Figure or Figurant?

From the outset, the housewife presents herself as a paradox that challenges the traditional definition of what a figure is: what stands in relief against a background. In the Italian cinema of the long ’68, the housewife is everywhere but rarely stands out, relegated as she is to ancillary roles that put her into the backdrop of any given scene. More than a figure, in fact, the housewife resembles a figurant: the underpaid, nonspeaking extra on a film set, often tellingly referred to in filmmaking parlance as “atmosphere” or “background.” It is hardly surprising, then, that the type of labor associated with this figure would follow a similar fate of obscurity, left for the most part out of the frame. Yet the fruits of this labor are visible throughout: clean, tidy apartments, children dressed and ready for school, sexual comfort for the weary worker, food on the table, a coffee always ready to be had. Even if one looks solely at the films discussed in the previous chapter, this pattern becomes apparent. Consider Lidia, Lulù’s partner in The Working Class Goes to Heaven, or Fiore and Rosalia, Mimì’s lover and wife, respectively, in The Seduction of Mimì: secondary characters framed as domestic fixtures and love interests whose labor remains largely unseen by the spectator and unthought by the films, centered as they are on the wage labor of the factory worker. In cinema as much as in the social sphere, reproductive labor is as necessary as it is often invisible.

The question of the marginalization of reproductive labor in the analysis of capitalism is nothing new. The published feminist debate on housework and the gendered division of labor began as early as 1825, with the publication of Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other, Men, a socialist pamphlet by Anna Wheeler and William Thompson.1 The authors sought to shift the focus from the oppressiveness of the gendered division of labor to an understanding of unpaid—and thus invisible—domestic work as an integral part of the process of production. Within the socialist tradition, intellectuals and revolutionaries like Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, Alexandra Kollontai, and Clara Zetkin helped carry over the analytical focus on the nexus between productive and reproductive labor from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. After the pioneering attempt by onetime Communist Party USA member Mary Inman in her 1940 book In Woman’s Defense to directly link housework to the production of labor power, the discussion culminated in the 1970s with the so-called domestic labor debate, a multiyear international conversation involving such iconic thinkers as Margaret Benston, Peggy Morton, Pat Mainardi, Sheila Rowbotham, and the theorists of the Wages for Housework movement, most notably Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, and Leopoldina Fortunati. In close vicinity to the debate was a vast constellation of polemical interventions. Drawing mainly from the work of Communist Party USA member and activist Claudia Jones in the late 1940s, Black thinkers like Angela Davis and the members of the Combahee River Collective unearthed the racialized components of reproductive labor while still affirming the political necessity of a socialist analysis of the relations of production. Radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett who were considerably more suspicious of the Marxist tradition posited patriarchy and capitalism to be parallel systems, but they identified the former as the primary cause of women’s oppression.2

When the intellectual momentum waned toward the end of the decade, the question of the relationship between housework and capitalism had been posed and probed in the most forceful of ways. Among the positions staked in the debate, the one articulated by Wages for Housework most thoroughly addressed the question of the invisibility of housework from a Marxist analytical perspective while also theorizing, from a militant standpoint, the rise of the housewife as a possible revolutionary subject. Largely indebted to the operaista tradition of the 1960s, and in many ways anticipating some of the intuitions of the Autonomia, Wages for Housework was from the beginning a resolutely internationalist political project, but with strong Italian roots.3

“Capital,” Federici writes in 1975, “has been very successful in hiding our work.”4 The goal, then, was to tear away this veil of invisibility. In rejecting the idea of the housewife as a figurant in the capitalist mode of production, the movement proposed to use the demand for a wage as the fundamental leverage to make housework visible, and consequently to open it up as a terrain of struggle:

To demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity.5

A wage, Federici admonishes, should not be understood as a thing. Rather, “wage” names a relation that opens up the possibility for the articulation of the housewife into a new feminist militant subject, but with an important caveat: struggles in reproduction are different than struggles in the workplace, for in the former, no direct confrontation obtains between capital and labor. In the struggle between labor and capital, wagelessness amounts to political nonexistence.6

If capital did well in hiding domestic labor and films, with some notable exceptions, conformed themselves to this obfuscation, then what is needed is a method of analysis adequate to the obstinate marginalization of the figure in question. In a figural reading of the housewife’s presence in Italian political cinema, then, we will have to look for her in the interstices of the action, less in what the image declares than in what it represses. Inevitably, the portrayal of this figure will be partial, in the sense of both incomplete and partisan. Like the specter (discussed in chapter 6), the figure of the housewife invents its own form of appearance: omnipresent yet largely unseen, the housewife retreats from the magnifying lens of systematic inquiry and appears always on the brink of vanishing altogether. She is what we might call a receding figure. A certain forcing, then, must take place. In order to wrest the housewife from oblivion’s ever-threatening clutches, one needs to take her side, resolutely. In practical terms, this means that one should not be afraid to read the films tendentiously and adopt the partial perspective of this receding figure and of the unseen labor she performs.

Reflecting back on her experience in the Wages for Housework movement, Federici writes in 2000: “Discovering the centrality of reproductive work for capital accumulation also raised the question of what a history of capitalist development would be like if seen not from the viewpoint of the formation of the waged proletariat but from the viewpoint of the kitchens and bedrooms in which labour-power is daily and generationally produced.”7 Indeed, what would that history be like? For its modest part, this chapter looks at cinema from “the viewpoint of the kitchens and bedrooms in which labour-power is daily and generationally produced,” and it explores the ways in which the receding figure of the housewife might point to an emergent political subjectivity.

In the attempt to discover the housewife behind the worker, much in the way the Wages for Housework theorists “discovered the home beside the factory,”8 we will return to The Working Class Goes to Heaven (analyzed in chapter 2) and look at it from the perspective of Lidia, Lulù’s partner. Before that, however, we will direct our attention to Marco Ferreri’s The Ape Woman (La donna scimmia, 1964). Seemingly removed from the long ’68 for chronological and thematic reasons, the film offers a formalization of the relationship between housework and capitalism as well as of the mediating role played by the wage, which implicitly draws from earlier, more celebrated representations of housework in Italian cinema. In this sense, The Ape Woman departs from its setting in the immediate aftermath of the Italian economic miracle to establish some coordinates useful in the cinematic thinking of historical crisis via the figure of the housewife that other films will articulate in the 1970s.

The development of this figural thought will be traced across two films: The Working Class Goes to Heaven, where the historical possibilities (and limitations) of the housewife coalesce around an act of demanding; and Ettore Scola’s neorealist melodrama A Special Day (Una giornata particolare, 1977), in which the housewife is presented as the agent of a reappropriation of time against the gendered division of labor imposed by capital and enforced by fascism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the way in which two films have given body to the separation between the housewife and housework: on the one hand, a housewife without housework in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (Deserto rosso, 1964); on the other, housework without a housewife in Ferreri’s Dillinger Is Dead (Dillinger è morto, 1969). These two films posit an enigmatic situation in which the condition for a piercing diagnosis of the malaise of contemporary capitalism is the displacement and disintegration, respectively, of the housewife herself.

The Archaic of Reproduction: The Ape Woman

The Ape Woman opens with a public event held at a convent in Naples. A missionary priest shows a crowd of paupers a series of slides documenting a recent Catholic apostolate in Africa. Manning the projector is Antonio (Ugo Tognazzi), a small-time wheeler-dealer always on the lookout for opportunities to make money. Perusing the convent’s kitchen in search of some free food, Antonio notices a young woman (Annie Girardot) working next to the older cooks, but he can’t make out her face. He teases her (“I’ll take you to the dance hall”), and when another cook tells him that she’s completely covered with hair, he approaches to see her face. After initial resistance, Maria complies with Antonio’s request, the camera zooming forward to a close-up of her hairy face. To avoid upsetting her, Antonio feigns indifference (“Here I was thinking I would see something extraordinary [chissà che cosa]. . . . Just a little beard, that’s all”) and sits back at the table to finish his lunch. When one of the cooks further reiterates the peculiarity of Maria’s appearance (“She looks like an ape”), Ferreri captures the instant when Antonio realizes that there might a profit to be made from Maria’s bizarre appearance. While eating, Tognazzi mimics the facial expression of an ape, the conceit of an ape woman to be exhibited to the public presumably forming in his head.

The sequence hinges on two shots: Maria’s first appearance and Antonio’s attempts to turn the situation to his favor. In its structuring themes and formal organization, the opening of The Ape Woman evokes that of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943). Similar to Ossessione, Ferreri’s film begins by foregrounding domestic labor. In both films, the site of the fateful encounter between the two protagonists is the kitchen. Like Giovanna in Ossessione (Clara Calamai), Maria is cooking when she first appears on screen; and like Gino (Massimo Girotti), Antonio happens on the scene of domestic labor only fortuitously, looking for something to eat. Furthermore, money is at the center of both scenes. Before leaving, Gino pays for his meal, but Giovanna pretends with her husband that he did not, which in turn leads to Gino’s staying at the roadside tavern and beginning his affair with her. Cesare Casarino has observed that the centrality of money and the money–exchange relation in the scene is conveyed by a close-up of Gino as he flips a coin, his face (which we first see a long four minutes into the film) “split and scarred by money.”9 In Ferreri, money does not attain the same level of visibility, yet it is conjured in the close-up of the scheming Antonio. The two sequences mirror each other. The deferred revelation of Maria’s and Gino’s faces occurs with the same zoom forward; Antonio’s calculating stare evokes Giovanna’s triumphant countenance when her plan to keep Gino at the tavern proves successful, while their respective protagonists remain unaware of their scheming (Figure 10).

