A Modern Invention

Of the figures examined in this book, the youth—il giovane in Italian—is perhaps the most elusive. In common parlance, “youth” indicates a state of transition between two identifiable stages in the biological and social life of the individual. Caught in a gray area between the child and the adult, the youth is no longer undergoing biological development but is not yet considered fully mature from a social standpoint. Furthermore, the historical emergence of this category has been fairly recent. In the nineteenth century, one would be hard pressed to find youths in the industrial proletariat, as young workers were to relinquish childhood as early as possible to immediately become part of the workforce employed in factories and subjected to the same hardships as their parents. Even in the upper classes, the youth was just an adult in fieri, preparing to succeed his father at the helm of the company, follow in his footsteps in the military, or assume the duties of his medical practice.

In this sense, the youth as a distinct actor on the social scene is by and large a twentieth-century invention. This is certainly the case in Italy, where the rise of the youth is inextricable from the economic miracle of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The sudden onset of economic growth brought about the emergence of a new middle class whose defining ambition was that sons and daughters would climb further up the social ladder than their parents. Education (high school, but also college) started to be perceived as essential for career advancement, and with the increase in the average number of years spent in school, a new demographic of young people who were no longer kids but not yet adults suddenly appeared on the national stage.

Before the rise of the youth, the dominant nonadult figure in Italian cinema was the child. One of the most iconic presences of Italian postwar cinema, the child was already prominently featured in one of the forerunners of neorealism (Vittorio De Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us [I bambini ci guardano], 1944) and maintained its centrality in the later development of the movement. The contrast between the child and the youth in the context of Italian cinema is revealing. In neorealism, the ideological investment in the figure of the child is obvious; it embodies the possibility of building a new future on the ruins of the war—a possibility that is celebrated (Rome Open City [Roma città aperta, Rossellini, 1945]; Bicycle Thieves [Ladri di biciclette, De Sica, 1948]) as much as mourned (Germany Year Zero [Germania anno zero, Rossellini, 1948]; Shoeshine [Sciuscià, De Sica, 1946]). In either case, there is an innocence or purity that sets the child apart from a troubled and hostile environment. This innocence can be lost, but the basic presupposition remains that a childlike purity once existed and that it should constitute the moral basis for a new national beginning.

The youth is considerably less transparent. There is no fantasy of innocence to be celebrated here; the youth is too old not to have already been somewhat determined by his place in the social structure. But he is also too young to have a full grasp of what belonging to that structure entails, and therefore he is also too young to be held to the standards of accountability of an adult. The youth is not only suspended between two biological stages but also, as a figure, trapped in a no-man’s-land between two fantasies: childhood as innocence and adulthood as duty. One could argue that these fantasies are actually two sides of the same coin, with one side the pure immaturity of enjoyment without guilt of the child, and the other the pure responsibility of guilt without enjoyment of the adult. In Italian postwar cinema, and especially from the beginning of the 1960s on, the youth insinuates himself in the middle of this fantasmatic distinction and breaks it apart. As we will see, the youth’s pursuit of enjoyment is deliberate, as is his rejection of the set of values shaping the life of the older generation.

The social and political unrest of 1968 marks the youth’s coming of age, his definitive affirmation on the national—and international—stage. But however prominent a role he may have played in this historical sequence, it is important to point out that the youth is not an immediately political figure. His generality (part biological, part sociological) prevents him from being easily captured by the confines of a political subjectivity. As opposed to the worker, the youth is not defined by the central position he occupies in the direct process of production. The centralità operaia (worker’s centrality) discussed in chapter 2 situates the dialectics of the worker’s subjectivity—his submission to capitalist exploitation and potential for radical antagonism—squarely at the point of the impasse between labor and capital. With the youth, this dialectic does not obtain with the same paradigmatic clarity. Also, unlike the worker, the youth has no single event site to call his own—not even the university, as the student remains at the margins of filmic representation in those years. Surprisingly, the university is evoked in the films I discuss as a distant place. It is more a device or reference for readily identifying a social type—the rebellious bourgeois—than a historically concrete site of contradiction and class struggle.1

In a way, what we might call the figural gap between the worker and the youth reflects the problematic history of alliance and enmity between these two dominant actors of the long ’68, a history determined as much by the waning political centrality of the factory worker as it is by the elusiveness and precariousness of the youth as a political subject. It is telling that to describe the new subjectivities that arose from the changing political landscape of the 1970s, Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni resort to the definition of the youth as a “general generational class,”2 a moniker that attaches to the youth a certain indistinction, superimposing as it does three levels: a lack of specificity (general), an age-related connotation (generational), and a socioeconomic grouping (class).

