The Accident: Anxiety and Courage

The Working Class Goes to Heaven revolves around Ludovico “Lulù” Massa (Gian Maria Volonté), a factory worker in Northern Italy who only cares about his piecework rates and refuses to meddle in politics. His output, the highest of any worker on the shop floor, is used by the foremen as a measuring stick to set general standards of productivity, and Lulù’s peers resent him for it. He, however, is only concerned with earning enough money to pay alimony and child support to his ex-wife and son, Armando, and to support his new girlfriend, Lidia (Mariangela Melato), and her son, Arturo. One day, Lulù’s index finger is cut off by a machine in an accident. The event changes his outlook, and when he returns to work, he becomes increasingly involved with political struggles inside and outside the factory. Lulù finds himself torn between the reformist tactics of the unions (who wish to attain better piecework rates through negotiation with management) and the more radical demands of the student-worker alliance, who want less work at more pay, as well as the wholesale abolition of the piecework system. Caught in this situation, Lulù shows signs of increasing mental instability, especially in his private life with Lidia and his longtime friend, Militina (Salvo Randone), an older coworker confined to a mental hospital after assaulting an engineer at the factory. Fired by the company after he took part in a protest turned violent, and left by Lidia (who does not share his recent interest in politics), Lulù contemplates a move to Switzerland, until, thanks to the unions’ intervention, he is reinstated. As a punishment, he finds himself reassigned to the assembly line.

The first part of the film pictures a remarkable dissonance between the figure of the worker and its background. Lulù is clearly introduced as a Stakhanovite, but the situation around him is, just as obviously, not that of a Stalinist factory. Regarded as a scab and despised by his colleagues, this worker from the 1930s teleported to the early 1970s hardly possesses any heroic halo. To try to mediate and reconcile this conflict between figure and background, Lulù has no choice but to give himself over completely to the company and fully submit to its abstract authority. In doing so, Lulù assumes the position of the pervert: he knows what capital—as the Other—wants (more production), and he turns himself into a mere tool in its hands. In psychoanalysis, perversions result from the subjective disavowal of lack (such as castration) in the Other; the subject identifies with the imaginary object of the Other’s desire and makes the Other whole by becoming the tool of its enjoyment. The recurrent motif of the superimposition between labor and sexuality in the film speaks precisely to this entanglement of disavowed lack and to enjoyment by proxy. When Lidia laments the tendency of the rate of Lulù’s libido to fall, as it were, he admits that he is only turned on while he’s working. It is not by chance that the only sexual intercourse he has in the film (with his coworker, Adalgisa) takes place in an abandoned factory. As a pervert, Lulù can only experience enjoyment in the moment of his fullest submission to the Other. Furthermore, the Stakhanovite’s perverted enjoyment is inextricably tied to repetition. Petri emphasizes the repetitiveness of factory labor with an obsessive visual focus on machinery at work and a soundtrack (by Ennio Morricone) that echoes its rigid rhythmical patterns. When Lulù is operating a machine, the camera lingers on Volonté’s face with extreme close-ups that tend to deform his facial features (Figure 1).

In one scene, Lulù stares into space, angry and sweaty, talking to no one in particular: “I’m already focused, I’m already in another world. Think only about the piece! Even if it’s no use. Every piece is a hole, every hole is a piece. Just don’t fall in the hole! If you don’t want to fall in the hole, think about Adalgisa’s ass . . . a piece, an ass, a piece, an ass.” Lulù’s grotesque disfiguration shows the overwhelming intensity of enjoyment—a senseless, passionate attachment that goes beyond the limits of the rational and the useful (“Think only about the piece! Even if it’s no use”). This enjoyment is solipsistic and essentially antisocial: “I’m already in another world.” (While Lulù works, the camera wanders over the shop floor to show the small acts of sabotage perpetrated by a group of militant workers—acts to which the protagonist remains utterly oblivious.) For Petri, stakhanovism has the same structure as any other perversion. Lulù can only find his own enjoyment in, quite literally, working for the Other’s enjoyment. His is an enjoyment freed from the enigma of desire: Lulù does not experience the thorny uncertainty of guessing what the Other wants; he knows it. Perversion is, in fact, nothing but a way to keep the machine running smoothly by avoiding all the problems that inevitably arise for the subject when the lack in the Other and the consequent subjective indecision about what it wants come into the picture.

Eventually, lack does indeed appear to make Lulù’s disavowal vacillate. All that is required to imperil the Stakhanovite’s perverse relation to the Other is a little piece of metal jammed in the machine, which Lulù ill-advisedly tries to scoop out with his finger. The fundamental caesura in the film—the accident in which Lulù’s index finger is mutilated—is therefore determined by a blockage, a small obstacle that obstructs the normal flow of production, interrupting the functioning of capitalist machinery. This undoing of the structure of perversion thwarts repetition while revealing the impasse that constitutes the very cause of that repetition: it reveals that there is a fundamental lack at the heart of the productive structure, and this lack determines the repetitive pattern on which the structure sustains itself. This lack around which the structure is organized suddenly presents itself as a positive materiality, an object whose presence appears as an obstacle to the normal pattern of the status quo: “Every piece is a hole, every hole is a piece,” says Lulù. When it gets stuck between the gears, one of the countless perforated cylinders that he produces becomes exactly that: a hole and a piece, a void and its material appearance, a lack of being and the being of a lack. This is the object of the Other’s enjoyment. It now confronts Lulù as, in Lacan’s formulation, the object-cause of desire, which plunges him into the dialectic of lack and desire that defines the neurotic, as opposed to the pervert. The lack that the Stakhanovite pervert stubbornly disavowed returns here with a vengeance. What is the mutilation of Lulù’s index finger if not the traumatic inscription of lack (castration) onto the body of a worker who for the first time has to question the desire of the Other—and, as a consequence, his own?

Lulù tries half-heartedly to downplay what happened, but the situation has changed. The guarantee of subjective consistency offered by his perversion has now revealed its precariousness. This sudden appearance of lack marks the subjective moment of anxiety. If anxiety, as Lacan says, is the only affect “that does not deceive,”7 then it is because its onset always signals the subjective encounter with a truth, a confrontation with the lack that stands at the center of the structure and constitutes its hidden cause. The name of this point of anxiety in the figure of the worker invented by the film is labor power. Labor power is the elusive element at the heart of the capitalist relation of production that is at once disavowed and exploited by the process itself, and that furthermore constitutes its fundamental condition of existence. The reason for its elusiveness resides in the paradoxical nature of labor power itself as a commodity that is unlike all other commodities. This became apparent to Marx when he too was confronted with an enigma: how does the capitalist produce nonequivalence (that is, surplus value) within a regime governed by market laws, and therefore by the exchange of equivalents? The answer for Marx lies in the peculiar nature of labor power as a special commodity whose use value is to congeal value in commodities. The paradox is evident: the power to make commodities is itself a commodity that can be bought and sold. Labor power, therefore, is not a substance but rather the name of a coincidence between two qualities: being a commodity and having the power to make commodities.

Alenka Zupančič has argued that labor power, as a sort of impossible Möbius strip in which two terms are implied in each other while remaining separate, “is the point that marks the constitutive negativity, gap, of [the capitalist] system: the point where one thing immediately falls into another (use value into source of value).”8 Sitting at this point we find none other than the worker himself, who alone possesses and sells this unique commodity. But if this is the case, Zupančič concludes in a remarkable turn of phrase, then “the Worker does not exist.” What exists is the person selling his own capacity for work, never himself as such, for that would make him a slave.9 This formula, reminiscent of Lacan’s famous claim about the Woman (“the Woman does not exist”), is to be understood as both prescriptive and analytical. Prescriptively, it corresponds to Marx’s admonition that the worker should not exist (the person selling his work “must constantly treat his labor-power as his own property, his own commodity,” or he would end up converting “from an owner of a commodity into a commodity”10). Analytically, with Zupančič, it names labor power as the gap between use value and source of value, the structural point of negativity that capital exploits for profit.