These chiastic pairings, however, signal an inversion of gendered roles. In Ossessione, it is the housewife who is looking to exploit any opportunity to abandon the unbearable drudgery of domestic life, including seducing the handsome newcomer. In The Ape Woman, however, it is Antonio who involves the domestic laborer in his devious scheme. In this inversion, the male protagonists find themselves in opposite positions, highlighting their own internal contradictions: in Visconti, a thief and trespasser willing to abide by the social rules of money exchange (“I can pay,” he assures Giovanna); in Ferreri, a self-styled entrepreneur talking his way into stealing a meal.

Although the encounter between the protagonists occurs in the same space (the kitchen), the sites where the kitchens are located differ markedly. The encounter between Gino and Giovanna in Ossessione takes place at the roadside tavern, where, as Giuliana Minghelli has argued, the intricate web of relations that define capitalism under fascism (money exchange, private property, patriarchal discipline) is put on display.10 In The Ape Woman, the convent’s kitchen constitutes an archaic, precapitalist enclave in the immediate aftermath of the economic boom. As such, the convent functions according to different principles than the tavern. Unlike Giovanna’s domestic labor, Maria’s is detached from any logic of monetary compensation. This difference measures the distance between the two houseworkers. Giovanna longs to relinquish the role of housewife but finds herself chained to it, as she cannot bring herself to let go of the tavern once her husband is out of the picture. Maria performs domestic labor in the convent but is not, strictly speaking, a housewife. In fact, she exists completely outside the capitalist relation of production (and reproduction: she serves meals to the paupers and unemployed) and is only interpellated as a subject of that system by Antonio.

In Antonio’s interpellation, emancipation and subjection find themselves intertwined. He promises normality as emancipation (“Wouldn’t you like to go out, to be like everybody else?”), but this emancipation takes the form of the ruthless exploitation and commodification of Maria’s body. Formally, the film frames the moment with a certain irony. When Antonio seems to have persuaded Maria to leave the convent and follow him into the outside world, the circus music–like theme that will accompany Maria’s performances until her death (and beyond) can be heard, providing an implicitly scathing commentary on the duplicitousness of Antonio’s intentions.

In opposition to Giovanna in Ossessione, Maria’s struggle is, in fact, to become a housewife—that is, to attain a defined social position, however marginal. While Ferreri is more interested in the grotesque lengths Antonio goes to in order to exploit Maria’s unusual appearance, the film is also punctuated by brief vignettes of housework that delineate Maria’s almost clandestine attempt at domestic normalcy. While Antonio waxes visionary on the financial opportunities of her exploitation, Maria is busy cooking, making coffee, and cleaning the apartment. She demands that conjugal roles be respected in the bedroom as well. Ultimately, she seems to find her own realization at the prospect of becoming a mother, thus fulfilling the set of requirements for the role she thinks she has been called on to assume.

This social desire to become a housewife, coming on the heels of an economic boom, has specific historical coordinates. While in the early and mid-1960s domestic labor had not yet been identified as a possible terrain of emancipatory struggle (in this sense, Ossessione is ahead of its time), one finds in The Ape Woman the statement, at the very least, that not only does housework exist, but it also assigns the domestic laborer a certain socially determined position whose name is “housewife.” The housewife position, Ferreri suggests, may be associated with a certain antagonistic impulse, however rudimentary its form. As in Ossessione, in The Ape Woman the housewife emerges as a figure of conflict against the status quo—of fascist society in the former and postboom Italy in the latter. In Ferreri, the figure of the housewife emerges in intaglio in the tension between the slave-like commodification of the female body imposed by Antonio and the semblance of domesticity Maria strives to create. This tension traverses the film, reaching a breaking point in the wedding scene, where Antonio makes a publicity stunt of the ceremony by having a reluctant Maria sing a song as an amused crowd cheers them along.

The absence of money exchange in the form of the wage relation forces Maria into a quandary that straddles questions of political economy and subjective ontology. Drawing from Marx, Federici highlights the role of the wage relation in separating laborers from their labor power as a commodity that can be bought and sold:

To have a wage means to be part of a social contract, and there is no doubt concerning its meaning: you work, not because you like it, or because it comes naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you are allowed to live. But exploited as you might be, you are not that work. Today you are a postman, tomorrow a cabdriver. All that matters is how much of that work you have to do and how much of that money you can get.11

In the first part of the film, Maria is her work. She is not selling her labor power as a commodity she owns; rather, she herself is sold as a commodity. Her place in the social contract is entirely determined by her appearance and the possibility it offers to be capitalized on as a circus attraction and object of sexual trafficking. As a consequence, her deformity comes to define her absolutely—a verdict that she fights through her dedication to domestic labor. Ferreri, however, is careful not to pin the moral blame of Maria’s predicament exclusively on Antonio’s supposedly innate deviousness. Rather, the film frames Maria’s position as the effect of the capitalist logic at work, of which Antonio is but a bearer, to borrow Marx’s famous formulation. In fact, Ferreri depicts Antonio’s relation to Maria and her deformity in ambiguous terms. Even in their first encounter, his reaction to Maria’s shame is to reassure her by downplaying her appearance. He then grows to love her and is obviously pained by her and their child’s untimely demise. In any event, any attempt at a psychologization of the character is quickly rebuffed by Ferreri. In the film’s ending, the capitalist drive to accumulate through exploitation reasserts itself in no uncertain terms, superseding any moral considerations.

It is in this context that the multiple references to Italy’s colonialist past in Africa disseminated throughout the film should be situated. Already suggested in the opening by the images of the Catholic apostolate, the idea of colonialism permeates the film. The very conceit of an ape woman captured in the heart of the African continent stems from the overtly racist fantasy of the colonized as an uncivilized, subhuman species. Antonio uses it to exoticize Maria’s medical condition (Maria’s mysterious origins are, of course, a ruse; abandoned by her mother, she grew up in the convent). While Maria engages in housework to provide a semblance of domesticity to her condition, Antonio embraces the stage role of the intrepid explorer roaming perilous uncharted territory. These are opposite and equally mystifying fantasies. They serve as disguises, one grounded in the normalcy of the domestic space and the other in the exceptionality of the exotic adventure, concealing the relationship of ruthless exploitation that exists between the two protagonists.12

The terms of this colonialist fantasy are altered in the second part of the film, after Antonio and Maria sign a contract to perform at a nightclub in Paris. The two reprise their roles as explorer and ape woman, but their new act stages a reversal. After killing Maria’s father (a stuffed chimpanzee), Antonio is sexually teased by her. Reluctant at first, Antonio lets himself be seduced by his supposed prey, who ultimately steals his gun and kills him with a shot to the head. In this performance, Maria’s body is exceedingly sexualized. She wears only a see-through organza dress, and her facial hair is covered in glitter. Her seductive dancing and coquetry prove too much for the explorer to resist. Yet her deformity is equally exaggerated, absorbed into the fictionality of the stage setting as one prop among others.

Her performance, in this sense, assumes the traits of a masquerade. As Mary Ann Doane argues in a landmark essay on feminist film theory, the masquerade may function as a distancing device for the feminine subject. By overemphasizing womanliness, the masquerade reifies it into a facade “which can be worn and removed,” thus opening up the possibility of breaking down ossified patterns of gendered identification.13 In this sense, the mask separates Maria from herself. If in Antonio’s circus act her being was reduced to her commodified deformity, now the glamorized flaunting of that same deformity allows her to find some distance from it. This is also reflected in the schematic narrative of the striptease. Once a trophy animal to be exhibited, Maria now plays a role more akin to femme fatale, with agency shifting from colonialist explorer to exotic temptress.

This reversal of the colonialist plot is more than a simple revenge fantasy. It is grounded in the changed material conditions defining Maria’s relation to her labor. Maria’s nightclub performance implicitly introduces the mediation of wage between the worker and labor power—here in the form of the contract signed with the impresario. It is not, however, the content of the show that somehow expresses the wage relation but rather its form. Maria’s masquerade—the performative separation between herself and her identity as a curiosity—is made possible by the mediation of wage, for now she is paid to don the mask of the ape woman without having to be one.

Even in this changed situation, Maria holds on to her housewife role. Right before relocating to Paris, Maria tells Antonio that she is “a little sad, leaving the apartment like that, now that it’s all renovated (sistemata).” In Maria’s fantasy, the home is glorified as a private space of authenticity, separate from the public sphere where her deformity is exhibited. With the pregnancy, the contradictions of this fantasy are laid bare. Maria has prepared lunch, and as they sit at the table to eat, Antonio first complains that he doesn’t like what she cooked, then makes a nonchalant remark about the child’s being a great investment (“You, the kid . . . we’ll make a lot of money”). In a stark illustration of a housewife’s rebellion, an infuriated Maria throws a plate of spaghetti at him. The untenability of the idea of a neat separation between public and private life becomes evident. Maria’s dream of a normal family life is shattered by Antonio’s call to put that very familial domesticity on public display. One is reminded of Juliet Mitchell’s forceful critique of the family as a sanctuary of intimacy: “The belief that the family provides an impregnable enclave of intimacy and security in an atomized and chaotic cosmos assumes the absurd—that the family can be isolated from the community, and that its internal relationships will not reproduce in their own terms the external relationships which dominate the society. The family as a refuge from society in fact becomes a reflection of it.”14 The absurdity described by Mitchell of a clear-cut separation between family and society comes to the fore in the film’s ending. The death of Maria and the unborn child allows Antonio to finally realize his vision. Embalmed together, the mother and son are featured in a touring freak show, the extraction of value from their deformity continuing unabated even after their untimely demise. Again, this should not be taken solely as Ferreri’s moral indictment of Antonio’s deviousness. Rather, it is a perfect demonstration of capitalist logic at work. Antonio’s resigned demeanor at the opening of the performance highlights the inevitability of this conclusion. The dictates of capitalist accumulation, evident here in the abject form of the desecration of corpses, pierce through any fantasy of separation of the familial from the social, or the private from the public.

