An Informal Triptych

To sketch out a possible conclusion of the figural arc of Italian political cinema, this chapter will center on three films that, despite their chronological and thematic proximity, are seldom mentioned in the same breath: Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975), Todo Modo (Elio Petri, 1976), and La Grande Bouffe (Marco Ferreri, 1973). The lack of a sustained comparative analysis between these films is perhaps due to the directors’ differing critical fortunes and the disparity of their respective positions in the Italian cinematic canon. Yet it is also, and just as importantly, a matter of sheer visibility, if one considers the Italian censors’ ferocious attacks on the films and, in the case of Salò and Todo Modo, the outright attempt to consign them to perpetual oblivion.1

Salò remains substantially faithful to its literary inspiration, the Marquise de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, while changing its setting to 1944. During the fascist last stand of the Republic of Salò (1943–45), four lords—the Duke (Paolo Bonacelli), the Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi), the Magistrate (Umberto P. Quintavalle), and the President (Aldo Valletti)—have a group of local teenagers kidnapped and taken to a villa near Marzabotto.2 For four months, the teens are subjected to acts of extreme physical and psychological violence, all for the pleasure of their kidnappers. The highly ritualized cadence of orgies, tortures, and rapes to which libertines and victims must adhere unconditionally is regulated by a group of four prostitutes, who organize a series of storytelling interludes between acts of violent debauchery.

Also based on a novel (Todo Modo by Leonardo Sciascia), Petri’s film applies spatial seclusion and the ritualization of time to a secretive retreat. While a mysterious epidemic is ravaging the country, the establishment of the political party governing Italy—which remains unnamed but is immediately identifiable as the Christian Democrats (DC)—gathers at an underground hotel to perform a series of spiritual exercises inspired by the teachings of St. Ignatius of Loyola, in which they are led by a mysterious priest, don Gaetano (Marcello Mastroianni). The exercises are repeatedly interrupted by mysterious acts of violence targeting the notables, while plots and intrigues are orchestrated by the President (Gian Maria Volonté, impersonating Aldo Moro, then the president of the DC) in order to save the party from an irreversible crisis. The film ends with the massacre of all the hotel guests at the hands of an unspecified governmental agency.

Finally, in La Grande Bouffe, four friends—a chef (Ugo Tognazzi), a television producer (Michel Piccoli), a judge (Philippe Noiret), and an airline pilot (Marcello Mastroianni)—organize a retreat to a villa with the purpose of eating themselves to death. Halfway through the weekend, they are joined by four women, three prostitutes and a schoolteacher (Andrea Ferréol), with whom they have sex. As the feast continues without interruption, the prostitutes leave in disgust and the friends die one by one, with the only survivor, the schoolteacher, assisting them in their final endeavor and watching over their demise.

The initial wager of this chapter is that Salò, Todo Modo, and La Grande Bouffe may be usefully read as an informal triptych. The approach I follow will be to consider this triptych as a single entity made up of three components, the figural significance of which is best elucidated by looking at them at a glance. The effort, different from a more standard comparative analysis, will be to understand the differences between the three films as central to the figural economy of the triptych as a whole. A triptych, after all, is not only predicated on harmony among its parts; it is also, and perhaps more importantly, an object made up of discontinuities and heterogeneity, as the unity of a triptych can only originate from the disunity among its components. This disunity is most readily perceivable in the fact that each film sketches its own figure. Borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s figural analysis in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, this chapter revolves around the tyrant (Salò), the intriguer (Todo Modo), and the martyr (La Grande Bouffe). This proliferation should itself be regarded as a symptom: what is it that these films wish to think collectively that cannot find articulation in any one individual figure?

Echoes of the Baroque

A glance at the films’ shared features points us toward the beginning of an answer. The three films are defined by two fundamental conditions: seclusion and ritualization. The two are functions of each other. Seclusion institutes what we might call a state of exception in which the rule of the law is suspended and substituted by a new, ritualistic set of rules—a routine of torture and violence for the sadistic pleasure of the lords in Salò, spiritual exercises of penance for the ruling class in Todo Modo, and the repetition of cooking, eating, and fucking in La Grande Bouffe. These rituals are enforced with a great deal of “scrupulosity,” which Roland Barthes, in Sade, Fourier, Loyola, associates to a certain theatricality (“a powerful impression . . . of performance”).3 This highly regulated performance of repetition is underpinned by a desire to control time itself—harnessing the passing of time to ultimately bring it to a standstill in the form of eternal torture, eternal penance, and eternal consumption. The state of exception portrayed in the triptych would thus not only be a legal one but also a temporal one, a regimented attempt at being excepted from history itself.

What is the ultimate rationale of this Sisyphean task? What is all this staged repetition designed to ward off? In all three films, we sense the pervasive omen of a world coming to an end. In Salò, the spectacular ferocity of the libertines in their secluded quarters not only reeks of the stench of decomposing fascism but also prefigures the future of a world without redemption, a hell on earth where suffering—and the pleasure that the lords derive from it—extends itself into eternity. (It is thus not surprising that Pasolini would structure the film on the topography of Dante’s Inferno.) In Todo Modo, Petri depicts the collapse of the contemporary political establishment, as the President’s attempts to stave off the decline of his party in the midst of a pandemic are cut short by the extermination of all its members. In La Grande Bouffe, the physical and psychological toll of the four friends’ endless gourmandizing makes itself felt in increasingly alarming fashion, tracing the progressive annihilation of the social order imposed by the bourgeoisie in the wake of World War II. The form of appearance of history in the triptych, then, is that of decay.4 The films record the dying whispers of an era, but they do so in intaglio—not directly, but through the protagonists’ inhuman efforts to stave off the seemingly inevitable deterioration of their world.

The origins of this idea of a naturalization of history as organic decay and the capacity of the work of art to give it form was located by Walter Benjamin in the genre of German baroque drama, or Trauerspiel:

Nature remained the great teacher for the writers of this period. However, nature was not seen by them in bud and bloom, but in the over-ripeness and decay of her creations. In nature they saw eternal transience, and here alone did the saturnine vision of this generation recognize history. [ . . . ] In the process of decay, and in it alone, the events of history shrivel up and become absorbed in the setting.5

The baroque is marked by what Samuel Weber calls a “confusion” between history and nature.6 In the Trauerspiel, historical change—represented by the transience of sovereigns—follows a methodical pattern of growth and decay reminiscent of the natural cycles of organic life. This destiny of the baroque sovereign, however, should not simply be read as the demise of an individual but rather as the “dislocation of sovereignty as such.”7 As a result of the process of secularization that began with the Renaissance and concludes in the baroque, the seat previously occupied by a divine principle of law, embodied by the sovereign and around which society coalesces, now finds itself empty. In Benjamin’s account, this “dislocation of sovereignty” is the epochal crisis that German baroque drama stages through the figures of the tyrant, the intriguer, and the martyr.