Zupančič’s point is convincing—so much so that it leaves us to ponder what implications it might have for our discussion of The Working Class Goes to Heaven. To put it bluntly, if “the Worker doesn’t exist,” then what is it we see in Petri’s film? The answer resides in the film’s ability to articulate a third way of understanding the formula. The statement “the Worker does not exist” should not only be read prescriptively and analytically but also figurally. The Worker as such does not exist. What exists instead is not only the person selling his labor power, or the gap at the heart of labor power, but also a figure of the tension between the two. The same element in the process of capitalist production—labor power—presents itself as internally divided. For the proletarian, it has no use value but only exchange value, so it constitutes a commodity to sell for money in order to survive. For the capitalist, it is a commodity available on the market whose use value is that of being a source of value. Initially, Lulù only sees labor power from the side of the proletarian. He trades his labor power for the capitalist’s money, and it is precisely the equitability of this exchange that grounds his identity as a Stakhanovite, living proof (to himself) that the Worker does indeed exist. This perception is unsettled by the accident, which marks Lulù’s traumatic encounter with the other side of labor power as the structural gap (use value as creation of value) that the capitalist exploits to his own advantage. This point of anxiety where Lulù’s entire worldview vacillates is precisely where the worker becomes a figure. In the attempt to think the tension internal to labor power, the figure sheds any claim to a stable identity (the Worker) and instead stages the worker’s confrontation with his own contradictory condition of freedom and exploitation.

The anxiety caused by the accident and mutilation marks the subjective moment of the vanishing of the Worker as a coherent, self-identical entity. “The Worker does not exist,” then, means not only that the worker should not logically exist (or else he would be a slave) and the worker cannot structurally exist (or else capitalism would not have any negativity to exploit), but also, figurally, that the worker does non-exist, in the sense that the film gives this nonexistence a concrete figural form. After the accident, The Working Class Goes to Heaven becomes the drama of a worker grappling with his own nonexistence. This figure alone, with its irreducibility to representation, can account for this nonexistence and use it as the starting point of the worker’s subjective destiny.

Once this lack at the heart of the structure is revealed, Lulù finds a way to turn this impasse against the structure itself, converting the lack of class relation into class struggle. This is the moment of subjective torsion that Badiou calls courage, and it corresponds in the film to the wager Lulù makes on the radicality of the student-worker movement’s demands for less work and more pay. In the film, the gap that separates the student-worker movement and the union measures, respectively, the distance between a subjectivity based on lack (the lack of the structure and the torsion of this lack against the structure) and one based on a disavowal of lack. For the student-worker movement there is indeed no class relation and no fetishistic conception of the Worker. The union’s position, instead, is defined by the conviction that a relation exists, and furthermore that it constitutes the foundation of any process of negotiation between workers and management. Once the truth of the absence of class relations becomes apparent, the figure of the worker morphs from a Stakhanovite to an agent of antagonism capable of transforming the anxiety-producing lack into a spur to action. This in turn translates into the worker’s rejection of the assigned position within the system of production.

Lulù’s courage materializes first in his defiance against management demands. Pushed to return to his preaccident output rate, he declines: “It’s not that I can’t, it’s that I don’t feel like it.” When the foreman notices his deliberately slow working pace and warns him that he will be fined, Lulù mocks him in his thick Lombardian accent (“Ah yes, the fine! The fine! I was forgetting about the fine! Why don’t you just fine me, then? Come on, fine me!”), then stops working altogether. He approaches the engineer’s booth, yelling, “You have to give back everything that you’ve stolen from me when I was a Stakhanovite! You have to shit everything out! Even the finger!” This moment of courage expands into Lulù’s incendiary monologue at the union assembly, where he openly sides with the student-worker movement and gives voice to their radical demands against the reformist tactics of the union leaders, and then reaches its culmination with the insurrection at the factory gates.11 In these two moments, the figure of the worker makes visible the truth of capitalist society after Marx: “There are no such thing as class relations.”12 There is no relation, properly speaking, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, only an impasse and a fundamental antagonism, so that any notion of collaboration or harmony between classes, including the perverse fantasy of the Stakhanovite, is nothing but ideology at work.

Commodities: Superego (and a Glimpse of Justice)

The dialectic of anxiety and courage accounts only partially for the general dialectical logic at work in the figure of the worker in The Working Class Goes to Heaven. In Badiou’s formulation, subjectivization names the point where the interruption of structural repetition (anxiety) meets the attempt at the destruction of the structure itself (courage). Anxiety and courage appeal to two other moments, superego and justice, that belong to a different temporality (subjective process) whereby new structural consistencies are explored and established. Specifically, anxiety appeals to the superego and courage appeals to justice. In the former pairing, the interruption of the structure’s self-perpetuation (anxiety) invokes a surplus of the law (superego), a despotic order that is nothing but the obverse supplement of the structural lack. In the latter pairing, the attempted destruction of the existing order (courage) rests in principle on the idea of a new order grounded in new rules (justice).

Precisely because of this divided temporality, The Working Class Goes to Heaven can scarcely be read as the uplifting chronicle of a burgeoning class consciousness tending toward its glorious revolutionary fulfilment. Anxious interruption and courageous destruction of the structure do not exist in a vacuum. Both dialectically imply a certain reorganization of the structure they intervene within and against. For this reason, our analysis of the temporality of subjectivation prompts us to go back to the film and look for traces of the two moments that make up the subjective process.

Let us begin with the superego. Consider the opening scene, in which Lulù wakes up in his apartment and begins his daily routine. While Lulù feigns a blasé attitude toward a condition he seems accustomed to, the formal organization of the sequence tells a different story, one of underlying disquiet. The mise-en-scène, for one, is claustrophobic: the space of Lulù’s apartment is dark and crammed with souvenirs, toys, and knickknacks. Some of these objects sit in the background, crowding the frame; others are brought to the foreground, as the camera lingers on them and places them in a series of shot/reverse shots with Lulù, as though engaged in a silent conversation (Figure 2). One is reminded here of Theodor Adorno’s description of the predicament of the occultist, who disavows the man-made character of commodities in the name of a modern animism. The commodity form forces Lulù into the position of the occultist “who draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish-character of commodities: menacingly objectified labour assails him on all sides from demonically grimacing objects.”13

This sense of enclosure in The Working Class Goes to Heaven is emphasized even within the frame. Petri relies heavily on close-ups of characters and objects, fragmenting the space and denying any sort of organic relation between it and the characters. As we have seen, the magnification of Lulù’s face imparts a certain deformation, grotesquely exaggerating some features. Furthermore, close-ups of Lulù and Lidia are always occupied by foreign bodies (the interlocutor’s head, a coffeepot) that tend to obstruct the frame and partially block vision. This pervasiveness of occluded vision is not limited to the opening scene; it constitutes a motif throughout the film. Home appliances, souvenirs, factory machines, walls and fences, and of course the omnipresent fog all conjure an image of the worker as a figure under siege, perpetually in danger of being swallowed by an encroaching background. In this invasive surplus of presence of Lulù’s environment may be located the moment of the superego as an excessive affirmation of an order bent on crushing the worker.

However, the setting assumes a menacing quality only insofar as the figure itself throws the background into relief and reveals its oppressive character. The thick materialities of machines, bodies, and objects become the overbearing reminders of the regime of oppression and exploitation to which the worker’s life is subjected. Employed by the machine (and not the other way around), massified into an anonymous and atomized collectivity, and surrounded by the worthless fruits of his labor, the worker sees the reality around him gain a surplus of tyrannical consistency even before witnessing its collapse in a moment of anxiety (the accident). The order of things, whose value the moment of anxious interruption reveals to be grounded in lack, returns here with a vengeance. The excessive reaffirmation of the existing order by what may be termed a foregrounding of the background clarifies that if there is a gap in the structure, it is capital’s prerogative to exploit it.