A “Practice of Demand:” The Working Class Goes to Heaven

The reverberation of the capitalist relation in the private sphere of the family is also at the center of the relationship between Lidia and Lulù in The Working Class Goes to Heaven. The character of Lidia in Petri’s film maintains an intermittent presence throughout, always appearing in an ancillary position to Lulù’s existential crisis. She complains about their sex life but then briefly provides affective care for him when he laments the tense situation with his colleagues at the factory. She also complains about housework: she repeatedly suggests that Lulù not use the living room because then she would have to clean it up. Yet the exchanges between the two always appear out of synch, as though they were engaged in two separate conversations. This disconnect culminates in a gesture of unexpected domestic violence: Lulù’s threatening to stab Lidia with a fork at the dinner table.

At one point in the film, Lidia comes home after work to find Lulù with a group of students who need a hideout after the riot at the factory gates. Visibly flustered by the invasion, Lidia is greeted with a request for food; the guests have immediately identified her as a housewife. The exchange between Lidia and the unwelcomed guests quickly turns political, with Lidia harshly addressing the students and reclaiming her role of waged worker: “What would you be without the padroni, a deadbeat [morto di fame]. . . . I’ll never be a communist! Never! I am for freedom! . . . And I like mink, and one day I’ll have it because I deserve it, you understand? Because I work! I’ve worked since I was twelve and I deserve it because I’m good [brava].”

The students launch into a pedestrian ideological analysis of Lidia’s position, accusing her of wanting to emulate her own exploiters by adhering to models propagandized by television. What is remarkable, however, is the sense that Petri is siding with Lidia in this particular instance. This reading is articulated on two levels. First, Petri thematizes the pervasiveness of ideology, then implicitly derides the students’ illusion of being able to exist outside of it. The supposed source of indoctrination—the TV screen—is prominently displayed across the entire scene, casting its bluish light indiscriminately on Lulù, Lidia, and the young Arturo, as well as on the students themselves. This suggests that all the characters (worker, housewife, youth) participate in the same totality and are equally—if in different guises—affected by this totality’s ideological formations.15 The students correctly detect the role played by media propaganda in the reproduction of the existing structure, but they fail to understand the implications of its pervasiveness. In this sense, the home cannot be completely separated from the factory or the university. Again, we see an artificial distinction between the public and the private collapse.

However, on another level, beyond the smoke screen of her false consciousness, Lidia expresses something else: she wants a mink coat. This is not a need, but a desire. The superfluousness of the object (the mink coat as the epitome of aspirational luxury for the working-class housewife), coupled with the clarity of her demand, inform a further dimension of the character while implicitly denouncing the dead ends of left-wing asceticism. The students’ mockery of Lidia illustrates in a nutshell what Dalla Costa calls “the ‘political’ attack against women.” Isolated and invisible, the housewife, argues Dalla Costa, often compensates for her exclusion from socially organized labor by purchasing things—a behavior that prompts accusations from her male counterparts of fomenting divisions within the working class. Of course, “the idea that frugal consumption is in any way a liberation is as old as capitalism, and comes from the capitalists who always blame the worker’s situation on the worker.”16 Thus, when observed from the viewpoint of the housewife, the scene in The Working Class Goes to Heaven reverses: the students, who accuse Lidia of wanting to emulate her exploiters, are in fact the ones parroting the capitalist with their moralistic call for asceticism. Lidia is identified as the bearer of a desire—one that all but loses its political significance if simplistically reduced to its object.

To better understand the import of this affirmation of desire in the film, it is useful to look at what Kathi Weeks terms a “practice of demand,” a political perspective whose genealogy she traces back to Wages for Housework. For Weeks, the practice of demand functions as a subjectivizing moment. It entails a request—wages for domestic labor—whose legitimacy cannot be recovered from any objectively existing situation but originates purely from a subjective “statement of desire.”17 This statement introduces a cut in the existing symbolic order in that it interrupts the logic governing the status quo that adjudicates which desires are trivial and which are not. It is around this cut, this fissure introduced by the demand, that a new political subjectivity may come into being.

In the context of Wages for Housework, this subjectivation has two intertwined aspects: an ideological one, in which a critical understanding of one’s own position within the capitalist relation of production is gained,18 and a militant one, with the formation of radical collectivities capable of meeting the level of class struggle imposed by capital. The demand of Wages for Housework as a perspective “functioned to produce the feminist knowledge and consciousness that it appears to presuppose; as a provocation, it served also to elicit the subversive commitments, collective formations, and political hopes that it appears only to reflect.”19 So in a way, subjectivity comes into being as the attempt to catch up with the radicality of a founding gesture of demand. It is important to emphasize that it is a mere attempt, meaning that there is nothing in the existing state of things that guarantees a successful revolutionary outcome of the process of subjectivation. In this sense, the practice of demand always presents itself as “a risk, a gamble, the success of which depends on the power that the struggle for it can generate.”20

The collective demand for wages for domestic labor and the individual expression of a desire for a mink coat have, of course, vastly different political scopes and imports. The motives underpinning Lidia’s stance remain trapped within a logic of meritocracy and recognition (she deserves the mink coat because she was “good”) that tempers the autonomy of her demand. The Wages for Housework theorists recognized early on the limitations of such a logic. In the groundbreaking essay “Counterplanning from the Kitchen” (1975), Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox argue that the demands of the housewife were never about the recognition of their efforts and sacrifices: “Our power does not come from anyone’s recognition of our place in the cycle of production, but from our capacity to struggle against it.”21 Lidia presents her demand as justified on the basis of external recognition (of the padroni, of capitalist society), while her anticommunist vitriol and ideological investment in freedom further obfuscate the subversive potential of her statement of desire.

What should not be ignored, however, is the fact that such a statement exists at all. If, as I have argued, the housewife in Italian political cinema (and cinema in general) is by and large a receding figure, then the limits of one’s own reading practice must be pushed in order not only to account for the marginal and fragmentary nature of the housewife’s manifestations, but also to detect the potentialities to which this figure gestures, however obliquely. Lidia’s outburst in The Working Class Goes to Heaven is one such manifestation. It occupies a decentered position with respect to the main story arc, and it could easily be dismissed as a pure ventriloquizing of the dominant ideology. Yet one can recover in Lidia’s peroration the presence, however feeble, of an affirmation of autonomy, for her statement of desire explicitly exists without any recognition from Lulù. It is telling, in this sense, that the scene ends with Lidia abandoning the apartment with Arturo while Lulù tries to calm her down by promising that he would grant her wish (“I’ll get you the mink”). Lulù misses the point, of course. Lidia is not asking him for permission to make the purchase; nor is she angling for a gift. Her decision to leave the apartment can be read in a similar light: a refusal to participate in a domestic sphere in which her desires and aspirations, however petty bourgeois they might be, are repeatedly stifled. Indeed, Lidia’s misguided defense of the padroni may be read as the perverse effect of the modicum of freedom afforded to the housewife by waged labor as, quite simply, time away from the prison of housework.

Centering precisely on the question of time, A Special Day explores on a considerably larger scale some of the potentialities and deadlocks alluded to in The Working Class Goes to Heaven.

The Houseworking Day: A Special Day

On May 6, 1938, Hitler is received in Rome by Mussolini for a state visit that culminates in a military parade. Antonietta (Sophia Loren), a housewife and mother of six, is left home alone when her husband Emanuele (John Vernon), a vulgar man and fervent fascist, takes the children to the parade. The large residential complex empties out, except for a nosy building manager (Françoise Berd) and Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni), a recently fired radio announcer awaiting deportation to Sardinia as a result of his homosexuality. Antonietta and Gabriele meet fortuitously when her pet myna escapes from its cage and lands near his apartment window, just as he is contemplating suicide to avoid being deported. After some initial diffidence, the two grow closer. Unaware of Gabriele’s sexual orientation, Antonietta flirts with him as he teaches her to dance a rumba. However, when he reveals first his antifascist sentiments and then, in a tense confrontation, his homosexuality, Antonietta is taken aback, her foundational beliefs in the virtuousness of the fascist regime shaken. After a moment of reconciliation and just before Antonietta’s family returns home, the two have sex. At nightfall, taking a rare moment for herself, she begins reading a copy of The Three Musketeers that Gabriele gave her, then looks on from her window as he is taken away by fascist officials. She is then called to bed by Emanuele, who wants to have a seventh child to qualify for the regime’s financial aid for large families. The child’s name, he announces, will be Adolfo.

A Special Day is the story of an encounter unfolding in accordance to a peculiar, even contradictory, temporality. For a housewife, a “special day” starts just like any other day. Antonietta is already up when we first meet her, ironing clothes and making coffee before waking up her children and husband, directing access to the bathroom, and washing the youngest in the kitchen sink in a series of automatic gestures impressed in her mind and body by endless repetition. Scola captures this routine with an elaborate long take that begins with a pan showing the tenants in the residential complex starting their day. The camera enters Antonietta’s apartment from the window, following her through the various rooms. Thus, from the very beginning, the time of the housewife is presented as a time of repetition without cut or interruption. The various actions that make up Antonietta’s daily drudgery bleed into one another, with domestic labor becoming one long, sweeping, endless gesture.