At the center of the question of sovereignty stands the conceptual linkage that unites the sovereign to the state of exception. In the work of Carl Schmitt, sovereignty is understood first and foremost as the power to decide on the state of exception—that is, the suspension of state law in the presence of an existential threat to the state itself. As such, the state of exception transcends the state and at the same time constitutes its ultimate guarantee: “the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form.”8 Interestingly, Benjamin adopts the opposite position on the matter. In the Trauerspiel, the Schmittian sovereign decision no longer obtains:

The antithesis between the power of the ruler and his capacity to rule led to a feature peculiar to the Trauerspiel which is, however, only apparently a generic feature and which can be illuminated only on the basis of the theory of sovereignty. . . . The sovereign, who is responsible for making the decision on the state of exception, reveals, at the first opportunity, that it is almost impossible for him to make a decision.9

The baroque dislocation of sovereignty, then, consists in this split between power and its exercise that defines the position of the sovereign. This position, according to Giorgio Agamben, marks the opening of an unbridgeable fissure in the law itself: “between Macht and Vermögen . . . a gap opens which no decision is capable of filling.”10 In this decaying world in which no transcendental guarantee is bestowed on the sovereign’s decision, the state of exception becomes the rule. This is the ultimate task of the baroque sovereign for Benjamin: not to safeguard state law by ensuring the existence of what transcends it (the state of exception), as it was for Schmitt, but to make that transcendence immanent to the state—to make the state of exception become part of the law. Under these conditions, the sovereign decision finds itself emptied of its function. No actual decision on an interruption of the law can be made when interruption has become immanent to the law itself.

The dislocation of sovereignty, however, is not a historicopolitical feature uniquely inherent to the baroque. The Trauerspiel gives it a particular historical form, but it is important to remind ourselves that Benjamin’s argument is less a historicist than a formalist one. His perspective is not that of an antiquarian, bent on identifying in baroque drama a lifeless relic of the past. Rather, as György Lukács observes, Benjamin strives to read this art form “from the perspective of the ideological and artistic needs of the present.”11 Benjamin himself surmises that eras of decadence tend to resemble each other, and furthermore that all art in eras of decadence look alike, to the point that modernism “reflects certain aspects of the spiritual constitution of the baroque, even down to the details of its artistic practice.”12 Benjamin’s analysis of the Trauerspiel, then, outlines the possibility of a formidable paradigm to interpret art in times of decay in general.

The hypothesis that we will attempt to verify here is not just that the triptych of Salò, Todo Modo, and La Grande Bouffe “reflects certain aspects of the spiritual constitution of the baroque.” The argument is, in a stronger sense, that the complexity of their figural dimension cannot be fully accounted for if not examined in the light cast by Benjamin’s analysis of the Trauerspiel. Indeed, do we not recognize the situation of Italy in the years of terrorism in Benjamin’s description of the becoming-rule of the exception? Agamben makes an unequivocal case for this interpretation. He traces the history of the prominence gained by the executive over the legislative in Italy after the unification of the country through fascism, a process that culminates in the law decrees (decreti-legge) designed to repress terrorism in the long ’68. These were issued by the government autonomously from the parliament and thus de facto plunged the country into a permanent state of exception.13

However, a crisis of sovereignty is never simply a legalistic matter. It certainly wasn’t in the baroque described by Benjamin, where the becoming-rule of the state of exception is but the symptom of a larger crisis of the symbolic order caused by the collapse of the master signifiers that hitherto organized the collective life of monarchic states, the most significant of which is the divine nature of the sovereign, now fully secularized. We can detect a similar decline in symbolic efficiency during the long ’68, which also stems from a historical crisis at the heart of the law. The libertarian and antiauthoritarian impulses of the long ’68, as we have seen in chapter 4, strove to do away with prohibition to enjoy without constraints, with the figure of the youth providing a mapping of the revolutionary overtures and dead ends that defined this quest. Likewise, the figure of the specter in chapter 6 introduced the idea of a division immanent to the law, split between the belief in a transcendental guarantee of state sovereignty and the games of political conspiracy.

As early as 1968, Jacques Lacan observes a symbolic collapse occurring in contemporary society, whose origin he identifies in the “evaporation of the father” (évaporation du père).14 This evaporation—suggesting a process of progressive dematerialization—causes a weakening in the Oedipal prohibition inherent in the Name of the Father (in French, le Nom-du-Père is also a pun for “No of the Father”), which, Lacan claims, leaves a “scar” in our society that “we could classify . . . under the heading and general notion of segregation.”15 The term Lacan uses is highly specific. Etymologically, “to segregate” means “to separate from the flock,” and it defines an act whose immediate effect is the isolation of a group of individuals from the rest. “What characterizes our century,” Lacan continues, “is a complex, reinforced, and constantly overlapping form of segregation that only manages to generate more and more barriers.”16 Salò, Todo Modo, and La Grande Bouffe offer one way to understand Lacan’s sibylline remark, in that the triptych literalizes precisely such a situation of proliferating segregation, in which the lords’ estate, the Jesuit hotel, and the friends’ villa represent the “barriers” that separate the characters from the rest of the world. The evaporation of the father as a crisis of sovereignty, then, has two intertwined effects: it generalizes and makes permanent the state of exception, and it establishes a regime of widespread segregation in which a multitude of local states of exception can be born.

Already in the Trauerspiel, this evaporation presents itself as the correlate of a void. The immanentized sovereign, banished from his transcendental seat of power, returns as an absence; the exclusion of transcendence in the baroque only makes the sovereign appear on the side of immanence as a “cataract.”17 Paradoxically, the sovereign acquires an even mightier aura in this emptied-out form, as Weber notes: “Far from doing away with transcendence . . . such emptying [of transcendence] only endows [the sovereign] with a force that is all the more powerful: that of the vacuum, of the absolute and unbounded other, which, since it is no longer representable, is also no longer localizable ‘out there’ or as a ‘beyond.’”18 What Weber describes here is, in Lacanian terms, a confrontation with the insubstantiality of the big Other. In chapter 6, we saw how the figure of the specter in Italian conspiracy thrillers lays bare the lack of a transcendental legitimation to the series of semblants of sovereignty that are involved in endless interlocking conspiracies: the executive, the judiciary, law enforcement, capital, and so on. If the specter revealed the brittleness of the Other floating untethered from any transcendental guarantee, the tyrant, the intriguer, and the martyr enumerate the consequences of this revelation.

