Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ to which the lessons of by-gone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key.

      —Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle”

      At the soirée, Mavi and Niccolò are standing in conversation while in an adjacent room (that is painted avocado green) well-dressed aristocrats, some of whom have lots of money and some of whom haven’t a bean, chat the night away. “We don’t have one single idea of a society,” complains Mavi. We cut to another room (also avocado green, that soothing but also alarming color) where the voice of a woman praises François Mitterand as a “nice man” whom she hopes “will do well.” (I stood once in the lobby of a hotel while Mitterand padded from the elevators to the door, a silent gentle little gnome, it seemed, surrounded by gruff security men who did not appear to recognize him.) At one point an old man escorts a much younger woman through the frame, gloating to her in a whisper, “One of my ancestors invented the double-bass!” (This is perhaps an invitation to rest awhile upon his lap, since the earliest bass was a violone da gamba and the speaker may be referring to a certain familial “expertise” [See Stiller, 462]. It is also, most surely, a genealogical claim dating back at least four hundred years.) Standing in front of a massive canvas (Tiepolo? Caravaggio?), Niccolò and Mavi are discovered by a doyenne:

      MAVI: Niccolò is trying to find someone.

      DOYENNE: What has the poor man done?

      MAVI: Nothing.

      DOYENNE (taking her leave): Why look for him then?

      What is this polite disengagement, this attitude of lethargy that permeates the upper class—a class that has nothing to do but consider itself? Mavi “moves like in a ballet within this world made up of counts, dukes, princes, and the black aristocracy, where there isn’t a single object that isn’t authentic. She moves at ease within these walls made up of ancient leather wallpaper” (Antonioni; qtd. in Bachmann, “Love” 172). “The Aristocrat devours nature,” writes Sartre. “The exquisite imperfection of forms and a discreet blurring of colours are the best guarantees of authenticity” (Masturbation 115–6).

      Niccolò is in a doorway next to a young man in a tux, who gazes forward, past the camera, at someone or something, yet with an empty regard that betokens neither comprehension nor involvement. “Is there always this sectarian atmosphere at your parties, cocktails, and dinners?” the director asks the boy, “Are you afraid of being spied upon?” The kid drops his eyes: “Many of us have escaped already.” As if a comment were in order, Niccolò rejoins, “Once it was the poor who emigrated from Italy. Now it’s this lot.” Need we be told that the poor who emigrated had nothing to hope for, and therefore nothing to lose? But these rich: clearly they have everything and are still destitute. They have escaped in order to have more than everything. We can suddenly read the slightly pouting, pampered expression on the boy’s face. The eyes glazed, observant but uncaring; the lips, fulsome but pursed with possessiveness; the dark curly hair cut as though to impress Donatello, the shoulders artfully slouched. Nothing in his world appeals to this boy, has merit for him, holds his commitment. As Niccolò was told by Mavi, this is a society in which there is no orientation, no sense of duty or obligation, no agreement on higher principles that can guide everyone in a unifying way. It’s a world of personality and disconnection, in which the social life has dried up and everyone who can afford to escape has jumped to richer pastures.

      In a party like this, one should be able to find the greatest lights of a society, the repositories and voices of its most supreme values. The paintings should be inspiring and beautiful, both classical and futurist: Guercino, Miró, Boccioni, Ensor, Crivelli, Duchamp, Canaletto, De Heem, Malevich. The language should be poetry, not the garble of the marketplace or the voting booth. Instead of talking about the double-bass, one should be invoking music. Meanwhile, a paid lutist is playing something inoffensive, popularly Mediterranean, vacuous, when he could be playing Bach or Vivaldi. And, given all the meaningless chatter, it is difficult for the personality who searches for light to locate a source of inspiration. All the guests are interchangeable, all the rooms interchangeable, the conversations all forgettable if indeed they are not full of lies or dissemblings: for instance, Mavi invites a man and his wife to dinner at her house, but soon makes it clear to Niccolò she hopes to borrow his place for this cultural adventure.

      What sort of an aristocracy or managerial class works without a principle upon which to base its designs? “In fairly populous societies,” wrote Gaetano Mosca in the 1930s,

      ruling classes do not justify their power exclusively by de facto possession of it, but try to find a moral and legal basis for it, representing it as the logical and necessary consequence of doctrines and beliefs that are generally recognized and accepted. So if a society is deeply imbued with the Christian spirit the political class will govern by the will of the sovereign, who, in turn, will reign because he is God’s anointed …. And yet that does not mean that political formulas are mere quackeries aptly invented to trick the masses into obedience. Anyone who viewed them in that light would fall into grave error. The truth is that they answer a real need in man’s social nature; and this need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing that one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of a moral principle, has beyond any doubt a practical and a real importance. (207–208)

      No chance here of satisfying that need. Mavi and Niccolò have invaded a den of lotos-eaters. In their presence it is difficult if not utterly impossible to discern value, truth, or loyalty to an idea. The “idea,” as it were, is the momentary self and nothing more.

      As the bourgeois revolution continues, writes Marx, the distinctions between people are diminished and also exaggerated, so that only two great classes—“two great hostile camps” (103)—remain. Among the slaving workers, “machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor” (110), a phenomenon illustrated again and again, to be sure, in the factory scenes of The Red Desert, but we can also understand this obliteration as an enhancement and reflection of a greater and more diffuse social change, in which distinction itself loses importance. As the bourgeoisie retreats further and further from the proletariat—“escaping already”—contrasting lifestyle and value are nowhere to be detected. The principle social value is selling and buying, a value broadly diffused through the population, coming to define freedom itself (as Marx writes), and supplanting a central feudal value, “the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism” (105). What eventuates is a condition in which people progressively lack the ability to gain true purchase on experience, because experience has been degraded into an exchangeable commodity that merely fluctuates around and shuttles between those who pay for and those who profit by it (see Pomerance, “Gesture”). Every experience is a quick fix, a snatch, a detachable, accountable, and expendable waste. Baudelaire describes modern bourgeois life as a “moving chaos where death strikes from every side at once” (Spleen 94), and Marshall Berman suggests that

      the man in the modern street, thrown into this maelstrom, is driven back on his own resources—often on resources he never knew he had—and forced to stretch them desperately in order to survive. In order to cross the moving chaos, he must attune and adapt himself to its moves, must learn to not merely keep up with it but to stay at least a step ahead. He must become adept at soubresauts and mouvements brusques, at sudden, abrupt, jagged twists and shifts—and not only with his legs and his body, but with his mind and his sensibility as well. (159)

      In experience—which is the zone of interest for an artist, or at least for an artist such as Niccolò—the somersaults and brusque movements required in the modern flux are vague and insensible to the degree that no solid world resists them, no fixed forms or established values, even revolutionary values, linger and persist as frictionable surfaces against which one can sense, thus find, oneself in motion. One is continually twisting and turning in modern life—just as Antonioni’s camera twists and turns in its Brownian motion СКАЧАТЬ