We can perhaps glimpse in this definition the idea of the youth as a figure without a specific event site to call his own. The logic of dialectical interplay between force and structure that subtends this figure remains similar to that of the worker, but the conditions under which it unfolds are markedly different. With the evaporation of the factory worker as the hegemonic political subject of modernity, as Antonio Negri writes in 1975, “the category of the ‘working class’ goes into crisis but continues to produce all the effects that are proper to it on the entire social terrain as proletariat.”3 The shift of the terrain of the struggle from the factory to society at large, already suggested by the films analyzed in chapter 3, gives rise to a new scene in which the target of antagonism is no longer, or not only, the capitalist exploitation of labor but rather the forms of repression that permeate all aspects of the social sphere: authoritarianism, in the early days of the 1968 movement, and, more in general, the rigidity of a tyrannical society where all roles seem to be perpetually assigned in advance. More than exploitation per se, it is the oppressive and pervasive nature of networks of power that constitutes the new focus of the struggle. With the youth, antagonism undergoes a process of generalization and becomes disseminated into the fabric of the social, with the aim to overthrow the institutions to which the control and reproduction of the status quo is entrusted: the state, the education system, the church, the party, the family, and so forth. The youth is the primary figure of this expansion of the field of the struggle, whose unprecedented novelty is the equivalence he postulates among all struggles for liberation—antipatriarchal, anticolonial, anticapitalist.

This diffused antagonism no longer constitutes itself in the universalist collectivity of the proletariat but finds its root in the irreducible singularity of the individual’s desire. The political wager of a movement such as the Autonomia in the 1970s will be precisely that of attempting to establish a dynamic of mutual determination between individual desires and the necessarily collective dimension of political action. As Deleuze and Guattari famously argue in Anti-Oedipus, a text that had an enormous influence on the Italian radical movements of the 1970s, any form of “becoming-revolutionary” is fundamentally determined by “desiring-production”—that is, the wholly immanent force of desire as infinite production of connections that must be liberated from the constraints imposed by capitalist society.4

The youth as figure certainly incorporates this impetus to free desire from any external limitation or mediation, toward the goal of an unfettered enjoyment. But rather than casting the youth as a vessel for the pure productivity of a desire untethered from the dictates of the system, the figural reading of the films discussed in this chapter will unearth the ways in which this desiring force finds itself in dialectical tension with the reactive feedback of the structure. By presenting the youth as inherently multiple, this chapter will unfold as a sort of taxonomy of the various versions of this figure, with each incarnation articulating a specific variation of the relation between desire and law that marks the terrain of the youth as a possible revolutionary subject.

Horrors of the Sweet Life

More often than not, in contemporary discourses, a vague notion of youthfulness has come to stand in for 1968 as a whole, with an idealizing semantic halo of rebelliousness, impulsivity, and vitality attached to it. However, if Alain Badiou is right in asserting that “every truth is marked by an indestructible youthfulness,” then one should resist the temptation to discount the youthfulness of ’68 altogether as a cliché and rather ask, what is the truth of which the youth becomes a figure in that specific historical sequence? We will begin to look for an answer in two films released before the events of 1968, yet widely regarded as historically prescient: Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione, 1963) and Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca, 1965). The coupling of these two films is, by now, a critical axiom, and not without reason. At the time of their release, the films were hailed as a historical break in Italian cinema, representing the arrival of a new generation of young auteurs determined to leave the cumbersome legacy of neorealism behind and invent new forms of filmmaking. Their proximity to the events of 1968 certainly contributed to their fortune. How could one fail to see in the two young protagonists, Alessandro and Fabrizio, the embryonic germs of a revolutionary desire that was soon to sweep not just Italy but the entire globe? Bertolucci and Bellocchio were retroactively christened as clairvoyant rhapsodists of the rebellion that was brewing at the heart of the bourgeois world, and the films found themselves crystallized as precursors according to that obstinate critical tautology that subordinates art to history, using the hindsight of the latter to explain the foresight of the former. To be sure, few would deny that a relation between 1968 and the films exists, but any assumption about the obviousness of such relation can be misleading, and at any rate, establishing a biunivocal correspondence in which the films represent 1968 before its time hardly exhausts the complexity of said relation. In a somewhat sacrilegious move, we will put in dialogue this prescient diptych with the later Come Play with Me (Grazie zia, Salvatore Samperi, 1969), a much less canonical work that nonetheless shows striking similarities to Before the Revolution and Fists in the Pocket while also offering a singular articulation of the youth as a figure of desire and transgression.