Père-version: The Sadistic Tyrant in Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom

A tyrant is, in essence, a despotic ruler whose range of action and decision is unrestrained by any law or constitution. In fact, he comes into existence by establishing a new law in the form of the state of exception. This moment is captured in the opening of Salò, in which the lords sign an agreement with each other: for 120 days, they will engage in all sorts of debauchery and violent excesses. As the covenant is sealed by a shared vow to marry each other’s daughters, the four notables find themselves united in a single monstrous figure, a four-headed tyrant.

Commenting on the nature of regulation in the autarchic worlds of Sade, Barthes pithily quips: “Law, no. Protocol, yes.”19 The distinction is subtle but significant. As a mere code of conduct, however inflexible, the protocol agreed on by the four libertines is but a pale copy of the sovereignty they embodied with their titles under the fascist regime: the Duke (aristocratic power), the President (sometimes identified as the President of the Central Bank, thus indicating economic power), the Bishop (religious power), and the Magistrate (judicial power). Reduced by Pasolini to mere types, these characters renounce their symbolic position in the outside world in favor of a new form of whimsical yet highly regulated sovereignty—a Sadean contradiction Barthes did not overlook: “The most libertarian of writers wants Ceremony, Party, Rite, Discourse.”20 As an emptied-out version of sovereignty, this protocol has the traits of a compensatory fantasy. While the lords’ world—the world in which they could be lords—crumbles outside the villa’s walls, they engage in a theatrical exercise of what we might call a surplus sovereignty whose figure is that of the tyrant. In Benjamin, the rise of the tyrant presents itself as the obverse of the crisis of the sovereign; the surplus of authoritarianism embodied by the tyrant is a symptom of the void left by the loss of the sovereign’s transcendental dimension. In Salò, this surplus serves a specific function. Faced with the irreversible crisis of sovereignty, the four-headed tyrant relies on an exaggerated despotism to cover up and disavow the crisis itself. The four lords’ peculiar way of staving off decay is thus pretending that the crisis never existed in the first place.

It may come as little surprise for a film inspired by Sade’s work that the tyrant in Salò, in his obstinate attempt to ignore the crisis of the symbolic order, displays a distinctly perverse inclination. As we know from Lacan, perversions are defined at their core by a disavowal of the lack in the Other. This is the remedy that perversions offer in the moment of crisis of sovereignty: behave as if the lack in the Other did not exist. This is why perversion for Lacan is also a “père-version”—that is, a version of the father; to counter the “evaporation” of the paternal metaphor, the pervert conjures up the all-powerful authority of an Other without lack.21 The sadist, specifically, annuls this lack by asserting his knowledge of what the Other wants: it wants to be tortured, and the sadist is only too happy to oblige. But—and here is the remarkable twist of sadism—the sadist’s victims are not the Other. A split, in fact, occurs. The victims are reduced to others—that is, dispensable objects in the hands of the sadistic torturers—while the Other as law is elevated to a transcendental guarantee of the torturer’s acts. For the four libertines in Salò, the Other has never been more whole or coherent. The bureaucratic protocol of rape, torture, and murder admits no deviations, and the tyrant, for all his autocratic posture, is but the Other’s instrument—and a rejoicing one at that. This is the perverted structure behind the lords’ absolute control over their victims in the film: under the aegis of a law degraded to a protocol that demands total submission from the torturers as much as the tortured, the otherness of the latter—the obscurity of their desire—is obliterated, their lack manipulated against them.

However, in the film, this schema of perversion has another side, one that has often gone unnoticed. One must agree with French film critic Serge Daney, who writes that Salò has less to do with a “triumphant fascism” than with the fundamental disconnect between two heterogeneous dimensions.22 One, which we have outlined above, speaks to the sadist’s enjoyment in his knowledge and control of the victim’s desire. The other has to do with another form of enjoyment: that of the teenagers themselves, who, as opposed to the lords, know nothing of their own desire and simply enact it in the interstices of the film. Consider the lesbian lovers (Antiniska Nemour and Olga Andrei), or the collaborationist Ezio (Ezio Manni), who has sex with the Black servant (Ines Pellegrini). In both cases, while the sadistic rule over life in the estate is supposed to be absolute, we witness the formation of pockets of antagonism within and against the protocol. The desire embodied by Ezio and the lesbian lovers marks a dimension of enjoyment that the lords do not have access to, something they can neither know nor control. Indeed, one of the most revealing moments of the film occurs when the lords, guns in hand and ready to kill Ezio for his transgression, experience palpable hesitation when confronted with his fist raised in the communist salute (Figure 22).

The surplus sovereignty of the tyrant suddenly reveals its ineffectuality in the form of an inability to decide. To be sure, it is only a fleeting moment of paralysis, but it stands out as a unique occurrence in the film. However transitory, this indecisiveness of the tyrant (which, as we have seen, Benjamin identifies as one of the features of the Trauerspiel) opens up a fissure in the facade of the pervert’s Other. The separation, foundational for the sadist, between the victims as others and the law as big Other is no longer tenable. The inscrutable Other is now embodied by one of the teenagers, who confronts the lords with an enjoyment they will never know or manipulate. In psychoanalytical terms, this breakdown of tyrannical sovereignty reminds the tyrant of his own lack as a lack in the Other—a lack their perversion was designed to disavow at all costs, and that now resurfaces carrying a surplus of anxiety. The lords’ ultimate reaction is telling. In contrast to the controlled demeanor they otherwise display throughout the film, the rather un-sadist-like fury with which they unload their guns on Ezio is symptomatic of a certain anxious disorientation.

