportunity for him to go to Rome. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I guess that's quite a particularly Italian thing. Like, if parents have to die in everything. Accident for you to, like, have any sense of self-actualization or fulfillment. I don't know. Like, I feel like ah an equivalent film from an English filmmaker wouldn't, this sort of narrative vice wouldn't need to be there.
Speaker: Like, if if this was made of an English filmmaker of the same generation, you'd just fucking go to London. It'd be fine. But there's some kind of, like, existential burden for the sort of southern Italian to, like, leave to go to Rome. It's a much bigger thing, right?
Speaker: Because the Italian other thing is is true. I mean, i like it just is. I mean, if I speak to my wife about my relationship with my mom, who's since deceased, but I mean, when she was alive, like she's like, this this is insane. you know She's giving you dating advice when you're 12 years old. What kind of an insane mom is this? you know Telling you ah all all girls are out to play games with you and break your heart. I mean, you know Freud's having a field day.
Speaker: it's it it It makes sense to me that an Italian would have to kill the parents to go to Rome. And also, which we haven't discussed yet, which we really really need to, tux the Baroness. It was maybe the most shocking part of the film for me.
Speaker: in essence, you know he's grieving. i think this after his parents pass away. Um, and so basically, you know, there's this question about what's he going to do and and how's he going to direct the sexual energy? He's at that age and he goes up and there's this just, I mean, you kind of can feel it coming, but it takes quite a while to unfold where she's like, Oh, there's ah a bat in my house. And then there is actually a bat in the house locked in a room that he, you know, actually has to contend with escapes, then finds her in bed, you know, sort of,
Speaker: ah like an odalesque, sort of draped in in her nightie across her her queen-size bed or whatever it is. and What did you all make of that? Because on the one hand, it's an autobiographical thing. It's like, you know I'm watching Amar Kord. All Italian directors seem to have to be sexually assaulted by middle-aged or older women. And I mean, you know let's be honest, it obviously rubbed off on Sorrentino. I mean, I've not seen a director linger on the bodies of 47-year-old women and so many times in two movies as this gentleman likes to. So I think it left a bit of an imprint.
Speaker: But what yeah what did you all make of that? I think it gets back to the whole, like, um, the weight way to the past thing, like, initially, like, the whole complex, out like, you know, what do you do? what How do you go on to, like, live now when you have all this heritage? Like, you're literally a young guy, like, fucking an old man. He's like, he's fucking the past. Like, you know, he's having sex with the past.
Speaker: And, you know, I think the fact she's a, may or may not be, or he pretends to be ah an aristocrat from an old regime kind of, um, links to that And she does at one point say afterwards, after this um this event, this development, she says um she did it, she she made this happen, quote, to help you look to the future.
Speaker: oh yeah. i like know Whether that's like glib or like sincerely meant by her or by Sorrentino is another question. But the fact that it's been spoken about in relation to the past and the future time, think it thing. And I certainly like sort of that as like a great gag about like maybe even, you know, this quite romantic director being a bit like self-aware for once. Like, you know, we have all these like quasi pornographic shots of like, you know, old buildings and, you know, like artfully disheveled facades or whatever. Well, like here's this guy like shagging a pensioner in pearls, like, you know, this whole kind of thing in that sense that
Speaker: but It's like, one days he's like deeply obsessed with both like utopia and nostalgia, right? Like he's constantly like dancing between nostalgia and the future in both of these films. Like, I think, is it Ramon, the, ah the agent of Gander, Garb and Dela has this like awful woman play.
Speaker: Um, I think it says something like, you know, what's wrong with nostalgia? Like it's something to believe in when the future doesn't exist. Um, oh yeah like in the great beauty, you have these boomers constantly trying to fuck Gen X.
Speaker: ah millennials are like constantly trying to fuck the future or like bring the future into being somehow in a way that that they're all like barren. Most them are barren or they're terrible parents and they're constantly trying to fuck you. people yeah Yeah. And then in, in the hand of God, have, you know, a young man fucking the past.