Bodies in the Streets: The Cannibals

A retelling of Sophocles’s Antigone, The Cannibals is set in contemporary Italy, where an authoritarian regime is determined to make an example of young protesters by murdering them and putting their corpses on public display across the city, a thousand Polynices left to rot in the streets. Antigone (Britt Ekland) wants to bury her brother, and is helped by Teiresias (Pierre Clementi), a silent, mysterious man who appeared out of nowhere. Forging a tacit alliance, the two engage in a series of acts of defiance against the government. After burying Polynices, they start removing other corpses from the streets. Their actions set in motion a series of events that will lead to a violent reaction from the state, as Antigone is put in prison and Teiresias is committed to a mental institution. Haemon (Tomas Milian), Antigone’s promised husband and the son of a powerful member of the government, tries to intercede with his father to free Antigone, to no avail. He ends up incarcerated himself, and in an act of desperate protest, he starts imitating a dog. After the two protagonists are publicly executed, a group of young men and women recently dismissed from a mental institution begin to pick up bodies from the streets and bury them, continuing Antigone and Teiresias’s rebellion.

In The Cannibals, the youth’s plight assumes an immediately political value, as testified by the unambiguous references to the contemporary student and worker protests as well as the brutality of state repression. At the same time, the recourse to a mythical framework tempers the evident topicality of the film, transfiguring it in part into a more general meditation on the subjective logic of revolt. At once saturated by history and looking to situate itself outside of it in the eternal time of myth, The Cannibals shows a certain ambivalence toward the possibility of political subjectivation that the figure of the youth carries. This ambivalence is reflected in the episodic organization of the film. After the initial, heroic decision to bury Polynices, Cavani shows Antigone and Teiresias confronting the state’s reaction in various settings, and to various effects. We see a mockery of the impotence of power in the chase scenes, inspired by silent slapstick comedies, with the two protagonists disguised as priests or soldiers trying to elude the police; a matter-of-fact denunciation of the brutality of state violence with scenes of imprisonment and torture; and finally, in the very last scene, the hope for a new collective subject to arise from the event of Antigone and Teiresias’s sacrifice, when young men and women pick up their legacy.

As a sort of compendium of possibilities, The Cannibals retreads some of the ideas that we have already encountered in other films, even as it envisions new ones. But more than the individual scenarios it presents, the most significant aspect of the film resides in its commitment to not commit, as it were, to any one of these possibilities. Far from a limitation, this is the film’s distinctive conceptual strength, namely, the attempt to traverse and encompass all the different and often contradictory facets of the youth as a figure of political subjectivation. In this sense, it would be a mistake to overemphasize the Sophoclean reference in the film. Antigone provides the narrative framework, but The Cannibals de facto limits itself to listing the tragic heroine’s ethicopolitical position as simply one of the possible subjective destinies of the figure of the youth.11 Cavani is more interested in surveying the larger political field of the figure of the youth after 1968, enumerating the manifold avenues to subjectivation that it presents. Yet more than a celebration of possibility, the film resembles a maze made solely of dead ends. Even the hopeful ending is hardly presented in the film as the necessary outcome of a process of subjectivation. It simply coexists with the other scenarios in the same realm of possibility.

In an interview, Cavani called the film a “happening” in a vein reminiscent of situationist public impromptu performances, especially in the practice, described by the director, of shutting down entire neighborhoods to stage the scenes with the corpses lying on the streets12—a veritable traumatic irruption of the political real into everyday life, which would lead one to suggest that if there is a kernel that resists subsumption into the seemingly fluid permutation of registers and scenarios that makes up the film, it is precisely in the images of the dead bodies scattered on the streets.

The imagery of the first part of the film is indeed stunning: a series of shots of Milan’s urban landscape littered with bodies even as life in the city bustles on, all but ignoring them (Figure 18).