Yet, however pervasive, the film does not permit this despotic excess of the world of commodities to turn into an eternal reign of terror. If anxiety conjures the superego, courage unceremoniously beheads it. Let us consider Lulù’s final act of courage in the film. Laid off and abandoned by Lidia, Lulù contemplates as a last resort the possibility of leaving everything behind and migrating to nearby Switzerland (“There is no other definition of courage: exile without return, loss of one’s name”14). Lulù, with Lidia gone, gathers all the knickknacks cramming the apartment, intending to resell them and start a new life across the Alps. But as he itemizes them and their value in terms of hours of labor, he realizes that there is no profit to be made. While he wonders about what compelled him to buy these commodities in the first place, Lulù is left to meditate on what Marx calls the “phantom-like objectivity” of the “homogeneous human labor” congealed in them.15 Remarkably, in this final moment of courage, the superegoical, oppressive valence of the commodities that saturate the filmic space is somehow suspended. Lulù names these commodities, talks to them, even assaults them (he taunts and deflates Scrooge McDuck with a cigarette burn). However, precisely in the act of lamenting the uselessness of these commodities and rattling off their prices in the form of hours of labor, Lulù reveals the persistence of a nonrelation—namely, that between the commodity as use value and exchange value.

Once the form of the commodity itself is divided by Lulù’s courage, it loses its terror. Lulù is no longer an occultist; the menacing surplus of ghostly life that the object possessed earlier in the film (“the demonically grimacing objects”) has now dissolved. Knickknacks, appliances, and souvenirs become lifeless waste. Lulù’s compulsive purchase of useless commodities with the wage earned from the sale of labor power to the capitalist is precisely an attempt to regain and enjoy the surplus that was subtracted from him in the first place. What these commodities do instead is function as reminders of the original exploitation of Lulù’s labor power as well as of the asymmetrical relation that that the worker and the capitalist have to the world of commodities. While commodities for the worker only have use value (they are consumed for subsistence), they have exchange value for the capitalist alone, who realizes a profit by monetizing the value (including the surplus value) of the commodities produced by workers. Faced with the ineluctability of this situation, Lulù desists. From this moment on, Volonté mostly plays him with a sense of detached disorientation that vividly contrasts with the energetic portrayal he provided up to this point.

What of justice, then, in such a bleak portrayal of the political horizon of the working class? One can perhaps discern in the student-worker alliance’s demand for the abolition of the piecework system a glimpse into a possible advent of justice as the fourth and final moment of the figure. It would be easy to argue that Petri’s sympathies lie with this radical position and not with the union. The student-worker movement advocates for an end to exploitation by way of a separation of wage from productivity, the project of a new order conjured to replace the existing one. The union, however, simply aims to adjust the rate of exploitation to a more acceptable level, thus refusing to call into question the system as such. Perhaps the film’s implicit championing of the student-worker alliance is enough to contend that justice is indeed present in the film, however fleetingly or virtually. However, it is also important to emphasize that after the insurrection, a spiraling down of the figure of the worker begins, as though courage exhausted its upward thrust and the possibility of storming heaven became increasingly unlikely. The result is Lulù’s disorientation, which intensifies when he learns the news of his reinstatement, brought by the film’s own version of the deus ex machina—the union—which signals Lulù’s return to factory work, but this time in the brutal regime of the assembly line.

The Assembly Line: Lapsing

The final sequence is an extensive ensemble piece that sees Lulù and his coworkers frantically performing repetitive tasks, trying to talk to each other over the deafening machinery noise. Screaming at the top of his lungs, Lulù recounts a dream he had: he is dead, trapped in a sort of purgatory separated from heaven by a wall, and along comes Militina, who incites Lulù to break through the wall. When the wall finally comes down, the workers are ready to storm heaven. Beyond the wall, however, Lulù only finds a thick fog from which all the characters in the film start emerging, including a doppelganger of Lulù himself. The account of the dream is interspersed with remarks and questions from Lulù’s coworkers who, because of the noise, mishear most of what he says. Formally, the scene is characterized by extreme fragmentation, fast-paced editing, and a wide variety of shots and angles that depict the thwarted conversation among the characters (Figure 3).

On the surface, the scene can be read as an allegory of the defeat of revolutionary aspirations brought about by capital’s authoritarian suppression of working-class struggle. In its basic structure, what the scene offers is the materiality of brutal exploitation on one side, a confused dream of revolution on the other, and only noise and fog in between. Where previously the condition of the worker provided the opening for a radical politics of refusal, now that condition finds itself unmoored from any collective political project. Incommunicability, isolation, disorientation—these are the affective dominants not only in the scene’s depiction of assembly line work but also, and perhaps more tellingly, in Lulù’s dream itself. The thick fog enshrouding seemingly everything in the film makes one last appearance here, as Lulù’s description links it directly to the illegibility of a political situation in which the stakes of class struggle have become elusive.

The motif of occluded vision recurs throughout the film, but the saturation of space that previously marked the onset of the superego assumes here a new valence. The fog becomes the perfect metaphor of a condition of disorientation—a “fog of class war,” as Evan Calder Williams called it, that symbolizes the worker’s inability to make sense of his own position within the capitalist relation of production, and from which the illegibility, atomization, and entrapment of the figure of the worker derive.16 The fog, in this sense, evokes the obfuscation of the fundamental impasse of the capitalist relation of production: class antagonism.

After all, what is Petri’s working class going to heaven to do, exactly? To storm it? Or to die and rest in peace, its antagonistic potential neutralized once and for all? The ambiguity of the expression “going to heaven” easily accommodates both options. But the working class in Petri’s film is not simply dead; it is still living labor exploited by capital. Nor is it glorified in the apotheosis of revolutionary violence. The final scene dramatizes the tension inherent in this ambiguity. On the one hand, the dream actualizes a sense of collective yet impotent rage; on the other, the shots of the characters at the assembly line portray a peace that is only the result of capitalist disciplinary repression. This working class on its way to heaven finds itself in limbo: the undoing of the coordinates of class struggle in the historical sequence of 1968 leaves the working class disoriented, lost. Historically, the loss of the hegemonic position of the worker registered by the film is due to the onset of a stagnation of the global economy and the consequent process of capitalist restructuring that began at the end of the 1960s. One of the effects of this restructuring was the marginalization of the antagonistic role of the factory worker within the process of production. Already by the mid-1970s, the factory begins to lose its status as the paradigmatic site of class struggle, as we witness the rise of a new proletariat whose labor power is not necessarily exploited within the walls of the factory. Antonio Negri famously named this emerging political subject operaio sociale (social worker), signaling a new process of capitalist exploitation—and its correspondent form of antagonism—that takes place in society at large.17 With the fragmentation and recomposition of the working class that occurs under the pressure of capitalist restructuration, the factory worker finds himself unable to map his own position within this transformed landscape of production.

The final scene evokes this disorientation by exceeding the immediate semantic halo of repetitiveness, exploitation, and dehumanization (with its attendant corollary of social critique of working conditions) that is usually associated with the assembly line in the cinema of ’68.18 The assembly line dominates the film’s final scene, yet nothing of the fluid, horizontal movement that defines it is retained in the scene’s formal organization—quite the opposite. What the appearance of the assembly line comes to signify instead is the reactive restructuration of capital that undoes existing forms of working-class subjective consistency, with the extreme aesthetic fragmentation of the scene as the formal correlate of this undoing. This line of reading also offers a possible interpretation of the enigmatic last shot of the film, where the camera assumes the point of view of the piece of machinery built by Lulù and his coworkers as it is unloaded from the assembly line and carted away, all in one long take. The contrast with the rest of the scene is stark. When the film looks at the situation from the point of view of the worker, all it sees is isolation, interruption, and a disjointed frenzy. However, as soon as it assumes the point of view of capital in the form of the machine, fluidity and continuity take over as signs of a new consistency acquired by the structure.

As Chaplin showed in Modern Times, the inexorable flow of production embodied by the assembly line is fundamentally dehumanizing—not, however, because of some generic socioethical preoccupation about the harshness of labor conditions, but, more literally, because industrial capitalism is predicated on a forced adaptation of the human to the machine. The mode of production needs to deform the human in order to make it fit the standards of efficiency dictated by machinery. The Working Class Goes to Heaven refines Chaplin’s (and Marx’s) point and pushes it further. The incessant process of assemblage in the final scene is less about dehumanization than about political desubjectification.