This asymmetry splits the film in two along the axis of enjoyment. On one side is a totalitarian fantasy of sovereign power that encounters its own failure; on the other is the episodic emergence of fragments of antagonistic enjoyment that threaten to undo the protocol presiding over the estate. The repetitive enjoyment of knowledge associated with the lords (who believe they know what the Other wants) is juxtaposed to the transgressive enjoyment of ignorance embodied by the teenagers. It is certainly tempting to read the teenagers’ blithe pursuit of pleasure as a properly political stance against the law, and Ezio’s raised fist appears to attest to that. But what are we to make, for example, of the final vignette, in which two collaborationists converse amiably about a girl and dance to the tune of a waltz while victims are being tortured and mutilated in the nearby garden? Isn’t their obliviousness to the horror that surrounds them yet another form of the enjoyment of ignorance that we have just described? And yet we would hardly count it as an active resistance against the powers that be—quite the contrary.

One possible key to understanding the status and function of this mysterious enjoyment is provided by the Lacanian concept of the sinthome, discussed in chapter 5 in relation to Teorema. However sparse and episodic, the youths’ private affirmations of their individual enjoyment in Salò would seem to make them precisely into synth-hommes. Ezio and the Black servant, the lesbian lovers, and the collaborationists chatting and dancing in the last scene all enjoy in such a way as to create for themselves a minimum of subjective consistency, which in turn allows them to survive in the aftermath of the evaporation of the father—a chance not afforded to the pianist, for instance, who takes her own life in a passage à l’acte after witnessing the horrors taking place in the garden at the end of the film. From the standpoint of the lords, this sinthomatic enjoyment remains forever obscure, either figuratively (because they cannot interpret it, like Ezio) or literally (because they do not see it, like the dancing collaborationists).

But the youths know nothing of their own enjoyment either. Lacan explains that there is a certain aspect of ignorance tied to the sinthome; even James Joyce himself (whom Lacan cites as an example of a sinthome created through literary writing) “didn’t know that he was fashioning the sinthome. . . . He was oblivious to it and it is by dint of this fact that he is a pure artificer, a man of savoir-faire.”23 This “savoir-faire” “is art, artifice, that which endues a remarkable quality to the art of which one is capable, because there is no Other of the Other to perform the Last Judgement.”24 Beyond Joyce, these lines seem to offer a fitting description of Salò as much as Benjamin’s analysis of the Trauerspiel. If, as Benjamin suggests, all times of crisis and their art resemble each other, they do so, Lacan adds, as historical moments of revelation that there is no Other of the Other. Salò offers two intertwined yet irreconcilable answers to this situation of crisis: the père version of the sadistic tyrant, who disavows the crisis altogether, and the self-fashioned artifice of the sinthome as a singular, unanalyzable path to the survival of the subject in a time of the crisis of the symbolic.

Seeking the Divine Will: The Intriguer in Todo Modo

In Todo Modo, the crisis of sovereignty generates a different figure, which we can identify with Benjamin’s intriguer or plotter (das Intrigant). What sets the intriguer apart from the tyrant and the martyr in the Trauerspiel is his readiness to come to terms with a new situation marked by the collapse of the universal principles that had hitherto governed society, with the consequent elevation of the state of exception to a rule. While the tyrant dissimulates the crisis of sovereignty by way of a surplus of authoritarianism, the intriguer recognizes it and acts accordingly by embracing the performance of power as nothing more than a game (similar in this to the Minister’s plotting in Illustrious Corpses, discussed in chapter 6). The intriguer understands better than anyone that the workings of power possess a fundamentally theatrical quality, in that roles are always assigned in advance, and any action or decision takes place within the boundaries of a set of predesigned rules: “Unlike the sovereign . . . the plotter ‘knows’ that the court is a theater of actions that can never be totalized but only staged with more or less virtuosity.”25

This theatrical dimension is evident in Todo Modo, where the irreversible crisis of the hegemony of the DC in postwar Italy is ruthlessly exposed. The film weaves an extraordinarily intricate web of internal conspiracies and plots, all unfolding within a unity of space (the Jesuit convent-hotel) and time (the three-day retreat). This complex choreography of power, in which alliances are unceasingly forged and broken and party notables meet their untimely demise, indicates what we may call a surplus of theatricality. The frenzied performance of political intrigue reveals what it is supposed to disavow: the fact that the DC establishment no longer knows its historical role. This doubt at the heart of the figure of the intriguer signals the rise of a different subjective position vis-à-vis the crisis of sovereignty, namely obsessional neurosis. As opposed to the pervert, the obsessional neurotic recognizes that there is no Other of the Other. Because of this awareness, the obsessional neurotic takes it upon herself to prop up the Other in order to stave off a complete collapse of the symbolic order. The elaborate and repetitive rituals associated with obsessional neurosis are precisely aimed at mastering this lack in the Other and preventing such a catastrophe.

According to Barthes, Ignatius’s spiritual exercises exhibit the exact structure of obsessional neurosis, in that they involve a repetitive accounting and enumeration of one’s sins that, crucially, engenders its own errors. Because the exercitant will always account for his sins in a faulty, incomplete way, he is guilty of a new sin that must itself be added on to the original list. The list thus becomes infinite, as the very fact of accounting for one’s sins is itself a source of sinful behavior: “It is the neurotic nature of obsession to set up a self-maintaining machine, a kind of homeostat of error.”26 In Todo Modo, the DC count its mistakes and crimes, but precisely to commit an error and thus create the need to continue with the count and avoid having to personally do anything about the mistakes. The spectacle of penance in the film is thus a defense mechanism that aims at leaving the status quo untouched. Guilt, one of the central affects of the obsessional neurotic, becomes irredeemable: one must live with it, and keep adding sins to an endless list. Petri, who was familiar with Barthes’s text, paints Moro in an explicit comparison with Ignatius, ascribing to both a certain pursuit of a “movement that could develop into immobility”:

For many years Moro carried his power like a cross on his shoulders, and the torment of this sort of exhausting spiritual exercise was clear in his emaciated face, in his somewhat lost behavior, in the bitter grimace of his mouth, in his sickly gaze. He took onto himself the impossible endeavor of mediating between the utopian and opportunistic souls of his party, between his party and the Left, between the poor and the rich, between the exploited and the exploiters. . . . Moro too, like Loyola and Sade, conceived of the unconceivable: a change that did not change anything, a movement that could develop into immobility, a whole that seemed empty, a Left that would go Right, and a Right that would go Left. . . . In the meantime, the cultural and social fabric of the country . . . was falling apart, rotting, and dying, and it is still dying.27