Speaker: I think like Sorrentino is obsessed with like some kind of like temporal sexual loop is going on. yeah Yeah. I think it is. i mean, I think you're all, you're all completely right at the symbolic level, but I also, I,
Speaker: There is, i mean, maybe this is just me being sort of a prudish American, but I do feel like it it comes out in a lot of, his especially Italian and French films, this sort of like... I don't know, the the sexual initiation, right? right I mean, Almar Kord comes to mind as this movie that's just like fundamentally about that. But I mean, watch any e like any any number of Fassbender's late movies, you'll see a similar thing. there's You used a term earlier, just I think you the the weight of the past or sort of like the, you know, that the just the weight of history, maybe something like this. Maybe it is true that, you know, for an American viewer watching this, we, I don't know, there's there's less a sense of history as a weight and more a sense of history as this thing that,
Speaker: allows us to liberate ourselves, you know, by, don't know. Just going back to, uh, utopia and nostalgia as these kind of like twin peaks, to use a terrible metaphor there, um, of these two films, um, there's just different pieces of the art world in The Great Beauty. And the one that I always forget about, and I, I remembered re-watching the film, and I always forget about it, but right towards the end, he goes to this conceptual art show,
Speaker: And it's devoid of the the sort of performative, you know, lustful, lecherous party. It's very quiet, and he's going to interview an artist, and it's finally an artist that he likes.
Speaker: And it's this young, middle-aged man, slightly younger than Jack Parker, presumably Gen X, kind of like maybe around 40. And he's got this huge display of... selfies ah effectively that his dad his father starts taking of him every single day and he carries on once his father dies and it's like a day by day chronicle of this man's life and it's interesting because at the start of the film he hooks up with this heiress called Orietta who admits to him that she obsessively takes selfies of herself sometimes naked and he I think is disgusted by this kind of narcissism of social incipient social media I think she says she posts them on Facebook so we're in the early sort of
Speaker: stages of social media. And yet you fast forward there's this male artist who's doing <unk>s exactly the same thing, but it's ah it's done by his father, ah presumably on Polaroid if it started when he was small child.
Speaker: um And Jack is like finally taken with a piece of art, right? And this piece of art is about progeny, it's about legacy, it's about relationship between the father and the son. presumably a Gen X son and a silent generation father. And there's this is kind of continuity there. This is kind of like, he's like deeply, deeply moved by it.
Speaker: And it's just interesting that that is the one thing that me and Jeff Gambardella in that film. And then the real sort of note of earnestness and sentimentality in the hand of God is the kind of relationship between the son, who is the son, and for Sorrentino,
Speaker: And his parents, who are like deeply flawed characters. I think the fathers had loads affairs, and yet still like deeply, deeply in love, right? like They whistle to each other, this particular whistle, every time they see each other. um There's a shot of the son, his father, and his mother on a Vesper, driving on the Neapolitan coast, and it's deeply felt, right?
Speaker: So it seems like Sorrentino in some senses is, there's a quite a kind of conservative family, maybe not explicitly conservative, but implicitly this kind of like very like pro-family, but those bonds of progeny and legacy are like the most important thing and like transcend whatever else is going on.
Speaker: You heard it here first that Paolo Sorrentino is fine with you posting pictures of your children, of your food on Facebook. These things are fine. You put a selfie up, it's not looking good. You're vain.
Speaker: He seems like deeply skeptical of like the selfie age at the start with Orietta, this woman who Jep hasn't affair with. But then later on, it's seen as this beautiful thing. I think it's it's the context in which that narcissism has played out that makes it okay.
Speaker: Well, because it stops being narcissistic once it's... Yeah, yeah. Sorry. When it's narcissism of a love of loving father towards his son, that's somehow... you know That's very different to ah this kind of self-reflective narcissism of a childless woman, the rich childless woman.
Speaker: That is a sort of, and maybe saying it ties both movies together, um this sense that the good you can do is always outside of yourself. I mean, maybe that sounds very trite, because I suppose it is, as any sort of lesson you learn from a movie ends up sounding. But that ultimately, any character who becomes too engaged in their own sort of like, okay, I'll use a little theory word, Hegelian bad consciousness, you know, that that's not good, right? You end up at the dinner parties making jokes to chase away death, as with Jep in the first movie or you know in in the second film, perhaps.