This is where our analysis must part ways with the Badiouian formalization of the logic of the subject. In the position where Badiou’s matrix conceptually locates the advent of justice, we must recognize in the film the consolidation of a new order that has little to do with justice. Instead, to borrow an apt term from Sylvain Lazarus, we would identify in the appearance of the assembly line the moment of “lapsing” of working-class subjectivity. In Lazarus, lapsing takes the form of a cessation of subjective categories that determine the end of a given historicopolitical sequence, which he calls “saturation.” This cessation, however, does not simply name a political failure to be disavowed. Rather, it is an opening onto a certain possibility whose termination at the end of the sequence must not erase the fact that that possibility did once exist: “When tackling a political body of work that once mattered, the alternative is between disavowal and saturation. In effect, declaring, for instance, the lapsing of the Leninist problematic of the Party, based on the simple observation of his historical discredit, without indicating in any way what this lapsing opens onto or leads to, amounts to a de facto disavowal.”19

Lazarus calls “intellectuality” that which a lapsing “opens onto or leads to” and that lives on after the political subjectivities of a given sequence disappear. If one were to read The Working Class Goes to Heaven from a purely historical standpoint, the film would be nothing but a snapshot of the evaporation that occurred between the late 1960s and the early 1970s of the factory worker as the hegemonic subject of anticapitalist struggle. However, would this not be tantamount to a disavowal of the intellectuality generated by the figure of the worker in the film after its subjective lapsing? It is undeniable that there is a certain irrevocable objectivity to the defeat of the workers’ movement captured by Petri in the final scene, especially if examined from the vantage of an almost half century of hindsight. But a figure does not merely represent what is available to perception—in this case, the being there of a historicopolitical situation. As we have seen, lapsing is but one moment in the larger matrix of a logic of subjectivity, and in no way does it retain primacy over the other moments. It is precisely in the articulation, and not hierarchization, of anxiety, courage, superego, justice, and lapsing that the figure of the worker in the film thinks one of the enduring intellectualities produced by the historical sequence of 1968: a working-class antagonism impervious to the reformist rhetoric of the unions, driven by desires and not rights, and adopting a revolutionary stance against both capital and the state. It is not a legacy, monumentalized and thus inert, but rather the singular thought of a historical moment of crisis and transition.

Courage without Anxiety: The Seduction of Mimì and the Logic of Debt

Carmelo “Mimì” Mardocheo (Giancarlo Giannini), a Sicilian worker, loses his job at a sulfur quarry in Catania after he refuses—more out of spite than political conviction—to vote for the candidate supported by the Mafia in the local elections. Unemployed, he is forced to leave behind his young wife, Rosalia (Agostina Belli), and migrate to Turin, in Northern Italy. There, after a few run-ins with the local Mafia chapter, he becomes a metalworker at FIAT and falls in love with Fiore (Mariangela Melato), a young leftist activist, with whom he has a child. Transferred by the company back to Sicily, Mimì finds out that his wife has cheated on him with a carabiniere, Amilcare (Gianfranco Barra). Because he now thinks of himself as an emancipated metalworker, Mimì does not give in to the patriarchal imperative to punish her with death. Instead, he devises a plan to get revenge and settle the score: seducing Rosalia’s lover’s wife, Amalia (Elena Fiore). Once Amalia discovers that Rosalia is pregnant with Amilcare’s child, although she is offended by Mimì’s ploy, she reluctantly agrees to play along and becomes pregnant of a bastard child of her own to spite her adulterous husband. The plan succeeds, but before vengeance is served, one last showdown must take place. At Sunday Mass, where the entire town is gathered, Mimì openly taunts Amilcare, who threatens to kill him, unaware that Amalia had unloaded his gun. At the height of tension, a Mafia sicario swoops in, kills Amilcare, and pins the crime on a stunned Mimì, who goes to jail for a crime he did not commit. Once he has served his sentence, Mimì is forced to work for the Mafia to provide for Fiore, Rosalia, Amalia, and their respective children. In a circular ending, he starts running a campaign of intimidation for the upcoming local elections. Fiore, disappointed in Mimì, breaks up with him and leaves with their baby.

The film is organized in three acts by place: first Sicily, where Mimì opposes the Mafia rule; then Turin, where he finds a sort of utopian situation in which a new love and a new politics become suddenly possible; and finally, the return to Sicily, where a chauvinistic and violent way of life demands its pound of flesh. The film opens with an act of courage against this rule. Armed solely with a feeble guarantee that his defiance will not come back to haunt him (his friends in the local PCI assure him that the vote is secret—until it isn’t), Mimì decides to oppose what he perceives as an inherently Sicilian—and thus local—form of oppression and goes into exile in Turin, because, he says, “there’s no Mafia and mafiosi up there.” Similar to Lulù, Mimì envisions the possibility of refusal and exile as liberation, but, unlike his counterpart in The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Mimì’s act of courage is not predicated on the torsion of a lack of the structure against the structure itself, for there is no lack to speak of in the first place. The subjective moment of confrontation with structural lack is utterly absent in The Seduction of Mimì, which therefore begins with courage, but without anxiety. Mimì’s rebellion is presented as voluntaristic—that is, it is not only autonomous from the dictates of the structure (every act of courage is) but also utterly independent from it, to the point where this antagonism configures itself as simply oppositional, giving the impression of a sort of sovereign decision that repudiates any dialectic between force and structure. We will see later how Wertmüller denounces this idea as a mere fantasy and plays it for comic effect against her protagonist’s longing for a pure emancipation. For now, let us note how this absence of anxiety gives rise to a logic of subjectivation that constitutes an inversion of the one articulated in The Working Class Goes to Heaven. Lulù had to first confront the impasse and experience anxiety as the collapse of his Stakhanovite self in order to mount a properly courageous offensive that would be a match for the reactionary power of the structure. Wertmüller instead has Mimì outright ignoring that moment of disorientation, which results in a courage that is completely blind to the impasse of the structure it wishes to subvert.

By way of Mimì’s act of courage without anxiety, the film’s first act establishes a situation of imbalance, which is then resolved by a compensation: Mimì owes something to his community (a vote for the candidate backed by the Mafia), but he refuses to make good on his due, and because of this refusal to abide by an unwritten code of rules, he has to pay a price and loses his job. This is, in its most elementary terms, an example of the logic that sanctions the relationship between creditor and debtor: someone deserves harm or loss for something that he owes and is not able or willing to provide. The punishment, however, needs to be commensurate to the harm done. An equivalence is therefore established between what is owed to the creditor and the punishment that must befall the insolvent debtor. In a somewhat Nietzschean fashion, The Seduction of Mimì establishes from its beginning the logic of credit and debt as the paradigm of social relations, a transactional logic of equivalences based on trade that precedes the properly capitalistic relation between production and wage labor.

Within this general framework, the original situation of imbalance seems to have been compensated. Mimì has paid his dues by losing his job and is now seemingly free of debt, so he can now embark on a journey away from Sicily and its backward, oppressive way of life, because “in Turin, they pay workers, and even Agnelli [FIAT’s principal shareholder] tips his hat to them! In Turin, labor is free and respected!” Turin, FIAT, and the condition of the factory worker that these names evoke in early 1970s Italy are cast by Mimì as a utopia of fairness, freedom, and progress where the Sicilian logic of always already being in debt has no purchase. The film, however, wastes no time in denouncing the fantasmatic nature of these beliefs. The passage between the first and second act is an abrupt cut that juxtaposes the sunny streets of Catania with the smog and fog of Turin, with Mimì stranded on a traffic island, an urban castaway unable to wade through the raging waves of cars (Figure 4). With her customary humor, Wertmüller has an aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore accompanying the scene: “We’ve arrived; there’s the tower where the State’s prisoners languish. / Ah, the hapless man was brought here!”