These images of mass murder coexist, as we have seen, with a number of other possible destinies of the youth, including Antigone’s and Teiresias’s heroic acts. In fact, one could argue that the film’s strange oscillation between history and myth needs to be understood precisely in the terms set by these two images: on the one hand, the corpses scattered in the streets as an explicit reference to contemporary history; on the other, the relentless activity and obstinate silence of the two protagonists as a mythical response not only to state violence, but also to a certain exhaustion of the strategies of revolt of 1968. It is in the ahistorical time of myth, Cavani suggests, that the youth must search for new forms of resistance, away from the dead remnants of defeated struggles—a defeat apparent not only in the images of a corpse-strewn Milan, but perhaps even more in the indifferent countenance of the city dwellers who go about their life as though these bodies never existed. Against the co-optation and neutralization by state and capital of the revolutionary impulses of 1968, Antigone and Teiresias embody the fantasy of a return to some kind of primitive condition of innocence and purity, a sort of mythical prelinguistic existence untainted by the dehumanizing dictates of society.13 Their silence stands as the sign of an absolute refusal to engage with the system—a refusal that extends beyond the two protagonists to include Haemon, whose transformation into a dog stems from a similar determination to end any dialogue with the powers that be.

The mythical side of the film thus resolves itself into a rejection of a dialectic of political subjectivation in favor of an autonomous self-affirmation grounded in a primitivistic fantasy of innocence. Suspended between the silence of the dead and that of the living, the youth finds himself split between history and myth—a history of compromise and defeat and a myth of revolutionary purity. This division, however, is proven untenable by the film itself. However celebrated by Cavani as a radical path toward liberation, the rebellion of the protagonists remains locked within a dialectical relation with the structure it aims to challenge. After her arrest, a professor lectures Antigone on the interconnection of revolution and reaction: “You need us because it is upon us that you discharge your revolutionary impetus; and we need you, your petty crimes and your exhibitionism. A power without its enfants terribles is an uncivil power, a power destined to perish.” Similar to Come Play with Me, we see the recognition on the part of the structure of the necessity of harnessing and incorporating the revolutionary impulses of the youth in order to survive, thus shattering any fantasy of primitivistic purity. The impasse that this fantasy points to is, however, absolutely real: how to imagine forms of revolt in a time when revolt itself constitutes the nourishment of authoritarian institutions? The fantasy of pure autonomy of the two silent heroes is precisely a symptom of this impasse, an attempt to solve it by pretending it does not exist.

We return, then, to the images that open the film. Beyond the ultimately reassuring fantasy of Antigone and Teiresias’s mythical heroism, these images actually touch on the real of the impasse. They reshuffle the terms of the figural articulation of the youth, who is no longer a potential political subject open to a myriad radical destinies but instead a persistent, lifeless remainder of a once-vital movement. In this sense, the corpses remain on display not only as victims of state violence but also as an ominous literalization of the demise of the youth movement of 1968 as a possible political subject. Cavani seems to suggest that any form of defeat that may befall the mass youth movements of 1968 will have to be thought not only in terms of collective suffering but also, and perhaps more ominously, on a vast generational scale.

Three films from the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s help clarify the contours and consequences of this defeat: I Am Self-Sufficient (Io sono un autarchico, 1976) and Ecce Bombo (1978) by Nanni Moretti, and Toxic Love (Amore tossico, 1983) by Claudio Caligari. We can see these films as unfolding from Cavani’s images of death. The youthful bodies in Moretti and Caligari may still be breathing, but their agonies of boredom and addiction speak to the historical exhaustion of the conditions under which the project of a liberation of desire and enjoyment could carry a revolutionary potential. Like Cavani’s youth-corpses, Moretti’s and Caligari’s protagonists are tasked with staging, despite themselves, the spectacle of their own defeat.

“The Color of Emptiness”: Desire and Drive in Moretti and Caligari

The focus of the three films is symptomatic of the distance that separates Moretti and Caligari, both in terms of their biographical background and their political leanings. In his early diptych, Moretti stages the existential and political disorientation of his generation through loosely connected vignettes of young middle-class types caught in the often comical dead ends and paradoxes of 1970s-era youth culture. Moretti pictures himself as distant from the universe of urban radical leftism—a distance he reclaims in his later films as well, most notably Dear Diary (Caro diario, 1993). Caligari, on the other hand, was an active participant of the 1977 movement, and his early documentaristic work on the lumpenproletariat as well as the student and worker struggles of those years amply reflects this political engagement. Toxic Love, his first feature film, is centered on a group of young heroin addicts in the coastal town of Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome. True to its neorealist inspiration, the film follows the characters (all nonprofessional actors and actresses, many of whom were present or former drug addicts) in a seemingly endless cycle of looking for money, buying heroin, getting high, and starting over again.