Speaker: i don't know if we get characters who act in that way in quite the same way, but that always seems to be the trap. Whereas if you can find something to pursue aesthetically, whether that's Rome or cinema or another person, insofar as you know love is also this aesthetic quality, that even if it doesn't guarantee escape, promises a certain level of yearning that is maybe for Sorrentino, if not the same thing as happiness, about as close as a person can get, right? It's sort of like accepting that yearning and inhabiting it and moving through it.
Speaker: Yeah. I think if if I was to do like a single word summary of five of these films, but particularly The Great Beauty, it would be yearning. This is a yearning coded film. It's yearn-pilled.
Speaker: The newest TikTok aesthetic is, ah yeah, dark yearning. Well, it is ah if I can bring us back to like the Gen X element of this all vis-a-vis boomerdom or whatever we're calling it.
Speaker: One thing we've come back to, whether it's in Fight Club or, I mean, really, basically anything we've spoken about this season, it ends up feeling like Gen X is at its wits end materially, right? That is to say that there's an acceptance of a kind of death of ideology. There's an acceptance of ah relative comfort with the important caveat of streetwise and kids, which we talked about and Van Tyn. But for the most part, that's in place.
Speaker: And what replaces it is a kind of spiritual hunger that And I use spiritual there in a very broad sense. I don't mean religious hunger. I just mean yearning, desire, a sense that there is you know more for a person than the end of history as ah ah as a moment of happiness. and you know What's the Fukuyama term? Thumos, Sam, I think that you brought up before? Thumos, yeah, Aristotelian thumos. A sense of boredom.
Speaker: And here, Sorrentino, a lot of the ambiguity that we're talking about here is uniquely Italian, right? Like the ways that it's expressed, the domineering, loving family, the beauty of Rome as a city, the um you know Berlusconi-esque bunga bunga parties that people are participating in, so on and so forth.
Speaker: These things are uniquely Italian. But the the thing being analyzed seems to me to cut through almost everything we've talked about. And Sorrentino seems to be attempting a very specific kind of resolution, which is not, you know,
Speaker: the revolutionism of a fight club or the, um I don't know, racial harmony of a glory or something like this, but as instead this, um you know, I don't like using this word, but almost like existentialist acceptance of one's yearning and hoping that that gets you somewhere, which maybe looks a little weird on the, you know, on the other side of the internet, so to speak, but it does seem to be deeply felt by him.
Speaker: I feel like Sorrentino is constantly trying to break out of that object within itself, existential yearning. He embraces it and yet he's skeptical of its totality. right like When Jep meets Elisa's husband after she's died, this is Jep's love interest. um Jep asks this husband, here like ah did you have any children? And he goes, no, I couldn't i couldn't have any children. And he goes, but I could. but i could um like there's a deep but The yearning is not just for self-actualization.
Speaker: in the classic sort of boomer Adam Curtis century of the self sort of way. It's also a yearning for like something exterior to oneself. Yeah. Like in that moment, Jeff is like, shit, like if we'd stayed together, we could have, could have had like something that was beyond me.
Speaker: Yeah. Uh, And I think Sorrentino is constantly sort of recognizing or like trying to deal with the the desire for self-actualization, which also like his standing character in Hand of God has, right? Like he has this constant desire to be a film director and he he leaves his brother as well.
Speaker: His brother sort of like kind of wants him to stay, wants like him to take longer to deal with his grief. He's just like, hang around Naples, have a good time. But he's like wanting to go to Rome. And... Yeah, it's not like clear whether that's a selfish decision or not. Like it's not fully endorsed in a kind of American girl boss, lean in way. can't even remember who wrote lean in, but like, it's not like you go girl, you go boy in this instance, like, you fucking get that bag.
Speaker: It's, it's... You go Neapolitan. Yeah, it's very deeply Neapolitan. It's deeply Gen X as well, I think, and like being quite suspicious of ambition. Hmm. Well, the the dissatisfaction with his own sentimentality is itself something we've come across multiple times here. In other words, like we could use the word postmodern if we want, but this need to always sort of at least have the eyes slightly willing to wink. You know, we're not quite at the world of Joss Whedon yet and, uh,
Speaker: you know we did a thing or something like that. But but we are, i think, in someone like Sorrentino, desirous of something more, but also recognizing that it's gauche to just say that.