The prophetic halo of the scene couldn’t be more transparent, as the clutches of mafioso oppression seize Mimì immediately after he arrives in Turin, again in the form of a logic of creditor/debtor. The Sicilian Brotherhood Association is happy to help out fellow Sicilians by providing jobs at a construction site, but only if the workers are willing to obey and keep their mouth shut. Mimì’s encounter with a supposedly Sicilian logic outside of Sicily is marked by a flash of uncanniness. The manager of the association, Tricarico, is played by Turi Ferro, the same actor who impersonated the mafioso boss in Catania. Mimì is stunned to notice that Tricarico bears the same identification mark as the boss: three moles on the right cheek.20 This is one of the running jokes in the film. The antagonists and figures of authority (the mafioso bosses in Sicily and Turin, a cardinal, a spy disguised as a communist activist, a police chief) are all played by Ferro, sporting the same three moles. Always presented with the same shot/reverse shot dyad that registers Mimì’s repeated astonishment, the three moles are the distinctive mark of power. They are the master signifier that intervenes when Mimì strays a bit too far, reminding him of his condition of debtor and immediately resuturing him into the structure.

Confronted with the pervasiveness of debt as a paradigm of social relations embodied by the omnipresent mafioso network, Mimì romanticizes the condition of the Torinese working class as a possible way out of this circuitous logic. Mimì’s job at FIAT, the burgeoning relationship with Fiore, and the novel political commitment with the PCI seem to confirm the possibility of a new beginning under the auspices of a progressive working-class subjectivity. Again, there is no trace in The Seduction of Mimì of the impasse that was at the heart of the figure of the worker in The Working Class Goes to Heaven. As the monolithic torchbearer of progress, the worker functions for Wertmüller as an entity external to the debt-centered mafioso network, thus remaining oblivious to the fundamental impasse of the capitalist mode of production that Petri’s film throws into relief.

Mimì’s faith in the worker as an inherently progressive figure betrays an idea of progress that has some content (a relinquishing of the logic of debt) but no form. It is hardly a progress based on struggle, of which the worker would be the agent. Instead, “worker” is for Mimì the name of progress as such, a figure that is fantasized as intrinsically emancipated and modern. Halfway through the second act, this idealization of the worker starts to break down. Mimì is pressured by the sudden appearances of Ferro’s characters, who invariably manifest themselves at turning points in Mimì’s new life—the arrival in Turin, the local PCI meeting, his son’s baptism. But Mimì’s self-fashioned progressive identity also starts to crack from within. Once Fiore becomes pregnant, for instance, Mimì’s political commitment starts to wane, as he abandons the union meetings to focus on petty bourgeois concerns. When Fiore asks him about recent developments in the struggle, he dismisses the question and shifts the conversation to her pregnancy. To his coworkers who accuse him of having defected to the “side of the padroni,” he replies, “Yessir, I have a job and I’m trying to be better at it. I have to think about my son.”

For Wertmüller, however, it is not simply a matter of morally chastising the character’s hypocrisy and the cynical opportunism of his commitment to the cause of the working class. Rather, we should read Mimì’s vacillation as the index of a certain tension inscribed in the film between the opposite poles of reaction and progress, oppression and emancipation, tradition and modernity. The worker is the site where this tension becomes visible, and the illusion of a clear-cut separation between the two poles is revealed to be just that: an illusion. The Italian title of the film, Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (Mimì the metalworker wounded in his honor), captures precisely this split, juxtaposing progress (the factory worker as the hegemonic revolutionary subject of modernity) and reaction (honor as the primary currency in the archaic system of values). But the title also points to a contradiction. If Mimì is a “metalworker”—that is, a progressive, emancipated individual—how can he be also “wounded in his honor”? If the world of progress and that of reaction are strictly separated, as Mimì believes, how is the retrograde concept of honor still an operative category in the modern world? The two domains, it turns out, cannot be separated once and for all. The impasse of being “a metalworker wounded in his honor” is what the film thinks through the figure of the worker, but remains unthought to Mimì himself.

To be sure, this problematic copresence of the archaic and the modern and the maladjustment of the individual to new customs is at the core of one of the most influential and long-lived subgenres in Italian cinema history: the Italian-style comedy. With its stereotypical characters and its penchant for cynical, grotesque humor, Italian-style comedy undoubtedly inspired Wertmüller.21 While the golden age of the subgenre was long gone by the early 1970s, she revitalized it by combining its features with not only the grandiosity of operatic arias, but also the spectacle of suffering of Hollywood melodrama, with its insistence on close-ups that highlight the violence of pathos.

This conjunction between Italian-style comedy tropes and melodramatic aesthetics is most evident in the third act. On his return to Catania, Mimì learns of his wife Rosalia’s adultery, and this brings his newly minted working-class identity to the breaking point. Again, Wertmüller shows, the Worker (in this case an emblem of pure emancipation) does not exist. To a friend who observes that a communist would never murder his wife and lover to regain his honor, Mimì curtly responds, “Fuck you and your communism—I’m a cuckold!” A fight between Mimì and Rosalia ensues, with overwrought screaming, cursing, crying, and wrestling turning melodrama into a grotesque farce. Wertmüller captures the parodic intensity of the acting through a series of close-ups (Figure 5).

While the grotesque is captured formally, its origin remains structural. What the deforming close-ups and twisted physiognomies point to is the deadlock Mimì finds himself in. His honor is wounded, and the patriarchal code demands blood to wash away the offense; but he is a metalworker, and there is no place for this kind of backward thinking in his newly acquired political perspective. He is thus caught between two logics, but without the possibility of giving into the structural imperative of the former or autonomously affirming the subjective emancipation of the latter. The choice offered by the two logics would be between swift revenge and forgetfulness. In A Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche identifies these two as the options of the aristocrat of heroic cultures, who either takes immediate action and retaliates without a thought, or simply lets the offense fall into oblivion out of a sheer sense of superiority. In either case, the ressentiment brought about by the offense does not linger to poison the nobleman’s psyche. Mimì is, however, more akin to the other protagonist of Nietzsche’s mythical dramatization of the origins of morality: the slave. Lacking the means to enforce any code of honor, the slave is doomed to experience the full brunt of ressentiment. In the impotence that his condition of weakness prescribes, the slave broods and lets ressentiment fester. However, this ressentiment is always addressed to someone, so revenge becomes first and foremost a gruesome fantasy in which all the enjoyment that the nobleman has stolen from the slave is taken back—and then some. This is the paradox of the slave’s condition: his revenge is oblique, calculated; yet his calculations fail to establish proper equivalences because the envy of the Other’s enjoyment makes it so that the original balance can never be fully restored. Can we not see in Nietzsche’s description of the slave’s ressentiment the predicament in which Mimì finds himself, forced to devise a plan of action that excludes either a swift reaction or forgetfulness? The result is, of course, a perverse and absurd mixture of the two, fueled by the misleading illusion that scores can in fact be settled.

The sexual encounters between Mimì and Amalia capture precisely this grotesque dynamic of ressentiment. The supposedly heroic customs of vengeance are turned into a parody in which doing what needs to be done is as inevitable as it is absurd. Amalia’s exaggerated physical features, magnified by Dario di Palma’s cinematography, together with Mimì’s stoic resignation, speak to the conundrum of a world that has gone off-kilter precisely by following a logic of pursuit of balance to its extreme.22 “The figures don’t add up . . . but I swear to God, I’ll make them!” guarantees Mimì. Little does he know that this brand of bookkeeping only works for masters, never for slaves (or workers).