The leap from the tedium of urban middle-class life to the epidemic of drug addiction in the suburban underclass is significant, of course, so much so that the juxtaposition of the films may seem dubious, if not outright forced, especially considering the starkly different critical fortunes that the two directors have enjoyed. True, there is the shared sociological relevance (the films as portrayals of a generation), but that angle hardly offers a solid footing for a comparative critical assessment. As with the rest of the present book, such justification can only come from the figure itself, and from the method it imposes on our analysis. So we must ask not only what variation of the figure of the youth is outlined in I Am Self-Sufficient, Ecce Bombo, and Toxic Love but also, and perhaps more importantly, across what impasses this figure comes into existence.

On the surface, the most conspicuous contrast between Moretti’s and Caligari’s works resides in the claim that they make on realism and on the question of authenticity. I Am Self-Sufficient and Ecce Bombo adopt an antirealistic approach in which theatricality and estrangement dominate the scene. Indeed, Michele Apicella (Moretti himself) and his friends are constantly performing, an awkward negotiation between the conformist demands of youth culture and a desire to affirm one’s own difference in the form of idiosyncratic narcissism.14 Toxic Love instead opts for a largely naturalistic representation (on-location shooting, natural lighting, the use of dialect and improvisation) whose primary purpose is verisimilitude. These two opposite approaches translate into opposite claims about the figure of the youth. In Moretti, the youth is marked by a kaleidoscopic self-fashioning of identity, where every posture projects a specific image of the self. Michele oscillates between the roles of victim and censor of this collective performance, as he makes fun of its aberrant aspects, but he also fully partakes in this theatrical dynamic. In Toxic Love, the constraint of realism generates the opposite figure; the characters are by-products of their material living conditions, their hopes and fears entirely determined by the position they occupy within the social structure. If in Moretti the youth struggles to be (and know) what he wants, in Caligari he can only be what he is.

In Moretti, the pliability of the self as performance is suffused with boredom. In psychoanalytical terms, boredom can be defined as a peculiar indetermination of desire: a “pure desire of enjoyment which does not find any suffering to enjoy”15 and therefore floats untethered from any concrete object. For Lacan, boredom is the reaction of us moderns to old semblances of love, like Beatrice’s divine bliss and Dante’s rapt contemplation of it.16 The root of this bored response is to be found, at least in part, in the youthful liberation of desire that wants to demolish all semblances and sublimations and enjoy without restraint. The figure of the bored youth as a by-product of 1968 is explicitly evoked by Lacan: “If I have talked of boredom, of moroseness, in connection with the ‘divine’ approach of love, how can one not recognize that these two affects are betrayed—through speech, and even in deed—in those young people dedicated to relations without repression.”17 These “relations without repression”—the fantasy of a pure, unrestrained enjoyment beyond the Oedipal prohibition—aim at annulling the fundamental kernel of impossibility that is sex itself: the traumatic real of the sexual nonrelation. As a society, we confront this real through processes of mediation and sublimation that allow us to rationalize its impossibility: “the sexual impasse exudes the fictions that rationalize the impossible within which it originates.”18 What Lacan calls “discourses” are one such fiction: forms of organization of social relations designed to offset the sexual nonrelation. One particular discourse, however, abdicates this task: the “capitalist discourse.” As Colette Soler writes,

Unlike the preceding discourses, [the capitalist discourse] thus does not make up for the real nonrelationship and leaves it exposed for all the world to see. This does not mean that it sheds light on the fact that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship; it simply deprives subjects of the symbolic resources that tempered it in other eras, leaving them more exposed than ever to the consequences of solitude and of the precariousness of the sexual nonrelationship.19

This is where youthful boredom finds its origin; the collapse of all forms of mediation between the subject and the object results in the impossibility of forging viable libidinal ties that, while not solving once and for all the problem of the sexual nonrelationship, would at least manage to make it tolerable for the subject. Soler again: “Boredom, in essence, is one of the affects of the desire for something else . . . a desire for another jouissance.”20 In the case of Moretti, the mirage of a direct access to enjoyment has as its obverse the impossibility of locating an anchoring for desire. The result is boredom, that peculiar situation in which desire drifts untethered from one object to the next, in search of another type of enjoyment. The bored youth in Moretti, then, is a mask that simultaneously disguises and reveals its own determining impasse, one of the “fictions that rationalize the impossible” of the sexual nonrelation.

