Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD

I first wished for a DVD of Fellini’s Toby Dammit in 1969, when I saw the film on its U.S. theatrical release and DVDs existed only as impracticable dreams. I wanted to detach the film from Spirits of the Dead, an anthology of European Poe adaptations where just to reach this version of “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” you had to trudge through the dreary wastes of Roger Vadim’s Metzergenstein and Louis Malle’s William Wilson. And then—more important—I wanted to watch the film over again, and in slow motion, and with the projection stopped at certain images and the reel rewound to particular scenes. For Dammit was a fugitive film: instead of unfolding before my eyes in the usual manner it seemed to be withdrawing—fleeing—racing from my vision. The images amazed me, but with the quick cuts, the careening pans, the ceaseless movement in the frame as well as by the camera, I got a distinct view of almost none. Now an excellent Arrow Blu-ray lets me correct for the film’s infernal velocity, and I may scrutinize its images to my heart’s old desire. Yet (no fault of Arrow’s) the high definition proves not high enough; my made-in-house stills are all spoiled by some little blur or murky patch impossible to resolve. I must face the fact anew: Dammit is a film whose images, even with DVD technology, resist arrest. And for a second time I am driven to wonder why Fellini should have elaborated so extravagant a vision only to make it hard to see. What, after all, is his rush?

A quick first answer:

Toby Dammit, the eponymous actor who once performed Shakespeare but now only performs the bad-boy behaviors of an addict and boozer, has come to Rome to star in “the first Catholic Western,” a parable of the Savior’s return to earth as a lonesome cowboy. No wonder Toby has demanded a Ferrari for his participation! The already overblown conceit, described at length by the production associates as they drive him from the airport, will suck up the genre’s other prerequisites too: “Our two outlaws represent irresponsibility and anarchy; the busty girl is the illusory escape into the irrational, the prairie is the region beyond history; and the buffalo are the means of subsistence for which man must struggle.” To convey this relentless allegory (from which even the buffalo are forbidden to roam), the film will make use of images “eloquent in their poverty … a cross between Dreyer and Pasolini with a touch of John Ford.” Poverty and eloquence are two sides of the same coin: by dint of their spareness, the images will have the enunciative clarity of pure signs. And as the reference to Dreyer and company implies, their march across the screen will be nothing if not measured.

While Toby is being told all this, the camera, aligned with his point of view, looks out the car window at the passing scene. In a few crowded seconds, the following images proceed and vanish before our eyes: a van with slabs of slaughtered beef inside; a lighting store full of illuminated fixtures; some construction work along the road; a fashion shoot; a religious procession; some Beatle lookalikes—to go no further. The dissonance between the film being described, with its minimalist images perfectly obedient to their function as signs, and the film we are seeing, with the opacity and clutter of its images overwhelming any possible semiotic obligation, could not be more striking. Against a film designed for exhaustive explanation, Fellini mounts the resistance of a visual practice that can only be encountered on the run. The breakneck pace forestalls interpretation by frustrating vision itself.

Dammit’s commitment to speed follows from the swift dialectical vicissitudes of Fellini’s style in the 1960s. In 8½ (1963), Fellini gave us a director hero who had “nothing to say” but wanted “to say it anyway.” The film effected a shift from the art cinema’s ethos of intellectual statements—the Something to Say—to the visual autism of a socially irrelevant but all the more bedazzling style—the Something to See. But even as Fellini was filming 8½, the visuals of La dolce vita (1960) went Hollywood in Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), where the Via Veneto and the Excelsior already looked as clichéd as the Bois de Boulogne and Maxim’s in the fin-de-siècle Paris of Gigi (1958). And after 8½, the process of commodification only accelerated. Reduced to a name (“the Felliniesque”) and a set of typical attributes (grotesque, dreamlike, virtuosic), the Something to See became little more than a way for spectators not to see it.

Under such conditions, Fellini’s stylistic practice seemed condemned to either of two fates. One—represented by Juliet of the Spirits (1964), the film after 8½—was a mannerism content to reproduce the reified Felliniesque in Fellini’s own name. And the other—represented by “Il viaggio di G. Mastorna,” the project after Juliet—was a failure to produce anything at all. What the fictional director did in 8½, the real one did to “Mastorna”: with sets built, parts cast, and a crew assembled, Fellini abandoned the film. On the originality of 8½, he had found it impossible to build anything original.