The encounter between Mimì and the managing director of the refinery (Ferro again) on a terrace overlooking Catania offers the ideal crystallization of this disparity. A cousin of Tricarico’s, the director reveals that it was he who had orchestrated Mimì’s transfer from Turin, and that Mimì should expect a successful career at the refinery, for he must now consider himself “one of us.” (In accordance with the mafioso code of omertà, Mimì refused to press charges against Tricarico and his henchmen after a botched attempt at his life in Turin, so he is now regarded as a man of honor.) As the inexorable logic of debt continues to exercise its authority, Mimì tries to resist: “I don’t want anything to do with you lot. I’m not like that. I believe in decent people, workers.” When Mimì, pointing to the rampant real estate speculation in the area, accuses the director and people like him of being “lackeys of the padroni,” the director warns him that he should relinquish all his “dreams of communism,” then reminds him that they “need padroni” in Sicily to maintain the status quo and continue reaping profits.23 The director, who sees right through Mimì’s hesitant political commitment, rhetorically asks why he never named Tricarico to the police or the unions, concluding, “I know what you’re made of. . . . You’re on our side.” After exposing Mimì’s essential impasse, the director lays out his conspiratorial plan: “Two or three months of bag-snatching, robberies, kidnappings, a few bombings pinned on the anarchists, some propaganda against our enemies in Rome, and we’re set. People are clamoring en masse for protection and order. And we give it to them. . . . It’s politics.” The director’s plan—evidently reminiscent of the strategy of tension (discussed in depth in chapter 6)—clarifies that the Mafia is but a stand-in for a more rapacious, and thoroughly modern, form of exploitation and control. The revelation of the scope of this conspiracy that melds together the capitalist drive to accumulation and the rise of the surveillance state can be read as the moment of emergence of the superego in our logic of subjectivity. Pressured by the remnants of Mimì’s courage, the network of archaic social relations that constitutes the fantasmatic support of the Mafia reveals its excessive face—one that is all too modern: financial interests, real estate speculation, political lobbying, state violence, and so forth. Sicily is then elevated from local pocket of backwardness to synecdoche of the networks of oppression and corruption that envelop Italy as a whole.24

The scene ends with a climactic moment that seals Mimì’s fate. The director takes a coin out of his pocket and casually throws it on the ground, then asks Mimì to pick it up for him. Mimì, hesitant at first, gives in to the director’s insistence and picks it up, inadvertently kneeling before him. What Nietzsche calls the “very material concept of debt” could not have received a more transparent representation.25 This is not a simple debt, however; if it was, it would be based on a system of equivalences, and as such it would imply, at least in principle, the possibility for it to be extinguished. But this debt that Mimì contracts with the director and his organization cannot be repaid, and his being in debt translates into an unconditional submission to the sovereignty of the creditor. The reason why this debt cannot be paid is that there is surplus enjoyment that the master derives from his being creditor and that will always escape the transactional logic of debt and repayment; in the scene the presence of this surplus enjoyment is indicated in the director’s malevolent laughter at Mimì’s kneeling. The disparity between creditor and debtor, with their respective mirroring relations to enjoyment (surplus versus envy), asks whether the relation between credit and debt as a zero-sum game is even conceivable. Be it through the ressentiment of the slave or the surplus enjoyment of the master, one is left to wonder whether such a thing as a simple debt, entirely comprised within a logic of trade, may actually exist.

Mimì will never escape this logic of debt. Instead, his debt will only increase, as the horde of kids (Fiore’s, Rosalia’s, and Amalia’s sons and daughters) that overwhelm him outside the prison ironically alludes to. The circular ending of the film signals precisely this inescapability: Mimì is now part of the same mafioso crew that was running a campaign of intimidation among the quarry workers for the elections. In his study of the logic of debt, post-operaista thinker Maurizio Lazzarato writes: “The principal explanation for the strange sensation of living in a society without time, without possibility, without foreseeable rupture, is debt.”26 This is the form that subjective lapsing takes in The Seduction of Mimì: time becomes objectified—that is, entirely determined by the structure of debt—thus suffocating any space for subjective antagonism. Debt, writes Lazzarato, neutralizes the risks inherent in time by anticipating “every potential deviation in the behavior of the debtor the future might hold. . . . Objectivizing time, possessing it in advance, means subordinating all possibility of choice and decision which the future holds to the reproduction of capitalist power relations.”27 The ending of The Seduction of Mimì stages precisely this predictability of the indebted man, as well as the defeat of the progressive utopia previously embodied by the worker. The final shot/reverse shots between Mimì, Fiore, her kids, and Peppino (a leftist friend of Mimì) are characterized by a surprising level of affectlessness—no rage, anxiety, or desperation, only an enigmatic hesitation, tinged with disappointment and resignation, as though the characters were taking stock of this seemingly irreversible objectification of time (Figure 6).

But there is still room for one last comical moment. “They are all cousins!” Mimì screams in the last shot, referring to Ferro’s omnipresent doppelgangers, as he runs after Fiore to protest his innocence. It is curious that in order to be made sense of, a countrywide network of relations of violence and exploitation needs to be reduced back to the known, and utterly inadequate, form of the family. Even more remarkable is that Mimì, as it were, still does not get it. Mimì is a fool because he is unable to understand his role in the scripted theatrical performance that unfolds in the film.28 His initial rebellion—courage without anxiety—created the illusion that a break from debt bondage was possible, that he could somehow write himself out of the performance. The comic effect in the film is generated precisely by Mimì’s unwillingness to acknowledge the structural determinations of his existence. Courage without anxiety means lunging to assault the structure without having seen its impasse, the point of vacillation. But what would anxiety without courage look like?

Anxiety without Courage: The Absent Factory in Trevico-Turin: Voyage in the Fiat-Nam

Trevico-Turin occupies a peculiar position within Ettore Scola’s filmography. For a director and screenwriter mostly known for his star-studded and widely popular comedies, the film constitutes a remarkable creative detour: no professional actors (except for Paolo Turco in the leading role), small budget, and bare-bones screenplay—but, most notably, also refusal to release the film in the commercial movie theater circuit.29

The film is a sort of docufiction ante litteram in which an aesthetics akin to cinema verité meshes with a dramatized account of the condition of Southern migrants looking for work in Turin in the early 1970s. The title refers to the voyage undertaken by young migrant Fortunato Santospirito from Trevico, his (and Scola’s) native rural town in Campania, to Turin, in hopes of finding a job at FIAT. This “Voyage in the Fiat-nam” has Fortunato wander across the city as Scola guides the spectator through derelict apartments, overcrowded dormitories, and soup kitchens, but also places like a train station at night, where the marginalized gather; or Porta Palazzo square, where the Southern immigrant community meets every weekend.

Fortunato’s voyage comprises a series of encounters: with the nameless real-life people that inhabit the urban landscape, and to whom the protagonist cedes the stage, receding into the background as an improvised off-screen interviewer; but also with four characters that are thrown into relief: a young barman, Beppe, who helps Fortunato in his search for an accommodation; a priest who illustrates the hardships that Southerners face in Turin; an older worker and PCI militant; and, most importantly, Vicky, a student associated with the radical left (she is part of Lotta Continua) who becomes Fortunato’s love interest.

In radical circles, the film was dismissed as a clumsy exercise, a children’s story whose sole merit was to have shown in an educational fashion the awakening of the protagonist’s class consciousness.30 Others, like Lino Micciché, lauded Scola’s political intentions and the sociological accuracy of the portrayal of the working class in Turin in the early 1970s.31 Surely such critical verdicts are predicated on an analysis of what, so to speak, is there, either in the film (Fortunato’s narrative trajectory) or in its immediate vicinities (the sociohistorical context). This is, after all, what the film shows: the didactic political discussions, the familiar iconology of immiseration, the humanism of the migrants’ faces captured in prolonged close-ups, the sentimentalism of Fortunato’s letters to his mother. In general, Trevico-Turin betrays an evident concern with a representation of the working class that would respond to criteria of accuracy and authenticity while at the same time offering a political statement consonant with Scola’s and the PCI’s reformist agenda. The film, in this sense, has a fairly clear political thesis, epitomized in the final scene with Fortunato’s letter to his brothers in Trevico: a doleful j’accuse against capital and the state which turns into a demand for more jobs in the South (“It’s important that you know what awaits you if you come here or go abroad. They have to give us jobs where we are born”). But the political crux of the film lies less with what it shows—or intends to show—than with what it thinks. To unearth this aspect, we need to look past Trevico-Turin’s obvious sociologizing implications. This would be, in a way, the ultimate testing ground for a figural reading of political cinema: how does one see a figure where only sociological stereotypes are visible? The beginning of an answer lies in the hypothesis that what is not there—the absences and ellipses—might be more significant that what is.

The most conspicuous absence in Trevico-Turin is, of course, that of the factory itself. Scola had planned to shoot inside the infamous FIAT Mirafiori plant—one of the major sites of the workers’ struggles in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s—to which the management opposed a categorical refusal. He therefore had to settle for the rudimentary solution of title cards, which nonetheless makes for an eerie estranging effect, with static and repetitive snapshots abruptly interrupting the flow of moving images (Figure 7).