If Moretti is primarily concerned with boredom as the “desire for another jouissance,” Caligari situates the youth in a territory beyond desire altogether. The cycles of high and low that Caligari’s youths go through point to the insistence of an irreducible surplus to the logic of desire, a compulsion to repeat that evokes the dimension of the drive. As responses to a structural impasse, boredom and addiction are two sides of the same coin. Both driven by fantasies of immediacy, they establish subject–object relations that are equal and opposite. To the impossibility of stable libidinal attachments in boredom, addiction opposes the promise of a unique, steadfast tie to an object capable of maintaining the subject in a continuous state of enjoyment. But while the logic of desire in Moretti still presupposes the fantasy of attaining the object, the drive that dominates Toxic Love projects no sense of futurity, only repetition.

Éric Laurent defines toxicomania as “the quest . . . for the verification of the color of emptiness.”21 The expression “the color of emptiness” is taken from Lacan, who identifies it as the fundamental “coloring” of the drive, which is “suspended in the light of a gap.”22 This gap is the limit imposed on desire by the symbolic—that is, the unattainability of the object of desire, or, in other words, the fundamental impossibility that is enjoyment itself. The young addicts in Toxic Love verify the color of emptiness by covering up this gap (through access to heroin, enjoyment becomes possible) while at the same time testifying to its irreducibility. The very act of covering up the gap installs a time of unceasing repetition, for the drive endlessly circles around its object without ever attaining it. In fact, the enjoyment associated with the drive only derives from missing the object, so that the cycle of the subject’s self-sabotage can be repeated once more.

Beyond the stereotypical portrayals of a defeated generation, the figure of the youth that emerges in Moretti and Caligari reveals a structural situation in which the fantasy of a direct access to enjoyment runs aground in the interconnected forms of boredom and addiction. Yet not only the proximity of but also the distance between the former and the latter, along with their attendant logics of desire and drive, register politically. In Moretti, the youth’s inability to forge viable libidinal ties translates into a deeply atomized world in which characters seem to float untethered from each other, refractory to any idea of collectivity, be it based on love, friendship, or solidarity. In Caligari, the dominance of the drive, often described as antisocial, generates the opposite effect. When understood as a universal condition of the human subject, the insistence of the drive—the gap—becomes the background against which social bonds can be created. One example of this is the subterranean motif of solidarity that traverses the film. Caligari makes a point to emphasize minor moments in which the characters, faced with the opportunity for selfish or even predatory behavior, opt for the opposite. For instance, after a botched robbery, one of the main characters, Cesare (Cesare Ferretti), insists that his partner in crime take all of the meager score; later in the film, Cesare steals a pack of cigarettes from a sleeping homeless man, only to then take one cigarette and put the pack back. Not only does solidarity become a form of resistance against a shared condition of marginalization, it also signals the episodic reintroduction of the Other (the heist partner, the homeless man) as the agent capable of regulating the access to enjoyment (renouncing one’s cut, taking one cigarette instead of the whole pack).

In Toxic Love, the structure constantly interpellates the characters as lumpenproletarian addicts. They are assigned the role of idlers and deadbeats, their behavior as predictable as the recurrence of the impulse to shoot up. However, these instances of unprompted solidarity speak to a refusal of this interpellation, little moments of heroism in which the drive is temporarily kept at bay. One scene vividly presents this refusal of interpellation. Sitting at a table in a friend’s apartment, Cesare reminisces to his girlfriend, Michela (Michela Mioni), about an episode from two years earlier. We hear the story of a heroin injection in the backseat of a cab that knocks Cesare out. When he comes to, he finds that the taxi driver has taken him to a hospital. When he notices two orderlies running toward him with a stretcher, Cesare flees: “I left them without their junkie corpse [il loro cadavere di drogato].” This leads him to briefly ponder suicide, a motif that returns in the following scene, where Cesare, after having had sex with Michela, puts a gun in his mouth and then to her head while she is sleeping. When she wakes up, she looks at him and calmly asks, “Why, Cesare?”