Speaker: And so he always needs to, I think, maintain a certain balance there. And i think that is typical of a lot of what we've seen so far, with with apologies to Gen X, maybe, for saying that.
Speaker: and What do people make of it as being a kind of Italian particularity? we've talked about Italian particularity a lot. like the weight of history, like the weight of like culture, like Italy is this be's dead museum that was a futurist reference. And yet all of that is like slowly being unpicked and at least a great beauty, right? Like there is a sense, uh, incipient underlying sense of globalization, like the first scene in the film, which but I think everyone overlooks because you immediately after the first like two minutes, you go into the party scene, which is like, you wow. But the first scene is ah ah a Chinese tourist group. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: like next to a fountain. It's not the Trevi. It's sort of on the outskirts of Rome somewhere. And one of the Chinese tourists like kills over dying while taking a photograph. Like this is an Italy lead that's on the on the verge of globalization, right? It's on the verge of losing maybe some of that particularity.
Speaker: The beauty was too big. It was too great. He couldn't contain it with his camera and it killed him. I think that is non-ironically actually kind of what the point is. like He is overwhelmed by it. almost like a riff on like Paris Syndrome with it. um Paris Syndrome, yeah.
Speaker: And um obviously, it's actually because it's too hot, but it's like, you sort of get in that little vignette, like this city is like an overwhelming thing.
Speaker: The entirety of what's to what's to come, don't you? I do think... It is, sam you make an interesting point, which is, i assume Italy was a tourist destination throughout the, you know, I don't know, the 20th century.
Speaker: But there is a way in which invoking the Asian tourist is necessarily a way of saying, you know, this is a different world. This is no longer the world of... of ah So this isn't the world of like, I don't know, like Hefzner and like 1950s like British. It's not the world of like a room with a view and like Ian Foster and like going and staying in like a pension in Florence. And there's like, you know, it's like, I don't know, any one time there's like 200 Brits studying like drawing at the Florence Drawing School. Like it's, this is the world of like mountainous cruise ships filling into Venice, like blocking off all sunlight.
Speaker: this is a world that's like, you know, fully commercialized, fully transactional in a way. And it's an interesting, because like, I don't know whether The the Great Beauty is actually, I suppose it is supposed set 2012, because there's that overturned cruise ship, which is historically pretty rooted. But like, to me, it really feels like a film of like, it's kind of annoying. I wish it was like a pre Great Recession film. Like, it feels like it should have been set in like 2007, 2006.
Speaker: Like, that's, that's the era that we're really are looking at. It's like, sort of mid-Bellasconi, Bunga Bunga, like, you know, what was it, the second, like, people are like, oh it's going like a second round of, like, Transgloria, it's like, it's a neoliberal moment of, like, wealth and partying, and it's like, it's the world that, like, Solbeck describes in his, like, novels. Isn't that told partly that the all these characters are pretending it is still that world?
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's a really good point, actually. Like, we're still at the P2 Lodge. yeah You should explain that for for listeners what that is, because I only learned what that was for you. I will, and then maybe I will, ah I think Josiah's got to go in a few moments, so maybe I'll try and and land the plane. But um yeah, so there's this this Masonic Lodge in Rome, mid-20th century.
Speaker: Licio Gelli is the famous head of the lodge. He's sort of an Italian political and business figure. And it is just the is organization through which a lot of the stay-behind stuff Sam mentioned earlier takes place, right? So it's just a concatenation of political sort of operators in Italy who are connected to people outside. And, you know, maybe did they have something Aldo Moro's disappearance? Yeah.
Speaker: Not for me to find out. look up Look it up. I don't know. Who knows? um What i will say by way of kind of going out here, I wanted to ask Josiah a question, but not before I tell a brief story that makes me think of Bunga Bunga.
Speaker: ah Not that I was ever invited, of course, being both ah too young and not nearly glamorous enough. But i was you know i started this call talking about how I was sort of scandalized by the opening scenes. And I realized that I was not fully scandalized. The only time I can remember experiencing something quite like this was being in Lugano, Switzerland, in the Italian part of Switzerland, and going to a sort of ah ah plaza, not knowing that there was going to be what I can only describe as a gigantic Eurotrash DJ party happening directly in that in that square. Amazing.