Yet this is a special day, not just because of Hitler’s historic visit presaging the signing of the Pact of Steel a year later, but because of the radical break that the encounter with Gabriele will introduce in Antonietta’s life. Scola foreshadows this break in two seemingly irrelevant occurrences, which are almost hidden in the opening scene. Antonietta inadvertently bumps her head on the kitchen lamp, twice, which causes a minor interruption in her tedious activity. Then, on her way to the master bedroom, she furtively sips her husband’s coffee, and, when he complains, she lies to him (“I made you a ristretto”). The lamp and the coffee will return later as markers of the proximity between the two protagonists (Gabriele will fix the sliding lamp for her and offer to grind the coffee). In the context of the long take, they signal, respectively, an unexpected obstacle that hinders her housework routine, giving her pause, if only for a moment; and a nascent desire for emancipation in the form of reappropriation: she is the one who woke up early to make the coffee, so she deserves to drink it first. These two seemingly contradictory temporalities—the repetition of the same as the eternal law of housework and the singular, contingent occurrences that trouble that repetition—are put by the film in a dialectical tension with the figure of the housewife at its center.

Right after Emanuele and the children leave, Antonietta stares at the empty complex from her window, and, as she resumes her domestic routine, pokes fun at the syrupy Italian motto, “Di mamma ce n’è una sola” (There’s only one mom), with a properly materialist retort: “Here we would need at least three. One cleans the rooms, the other takes care of the kitchen, and the third, which would be me, goes to bed and sleeps.” After cleaning up the kitchen table with methodical, efficient gestures, her gaze inadvertently rests on a comic magazine lying on the floor. As she absent-mindedly starts to read about fascist action hero Dick Fulmine’s exploits in the Land of the Pigmies, she falls asleep, only to be awakened by the myna calling her name. Scola’s explicit referent here is Ossessione, specifically the scene in which Giovanna, exhausted after a day of hard work at the tavern, falls asleep while reading a newspaper, surrounded by piles of dirty dishes (Figure 11).

Cesare Casarino has noted that “Giovanna is not tired. She is exhausted. This whole sequence expresses exhaustion,” and reads her predicament, with Deleuze, as that “of someone who has exhausted all of the possible, of someone who can no longer even imagine any possibility.”22 We can perhaps also recognize Antonietta in this description. As with Giovanna, the dirty dishes that surround her are “veritable monuments to housework past and housework to come,” the tangible expression of the endless temporality of repetition associated with domestic labor.23 Casarino goes on to compare the depiction of housework in Ossessione to that of a film at the opposite chronological end of neorealism: the celebrated scene of Maria’s morning routine in Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952). Casarino argues that although Maria, like Giovanna, may have “exhausted all of the possible,” she is the bearer of a different philosophical lesson than Visconti’s heroine. Maria’s gesture of stretching out her foot to close the kitchen door is read by Casarino as an affirmation of potential itself in the face of the exhaustion of possibility: “Can she do it? . . . Somehow, over and beyond all, possibility, she still has it in her to seek and express sheer potential, with no external goal or signification.”24

Both Ossessione and Umberto D. are evident points of reference for A Special Day. Scola’s film claims its own kinship to them not only by way of a series of affectionate homages but also through an attempt at replicating the peculiar temporality of housework that these films first made visible in cinema. With a particularly felicitous expression, the film has been called the “untimely offshoot of Neorealism.”25 While Scola’s profound admiration for neorealism is on full display in A Special Day, it is this untimeliness that must be interrogated. What does it mean to make a neorealist film in 1977? What kind of contemporary political fault lines can be made visible by resurrecting and simultaneously displacing an idea of cinema that belonged to a different historical sequence? What exactly does this afterlife of neorealism make possible at the level of thought in the long ’68?

Casarino hints at these questions by looking at them from the angle of historical causality. In his reading, the occurrence of neorealism in the postwar period is partly responsible for making possible the rise of a new political thought later on: “I am suggesting . . . that neorealist cinema and its preoccupation with domestic labor constitutes an integral part of the cultural and historical conditions of possibility of Marxist-feminist understandings of housework—and, in particular, of the Wages for Housework movement—in Italy in the 1970s.”26 Casarino does not further elaborate his position, but from a cultural and historical standpoint, one would be hard pressed to disprove its accuracy. Yet the avowed untimeliness of A Special Day compels us to adopt a different perspective. The “conditions of possibility” established by neorealism come to fruition not only with Wages for Housework but also with Scola’s film—that is, within cinema itself, and with the way in which cinema thinks the time of crisis of the 1970s by way of the figure of the housewife.

As theorists in the Wages for Housework movement have repeatedly pointed out, at the center of this question of housework and subjectivity stands time. Indeed, one of their most striking conceptual gambits was that of subordinating the question of time to the question of subjectivity. Drawing in part from Marx’s analysis of labor-time in Capital, the theorists of the movement understood time as a fundamental terrain of political struggle onto which a process of subjectivation could be articulated, specifically around the question of the working day. In the most substantial critique of the Marxian concept of reproduction articulated within the movement, Leopoldina Fortunati links the rise of a “new working figure” with a change in the way capital organizes time. She argues that capital has progressively shifted from “a houseworking day posited as an extension of the factory working day, to a houseworking day characterized by the fact that it has no limit other than the duration of the day itself. Thus a new working figure is born, the housewife.”27 The rise of this “new working figure,” then, is inseparable from a specific, materially determined appearance of time as a working day without limits if not those of the day itself, over which capital has no power.

What we are given to see in Scola’s “untimely offshoot of Neorealism,” then—the very substance of its untimeliness—is the housewife as a new working figure whose primary terrain of struggle is time. As closely related to her forebears as she is, Antonietta undergoes a process denied to Giovanna and Maria. Where domestic labor in Ossessione and Umberto D. gave rise to an exhaustion of possibility that, at least in the latter, still affirmed the pure potentiality of time, in A Special Day, time assumes the specifically capitalist form of the houseworking day, but redoubled into a special day. On the one hand is the drudgery of a routine that repeats itself day in and day out; on the other is the absolute singularity and contingency of an encounter that, in a dialectical turn, reveals the point where a subjectivation of the housewife can take place. Mediating the two temporalities is the state, with a national holiday that pretends to interrupt the daily routine of labor, but manages to interrupt nothing at all, especially for those left at home.

For Antonietta, exhaustion marks the point of a specific impasse in the capitalist relation of production. No longer a closure of the horizon of possibility, as it was in Visconti and De Sica, in A Special Day, exhaustion indicates a point of impossibility. It constitutes the material effect of an irreducible split inherent to capital—namely, that of the gendered division of labor. As we have seen in chapter 2, the exhaustion of the male factory worker derives from the split at the heart of labor power that the capitalist exploits to the limit. The exhaustion of the housewife derives instead from the gendered division between productive and reproductive labor. This gendered division presents itself as follows: on the side of productive labor, there is wage labor performed within the fixed temporal limits of the working day by a male laborer at the workplace; on the side of unproductive labor, there is unpaid domestic labor performed without fixed temporal limits by a female houseworker at home.28

This split is also exploited by capital. In order to keep housework unpaid, capital engages in an operation of mystification by projecting an opposition between two kinds of labor: productive labor performed by the male worker at the factory as abstract, socially necessary, and simple; and reproductive labor performed by the housewife as concrete, individually necessary, and complex. However, as Fortunati observes in an illuminating passage, “Capital can only posit housework as abstract, . . . socially necessary and simple labor to the degree that it represents itself as concrete, individually necessary, and complex.”29 In other words, the condition for capital to be able to control and exploit labor power in the home as if it were in a factory is to make that labor appear as its opposite—that is, totally heterogeneous, even antithetical—to the labor that occurs in the sphere of production.

This contradiction points us directly toward the question of political subjectivity, for casting the housewife outside of the capitalist relation of production drastically limits her space for struggle. The creation of a space seemingly outside of the capitalist relation mystifies reproductive labor as an act of love and familial care. Indeed, the antidote concocted by capital to the dehumanizing exploitation of the worker on the shop floor is the humanist ideology that celebrates “the family as a ‘private world,’ the last frontier where men and women ‘keep [their] souls alive,’” which in turn conceals the equally brutal exploitation that occurs behind the closed doors of the home.30

Antonietta’s exhaustion in A Special Day marks the manifestation of this contradiction as a limit point of impossibility, whereby housework finally appears as two opposite and incompatible types of labor at once: concrete, individually necessary, and motivated by a dedication to the family, but also abstract, socially necessary, and exploited. The housewife’s exhaustion is caused by the former (no one punches a time clock for performing acts of love), but it is revealing of the latter (exhaustion is a function of her exploitation). This is the housewife’s impasse. She is situated at the intersection of the material conditions that determine the form and temporality of her labor, and the ideological structure that reproduces these conditions by concealing them.

The little fascist scrapbook that Antonietta puts together, which Gabriele amusedly peruses, captures this impasse. On the one hand, there is the mystification of the gendered division of labor as a natural fact, with the enshrinement of Mussolinian clichés like “fascist women, you must be the angels in the house” and “man is not man if he is not husband, father, soldier.” On the other hand, there is a subtle hint at the socioeconomic structure underpinning this division of labor; consider the picture of Mussolini shaking hands with FIAT founder and senator Giovanni Agnelli, which symbolizes the alliance between fascism and industrial capital. The contradiction between this partnership and the populism of some of the fascist slogans collected in the scrapbook is lost on Antonietta, but even as she cannot quite conceptualize yet the source of her discontent, she is forced to confront the impossibility of her position, first inchoately, through exhaustion, and then, more poignantly, through her encounter with Gabriele.

