La Dolce Vita , "the sweet life" has now reverted to its literal meaning, or the antithesis of what Federico Fellini intended when he appropriated the phrase for the title of his 1960 film. The director's cinematic masterpiece popularized, satirized and internationalized the idiom as lingua romantica, even as what he depicted on the screen was sour, sarcastic and disapproving - episodic debauchery among the wealthy, the shallow, the hedonistic and the vacuous, all of it a metaphor for the sudden loosening of morals and equally sudden rise of a celebrity-crazy culture in postwar Italy.   Oh, if Fellini could see us now.

ROME - The irony in la dolce vita  has long since been lost to history and a dreamy, languid romanticism.

That expression "the sweet life" has now reverted to its literal meaning, or the antithesis of what Federico Fellini intended when he appropriated the phrase for the title of his 1960 film.

The director?s cinematic masterpiece popularized, satirized and internationalized the idiom as lingua romantica, even as what he depicted on the screen was sour, sarcastic and disapproving - episodic debauchery among the wealthy, the shallow, the hedonistic and the vacuous, all of it a metaphor for the sudden loosening of morals and equally sudden rise of a celebrity-crazy culture in postwar Italy.

Oh, if Fellini could see us now.

From there to gossip blogging " TMZ, Perez Hilton, The Daily Beast, the Drudge Report " in half a century; the evolution of tittle-tattle journalism, boldface reportage and a devalued market of 21st-century fame that increasingly reads like police blotter dispatches on popocracy behaving badly.

What?s really weird is that Fellini?s broad canvas of modern society collapsing has been completely missed or deliberately ignored in a photographic exhibit that has just opened here ostensibly celebrating the movie?s 50th anniversary while nostalgically revisiting Rome when it sizzled, from 1950 to 1960.

Fellini was mocking the "throwaway" culture of pop celebrityhood in his story about Marcello, a reporter for a sleazy Rome scandal newspaper, played by Marcello Mastroianni, and his photographer sidekick Paparazzo -  hence the term "paparazzi", which entered into the modern lexicon via the film. 

(Paparazzo is a genuine Italian surname, but more likely was used in La Dolce Vita  as a corruption of papataceo, a large, bothersome mosquito, thus fitting for the phenomenon of intrusive tabloid shutterbugs.)

Mounted in the restored ruins of Trajan?s Market " a spectacular venue"  the exhibit presents a black-and-white, freeze-frame documentation of international celluloid stars working and playing in the Eternal City then at its apogee of movie-making at the Cinecitta studios: Frank Sinatra drop-dead cool as he strolls through the streets; Ava Gardner incandescent whilst enjoying caf? society; cantilevered buxom Jayne Mansfield doing The Twist with her former Mr. Universe husband; Sophia Loren, a national monument in herself; an aging yet sexy Clark Gable; an unrecognizable Greta Garbo; Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Gina Lollabrigida and Anna Magnani and Elizabeth Taylor; Charleton Heston riding on a Vespa in Ben-Hur  costume.

Such glamour, such big-screen gloss, such a vast difference in the reference of luminary compared with today?s pipsqueak celeberati, the talent-less, the fleetingly famous for being famous, the utterly forgettable detox cast that?s grist for People  and Us  magazines - check-out line descendants of Tempo  and Epoca  and Oggi,  which sold a million copies a week at a time when only 6 million Italians were literate.

Italians loved their movies " one theatre for every 33,000 residents in 1953, second only to Sweden in Europe " with more than 93 million lire spent watching films and a disproportionate number of Italians represented among directors, scriptwriters and actors in the global dream factory of cinema.

Similarly, the VIPs adored Italy, descending on the country to make movies, have affairs, get married; actors cross-pollinating with beauty pageant winners; actresses wedding Italian royalty and picking up nobility titles along the way. 

Nowhere else on the planet, not even in Hollywood, were the stars so idolized from the moment they stepped off the plane to conduct their first press conference.

Scandals came easy and were only occasionally constructed from frenzied imagination. Most of the public canoodling was real and the spats " slaps, pouts, curses " even more so.