By way of this enabling constraint, Trevico-Turin asks: what happens to the worker when the factory disappears? What kind of figure is tied to the void left by a factory that is hiding in plain sight? As we begin to discuss how the film might offer an answer to these questions, it would perhaps be useful to retrace our steps and observe the ways the worker and the factory—the figure and its background—are linked in the films we have already discussed. In The Working Class Goes to Heaven, the factory incarnates what Badiou might call an “event site,”32 which is the space where the clash between force and structure occurs, and where a new political commitment suddenly manifests itself as actually being possible. It is on the factory floor that Lulù confronts the disorientation of anxiety caused by the accident, just as it is there, again, that he turns this anxiety against the structure in the moments of courage marked by the workers’ assembly and the insurrection at the factory gates. In the film, the figure of the worker hinges on the centrality of the factory, which must be grasped dialectically: the factory as “House of Terror” for paupers,33 where the worker is subjected to the unchecked exploitation of piecework labor; and, at one and the same time, the factory as event site from which a new emancipatory politics and a new subject may arise.

In The Seduction of Mimì, the protagonist fantasizes about the factory as a utopia of fairness and freedom without being able to see and recognize the system of capitalist exploitation that subsumes not just the factory but the country as a whole. Whereas Mimì only sees an imagined event site, the real house of terror ravages the country and manages to force him into submission. The result, as we have seen, can only be the birth of the Nietzschean man of ressentiment, a figure whose defining impotence is precisely determined by an inability to properly recognize situations of real antagonism.

In Trevico-Turin, as the factory disappears from sight, it hardly dissolves into nothingness. On the contrary; its ghostly presence towers over the film, haunting all the various places depicted in it. In fact, Trevico-Turin seems to suggest that the condition of being a worker—and specifically a migrant worker—cannot be confined to the factory and the process of exploitation that occurs therein. It requires mapping on a much larger scale. The film can therefore be read as a diagram of the urban space as an extension of the factory. By vanishing, the factory exists everywhere. To Petri’s designation of the factory as event site and Wertmüller’s deployment of the factory as deceptive utopia, Scola adds the factory as a structuring absence capable of refashioning the urban space in its own image.

Taken individually, the spaces of Trevico-Turin can be considered nonplaces, according to Marc Augé’s famous definition. They are all places of transience that structurally preclude any form of inhabiting or stable dwelling, thus dooming Fortunato and the other immigrants to a fate of endless errancy. But Trevico-Turin does more than simply provide a generic catalog of sites of alienation; it also traces back these individual snapshots to the unitary colonizing logic of the (absent) factory. The film casts the factory as the absent structural cause of the totality of urban space, manifesting itself only in the singularity of its tangible effects. “Turin is all FIAT,” declares Vicky. The process of exploitation of the working class is no longer confined within the walls of the physical factory. Now it takes place in the social fabric itself. As Vicky tells Fortunato, “They exploit you in the factory, at school, when you sleep, when you breathe.” Can we not read in the grain of this violent factorization of society the presence of a certain surplus of the structure that aims to extend its rule beyond its typical territories and subjugate all aspects of the individual’s life?

Trevico-Turin depicts a situation in which anxiety escapes from the Pandora’s box of the factory and saturates the social. Neither concentrated into an uncanny flash of revelation (as in Petri) nor simply absent (as in Wertmüller), anxiety turns into a soft, all-pervasive condition of constant uneasiness that cannot be assigned to a specific place or moment but envelops the film as a whole. Fortunato’s anxiety is born out of a repetitive encounter with the various aspects of exploitation within the social fabric as the capitalist logic of production spills into the urban space, and starts dictating the terms of the process of reproduction of labor power too. This surplus of authoritarian presence of capital is how the correlate of anxiety—the superego—appears in the film. Capital reorganizes the worker’s life in such a way that Fortunato, unlike Lulù, is prevented from recognizing the void at the heart of the structure. Instead of marking the impasse as the point of revelation of the precariousness of the system, the anxiety of the worker in Trevico-Turin turns inward and becomes the symptom of Fortunato’s own precariousness within a system that conversely appears invincible in its omnipresence.

Most of the spaces that Fortunato and the other characters populate are monuments to this sense of precariousness. With their emphasis on transience, anonymity, and disjointedness, the various snapshots of the urban landscape that make up Trevico-Turin reflect the subjective situation of the figure of the worker. Places like the train station, the dormitory, the lumpenproletarian ghetto, and the abandoned monorail are all reminders of a precariousness marked specifically by the condition of not being at home. The Southern migrant roaming these places precisely embodies this situation; as Paolo Virno suggests in his reading of Heidegger, once the individual is deprived of community, she falls prey to an anxiety that is ubiquitous and constant.34 The spaces in Trevico-Turin thus oscillate between the poles of objectivity and subjectivity. Their physical consistency is always in some way overdetermined by the subjective situation of precariousness experienced by the characters inhabiting it.

This indiscernibility between the objective and the subjective points to an interesting parallel between the spaces in Trevico-Turin and the “any-spaces-whatever” that Deleuze indicates as one of the hallmarks of the modern cinema born after World War II with Italian neorealism. Deleuze describes the “any-space-whatever” as a “disconnected . . . emptied” space in which a point of indiscernibility is reached between objective and subjective, or real and imaginary.35 These “any-spaces-whatever” give rise to “pure optical and sound situations” in which characters are no longer subjected to the dictates of stimulus/response or action/reaction (the “sensory-motor schema”) that define the mode of classical Hollywood cinema. Instead, according to Deleuze, beginning with neorealism, we see a “slackening” of these connections, which translates into the rise of a new breed of characters who privilege a passive demeanor over action and an exploration of space through aimless wandering over the strictures of narrative motivation. It is, in Deleuze’s words, “a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent,” where the protagonist “records rather than reacts.”36

In this sense, Fortunato is undoubtedly one of the epigones of De Sica’s and Rossellini’s characters. He is, first and foremost, a witness who sees and records. He roams an urban space that reflects his and his fellow migrants’ precariousness and alienation, while his presence on screen and off gives voice to the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. It is no secret that Scola held the neorealist tradition and its ethicopolitical project in the highest regard—indeed, he explicitly celebrated its legacy and lamented its demise in We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974). It is thus not difficult to see how a film like Trevico-Turin would for Scola be a homage to that filmic lineage, trying its best to reclaim some of the neorealist aesthetic features so perceptively captured by Deleuze.

Among them is also the significance of the encounter. Quoting Cesare Zavattini, Deleuze writes that neorealism is “an art of encounter—fragmentary, ephemeral, piecemeal, missed encounters,”37 and what is Trevico-Turin if not a chronicle of encounters? The friendly barman, the priest, the PCI militant, and Vicky—not to mention the myriad nameless people Fortunato meets along the way—all conjure some idea of solidarity for Fortunato. Yet all these encounters are somehow missed. After Beppe helps him out, Fortunato looks for him, but he is told that he does not work at the bar anymore; the priest and the PCI militant are both mentors to the protagonist, but then disappear from the film; and finally, with Vicky, the distance between the immigrant worker and the rebellious student from a well-to-do family proves unbridgeable, and a burgeoning love affair ends abruptly.

It is in these missed encounters that we ought to look for clues regarding the fate of courage in the film. We know what happens to courage when it is disjointed from anxiety, as in The Seduction of Mimì; it becomes blind voluntarism, a show of force that remains oblivious to the determinations imposed by the structure. As glimpses of solidarity, the encounters in Trevico-Turin constitute an opening onto the possibility of courage as a collective forcing of the structure. At its most elementary, this solidarity takes on the form of friendship, which offsets the worker’s isolation (Beppe). With each encounter, however, this solidarity becomes more properly political, envisioning the prospect of collective forms of resistance against the structure—forms based on the humanistic unity of the exploited (the priest), the organized unity of the party (the PCI militant), and finally the unity specifically thought by the event of 1968, that of workers and students (Vicky). But all these encounters, as we have seen, are missed, for they do not coalesce into a proper collective forcing of the structure.