With his quiet charm and gentle irony, the queer presence of Gabriele functions as an agent of disturbance that scrambles the frequencies of fascist propaganda—both metaphorically and literally, as he often talks over the omnipresent radio announcer’s voice chronicling the military parade. When Antonietta invites him to sit at the dining table, because “the kitchen is not a man’s place,” he replies that he’s used to it because he is a bachelor; and when they are folding the laundry on the rooftop, he declares that he “always helped at home.” But one particular exchange crystallizes Gabriele’s subversive effect on Antonietta. It is worth looking at in detail. Gabriele reads aloud from the scrapbook: “Incompatible with the physiology and psychology of the female, genius is strictly masculine.” Then he asks her, point-blank, “Do you agree?” Antonietta mechanically feigns certainty (“Of course I agree. Why?”), but Loren’s acting reveals an infinitesimal crack in her character’s fascist facade. She immediately stops smiling, taken aback by Gabriele’s question as though nobody has ever asked her, in her entire life, what she thought. Even when she answers, her eyes turn inquisitive, seemingly looking for confirmation that that is indeed the correct answer. Even her retort (“It is always men who fill up the history books, no?”) is made to seem less motivated by true conviction than a desire to assuage a certain anxiety. Gabriele’s reply (“Yes, maybe even too much, so that here’s no room for anyone else. Least of all women”) gives her pause as she stares into the void, thinking. Her troubled demeanor is further accentuated after Gabriele talks to her about his mother, who defied many of the gender roles of the era by becoming the head of the family after her husband left. A subtle formal choice by Scola highlights the significance of the moment (Figure 12). The close-up of Antonietta that concludes the scene is visibly closer than any other in the conversation. It magnifies her anxiety as she stares into space with her hands clasped, clearly pondering with alarm the sudden manifestation of a fracture in her perception of the world.

Troubled by Gabriele’s queerness, the “natural” nonrelation between production and reproduction now finds itself denaturalized and exposed as a fundamental contradiction. Suddenly the unthinkable destruction of the gendered division of labor is “placed in the position of possibility.”31

As mentioned above, the construction of the figure of the housewife in A Special Day has time as its pivot. Early in the film, there never seems to be enough of it. During their first encounter in Gabriele’s apartment, Antonietta is reluctant to stay for coffee because she has to get back to her routine. When she does, she sets her alarm to go off every hour so she can get a more accurate measure of the time she has left for domestic labor. Gabriele, for his part, repeatedly glances at his wristwatch, counting the hours that separate him from deportation; and when he repeatedly offers Antonietta a copy of The Three Musketeers as a gift, she replies that as much as she would love to read it, she surely won’t have the time.

But then something changes. Antonietta reappropriates time from her domestic duties to be with Gabriele. On the rooftop, her domestic labor is again interrupted by Gabriele’s presence, until she stops folding laundry altogether and declares her infatuation to him. This is a first, misguided attempt to respond to the impossibility with which Gabriele confronts her, a clumsy gesture of refusal of her own condition. The inadequacy of this response derives not only from her inability (and unwillingness) to see Gabriele’s homosexuality, but also, and more importantly, from the fundamental acceptance and perpetuation of the status quo that it implies. This is the meaning of Gabriele’s harsh dismissal of her, delivered as they hastily descend the stairs to Antonietta’s apartment: “What were you hoping for? Kisses? Love bites? My hands up your dress? . . . Is that what a man does when he’s alone with a woman? . . . You’re just an ignorant little housewife in heat, but oh so very proper! One of those who say ‘It was a moment of weakness, what must you think of me?’ Prepared to be fucked on the rooftop, but ready to judge and condemn.” With his invective, Gabriele exposes Antonietta’s desire as a mere fantasy of transgression—a “moment of weakness” that in no way challenges the dictates of fascist society and that in fact reaffirms them absolutely. The desire of the fascist subject, Gabriele indicates, is predicated on the interplay between fantasies of transgression and petty bourgeois ideals of respectability and decorum.

Transgression possesses its own temporality. It is that of the punctiform occurrence, the exception that leaves the rule untouched. As such, the scene on the rooftop hardly qualifies as a fundamental subjective turn for Antonietta, but it does mark the beginning of her tentative experimentation with the temporality of subjectivation. This process, whose seed had been planted in scrapbook scene discussed earlier, receives further articulation in Antonietta’s last encounter with Gabriele. The scene’s prelude is another interruption of housework where Antonietta, shaken by Gabriele’s exacting words, reluctantly makes the bed and cleans off the table, only to then show up again at his doorstep to apologize. The two have lunch together, and she describes the profound misery of her life as a homemaker: “There are a lot of times when I feel humiliated too, treated like a nobody. My husband doesn’t talk to me, he orders me around, day and night.” After the two have sex, Gabriele somberly remarks, “It was nice, but doesn’t change anything.” What matters to him, he explains, is their encounter, the time they spent together on this special day. This is the temporality of a process made up of a succession of occurrences (departures and returns, misunderstandings and reconciliations) that, unlike the punctiform appearance of transgression, extends through time. The effects of this process are asymmetrical. For Gabriele, whose destiny is already decided, it provides temporary solace at a difficult time. For Antonietta, it opens the possibility of a different conception of time altogether: a time for herself. The remarkable redoubling of a previous shot during their last good-bye suggests as much (Figure 13). In the first iteration on the rooftop, the two uneasily embrace in depth of field, surrounded by hanging white sheets; in the second, the laundry has disappeared and with it, if only for a moment, the prison of domestic labor.

Immediately on her family’s return, Emanuele scolds Antonietta for neglecting the housework, to which she finds the courage to retort, “Wasn’t it national holiday for everybody today?” After Emanuele’s crass reply (“But you stayed home, in bed”), Scola slowly zooms in on Antonietta, who reciprocates the gaze of the camera.32 As the fourth wall breaks, she isolates herself from the babbling about fascism’s radiant future that surrounds her at the dinner table, remaining faithful to her encounter with the impasse, the impossible turned possible of the recognition and refusal of her own oppressed condition.

The reappropriation of time that has so far characterized this encounter culminates in Antonietta’s quiet defiance of Emanuele’s request to immediately come to bed. Instead, after washing the dishes, she sits by the kitchen window—with a view of Gabriele’s apartment—and starts reading The Three Musketeers aloud. It is, of course, an effusively melodramatic moment of nostalgia for a love without a future. But it also signals a shift in the figure of the housewife. Antonietta carves out from her routine a time that did not exist before. This is a courageous gesture of revolt, a blind wager performed in the absence of any inkling of what it might bring about. Antonietta’s nascent antagonism toward the established rules of gender inequality is suggested by the film’s use of sound. As Gabriele is taken away to Sardinia, one of the fascist songs heard during the day resonates extradiegetically in the background. A simple piano tune initially follows the melody of the chant but then begins to drift away, all but drowning it out. The piano motif finally lands on a rudimentary rendition of Aranci by Daniele Serra—the rumba that Antonietta and Gabriele danced to earlier in the film, and that was itself made inaudible by the radio chronicle of the military parade. The auditory counterpoint between the two melodies and the final overpowering of the fascist song by the rumba formalize Antonietta’s process of subjectivation: a dull acceptance of the status quo traverses a moment of discrepancy and as a result divides into two, giving rise to an antagonism between fascist oppression and exploitation on the one hand, and a tentative subjective thrust toward emancipation on the other.

The film, however, ends on an ambiguous note. A long take, mirroring the one we saw in the film’s opening, follows Antonietta as she turns off the lights and goes to bed. The last shot of the film shows her bedside table, with the alarm clock—the one that partitioned her day in one-hour intervals—prominently displayed. Does this announce Antonietta’s forthcoming return to her daily drudgery, as if nothing happened? Or is it simply a reminder that the objective conditions within which her subjectivity arose have not simply ceased to exist? The uncertainty remains. Perhaps a better question to ask about the conclusion of Antonietta’s arc in A Special Day is the one Casarino formulated about Maria in Umberto D.: “Can she do it?”—not, however, in the sense of an affirmation of the pure potentiality of time, as it is for Casarino, but rather as a question about the subject’s ability to sustain herself through her desire. Can she do it? Can Antonietta keep alive the subjective process opened up by her encounter with Gabriele, or will she be crushed by the status quo of gender inequality, of which Emanuele is but one enforcer?

“The real,” writes Badiou, “is what the subject encounters, as its chance, its cause, and its consistency.”33 The figure of the housewife in A Special Day provides us with a way to think the relation between this real and the subject. Unannounced and enigmatic, the real irrupts in Antonietta’s life precisely as a chance encounter that pierces through the repetitive temporality of housework. The real is also the cause of the rise of a new subject. It is in relation to this unsettling real that a form of subjective antagonism against one’s own structural situation can emerge; after all, is not the myna calling Antonietta’s name before instigating her encounter with Gabriele an apt metaphor for this interpellation of the real? Last is the issue of consistency. Can the real of this special day provide enough of an anchoring for the subject to sustain herself through her struggle? Can she do it? This is the question Scola leaves us with.

A Housewife without Housework: Red Desert

It seems significant that in order to pose the question of the housewife as a figure of struggle, Scola opted to return to the late 1930s. In this sense, A Special Day feels like a tactical retreat into a past that is perhaps best suited to clear-cut depictions of everyday oppression and exploitation, with the intertwined authoritarianisms of patriarchy and fascism as the obvious foils of Antonietta’s nascent subjectivity. Yet Scola’s choice ought not be mistaken as mere didacticism; we might read it as a symptom of the difficulties of imagining how the housewife’s subjective trajectory may manifest itself with that same clarity in a present—the second half of the 1970s—where apparatuses of oppression and exploitation are at the same time less apparent and more pervasive.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert and Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger Is Dead contend precisely with this conundrum. They do so by shifting the social background of the housewife away from the working-class environment of the films analyzed thus far, and toward a thoroughly recognizable bourgeois milieu. This class repositioning is made apparent in the narrative and the mise-en-scène—but also, and more crucially for our discussion, in the fact that in these films, housework is paid, as housemaids tend to children, cook dinner, and shadow the protagonists as they wander through the rooms of their luxurious modernist apartments. What happens, then, when wages for housework ceases to be a political battle cry for proletarian women and becomes the ordinary reality of bourgeois families? How does this semblance of freedom from the drudgery of domestic labor affect not only the housewife but also reproductive labor itself?