Caught between reproduction and no production, Fellini appears to have thought of Dammit, his first project after “Mastorna,” as an exercise de style that would mirror back to him his unmanageable quandary. In it, he says, “I was trying to mock myself—destroy myself—exacerbate ‘Fellini style’ to the point of parody and no return.” Dammit would end repetition by repeating Fellini hallmarks ad nauseam. And since parody works best by abridgment—by leaving out the tissue connecting the tics—the form of this violent reprise would be a digest in overdrive.

The first three of Dammit’s four episodes reiterate—in perfect order, but exacerbatively—the well-known Silvia sequences from La dolce vita: her airport arrival and ride into Rome; her interview with the press; her appearance at a nightclub. Everything now has been cheerlessly routinized. On his arrival at Fiumicino, Toby descends no plane ladder, nor does a cavalcade of convertibles escort him into town; he is confined to interiors, behind glass. The interview, once live in a hotel room, occurs in a TV studio with the canned questions matched to canned applause by experts in white coats; and Toby’s hostility to his interviewers, themselves antagonistic, replaces Silvia’s happy flirtation with a titillated media. The nightclub, with a slight theme change from Baths of Caracalla to Hadrian’s Villa, has become the venue for a thoroughly scripted awards ceremony—the Italian Oscars—abounding in phonies who are far beyond the reach of that ecstasy which once impelled all present to join in Silvia’s primal dance. The “dolce vita” has surrendered its intoxicating sweetness to an irony as bitter as the whisky Toby half drinks, and half spits up, to go on living it.

As Dammit’s content repeats La dolce vita, its style is rehearsing the tricks and devices of 8½, to whose virtuosity it adds a kind of coda. But in Dammit the virtuosity is squared, its execution quickened so as to outpace the speed of the co-optive culture in which it must move. For example, those disorienting pans that introduce us to the denizens of the airport lounge take the technique of 8½’s spa sequence to a new level of confusione. This is not just owing to the pinwheeling miscellany of religions, ethnicities, and outfits. Unlike at the spa, it is no longer clear even what people are doing here. Though we might commonsensically suppose they are arriving or departing, the visual plan suggests they inhabit a more enigmatic condition in which no one is going anywhere. Sometimes, huddled in heaps, they seem simply abandoned; at other times, in urgent prayer, they appear to have taken refuge from the mysterious disaster (a storm? a war?) that the orange light suffusing the corridor, the strange wind rushing through it, and the brutal-looking mercenaries policing it all combine to connote. And though they’re most often in motion, it is only to and fro, retracing their steps or even walking backward. The sped-up montage, as if similarly trying to avoid such a deadlock, only insinuates into the movement of images the same unbearable stasis.

The royal road for tracking this creeping stagnation is to follow the mutation suffered here by the Fellini object par excellence: the face. However eccentric, extravagant, or ruthlessly caricatured the face in Fellini had been before Dammit, it always stood in a classically expressive relation to character: its features amounted to so many traits of the person wearing it. In La dolce vita and 8½, there were two kinds of faces: the generalized good looks reserved for the protagonist (Mastroianni), and the vividly exaggerated faces worn by the minor characters (everyone else). Both kinds were revealing. If the protagonist’s face looked vague in its very beauty, that was because he was a “beautiful soul,” detached from the determinations of a world that he preferred to sample (like Marcello) or soar over (like Guido). By contrast, the vivid “Fellini faces” went to show that the other characters had characters, at once richly specified and cruelly limited.

But look at the first face we see when Toby lands at the airport. It is the female face that appears as an image on a ceiling monitor. Its outsized, overcomposed features communicate nothing but the affable vacancy required to announce departing flights. The 1960s “flip,” a barely softened helmet, echoes the bulbous shape of the head like a second skull. Along with the high Peter Pan collar, the tight round framings of both the image and monitor detach the head from the rest of the body. We notice, too, that these framings do not quite coincide. As if projected onto the screen rather than emanating from behind it, the image never stays put within the monitor, and (like the head on certain dolls) appears to bobble. Reduced to icon, function, “look,” this face is anything but a window on the person, let alone the soul. And what seems most to disable its transparency is that the face is overwhelmed by the head.