Why indeed? Beyond any psychologizing explanation that would cite hopelessness and existential despair as the reason, the answer to Michela’s question resides in Cesare’s previous gesture of refusal: “I left them without their junkie corpse.” Similar to his suicidal fantasies, Cesare’s escape from the hospital speaks to a desire for withdrawal. But withdrawal from what—or rather from whom? Someone, it seems, is watching. Cesare’s words suggest the scene of a spectacle in which the addicted youth fulfills the role of the sacrificial outcast. “They,” therefore, doesn’t simply refer to the orderlies but also to the entirety of so-called civil society that takes pleasure from the spectacle of self-destruction staged by the addicted lumpens. The “junkie corpse” would then be precisely the ultimate object of desire that this spectacle would have to offer, and that would unfailingly be met by “them” with a mixture of distant compassion and reproving paternalism.23 This, however, would be nothing more than a veneer of respectability papering over a collective enjoyment derived from this spectacle of death. Lacan clearly identified this aspect when he admonished the students protesting at Vincennes in 1970 that the powers that be were in fact taking pleasure in the spectacle of their rebellious appropriation of enjoyment: “You fulfill the role of the helots of this regime. . . . The regime puts you on display; it says: ‘Watch them fuck.’” Does not the invisible “regime” of civil society in Toxic Love put the youth on display and say “Watch them die” or, more precisely, “Watch their own enjoyment kill them”?

In fact, more than addiction itself, Cesare’s tragedy is that of awareness—the awareness of performing for an audience whose enjoyment comes in equal measure from the sanctioning of addiction on a social and moral level and from the spectacle of devastation unleashed by drug abuse among the rebellious youth of the long ’68. Cesare’s dogged refusal to give “them” anything to enjoy is the last, desperate political gesture of the figure of the youth. In this sense, we could read the tragedy of Cesare in Caligari as the obverse side of the comedy of Michele Apicella in Moretti. Michele shares with Cesare the awareness of being on a stage, but in contrast to the protagonist of Toxic Love, he fully embraces the performance. Boredom then becomes a way to turn the tables on the regime by exposing the absurdity of the spectacle of enjoyment that it forces the youth to interpret. It is not surprising, then, that the end point of the youth’s arc would coincide with a meticulous portrayal of “them,” those who are loudly applauding at the spectacle of the youth’s demise: Mario Monicelli’s An Average Little Man (Un borghese piccolo piccolo, 1977).

The Cloven Youth: Fantasies of Reaction in An Average Little Man

The life of Giovanni Vivaldi (Alberto Sordi), a cynical, opportunistic white-collar employee nearing retirement, revolves almost exclusively around his son, Mario (Vincenzo Crocitti), a dim-witted accounting graduate looking to follow in his father’s footsteps and secure a job in the public sector. Giovanni goes to great lengths to make sure his son is hired (including joining a Masonic lodge), yet his dreams of a solid middle-class future for him are shattered when Mario is accidentally killed during a bank robbery. Stunned, Giovanni nurses ideas of revenge while his wife, Amalia (Shelley Winters), is left paralyzed and mute by a stroke. Convinced he has identified the murderer (Renzo Carboni), Giovanni springs into action: he severely injures the young man and abducts him to a shack in a swampy area at the outskirts of Rome with the idea of torturing him. The prisoner, however, dies from his wounds. Disappointed, Giovanni prepares to enjoy his retirement, but Amalia too passes away, overcome by her illness. The film ends with Giovanni caught in an altercation with a young man. The two exchange insults, and as the young man walks away, Giovanni starts following him in his car, presumably ready to kill again.

At first sight, An Average Little Man seems bent on rejecting the type of dialectical positioning of the youth that we found in the films discussed so far in this chapter. Monicelli depicts neither the creature of desire, caught in a wrestling match with the Other, that one finds in Bertolucci, Samperi, and Bellocchio, nor the outcasts lured by the mirage of free enjoyment we encountered in the films by Moretti and Caligari. What we see in An Average Little Man is a sort of Januslike figure made up by two diametrically opposed faces: that of the purely familiar object of love (Mario) and that of the purely foreign object of envy and hate (the bank robber). Monicelli emphasizes this duality by arranging the film around the split between these two faces of the youth, with the death of Mario occurring exactly at the halfway point. In formal terms, while the first part is reminiscent of the Italian-style comedy, the second takes on a considerably more somber tone, as the one-liners and surreal imagery give way to protracted silences and a more austere mise-en-scène.