In Red Desert, bourgeois housewife Giuliana (Monica Vitti) engages in housework only sporadically. There is no sense that domestic labor in any way determines her everyday life and her relationship with time, the way it did for Antonietta. She is, we could say, a housewife without housework. She too is tired, but, she admits, “not always,” just “sometimes.” Domestic labor is performed by somebody else, so her tiredness is not a direct effect of the exploitation at home, as it was for Antonietta. Rather, it is a symptom of a more elusive malaise. We have seen how, for Antonietta, exhaustion marks the point of contradiction between housework as a labor of love and as unpaid labor necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist system. The position of the housewife in Scola thus emerges as an impossible one. Antonietta’s encounter with Gabriele exposes this impasse, shaking the foundations of her perception of herself and the reality of fascist Italy, which in turn allows her to begin to articulate a conscious refusal, however tentative, of her own condition of oppression. Antonioni hardly affords the same opportunity to Giuliana. Her tiredness does not reveal housework as a point of inner contradiction of the structure. Instead, it is framed as a random aberration—a pathology—within a structural situation that is otherwise running all too smoothly.

This situation—evoked in the film’s opening by the apocalyptic landscape of Ravenna’s industrial district—is that of a rapidly modernizing Italy on the tail end of the economic miracle, a moment of radical socioeconomic transformation to which Giuliana seems unable to adapt. Her existential and psychological crisis is the film’s focus. We learn that she was recently involved in a car crash, and she hasn’t yet mentally recovered. It is then revealed that it may have been a failed suicide attempt, and that Giuliana spent time in a clinic to cure her psychological ailments. Not even a budding love affair with the industrialist Corrado (Richard Harris), a business associate of her husband’s (Ugo, played by Carlo Chionetti), can alleviate her pain; her behavior becomes increasingly erratic as the film progresses.

The way the film presents the figure of the housewife is strikingly original. Not only does Antonioni separate her from her defining activity (housework); he also reverses her standard regime of appearance. No longer a figurant who appears everywhere but never prominently, the housewife is now assigned a preponderant position in the narrative while being simultaneously displaced on a formal level. For example, her narrative centrality is constantly offset by a series of formal decenterings. Her voice is often accompanied by a host of intruding mechanical sounds. Long shots, repeated décadrages, and the camera’s deliberately pulling out of focus subordinate her presence to that of objects in the background. The editing (false eyeline matches, absent transitions) challenges the spectator’s perception of the spatiotemporal coherence of her actions. One possible interpretation of the film may offer a solution to this paradox of a decentered centrality of the housewife: the deviations from classical cinematic syntax are to be read as the expression of Giuliana’s troubled interiority, so that her fractured perception of the world acts as the matrix of the film’s formal organization. From this perspective, the subjective bleeds into the objective. Reality is transfigured by Giuliana’s apprehension—in the mutually codetermining meanings of perception and disquiet. As a consequence, this blurring of the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity would grant to the spectator access to Giuliana’s psychology, now externalized into objective reality.34

Subjectivity and objectivity clearly constitute one of the fundamental oppositions that structure the film. But if we look at Giuliana as a figure—the figure of a housewife without housework—then this opposition cannot simply be resolved into an indiscernibility between the two terms. Instead, subjectivity and objectivity must be put in a dialectical relation. Far from being reducible to her psychological makeup, then, Giuliana’s subjectivity exists in tension with the objective world that surrounds her. On the one hand, Giuliana’s interiority constitutes the subjective effect of objective conditions; the transfixed world of the film should not be explained as a consequence of the existential predicament of the protagonist but rather as the form of appearance of objective forces that in turn determine the character’s inner world. On the other hand, Giuliana’s subjectivity exists in excess of the rule of the structure; she is marked by a certain maladjustment, an inability to fully comply to the interpellation of the objective forces that surround her. The question posed by the peculiar figure of a housewife without housework, then, is that of a subjectivity in crisis whose reach exceeds any psychologization of the character or projection of her inner world onto reality. But how exactly do these objective forces appear in the film?

The visual primacy gained by the objects that populate Giuliana’s environment is perhaps the most conspicuous trait of the transfigured world of the film. Often the camera purposefully abandons human action to wander over industrial equipment (oil pipes, steel ducts), stacks of commodities (glass jars), and even the walls of a warehouse or domestic furniture. Red Desert’s painterly references have been amply discussed by critics, but the visual articulation of this upended relationship between individuals and things is strikingly reminiscent of the work of Italian visual artist Leonardo Cremonini, to whom Louis Althusser dedicated an illuminating 1966 essay.35 In Cremonini’s paintings and lithographs, Althusser argues, “normal connections between men and objects are inverted and dislocated” as we encounter “‘men’ fashioned from the material of their objects, circumscribed by it, caught and defined once and for all.”36 These formulations would seem to describe Red Desert just as accurately. In both Antonioni’s film and Cremonini’s images, objects assume visual predominance and seem to take on a life of their own, while human bodies seem constantly restrained, enclosed by windows, doorframes, and mirrors.

Althusser terms Cremonini a “painter of the real abstract,” of “the real relations (as relations they are necessarily abstract) between ‘men’ and ‘things,’ or rather, between ‘things’ and their ‘men.’”37 Capitalism depends on abstractions (the commodity form, the value form, and private property, for instance) like no other mode of production before it; as Marx famously puts it in the Grundrisse, “Individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another.”38 The very fact that abstractions can “rule” individuals under capitalism is proof of their concreteness. Real abstractions are not mere illusions or diversions that dissimulate the existence of some true, deep essence; nor are they mere figments of the individual’s imagination.39 They are, in a word, objective. They originate from the actions of individuals in society but then transcend those actions to achieve a seemingly autonomous existence, with the result that the eminently social origin of the abstraction remains unthought to the individual, who comes to perceive it as something akin to a law of nature. This, for Althusser, is the human being that appears in Cremonini’s works. As a “profoundly anti-humanist and materialist” artist, Cremonini pictures his human beings not as the bearers of some recondite interiority, but as purely exterior structural effects of the abstract relations that govern them.40

Because these abstractions defy direct representation, they manifest themselves in the image as fragments of the “objective” background encroaching on the human figure. This is what the repeated décadrages in Red Desert highlight. The camera’s deliberate insistence on objects and shapes in the background suggests the predominance of abstract yet objective constraints over human life. These abstractions can be evoked more or less explicitly. Ships, ducts, and commodities, for instance, conjure the intangible but very real movement of value in the global capitalist system. Linear shapes like the steel rails in Giuliana’s home and Corrado’s hotel room, or the blue stripe painted on a warehouse wall, stand as more enigmatic signifiers of a pervasive, controlling presence whose extension and logic remain largely unintelligible to the characters themselves, particularly to Giuliana (“There is something terrible in reality,” she laments, “and I don’t know what it is”).

When Corrado asks her what she is afraid of, Giuliana cries out, “Streets, factories, colors, people, everything!” Giuliana feels the weight of abstractions. She instinctively grasps their pervasiveness but fails to understand their inner logic. This is most evident in the scene where she attempts to board a cargo ship docked in the Ravenna harbor and engages in a mutually unintelligible conversation with a Turkish seaman. The question she addresses to him (“Does this ship carry passengers too?”) reveals a fundamental confusion, which illustrates the incommensurability between the abstract logic of movement of value in international trade and the concrete logic of movement of individuals as it is understood by Giuliana. The process of the circulation of value on a global scale (the ship carries commodities—that is, capital waiting to be realized) possesses its own objective rationality, and it exists independently from the desires, intentions, and aspirations of individual human beings.41

But what happens when one wants to bridge that incommensurability, turning a freighter into a ferry—or perhaps a lifeboat? It is precisely in Giuliana’s misunderstanding about the cargo ship that lies a further dimension of her subjectivity. The film, as we have seen, presents Giuliana as a by-product of her environment. But her subjectivity cannot be reduced to a purely mechanical emanation of the structure. In fact, she is also the bearer of a certain subjective surplus, which in the film takes the form of a sort of inchoate resistance against her own environment. Recognizing the strangeness of a world in which relations among humans are mediated by relations among things, she finds herself unable to adapt to it. The terms of this inability are peculiar. As the behavior of individuals becomes exteriorized into objective social forms, Giuliana’s struggle against reality undergoes an equal and opposite process of interiorization. It begins from the objective pressure of abstractions, then turns inward to become a pathology to be stigmatized—or, at best, pitied—by the other characters, who do not experience the same maladjustment. Ugo, for instance, seems to adapt to the rule of abstractions without many qualms. Even Corrado, tormented as he may appear, abides by that rule; he behaves in accordance with his social role as a capitalist, chasing after surplus value in observance to the law of competition and the imperative to cut costs in order to increase profitability. The only true figure of the film, in this sense, is the housewife. Giuliana alone indexes a proper tension between the dictates of the structure and the individual’s inability to fully adjust to them.

Why is that so? What is it that makes the housewife uniquely situated to register this subjective tension between the objectivity of all-encompassing abstractions and the individual’s failure to comply to their command? It has to do, at least in part, with the ideological work that the housewife is forced to perform. As we have seen, the position of the housewife within the capitalist mode of production is inextricable from the fantasy of the home as a private refuge from the oppressive and predatory practices of capital in the social sphere. The explicit humanism that underpins this ideological formation (domesticity as sanctuary of nonalienated labor and authentic human relations where the individual can flourish and simply be herself) makes the housewife into the guardian of a space where the abstractions that rule modern life should have no purchase. The decentered centrality of the housewife in Red Desert, then, depicts a limit situation in which it is precisely by registering the effects of real abstractions on a figure ideologically tasked with warding them off that the true reach of their rule can be measured.