In the film, Volonté’s caricature of Moro carries the power of mediation and reconciliation not only as a cross, but also as an endless source of sin for which atonement is required, as don Gaetano repeatedly preaches. To fully grasp the nature of Moro’s balancing act in Todo Modo, one must consider the formal logic of the Jesuit spiritual exercises. We can describe Ignatius’s central preoccupation as follows: to conform one’s own behavior to God’s will. But how does one identify divine will? The title of the film evokes the famous Ignatian motto, “Todo modo para buscar la voluntad divina” (One must use every means to seek the divine will); the spiritual exercises are to be understood precisely as one such means. This is why the exercises possess an “interrogative structure”:28 they ritualize the act of asking a question addressed to God. The question, however, is not open-ended (“What should I do?”); rather, it assumes the form of a binary choice: “To do this or to do that?”29

This is what Ignatius calls the moment of election—which counterintuitively requires an effort on the part of the exercitant not to choose. Barthes explains this conceptual layer of the Jesuit discourse most lucidly:

The exercitant must strive not to choose; the aim of his discourse is to bring the two terms of the alternative to a homogeneous state so pure that he cannot humanly extricate himself from it; the more equal the dilemma the more rigorous its closure, and the clearer the divine numen, or: the more certain it will be that the mark is of divine origin; the more completely will the paradigm be balanced, and the more tangible will be the imbalance God will impart to it.30

The highest achievement of the exercitant, then, is creating a balance between the two terms of the binary choice that is so perfect as to preclude the very possibility of any decision, thus throwing divine intervention into relief as the overriding principle capable of breaking the stalemate. This rigorous pursuit of the inability to decide—the Ignatian principle of indifference—has obvious echoes in the crisis of sovereignty we identified in the Trauerspiel as the monarch’s defining indecisiveness regarding the state of exception. In the case of the figure of the intriguer in Todo Modo, however, this inability to decide is not considered a hindrance to the exercise of state power; rather, it is elevated to its ultimate goal. The President engages in a rigorous accounting of his sins so that he would not have to stop atoning for them. He does the same in relation to his political positions, seeking an impossible reconciliation of opposites in order not to have to take a side. Consider for instance the programmatic monologue he delivers at dinner:

I feel the time has come to think back on the thirty years during which we’ve led the country. Thirty years during which we’ve carried out a difficult, painful, maybe agonizing conciliation. . . . I mean reconciliation between past, future, and present. Between religious faith and political practice. Reconciliation between public and private enterprises, stasis and development, North and South, Left and Right, the rich and the poor, wages and prices . . . between us and them. Now nobody wants to recognize the need for any reconciliation with our own role. They ask for clarity. What should we do, then? We can no longer dilly-dally. New orientations are necessary.31

The President casts the historical role played by the DC in the postwar period as one of mediation and compromise at the political, social, and economic level. “Between us and them,” in particular, seems to refer to the Historic Compromise (Compromesso Storico), a decade-long alliance established in 1973 by the Moro-led current in the DC and the PCI that aimed to fend off the risk of an authoritarian turn in the country. But the President’s sibylline expression could also be read in the context of foreign policy: not the DC and the PCI, but Italy and the United States, with the former’s unwavering Atlanticism as the guarantee of American influence on one of the strategic outposts in the Cold War. This project of national and international reconciliation, however, reaches a point of exhaustion in the second half of the 1970s, primarily as a result of shifts in global geopolitics and the historical trajectory of capital from postwar expansion to a phase of stagnation and recession. “Clarity” is needed in this situation of crisis, and “new orientations are necessary”—hence, in Todo Modo, a renewed interrogation of divine will.

As the President also suggests, what the DC establishment is looking for in the Jesuit retreat is a confirmation of their party’s historical role in the developmental trajectory of capitalism (“Now nobody wants to recognize the need for any reconciliation with our own role”). History is the God that must be interrogated as to what it wants. However, if in the past the obsessional neurotic principle of Ignatian indifference would reassure the DC of their historical function as mediator of conflicts and overseer of postwar reconstruction and the subsequent period of economic growth, now it only puts into relief the absence of any providential design. In the opening of the film, an intertitle informs us that spiritual exercises have been used as an educational tool for the economic and political establishment since the sixteenth century, providing the religious guarantee of a link between divine will and the mundane exercise of power. Todo Modo shows what happens when this link is severed. The silence of divine (historical) will reduces sovereignty to an endless practice of scheming and plotting, aimed solely at retaining power in the absence of any transcendental legitimation. This is where the Jesuit ethics of obsessional neurosis meets the Benjaminian figure of the intriguer. With the moment of Ignatian election incapable of yielding any indication of what God wants, the intriguer alone can attempt to stave off catastrophe by way of what we might call a conspiratorial management of decline.

Decline, however, remains inevitable. “It’s nothing more than a long downfall” for the party, don Gaetano admits, then adds, “We are the dead burying the dead.” This evocative formulation has a long history that links the Gospel of Matthew (“Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead’” [8:22]) to Marx, who was fond of the expression and used it repeatedly.32 In Matthew, this is an exhortation to break with the past addressed to a disciple beholden to his duty to bury his dead father. In Marx, the appeal similarly indicates the need to loosen the grip that the dead have over the living, so that the new of the revolution can be born. In Todo Modo, however, the famous phrase assumes a more diagnostic tinge. Don Gaetano compares the DC establishment, the representative of the state (district attorney Scalambri [Renato Salvatori]), and himself to the “dead burying the dead,” all but acknowledging their shared obsolescence. The string of mysterious assassinations that punctuate the film—the dead to be buried—is then to be understood not as an intraparty feud or a targeted intimidation, but rather as the ratification of a general state of affairs that marks as already dead the living representatives of political, economic, and religious power.

In this sense, if there is a manifestation of divine will in the film, it is to be found in the cryptic message sent by the assassinations themselves. As the President explains to Scalambri, the acronyms of the public companies chaired by the victims come together to form a sentence: “Todo modo para buscar la voluntad divina.” The Ignatian dictum is uttered again moments later, when don Gaetano asks the President, mystified as to what this divine will could be, if he would be ready to renounce power. This is what history asks of the President and the DC establishment: accepting obsolescence and exiting the political stage. One is here reminded again of Pasolini’s scathing critique of the DC elite as “death masks” in his 1975 article “The Void of Power in Italy,” discussed in chapter 6. In Todo Modo, just as in Pasolini’s description, the DC is presented as suffering from an utterly deluded grasp of its own historical role and unable to come to terms with its own decrepit conditions.