Like any clear-cut division in which the two parts are found in a position of inoperative externality, this seemingly self-evident presentation of the two-faced youth should give us pause and prompt us to look at these two faces in detail. Mario is unassertive and obedient, his aspirations perfectly aligned with those of his father, who sees his son as a mere extension of himself. There is no conflict to speak of between the two, no contrasting worldviews or any trace of generational hatred. Mario, in this sense, embodies the revisionist fantasy of a world in which 1968 never happened. This timid, infantile son poses no enigma; his desire is, quite simply, his father’s. The other face of the figure of the youth in the film, the bank robber with no name or backstory, is Mario’s obverse. In Giovanni’s eyes, he embodies an unchecked, socially unacceptable drive that stands in open defiance of the law. While Mario is a conformist entirely absorbed into his middle-class existence, the bank robber is pure antisocial otherness, the photographic negative of Mario as a family man–to-be.24

The crux of Giovanni’s reactionary fantasy resides in the relation between these two faces of the youth. On the surface, it might seem as though Mario’s murder is the cause of Giovanni’s desire for revenge. But perhaps the terms should be reversed. What if Giovanni’s desire for revenge came first, and the scenario that the film depicts is nothing but the fantasmatic enacting of that desire? In other words, it is not the case that the murder triggers the fantasy of revenge but rather, inversely, that the fantasy of revenge—in order to be acted on—requires Mario’s sacrificial murder. In this sense, the split in the figure of the youth is a by-product of the father’s fantasy. Mario’s death is as much an integral part of the unfolding drama of Giovanni’s desire as the kidnapping and torture of the bank robber.

Reactionary fantasies are, at their core, always fantasies of ressentiment. Giovanni is hardly seeking justice. Instead, he is envious of what he thinks is the youth’s enjoyment and wants to pry it from him. Uninterested in simply handing down a death sentence (Giovanni is visibly disappointed when he discovers that his prisoner has died), the borghese piccolo piccolo (petty petty bourgeois) wants to put the unruly youth under his control and deprive him of his source of enjoyment: that freedom that, according to Giovanni, is a “good thing” but, he also says, has become too widespread, too readily available by the time of the late 1970s. Selfishness and envy of the Other’s enjoyment go hand in hand. Giovanni’s petty acts of abuse (such as taking advantage of a situation and then lamenting a disregard for the common good when others do the same) speak precisely to the cynical intersection of freedom (for oneself) and normativity (for everybody else), which makes the petty bourgeois a figure simultaneously of victimhood and hostility.

However, there might be an even more sinister aspect to Giovanni’s project of revenge. In the attempt to keep his captive alive, we can see a co-optation of the bad son, who has now been tamed, into a newly minted familial nucleus in which the father can once again exercise total control. Giovanni’s is not only a fantasy of revenge; it is also, more subtly, a fantasy of fatherly omnipotence affirming the idea that as history unfolds and different figures of the youth emerge, paternal authority remains unchanged and unchallenged. Giovanni is, after all, a former member of the Resistance who admiringly quotes Mussolini and, it is safe to assume, traversed the past two decades of Italian history unfazed by the momentous events that transformed the country—unfazed thanks to his chameleonic ability to blend in, to become whatever fits any given historical moment (the obverse of this compulsive adaptability being, of course, a reactionary faith in the immutability of the existent).

Giovanni’s fantasy persists even after the death of the bad youth, as the film’s ending demonstrates. There is something ridiculous and at the same time horrifying about the image of an old man in a small, ramshackle car stalking a young bully, ready to pounce at any moment. Every private fantasy, seen from the point of view of an external observer, appears laughable and infantile, and Giovanni’s reverie is no exception. However, this individual fantasy evokes a larger, collective desire for revenge as reappropriation of enjoyment from the youth that takes on a distinct shape in the late 1970s. Giovanni enacts the fantasy of the so-called silent majority, the moderate middle-class electorate seething in anger at the radicalism of youth militancy and secretly longing for a return to order and discipline.25 With An Average Little Man, the youth is observed from the standpoint of this silent majority and co-opted into the fantasy that sustains its reactionary desire. This reification of the youth into the false contradiction of good versus bad renders the figure politically inert, de facto putting an end to the exploration of the vicissitudes of desire and their attendant subjective potentialities that we traced in the films examined in this chapter. The youth in An Average Little Man has no desire to call his own. Instead, he seems to throw into relief the desire of the structure, an ominous foreshadowing of the mounting tide of reaction and alienation that will sweep Italy in the years of the riflusso.