The humanism that underpins the ideological position of the housewife also creeps into Giuliana’s imagined solutions to her own crisis. Be it her simple attempt to board a cargo ship or her tortured love affair with Corrado, Giuliana is looking to escape from these haunting abstractions toward some haven of authentic human experience. The futility of such escapes is perhaps best captured in the conclusion of the long party scene that occurs halfway through the film. Terrified by the unexpected arrival of a cargo ship (seemingly with an undisclosed outbreak on board), Giuliana forces everyone to leave, even though none of her companions shares her concern. After a series of close-ups of the characters on the foggy pier, Antonioni returns to a close-up of Giuliana, who is now observing Ugo, his friend Max, Max’s wife, and her friend, all grouped into a medium shot, staring back at her, while a ship’s horn can be heard in the distance (Figure 14).

The fog suddenly thickens and swallows the motionless group, making them all but disappear from sight. Clearly distraught by the vision, Giuliana runs to the car and drives it to the end of the jetty—a further attempt to escape that is also, perhaps, a partial reenactment of her earlier suicide attempt.

Her attempt to escape from the ominous presence of the infected ship ends in a confrontation with an image that is perhaps even more unsettling. The thinglike fixity of the staring partygoers functions as a reminder that no true human essence is to be found behind the veil of abstractions, for the latter are constitutive of human relations as such, mediating not only professional bonds but also private and familial ones. Even the idyll of the famous scene set on the island of Budelli cannot be imagined without the intrusion of the nonhuman capitalist logic of global trade, embodied by a mysterious ship without a crew (“One of those ships that braved all the seas and the storms of this world, and, who knows . . . out of this world”). No place is immune from the rule of real abstractions. Every elsewhere evoked in the film, no matter how exotic, is also intimately connected to the dreary landscape of Ravenna, as illustrated by the scene where Corrado recruits workers to send to Argentina. The workers’ situation of exploitation will be the same in the new continent because they will be ruled by the same abstractions, a point the film makes with a repeated raking focus blurring the faces of the workers to show the capital that surrounds them in the form of glass jars and the walls of the warehouse.

Yet even in a situation that is becoming increasingly disorienting as a result of incipient processes of globalization and delocalization, the workers in Red Desert can still identify a terrain of struggle. In fact, the film opens with a strike just outside the gates of the plant Ugo manages. The outcome or even the motivations of their action are not revealed, but at a minimum, the potential for forms of collective antagonism is assumed for the workers, who can still identify the factory as the possible event site of their subjectivation (see chapter 2). Giuliana, the housewife without housework, finds herself in a very different predicament. Housework is, we might say, the figurally specific way in which the capitalist relation appears to the housewife. It can become a terrain of struggle through the affirmation of a statement of desire that exceeds common notions of what a working-class housewife can or cannot want (Lidia in The Working Class Goes to Heaven) or a process of subjectivation driven by a reappropriation of time (Antonietta in A Special Day). Without housework, the housewife in Red Desert finds herself untethered from this terrain of struggle.

This is not to argue that the housewife should cling on to her own exploitation—quite the contrary. However, the separation between the housewife and domestic labor staged in Red Desert has consequences for the potential emergence of a subjectivity. The theoretical-political gambit of Wages for Housework, as we have seen, was that of redefining the role of domestic labor in the capitalist relation of production in order to reveal the home as a site of class struggle. From a purely sociological standpoint, Giuliana still identifies as a housewife, but figurally, she has no field of struggle to call her own, one she could use to articulate the beginning of a subjectivity. No event or encounter—certainly not the one with Corrado—can reveal to her the impossibility of her own position, and therefore point her toward the possibility of a subjective reckoning. Nor does the oppressiveness of her condition become apparent to her qua housewife—that is, in the form of the drudgery of domestic labor or patriarchal tyranny, like it did in A Special Day. As a consequence, while the cause of said oppression (the capitalist mode of production) remains the same as it was for Antonietta, its manifestations become dispersed and inscrutable. Giuliana thus follows a different trajectory than Scola’s protagonist. The proletarian housewife springs from monolithic conceptions of reality and of her own place in it that are inextricably tied to domestic labor, only to then radically question them. The bourgeois housewife is always already mired in a situation of generic maladjustment to reality; the causes of her malaise are interwoven into the very fabric of the social, making it impossible for her to pinpoint them, let alone revolt against them. In this sense, her interiority comes from without. The characters’ subjectivity as crisis comes into existence as an effect of the modern conditions of real abstraction under capitalism.42

This is, in the last analysis, the tragic limitation of the housewife’s subjective horizon in Red Desert. As the point of lack in the proper functioning of the structure, her maladjustment gestures toward a potential antagonism. In this sense, she stands for a sort of degree zero of subjectivity—the subject as the gap in the symbolic, the point of inner contradiction of the structure. However, this lack becomes interiorized and psychologized as a form of paralyzing anxiety not too dissimilar from the one we saw envelop Fortunato, the protagonist of Trevico-Turin discussed in chapter 2. The fate of the bourgeois housewife and the fate of the migrant factory worker are surprisingly similar. Once they lose their event site (the home and the factory), both are forced to surrender to the seeming omnipotence of the structure, with the political process of their subjectivation thwarted and reduced into a psychodrama of individuality.

Housework without a Housewife: Dillinger Is Dead

Any residue of this psychodrama, and the effect of interiority that it projects, disappears in Dillinger Is Dead, where the protagonist (an engineer who remains unnamed during the film but is identified as Glauco in the credits, played by Michel Piccoli) is deliberately presented as devoid of any psychological depth. One summer night, back home from the office, he engages in a series of disconnected and largely unmotivated actions, while his wife, Anita (Anita Pallenberg), lies in bed with a migraine and the maid, Sabina (Annie Girardot), has taken the night off. Uninspired by the dinner Sabina left for him, he turns on the TV and sets out to cook a gourmet meal for himself. Thus begins a night of relentless reproductive labor. While looking for an ingredient, Glauco stumbles on a rusty gun wrapped in old newspapers from 1934 reporting on the death of John Dillinger. While cooking, he disassembles the gun and polishes it to bring it back to functionality. Meanwhile, the maid returns; after a brief encounter with Glauco in the kitchen, she retires to her room, where she dances to pop songs in front of the mirror while wearing lingerie. Glauco eats his meal with gusto, watches some Super 8 films of his and Anita’s vacation in Spain projected on the living room wall, reassembles the gun and then paints it red with white polka dots, seduces Sabina, and finally returns to the bedroom to kill a sleeping Anita with three shots to the head. At daybreak, he leaves the city and takes a swim at Byron’s Cave in Porto Venere, Liguria. He then boards a ship headed to Tahiti and insists on replacing the cook, who just died. As he makes a chocolate mousse ordered by the young female shipowner, the ship sails toward its destination bathed in an unnatural red light, as an immense sun burns on the horizon and the image turns to negative.

In Dillinger, the housewife disintegrates. The figure splinters into three characters: Anita, who does not perform domestic labor because she is indisposed (and, presumably, because she has hired somebody else to do it); Sabina, who is supposed to be performing that labor but is otherwise occupied; and Glauco, who actually performs it. As a consequence, the received structure of the gendered division of labor falters, and the figure itself ceases to provide the marker of a subjective position, be it around a kernel of presubjective antagonism (The Ape Woman), a statement of desire (The Working Class Goes to Heaven), or a reappropriation of time (A Special Day). Yet the shards of this exploded figure remain recognizable, especially in the extended sequences Ferreri devotes to Glauco as he cooks dinner while wrapped in a conspicuous red apron. But along such defamiliarizing depictions of housework, we notice in Dillinger a series of curious displacements. Glauco puts the disassembled gun in a bowl, drizzles it with olive oil, and mixes it as if it were a marinade; then, after painting it, he leaves it hanging on the terrace to dry like laundry. These acts point to a situation in which housework persists after the disappearance of the housewife. The form of the activity itself remains practically intact, but its ends become warped, so that polishing a gun and leaving it out to dry become indiscernible from, respectively, marinating a piece of meat and hanging up wet laundry.

The disintegration of the housewife and the correlated perversion of housework compel us to ask what kind of reproductive labor Dillinger represents. The picture of reproduction that we can glean from Marx’s sporadic treatment of the topic is one defined by scarcity—a scarcity of time, resources, and means for the development of the individual that is imposed by the structural logic of capitalism. As a result, the wage laborer in the capitalist relation of production is always already reproduced, to borrow Tithi Bhattacharya’s expression, as somewhat “lacking,” always in want of more opportunities to develop himself.43 Yet Glauco seems to be facing the opposite problem. Hardly animated by a frustrated desire to better himself, his relationship to reproduction is one marked by abundance. He has the entire night for himself, with plenty of opportunities to indulge his every recreative whim. His essential dimension, then, is not lack but rather surplus, expressed in the host of objects that surround him and in his relation to them, which is marked by a compulsive operosity. His inscrutable behavior assumes the form a totally depsychologized, automaton-like, repetitive activity oriented toward a multiplicity of partial objects.

In this sense, more than the logic of desire (grounded in lack), Glauco should be associated with the logic of the drive (defined by surplus). The significance of the drive in Ferreri’s cinema has been emphasized by Gilles Deleuze. In Cinema 1, Deleuze identifies Ferreri as one of the foremost auteurs of the drive-image, which is directly connected to “naturalism.”44 Ferreri, writes Deleuze, is “one of the few recent directors to have inherited an authentic naturalistic inspiration and the art of evoking an originary world at the heart of realistic milieux.”45 Naturalism, it should be pointed out, has nothing to do with any ideological representation of reality as it is, but rather with the irruption of the drive onto the scene. The source of this drive is the “originary world,” “a pure background, or rather a without-background, composed of unformed matter, sketches or fragments, crossed by non-formal functions, acts, or energy dynamisms which do not even refer to the constituted subjects.”46

The emergence of this “originary world” of the drive within a “realistic” milieu is what distinguishes the drive-image from the other subsets of the movement image. Realism persists, but transfigured. The realistic milieu constitutes the medium through which the drive can emerge. Concretely, this means that the elements that compose the milieu (the behavior of its characters, the objects that populate it) become separated from themselves. Behaviors and objects are transfigured, respectively, into drives and fragments (or partial objects). Deleuze specifically locates this operation in Ferreri’s Bye Bye Monkey (Ciao maschio, 1978), but one can see it at work in Dillinger as well, perhaps even more prominently.