The film’s ending seals the fate of this political class. The camera follows the President wandering a hotel estate littered with the corpses of his fellow party members and heaps of incriminating documents from don Gaetano’s archive, just before he is himself shot to death. If revolutions, as Marx says, must “let the dead bury the dead” in order to come into their own, what is alluded to in Todo Modo is nothing other than the revolution of capital in the 1970s, with the prominence gained by processes of deindustrialization, overproduction, and falling rate of profits in the manufacturing sector, and the consequent migration of capital to the financial sector. In Italy as elsewhere, to accomplish this revolution, it was necessary to let the death masks of power bury their dead, and continue to seek the divine will of capitalism by other means.

Ad Nauseam: Martyrs of the Unconscious in La Grande Bouffe

To recapitulate: with Salò and Todo Modo, we see the articulation of two distinct figures—the tyrant and the intriguer, respectively—grounded in a crisis of sovereignty. The tyrant coincides with the position of the pervert, who disavows the lack in the Other and construes law as omnipotent, while the intriguer corresponds to the obsessional neurotic, who recognizes the lack in the Other and assumes onto himself the burden of propping up a symbolic order on the verge of collapse. With La Grande Bouffe, a new figure comes onto the stage: the martyr. There is, according to Benjamin, a specularity between the tyrant and the martyr: “In the baroque the tyrant and the martyr are but the two faces of the monarch. They are the necessarily extreme incarnation of the princely essence.”33 The martyr’s extremism is the obverse of the tyrant’s; whereas the latter exercises his despotic rule in the absence of any transcendental guarantee of his sovereignty, the former shows the inherent self-destructiveness of such efforts.

As a subset of the Trauerspiel, martyr dramas revolve around an insane act of self-annihilation that is specifically thematized as bodily torment, for in baroque drama, “the only response to the call of history is the physical pain of martyrdom.”34 “Martyr” is then returned to its etymological meaning of “witness”: a form of suffering that bears the mark of, and thus implicitly announces, a truth. (In the case of baroque drama, this truth is the historical crisis of sovereignty.) The two intertwined aspects of self-destructive madness and physical pain as responses to the “call of history” are absolutely central to Ferreri’s film, as the only reaction to this call that the four friends can muster is self-imposed agony. But what is the truth that they bear witness to? If in Salò we saw a bourgeoisie intent on supplementing the crisis of its own sovereignty with a surplus of authoritarianism, and in Todo Modo we saw the downfall of the political establishment designated to defend the bourgeoisie’s interests, then in La Grande Bouffe we see the annihilation of the order established by the bourgeoisie in the wake of World War II.

In Ferreri, the four martyrs in La Grande Bouffe literalize their own historical condition of obsolescence by way of a psychotic passage à l’acte. It is useful to revisit here one of the ways in which Lacan defines the difference between neurosis and psychosis in his late teaching: “The difference between believing in the symptom and believing it is obvious. It is the difference between neurosis and psychosis. In psychosis, not only does the subject believe in the voices, but he believes them. Everything rests on that borderline.”35 The neurotic believes in the symptom in the sense that he acknowledges the existence of the symptom as the sign of a lack in the Other. The psychotic is defined by a further dimension of this belief. He believes the symptom itself in the sense that he takes it not as the signifier of a lack, but as the real directly interpellating him. If the Other for the neurotic remains silent and inaccessible, for the psychotic, it never stops speaking; the Other and the psychotic are in a relationship that knows no lack but only imaginary plenitude.

It is in this sense that psychosis can be read as the most radical consequence of the “evaporation of the father” we previously discussed as the psychohistorical situation that the triptych tries to grapple with. As we have seen, the “separation” that Lacan associates with this “evaporation” takes in the triptych the form of seclusion. In La Grande Bouffe, this seclusion coincides with a foreclosure—a foreclosure of the Name of the Father as the principle of prohibition that mediates and makes possible the subject’s entrance into the symbolic. The four friends set up a situation in which they can experience enjoyment without prohibition. Yet at the same time the film is also marked by a sense of paralysis, as though the negation of the limit paradoxically ends up conjuring the most inescapable of constrictions. This condition is emblematized in the scene in which Marcello launches a Bugatti race car at full speed toward the closed gate with Andrea, the schoolteacher, sitting at his side, as if ready to go for a joyride—only to then stop, back up into the driveway, and do it again. It is what Lacan calls plus-de-jouir: in the circuital repetition of the drive, surplus enjoyment coincides with no more enjoyment.

One is here reminded of Lacan’s formulation in book 3 of the Seminar: “The psychotic is a martyr of the unconscious.”36 Referencing the etymology of the word “martyr,” Lacan claims that the psychotic provides an “open testimony” about the existence of the unconscious, whereas the neurotic can only give “a closed testimony that needs to be deciphered.”37 The latter may be able, through analysis, to name the meaning of her testimony; this possibility, however, is precluded to the former: “The psychotic . . . seems arrested, immobilized in a position that leaves him incapable of authentically restoring the sense of what he witnesses and sharing it in the discourse of others.”38 We can discern this deadlock in Marcello’s jubilant howling when he succeeds in repairing the Bugatti, in Michel’s cries of sorrow when Marcello is found dead, and in Ugo’s uncontrollable laughter after a sewage explosion—all nonlinguistic attempts to communicate the psychotic martyrs’ experience of the unconscious, tinged with the ambiguous nuances of enjoyment.

Ferreri underlines this ambiguity throughout the film, but it is nowhere more evident than in one of the scenes set in the garden. The scene is composed of two shots. The first is a long shot of the group of friends sitting around a roasting pit, which depicts one of the prostitutes, Gita (Solange Blondeau), bidding Marcello good-bye after complaining that she threw up all night. The second is a medium shot of Ugo standing next to the pit and exhorting his companions to have fun (“Allegria! Allegria!”). But his appeal falls flat, and his forced smile is immediately followed by a forlorn stare at the roasting meat (Figure 23).

The contrast in the scene is apparent, as Ferreri juxtaposes the self-preserving dictate of the pleasure principle embodied by Gita to Ugo’s extreme and self-destructive drive toward a plus-de-jouir. Gita acknowledges that she has reached the outer limit of her enjoyment and leaves in observance of her own instinct of self-preservation, while Ugo’s plea and subsequent hesitation signal the excessive and ultimately deadly nature of the four friends’ pursuit of enjoyment.