Speaker: And my friend and I just sort of, you know, we're in you know we're just having fun, whatever. And the DJ rips his shirt off and throws it into the crowd. And it's caught by a couple of like younger girls and some like older guys who begin fighting over the shirt. And my friend decides that he's going to get involved, that he can grab the t-shirt and give it to the girls.
Speaker: And so sort of comes over, tugs it away, gives it to them, and gets to feel sort of chivalric or what have you. But absent that dimension, just this idea of ah a Euro trash moment, yeah I suppose it was with the Italians in Switzerland. It's not totally foreign to me. ah My question, I'm sorry to bore you all at the story, is just, I don't know if we said anything about your connection to Italy or interest in Italy as a place. I mean, did you want to talk about that by way of...
Speaker: Yeah, hi it is quite limited. i don't want to sort of um frame myself as um some kind of expert on it. like it it Literally, all it was was that I lived there as a kid in Milan, so sort of quite far from where these two films are set.
Speaker: um And obviously, initially, these distances matter from age... seven to ten you know went to the British School of Milan where all these sort of future Eurotrash kids were going and know just because My dad was working for a multinational corporation at the time, so it was like he was posted. postend and um but yeah, and sort of like, you know, we've obviously, as lot of Brits do, gone on holiday various places in Italy over the years and, um you know, have sort of Italian friends who we've sort of heard more of the inside track on from.
Speaker: So, you know, I mean, i sort of experience certainly doesn't um qualify me to sort of give the analysis of proper Italian or like you know someone who's like lived there for for years or whatever, but you know it's certainly been something I've always been interested in. I think the kind of um like the regional variation in history is very interesting. I think for another random recommendation, The Leopard, which is obviously this classic um work of all literature, is banging. Phenomenal novel, phenomenal movie.
Speaker: So yeah, so that's my connection to it. don't know um um And maybe that kind of explains why, as per my half-Italian friend's comment, I sort of gelled a lot more of this film than a lot of um straightforward Anglos do. Because I think, um like just to maybe to touch on before we go, is we go on the... um I'm not going to pretend I any more scrupulous research than going on the Wikipedia page for The Great Beauty, but when when you go on there, do you see this this sort of critical reaction critical debate played out about the film, especially after it won the um Best Foreign Film Oscar?
Speaker: about whether this was just another like sort of film, like stereotyping Italy, playing up the kind of Yankee gaze, maybe could call it, or whether it was like actually doing something kind of interesting about it. And I think that's that kind of duality is that kind of um argument explains why people...
Speaker: see it quite differently and kind of, i think, ties in with, like, that quite interesting and, in my view, and maybe sounds like a successful element of how Sorrentino dares you to take a lot of it extremely seriously and extremely sincerely.
Speaker: And um maybe that connects to you know, what we've discussed, I think, midway through about um Gen X and its relationship with Sincerity. Obviously, you have, like, the whole thing about, like, the new Sincerity.
Speaker: so Foster Wallace and, like, in, you know, it applies to a lot of like, music as well. And I think you do kind of get that in that film, you know, as something which...
Speaker: you know Rather than you know how do you how is he kind of reacting against and this these sort of like cynical, hedonist, Botox-obsessed people who are 10, 20, 25 years older than saying that they're...
Speaker: he's essentially saying there not serious people to quote. And I think that's the kind of key thing for me, like the the key thing about how it works generationally is And it's it's interesting, obviously, to see now in in the context of Zoomers being serious and, you know, small C-Conservative and big C-Conservative and whatever, you almost see an echo of a premonition of that sort of generational um kind of step with um Boomers and Gen X, in the same way you have Millennials to Zoomers, maybe.
Speaker: Hmm. That's perfect. ah Josiah Gargherty, I think we can say Death is a Photograph, Italy correspondent. Is there anything you'd like to promote, let the people know about, ah regale them with?
Speaker: Oh, I don't know. um Follow on Twitter. I'm still there just about. um Please read my work. And make sure to check out Talia Concepts sub-stack while you're there. Exactly.
Speaker: Patreon.com slash deathphotopod. If you subscribe to our highest tier, you'll enter you'll enter into a raffle with me to win Anglo-Italian suit. Thanks so much, guys.
Speaker: likewise Like, guys. Thanks lot.