Keeping in mind the framework offered by the concept of the drive-image, we can now return to the question of reproductive labor in the film, particularly the relation between Glauco’s operosity and the mass of objects surrounding him. From the living room to the kitchen, the master bedroom to the maid’s quarters, the study to the terrace, Glauco incessantly roams the spaces of his apartment, looking for something—anything—to occupy himself. Deleuze calls this type of roaming an “exploration” of the milieu in which the drive does not intentionally pick and choose its objects; rather, the drive “takes indiscriminately from what the milieu offers it.”47 The object of the exploration, then, is determined not by some intrinsic quality of the drive but externally, by the milieu itself.

Dillinger thus translates into the sphere of reproduction the dramatic dislocation of the relationship between individuals and objects that we first saw staged in Red Desert. Almost immediately on the protagonist’s return home, the configuration of reproductive labor undergoes a reversal—not purposeful activity, but the endless distracted exploration of any object that “the milieu offers.” As one critic observes, “The reason for using the object follows the encounter with its shape and not the other way around. Glauco’s silent soliloquy composes the following dogma: I do not need the object, but given that it now finds itself in my hands, I will use it.”48 There is nothing purposeful in Glauco’s consumption of his means of subsistence; the purpose, in fact, seems to be coming from the object themselves. Dillinger seems to swiftly refute Marx’s claim that the worker belongs to himself in the sphere of individual, reproduction-oriented consumption. In the incipient stage of late capitalism at the end of the 1960s, the worker is, in fact, as separated from himself in the sphere of reproduction as he is in the sphere of production. If The Working Class Goes to Heaven, discussed in chapter 2, showed us a factory worker who “doesn’t exist” because of the inner division at the core of labor power itself, then Dillinger depicts a managerial employee at home who never acts as himself but rather in conformity to a drive that remains unthought to him.

In Ferreri’s drive-image, then, the relationship between man and the things that surround him undergoes a reversal. The latter cease to be inert matter and assert their autonomous command over the former. The real abstractions that presided over Giuliana’s tormented existence in Red Desert return here to colonize the sphere of reproduction as well, domineering an automaton-like character who knows no anxiety. The antihumanism that tinged Antonioni’s film is here explicitly avowed, with the protagonist reduced to an emanation of the commodities that surround him, an “appendix” of sorts, “without any lighting or shot angle reestablishing the hierarchy” between the human and the nonhuman.49 Even more than Giuliana, Glauco is the cinematic epitome of the “hardly outlined” characters Althusser saw in Cremonini’s paintings. He is an “anonymous being” whose enigmatic facade does not express anything other than the effect of the real abstractions that rule over him, and that determine even his “experience of freedom.”50 For Glauco, this experience of freedom is not at all free, as the ironic use of pop songs in the film makes clear. Two in particular are prominently featured: Patty Pravo’s “Qui e là” (Here and there) and Jimmy Fontana’s “Cielo rosso” (Red sky), both from 1968. They tell stories, respectively, of uncompromising affirmation of individual freedom and melancholic longing for a fantasized elsewhere. In the context of the film, however, the voices coming from the radio seem to mock Glauco’s predicament while at the same time predicting his doom.

This illusion of the worker’s freedom in the sphere of reproduction has deep historical roots; it rests on the assumption of a spatial and structural separation between workplace and home, whereby the former is associated with production under capital’s direction and the latter is associated with unsupervised labor. The latter’s freedom is the obverse of the former’s strict social control, however. In capitalism, any instance of concrete, use value–oriented, seemingly nonalienated labor is always already overdetermined by alienated social relations that have their material basis in the wage relation—what Bhattacharya calls the “conditioning impulse of wage labor” on the unpaid labor of reproduction.51 Marx frames the worker’s “freedom” to reproduce himself on his own time and dime as a concession that capital all too happily grants, for it satisfies in the most cost-efficient way its need for the renewal of labor power. As such, the individual reproduction of the worker is to be considered “a mere aspect of the process of capital’s reproduction,” and therefore is totally overdetermined by it.52

The depiction of vacation in the film, in particular, offers an example of this dynamic. While perceived as essentially free time, vacation is in fact the ultimate emblem of the “conditioning impulse of wage labor” on reproduction. In Dillinger, a ghostly redoubling of reproduction takes place. Projected on the wall as a Super 8 home movie, vacation becomes commodified into an object “included in the system of production/consumption and abstract in its exchange-value,” and therefore no different in nature from a cookbook, a gun, or the projector that generates its images.53 Far from free time in which the worker can temporarily suture the split of his own alienation, vacation too partakes in the despotic command of things over their men in the sphere of reproduction.

In Dillinger, this slavery leads Glauco to the final illusion of freedom in the form of murder and the most banal of escape fantasies (is this ship the same one that haunted Giuliana’s fable?)—a fantasy that the film invites us to see as a dead end, if not as an outright apocalyptic vision. This motif of the end of the world, which will be on Ferreri’s mind well into the 1970s, is a constituent part of the drive-image: “The originary world is a beginning of the world, but also an end of the world, and the irresistible slope from one to the other.”54 For Deleuze, naturalism in cinema is therefore composed of two aspects. On the one hand is the extreme fragmentation of partial objects in the “originary world;” on the other is the inexorable clinamen that leads all fragments toward entropy and waste. Cremonini belongs fully in in the former condition, clinging to a certain suspended fragmentation; in contrast, Ferreri, illustrating the latter condition, rushes the heap of partial objects headlong down the slope, toward a destiny of death that appears as inevitable as the insistence of the drive. But if it is true, as Deleuze says, that naturalist directors provide diagnoses of civilization, then what social ailment has been discovered by Dillinger’s enigmatic relationship between reproductive labor and the destiny of demise to which the slope inevitably leads?

In her video essay Philosophy in the Kitchen (2014), Domietta Torlasco posits a direct link between housework and death—murder, in particular—in cinema. As the voice-over declares that “murder is the outcome, the aberrant offspring of domestic labor,” scenes from several European films, including Dillinger, are juxtaposed in split screen: Ossessione, Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934), Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011), Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965), and La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol, 1995). While Torlasco notes that in all these instances violence and death are associated with domestic labor, a crucial difference sets Dillinger apart. In the examples cited in the video essay, the occurrence of murder attains a particular level of narrative significance that distinguishes it from housework. It can be the dramatic climax of a mounting psychotic breakdown within the domestic space (Repulsion), the end game of a housewife’s plotting (Ossessione), or the interruption of domestic labor (Sabotage). In Dillinger, however, we find a different configuration whereby housework and murder become practically indistinguishable. In the context of Glauco’s feverish activity, just as no hierarchy is established between human beings and things, no act or gesture is more or less important than any other. Ferreri does not put any particular narrative emphasis on the final uxoricide, opting instead for a pure record of facts that reads like a perverse homage to Cesare Zavattini’s neorealist aesthetic of pedinamento. Murder and death in the film, then, are less the “aberrant offspring of domestic labor” than a mere moment in the naturalist world of the film, an activity like any other—like cooking, eating, drinking, fucking, and watching home movies.

Yet the film’s universe, with its chaotic proliferation of partial objects and unmotivated gestures, bends toward some kind of apocalyptic ending. What if, Dillinger asks, there is no tomorrow? Glauco’s activity resembles the customary representation of reproductive labor, yet it finds itself deprived of its structural aim in the capitalist mode of production because the proverbial next day at the factory, when Glauco will expend his regenerated labor power, never obtains. But this disjunction between reproduction and production, as we have seen, does not assume the form of a liberation of free time from the “conditioning impulse of wage labor.” On the contrary, Dillinger paints the picture of a reproduction that finds itself fully colonized by the real abstraction of the capitalist relation. This is, in a nutshell, Ferreri’s diagnosis of Western civilization at the dawn of late capitalism. The drive-image in Dillinger captures the real subsumption of domestic and reproductive labor under capital; purposeful labor is thus forced into the inherently perverse curvature of the drive, as means of subsistence are transfigured in an endless array of partial objects, and all hierarchy between human beings and things disintegrates. This in turn leads to an apocalyptic conclusion whereby a strange night of restlessness ends with the sphere of reproduction orbiting away from that of production, as Glauco sets sail to Tahiti. What Dillinger diagnoses is an impasse internal to late capitalism: the impasse of a social relation for which it is increasingly difficult to reproduce itself.

In a way, this diagnosis is made possible by the very disappearance of the figure of the housewife. The film calls on Glauco, Anita, and Sabina to relinquish their humanity and become objects among other objects. What remains, then, is reproductive labor without a subject—housework without a housewife. In a way, the film interrupts the precarious process of subjectivation of the housewife we have traced across The Ape Woman, The Working Class Goes to Heaven, and A Special Day. At the same time, Dillinger carries to the extreme consequences Red Desert’s intuition about the limitation of the housewife’s political horizon. Indeed, if Dillinger points to a subjectivity, it does so exclusively to the extent that this subjectivity be understood in its strict Althusserian sense—that is, purely as an effect of the structure. All this subjectivity has to offer—and it is no trivial matter—is “a knowledge of the laws of [one’s] slavery” to abstract relations.55