To be sure, the impact of these encounters on Fortunato’s budding class consciousness is hardly negligible. Fortunato openly confronts the gloomy reality of exploitation in Turin that another migrant proletarian, Mimì, desperately wanted to disavow. While Mimì holes up in Fiore’s apartment, forbidding her to join the workers’ protests raging in the streets, Fortunato constantly navigates the city and does not shy away from struggle; he participates in strikes at FIAT and stands up for himself against a foreman at the assembly line. But the film maintains a certain distance even from these displays of courage, making them too, in a way, missed. The strike is only evoked by Fortunato’s voice-over reading a letter to his mother, and the incident with the foreman is briefly alluded to in one of the title cards. And when Vicky, the true source of courage in the film, exhorts the dwellers of a public housing to organize and demand better living conditions, she does so by evoking other struggles and other places, to which the interlocutor replies: “They had the courage to do it, and they were united. But here it’s one, two, three, four people at most. The others won’t do it.” Even the final moment of refusal—Fortunato kneeling in the deserted street screaming “Enough!”—is tinged with impotence and desperation, amplified by the muted soundtrack that elides Fortunato’s cry. In a film in which what is absent is just as important as what is shown, these missed moments of courage—evoked, invisible, silenced—become the correlate of diffused anxiety. Anxiety and courage are reduced to precariousness and frustration, purely reactive stances that already carry within themselves the seed of political defeat, for they remain entirely determined by the monstrous surplus of control of the capitalist structure. It is not by chance that the last image has Fortunato trudging toward the ironworks in depth of field, like a young working-class Monsieur Verdoux walking to the gallows (Figure 8). We can very well imagine that he might not leave that plant again.

It is here that Trevico-Turin’s avowed neorealist afflatus meets its breaking point. However closely they might resemble each other, a fundamental difference separates Deleuze’s any-space-whatever from the landscapes in the film, and it has to do with their evental potential. This is what Deleuze had to say about the “potentialization” of the any-space-whatever in his 1982 seminar on cinema:

The any-space-whatever is inseparable from a simple potentialization. This is why it is not an actualized space: it is a pure potentialization of space. What does it mean, a potentialization of space? It means that it is a space which, because it is empty . . . anything can happen in it: but what? Something [quelque chose], any event [un événement quelconque] can occur, at the same time from without and within.38

“Any event can occur.” To the nondescriptiveness of the space corresponds the potential for something—an event—to take place. For Deleuze, any-spaces-whatever are event sites in the sense that they open up the possibility for “anything” to happen—something that cannot be entirely foreseen because it is not determined by the “sensory-motor schema” that makes space a function of narrative and action. Yet the spaces in Trevico-Turin do possess a degree of determination. They may be physically empty, but they are not anonymous spaces of pure potentiality. The indeterminacy of these spaces, and thus their potentialization, is always already limited by the invisible presence of the factory. The long sequence of Fortunato and Vicky wandering through the monumental ruins of the so-called Italia ’61 area, named after the exposition celebrating the centennial of the unification of the country, exemplifies this relationality between these nonplaces and the elsewhere of the factory. Something may occur in them, but not anything. The abandoned monorail, the massive Palazzo del Lavoro, and the Palazzo a Vela in the distance are spaces that seem to open up the possibility of an event—love between Fortunato and Vicky, of course, but also a political alliance between workers’ and students’ struggles. At the same time, however, they are signifiers of the absent factory, as Vicky explains to Fortunato: because the Italia ’61 exposition area was conceived as a publicity initiative for FIAT, it can be compared to “a soap salesman who dresses up to sell more soap. Turin is dressed up so it can sell more cars” (Figure 9).

Aesthetically, the film presents the spaces as any-spaces-whatever with a degree of evental potentiality. However, from the standpoint of the structuring absence of the factory, these spaces are far from indeterminate, inextricable as they are from the history of Italian capitalism and the many forms of its rule over society.39 In the case of Scola’s film, the ruins of Italia ’61 do not simply express potentiality in themselves; their potentiality (for love and class struggle) is also affirmed only in the relation between these abandoned spaces and what constitutes their hidden cause: industrial capital, as personified by FIAT.

This primacy of the absent factory in Trevico-Turin makes visible a different facet of the figure of the worker in Italian political cinema. As opposed to Lulù in The Working Class Goes to Heaven, who starts off as a parody of the Stakhanovite worker from the 1930s, Fortunato is fully a worker of his time. A young, unskilled Southerner migrating to the industrialized North in search of a job, he embodies the mass worker described by the operaisti in the 1960s. The figure of the worker and that of the migrant become indiscernible; indeed, as Scola himself quipped, “Fortunato is not a hero, a revolutionary, or a unionist—he is a Southerner.”40 Fortunato undertakes the same trip as Mimì, but while in Wertmüller the experience of the migrant is largely reduced to clichés of mutual incomprehension between different cultures, Trevico-Turin focuses more attentively on the structural role played by Southern workforce within the Italian capitalist system. This role, to borrow Marx’s term, is that of a surplus population that is readily available to offset phases of contraction and expansion of the capitalist labor market.

In Scola’s film, the city becomes an immense storage facility for this surplus population, which includes not only the employed but also the unemployed and the unemployable. Trevico-Turin thus signals a dissipation of the figure of the worker into the more capacious figure of the proletarian, which includes young workers like Fortunato, the unemployed still looking for jobs, and ex-workers considered too old to be rehired. But this figure stretches even further out to the margins of the process of production to touch the territories of what Marx calls pauperdom, exemplified in the film by the lumpenproletarian who turn to stealing to survive and the mentally ill person whose desperation foreshadows Fortunato’s final cry. In a way, the irreducibility of the figure of the worker to any one character discussed in chapter 1 is nowhere more explicit than in Trevico-Turin. Every face and every voice in the film become part of a larger mosaic that extends well beyond the contours of the factory worker.

In the film, this surplus migrant population is presented as the by-product of the omnipresent rule of the absent factory, which mobilizes it as a necessary part of the process of production, what Marx (who himself borrowed the expression from Engels) calls the industrial reserve army. Commenting on the significance of this concept in Capital, Fredric Jameson describes it as

a stage of “subsumption” in which the extra-economic or social no longer lies outside capital and economics but has been absorbed into it: so that being unemployed or without economic function is no longer to be expelled from capital but to remain within it. Where everything has been subsumed under capitalism, there is no longer anything outside it; and the unemployed . . . are as it were employed by capital to be unemployed; they fulfill an economic function by way of their very non-functioning.41

“Where everything has been subsumed under capitalism, there is no longer anything outside it.” What better way to capture the surplus of the rule of the structure over the city than the idea of a place that has no outside? With its depiction of the rule of the absent factory over the urban social space, Trevico-Turin gives body precisely to a situation in which “the extra-economic or social no longer lies outside capital and economics but has been absorbed into it.”

We should not, however, make the mistake of assuming that all Trevico-Turin does is document an objective state of things—namely the process of capitalist subsumption of the surplus population as a buffer against structural cycles of expansion and contraction. What political cinema thinks is not just the status quo of things as they are but also includes the unforeseen subjective forcings and antagonisms that occur in the situation, with the figure as the point where this dialectical relationship between structure and force is made visible. Although a certain pedagogical intent is undoubtedly present in Trevico-Turin, the film can be read as less concerned with an authentic representation of the working class than with thinking the impasse that marks the field of subjective possibilites of the worker when the factory disappears and exploitation comes to colonize every aspect of human life.

As the factory worker in Trevico-Turin dissipates into the Fiat-nam and becomes indiscernible from the unemployed and the unemployable, he is reunited under the more capacious banner of a new proletariat, of which the social worker is the emblem. The consequences of the rise of this new worker in the 1970s will be enormous. On the one hand is an expansion of the field of class struggle beyond the walls of the factory; on the other is a certain difficulty in pinpointing this elusive form of political subjectivity and channeling its force along a revolutionary trajectory. A dissipation of energy always causes entropy. The Italian radical left in the 1970s will go on to learn from the figure of the mass worker and its courageous struggle, just as it will have to endure the challenges posed by its dissipation.