The four friends are shown as hardly taking any pleasure in the gourmandizing and the fucking, as they chew and swallow their food in as mechanical a manner as they have sex. This kind of automatism of consumption implies that the motivation of this behavior does not originate in any given human need but rather in a self-internalized imperative to enjoy. Ugo’s “Allegria! Allegria!” and Marcello’s reminder to keep eating at all costs when Michel falls ill (“Il faut manger . . . Il faut manger!”) are the voice of this imperative in the film—an imperative that disregards any measure of the good and the useful, and that transcends the human limitations of the protagonists’ bodies. When Marcello’s and Michel’s bodies finally give up, they are transferred to the kitchen. Stored in the refrigerating room–turned-morgue, the two corpses keep participating in the feast, visible at all times in the depth of field and staring at their remaining companions. Giving in to the drive and following its trajectory to the ultimate point of self-annihilation means realizing that the drive is the undead, a force of negativity that persists, uncannily, even after death.

The death drive tearing through the bodies of the four protagonists reveals the psychotic freedom of martyrdom as an optical illusion. In a brilliant investigation of the “discourse of freedom” in Pasolini and Lacan, Lorenzo Chiesa argues that the martyr’s pursuit of an absolute freedom from castration and the Name of the Father results in the impossibility of actually achieving any liberation: “The martyrs of the unconscious sacrifice the emancipative possibility of acquiring meaning against the background of a more general meaninglessness of human life (that is, in short, a life that language deprives of freedom) in the name of being absolutely free. In doing so, they miscalculate that the mirage of such a freedom is a lure of the Imaginary.”39 The defining paradox here is that of a call for total freedom that comes to coincide with its opposite—that is, an absolute imperative—as exemplified by Marcello screaming “I have to do it!” when he cannot manage to have sex with Andrea.

The psychotic foreclosure of the Name of the Father in La Grande Bouffe sets up an even more tyrannical principle of authority grounded not in prohibition but in the imperative to enjoy without restraint. It is hardly surprising that the first martyrs of this new configuration would be the representatives of the bourgeoisie that instated the old order in the aftermath of the Second World War. In a curious short-circuit of representation, the actors in La Grande Bouffe play themselves while at the same time evoking obvious bourgeois types: Ugo is the self-made man, who left his small Italian hometown after the war to become a business owner in Paris; Michel represents mass media, which played a crucial part in building the social and political identity of European countries after the war, while also providing ideological legitimation for the rule of the bourgeoisie; the globe-trotting Marcello is the icon of a budding cosmopolitanism in an expanding world market; and the magistrate Philippe conjures the institutions of the bourgeois state. The historical sequence of 1968 took aim at all these, providing forceful critiques of the myth of hard work and meritocracy, the role of media in manufacturing consent, the beginning of globalization, and the state’s collusion with capital. Sensing the impending undoing of their social roles, the four friends try to be contemporary to their own time, and they do so by shedding their types in the secluded environment of the villa (as time goes on, the characters start wearing each other’s clothes) and fully submitting to the new psychotic arrangement of jouissance.

But the historical gap haunts them at every turn. This gap is already suggested in one of the opening scenes, when Michel meets his daughter (played by Piccoli’s real-life daughter, Cordelia) at the TV studio to say good-bye and give her the keys to his apartment—a gesture of withdrawal accompanied by a send-up to paternal authority (“Autorité paternelle de merde!”), which, when uttered by Michel, rings hollow, like the ridiculous affectation of a man out of step with the times. Even the chosen setting of the film signifies the obsolescence of the four bourgeois men. The house, owned by Philippe’s family and thus part of the old bourgeoisie’s heirloom, is itself a museum-like space saturated with old furniture, paintings, and elaborately staged stuffed animals, along with the vintage race car from the 1920s sitting in the garage and the linden tree under which seventeenth-century poet Boileau used to rest and look for inspiration. Even when the characters play with unequivocal signifiers of contemporary culture, they are still haunted by their own anachronism. It seems indicative that Ugo, of all film icons, would offer an impression of don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), with Brando’s character being the ultimate emblem of the nostalgic longing for a vanishing world.

Lacan’s formulation that psychotics are “martyrs of the unconscious” thus receives in Ferreri a more precise historical acceptation. The four friends are “martyrs of the unconscious” in the sense that they give an “open testimony” about a new social arrangement of enjoyment by succumbing to it. Their suffering and death elucidate the logic of this new form of tyrannical sovereignty of the freedom to enjoy while at the same time sealing the end of the old bourgeoisie’s rule over postwar society. The character of Andrea, in this sense, offers the perfect contrast to the protagonists’ martyrdom. She is the only one in the villa who seems to genuinely enjoy the food and sex. Her appetite for both is voracious, far outpacing that of her four companions. While the protagonists die one by one, she continues to eat, cook, and have sex with them. As an almost otherworldly entity that knows no fatigue nor satiety, she embodies the drive itself, but in an idealized form. With Andrea, the link between surplus enjoyment and the drive is refigured to elide the principle that every drive is a death drive. By embodying the possibility of an enjoyment without limits, she is the ideal subject of the discourse of freedom in the long ’68—the discourse whose toll the four bourgeois men cannot withstand. Andrea is identified by specific attributes: she is young (Ferréol was twenty-six at the time of release) and middle class (schoolteacher being one of the prototypical petty bourgeois professions), thus suggesting the rise of a new social type from the ashes of the old bourgeoisie. In this sense, she is no martyr. Her plus-de-jouir is an inexhaustible surplus that seems to never turn into suffering; it testifies to nothing if not the fantasy of an enjoyment without negativity, without repression, and ultimately without unconscious.

Commentators have identified in the film’s emphasis on the relentlessness of consumption a critique of consumerism, and there is certainly some validity to that claim.40 Yet consumerism has primarily to do with desire. It is the capitalist’s promise to fill the constitutive lack of the subject with a series of objects, each announcing itself to be “it” yet invariably failing to fulfill that promise, and forcing the subject to move on to the next object. In the film, however, it is not simply a matter of consumption, or even overconsumption. It is also a matter of that which exceeds consumption altogether. The four friends are not seeking reprieve from their own lack in the succession of gourmet dishes; there is never a sense that they believe that the next item on the menu will finally be it, or that any kind of homeostasis between desire and satisfaction can be achieved. On the contrary, the drive ignores the human limitations of consumption and reveals its exorbitant nature, confirming that it is at the level of the drive and its relationship to surplus enjoyment—an enjoyment literally enjoyed by nobody—that the deeper significance of the film rests. The film’s ending, in this sense, is telling (Figure 24). It is a long shot of the garden, festooned with carcasses, dogs running around, as large quantities of fresh meat and poultry are being delivered to the villa even after the four friends’ death—an image of the uncanny persistence of the drive beyond any notion of what is useful or needed for consumption, and beyond death itself.