In this way, the announcer announces the metamorphosis of the old Fellini face into what I will call the Facehead. Again and again, with inexhaustible invention, Dammit makes us witness the spectacle of the face—traditional sign of a person—being transformed into a head that seems only a thing. Instead of an old-fashioned expression, these Faceheads seem to be wearing masks that have nothing to disguise. The only mobile features among them belong to a TV interviewer doing facial exercises before her show and a performer whose rubberface is part of a novelty act. Some Faceheads wear actual masks, cardboard cutouts that render them two-dimensional in the strictest sense. Atop the Facehead, hair is lacquered like a shell or frizzy like a wig, inviting us antithetically to imagine what on many male examples has become all too salient: the bald or thinning pate, where balding marks the further advance of cranium over visage. And below, the neck has been lost to view through late-60s accessories (chokers, mufflers, Mao collars, fur pieces), oversized masks, or Fellini’s literally cutthroat close-ups. Thus detached and unbelonging, seeming to float and turn in a void, the Faceheads offer so many iterations of the decapitation that will finally take narrative form in Toby’s fatal accident.

Are the Faceheads human? Alive? At times, they are attached to so many prostheses (headphones, antennas, mikes, even heavy-framed or dark glasses) that they more closely resemble insects, aliens, or robots. And when the thick makeup does not make them look dead, the masks—like the Invisible Man’s bandages—turn them into implicitly hideous survivors of perhaps the same unnamed catastrophe intimated at the airport. More object than subject, the Facehead finds its most evolved state in those wholly insentient globular lamps and monitors that decorate Dammit’s world. The skull no longer lies discreetly “beneath” the skin; it has become the undisguised module for everyone’s design for living.

Even Toby’s own good looks—inherited from earlier Fellini protagonists—are spoiled by a truant eyebrow shooting up the forehead, as though he just might become a werewolf, a suggestion reinforced by his sudden howling in the car near the end. But he is more visibly in danger of becoming a Facehead like the others. His waxen, humid complexion already looks embalmed and becomes even more ghastly under the paparazzi’s blanching flashes. Nonetheless, if his expression is sometimes artificially withdrawn or theatrically exaggerated, it still manages to convey a genuine struggle against the transformation that has claimed the others, including the usual female salvation figure who, though she never actually saves the protagonist, has always before (like Paola in La dolce vita or the water bearer in 8½) radiated undeniable vitality.

Yet what point can Toby’s struggle have? What authentic state would he be retaining or returning to? For the old expressivity now poses a problem, too. Toby’s only emotion, after all, is disgust. He looks nauseous; and when he sticks his tongue out at people, it’s both a reflex—they make him gag—and the expression of a project—to vomit right in their face (which is also ours) everything he’s ingested from their noxious world. His quest would be not to recover full expressivity, but to enact a self-impoverishment that emptied him of everything including character-building disgust. It is essential to this ambition that, uniquely in the film, Toby has a personal demon: in the form of a sly little girl—a prenubile vamp very different from La dolce vita’s “Umbrian angel”—this devil keeps tempting him to play with her ball. Toby’s wild drive in the Ferrari will involve making a pact with her as the only proof of his having a soul at all. And though, inevitably, he must lose his soul, he gets to lose his head too.

In their satire of a late, “decadent” phase of cultural production, the first three episodes of Dammit make some claim to redemptive social value. Their rapidity in outracing a speed culture would be an attempt to get a critical distance on their subject matter as well as from it. But how secure, how stable could this distance be? Fellini’s delirious tempo makes too good a fit with life in the fast lane; and the glibness of three cloned starlets making the identical thank-you speech is not so different from the facility of the perfectly matched jump cuts that bring them before us. Like Toby, Fellini is constantly signaling his own revulsion at what must be, sooner or later, his style’s complicity with its revolting content. Recall the fashion shoot alongside the road construction: the auteurist brand ripped off to sell product. What can Fellini add, the first three episodes all seem to ask, to a world already nauseatingly replete with Felliniesque touches?

But the final sequence—Toby’s reckless drive—puts all this in the shade. In a frenzy of acceleration, it takes the film’s speed to the limit, surpassing anything yet seen in Fellini’s oeuvre. This is the speed of nightmares, drugs, and car accidents spun into one. And Fellini seems to be looking not just for a faster form of virtuosity, but also for a purer one, one whose supreme velocity would transport the film from its sickening worldly content to nothing but motion, light, darkness: sheer cinema. Tellingly, the distinctive pans employed earlier for the passing parade of Faceheads are now used to negotiate depopulated corners when Toby makes a turn. And when the Ferrari is speeding ahead, Fellini gives us images of the road unfolding like a ribbon, so as to remind us that, like the car, the film is ripping up a strip. In the Ferrari’s velocity, Fellini’s virtuosity has found a new vehicle.

“Death to the Faceheads!” might be the drive’s motto. They are sparsely visible here and only in their most drastically devitalized forms: as posters, mannequins, cutouts. The posters all depict heads being destroyed or effaced: one is coming open, another is all silhouette and a third has the lower half of its face missing under a mask. As for the mannequins, bizarre chef/waiter figures placed outside restaurants not even open for business, Toby smiles contemptuously at one, deliberately runs down another.

I misremembered Toby’s joyride cum deathtrip as a single sustained race to decapitation; in fact, it repeatedly loses momentum and starts over. Toby winds up off the main road in a maze of little streets where he must stop, leave the car, ask for directions; and even back on the highway, he smashes through a roadblock, again halts and resumes. All these frustrations come literally to a head when he reaches a collapsed bridge. There, on the other side, stands the diabolical vampette who beckons him to come play and thus inspires his fateful wish: to drive the Ferrari fast enough to leap the gap between road and bridge.

By now we understand that far more tempting than the devil’s putative pedophilic charms is the ball she holds. Smooth, without color or particularities, equally removed from the vitality of a person and the living death of a zombie, this ball is the utmost abstraction of the Facehead and—as such—its only possible alternative. When it rolls into the frame next to Toby’s severed head, we too are weirdly compelled by the exchange of the Facehead’s imitation of life for the sphere’s realization of death.

Whether from malice or genuine inspiration, Fellini has lifted Toby’s drive from Two Weeks in Another Town, but he alters his source almost beyond recognition. Unlike Fellini’s Ferrari, Minnelli’s Maserati is little more than the conveyance of catharsis: its roar is never permitted to drown out the more important monologue in which the protagonist (another alcoholic actor come to Rome for a film) talks himself free of his obsession with his ex, conveniently along for the ride. Rather than killed, he gets cured; only his self-destructiveness is laid to rest as he resumes a successful acting career. It is not just that, by contrast, Fellini replaces cure with fatality; his emptied-out style abstracts this fatality from pathos and narrative rationale alike. Toby’s is a sheer death drive.

Death, of course, is openly figured in the film’s last image. One of Joseph Nathanson’s great matte shots, it discloses the broody abyss that the Ferrari has flown over; on one edge lies the highway with its broken dividing line and on the other stands the bridge with its evenly spaced arc lamps. Not just the collapsed part, but every part of this road seems fissured, like the always-already segmented filmstrip that has effectively decapitated Toby by a jump cut between one frame and the next. In the obscene way that the thick reinforcing wires curl out from the break like shreds of torn nerve and sinew, the bridge seems less damaged than mortally injured, a metonym for Toby’s headless carcass, which has presumably fallen down its cleft. This is an image of such radical stillness that, if the lighting didn’t change from night to day, we could mistake it for a freeze frame. At last the film performs the pause function it has made us wish for and gives us time to look, contemplate, “remember we must die.” Before the vision of what it would overrun, it stops dead in its tracks.

Yet Dammit’s identification with Toby’s death drive binds the film not just to death, but also to the drive—not just to Toby, in other words, but to the Ferrari too. And, however memorable the matte shot, the drive receives an even more stunning figuration. Because of the placement of the decapitating wire over the far side of the bridge, we must assume that the Ferrari has succeeded in jumping the gap. Other circumstantial evidence confirms this. We observe tread marks beneath the wire, and, though a mere falling barrel had made a dreadful racket only moments before, we hear no noise whatsoever, let alone any suggestion of a crash. Having made it across, however, the car seems to vanish. To those curious enough to ask where it has gone, the film supplies a mind-boggling answer. Earlier in the film, if we had eyes to see something besides Faceheads, we might have spotted a car with no driver moving slowly among the other vehicles in traffic. That buried image now comes into its own as the film asks us to imagine, as the very negation of image, a souped-up version of the driverless car liberated from gridlock and belting along an endlessly deviating road, truly death-proof. Unseen and unseeable, this image outraces all attempts to capture it.