Facies Hippocraticae: From Figure to Allegory

We have seen how in the three films under consideration the crisis of bourgeois sovereignty in the long ’68 is registered by three different figures, each marked by a distinct pathological relationship to this crisis. In reacting to the crisis, each figure crystallizes a specific excess: the libertines in Salò resort to an excess of authoritarianism; the DC establishment in Todo Modo mounts an exaggerated performance of political intrigue; and the martyrdom of the four friends in La Grande Bouffe testifies to the deadly and unavoidable presence of a surplus of enjoyment. Yet this psychopathology of the bourgeoisie after 1968 should have us question whether, in fact, the tyrant, the intriguer, and the martyr are figures at all. Throughout this book, I have relied on a definition of the figure as the embodiment of a dialectical relation between two elements: an existing structure and the antagonistic force born within it. The differences among the various figures we have encountered are due to the variations in the contents and parameters of this relation. Now, the three figures analyzed in this chapter hardly convey any sense of an antagonistic force at work—nor, for that matter, of a structural status quo to be overturned. Rather, they are reactive entities that register the collapse of the structure through pathological practices—torturing, conspiring, overeating—that hardly qualify as force because no real antagonism is discernible in them.

What are these figures without structure and without force, then? To describe the appearance of history as decay, Benjamin uses the Latin term facies Hippocratica, the emaciated, sunken facial features of the dying.41 The tyrant, the intriguer, and the martyr are all versions of the Hippocratic face. They are exhausted figures, staring at the spectator with the cloudy eyes of the moribund. Benjamin further specifies that it is with the concept of allegory born in the baroque that history appears in the form of the Hippocratic face, for the allegorical alone can capture the peculiar temporality of historical transience and decay. A tension, then, comes to the surface. Are the Hippocratic faces in Salò, Todo Modo, and La Grande Bouffe still figures, or have they crossed over into the territory of allegory? More fundamentally, how can we conceive of the difference between the two?

Like figures, allegories dance; in allegory, writes Benjamin, truth is “bodied forth in the dance of represented ideas.”42 Defined by a taste for the theatrical, allegories appear on a stage, putting up performances in the register of the “as if” that make legible the dynamics of history. In the triptych, this theatricality emerges in the artificiality of the settings, the staged rituals of torture, penance, and consumption, the importance accorded to performance, and the ability—or lack thereof—to play one’s assigned role. But, in contrast to the figure, allegory pursues its experiments of legibility according to a logic of representation (a “dance of represented ideas”): allegory lets the truth of an obscure historical situation shine through its own representation of it. Commenting on the Trauerspiel book, Fredric Jameson puts into focus this representational aspect of allegory: in a world that has become enigmatic, the signs of a fragmented reality are arranged and displayed so as to project a modicum of coherence and meaning. Allegories “are the fragments into which the baroque world shatters, strangely legible signs and emblems nagging at the too curious mind, a procession moving slowly across a stage, laden with occult significance. In this sense, for the first time it seems to me that allegory is restored to us [ . . . ] as a pathology with which in the modern world we are only too familiar.”43 In the baroque, as in modernity, the world of allegory is a world of signs in which the meaning of what one experiences in everyday life resides elsewhere and functions according to a logic that is far from immediately apparent. Allegory, in other words, is a fictional way of representing a world of signs whose true meaning escapes the grasp of the individual’s lived experience. The constitutive inauthenticity and theatricality of allegory, then, reflects a generalized situation in which lived experience itself can no longer be considered authentic. This is why for Jameson allegory is a “pathology” that is “only too familiar” to us moderns. Insofar as the totality of contemporary capitalism does not lend itself to comprehensive depictions, allegory stands as the last aesthetic resort to register, at a minimum, this representational difficulty itself.

Salò, Todo Modo, and La Grande Bouffe grapple with a similar problematic of allegorical representation: how to convey the sense of an epochal shift that reshapes class relations, geopolitical scenarios, and the very structure of sovereignty after 1968? This shift can hardly be represented in all its social, economic, and political complexity, so the films resort to figures characterized by a pronounced allegorizing tendency. As “strangely legible signs,” they project the semblance of a historical meaning on an otherwise enigmatic situation. “A procession moving slowly across a stage” is admittedly more than a few steps removed from a “dance of figures.” The dialectical movement that characterized the figures I have discussed so far in this book does not seem to obtain with the tyrant, the intriguer, and the martyr. More than creatively exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of a given historical sequence, these figures aim to represent the truth of a historical situation. The motif of seclusion is central to this operation. It is motivated by the three figures’ desire to stage a performance of sovereignty undisturbed by the rumblings of historical change, yet it is precisely by way of the secluded performance of the figures—and the pathologies that underpin it—that historical change is allegorized in the films.

But in a way, this is all these figures can do. They register their own obsolescence in a failing symbolic order, but they do so exclusively in the form of a representation of crisis. The break of subjectivation that we saw with the worker in The Working Class Goes to Heaven or the housewife in A Special Day never obtains for the tyrant, the intriguer, or the martyr. What emerges instead is the depiction of a purely structural situation in which subjectivity is reduced to the stillness of pathological positions (the pervert, the obsessional neurotic, the psychotic). To borrow a formulation from Alain Badiou, these figures show no “mastery of loss.”44 They can capture allegorically the undoing of a social class, but only as a consequence of changing structural conditions—never as the opening of a gap in the existent where a new subject can take hold. In this sense, allegory names the outer limit of the figure; it marks the point where the figure falls back into a logic of representation, however mediated and enigmatic this representation may be. The movement registered by the triptych, then, is one of erosion of the figural into the allegorical. If figures, as the by-product of cinema’s inventiveness, provide a dramatization of the subjective conditions of a given historical sequence, allegory can only register the objectivity of decay by representing history as a landscape of mysterious ruins. Among these ruins, the tyrant, the intriguer, and the martyr hesitantly perform the last steps of the dance of figures this book has attempted to choreograph.