The glitz, sensationalism and wanton amorality was silhouetted in La Dolce Vita: the decadence of Rome nightlife, the excesses and follies of aristocracy, the newly emergent jet set and those scrambling for publicity at any cost.

Marcello chronicles it all for pulp consumption, trolling through the demi-monde watering holes of Via Veneto, at that time ground zero for the rich and infamous. With life imitating art, the film itself attracted hot chatter in Rome?s daily papers, with the actors dogged by dirt-sniffing journos.

The movie character Marcello, who aspires to serious novel-writing, understood his job was repellent; whether the real-life reporters shared that view is up for debate. 

Ditto those who?ve followed in their muckraking footsteps - blow-by-blow infotainment correspondents, from cable TV to the blogosphere.

Our era?s typists, television babblers and Tweeter twits haven?t invented gossip journalism, merely transformed it into a 24/7 pursuit, both feeding and driving the appetite for inside-fame details " from Hollywood to Washington to Wall Street, cinema to politics and high finance" all of it reduced to exclamatory tidbits and unconfirmed regurgitation, forcing even mainstream journalism to swim with the current of dross, diving into the trough of slime.

Dreck TV impresario Aaron Spelling once defined gossip as "rich people having problems that money can?t solve."

Malcolm Muggeridge, writing on the gossip page for The Evening Standard, described the assignment as "revoltingly futile and exhausting"

Cybercolumnist Matt Drudge said, forthrightly: "I don?t call it journalism. I go where the stink is"

But a taste for the salacious seems hardwired into the human consciousness, evident long before communication technology caught up and made instant mass dissemination of blather possible so that even the most boring among us can YouTube and social network our unremarkable lives.

In Scandal: A Scurrilous History of Gossip 1700 to 2000,  author Roger Wilkes reminds that Daniel Defoe devised the world?s first chatty newspaper column, pioneering the technique of keeping names secret (as in L---- was seen kissing J----).

Then came introduction of the personal voice: "I hear that . . .", ?I understand that . . ."

Nancy Mitford, penning a society column for The Lady,  delighted in the job, calling it a freeloader?s dream. That, of course, was in the days when boldface was the purview of social elites, the Town and Country  set who, unlike the middle class, could indulge whims of lust and intoxicants with abandon.

They would be overtaken by the nouveau riche A-list, movie idols and rock stars and, more recently, reality-show arrivistes whose only real claim to fame is callow shamelessness.

Fellini depicted the Italian society of his generation as empty and rotten at the core, from the fraudulence of children claiming to have been visited by the Virgin Mary (the Vatican condemned the movie) to the absurd pretensions of intellectuals reciting inane poetry.

Bosley Crowther, reviewing the film for The New York Times, praised La Dolce Vita  as a "brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swatch of society in sad decline and, eventually, a withering commentary on the tragedy of the over-civilized".

The movie?s most famous and iconographic scene has Anita Ekberg, the beauteous former Miss Sweden, wading into the Trevi Fountain in her strapless evening gown, Aphrodite incarnate and carnal, trailed by the attendant, awed Marcello.

That scene took a week to film in the middle of winter. Ekberg stood in the cold water for hours without complaining, but Mastroianni wore a wetsuit under his clothes and guzzled vodka.

These days, dipping a toe into any of Rome?s fountains will draw a scolding from street wardens. And the Via Veneto, while still flanked by posh hotels and famous bistros, is peopled almost exclusively by tourists sipping 10 euro drinks, wondering where all the celebrities, playboys and socialites have gone.

La Dolce Vita  actually marked the end of a belle epoque as celebrity culthood segued into the Swinging Sixties, mod culture blooming on Carnaby St. in London and then morphing into keyhole-peeping absorption with pop singers, TV actors, fashion models and sports idols.

Today?s Rome, while endlessly stylish and eternally sensual, has lost something in translation. In lieu of shimmery stars there is, instead, the junk of variety-show bimbos on RAI TV and the vulgarity of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, with his bevy of bed-and-blab escort girls, trollops who titillate but will never captivate.

They can?t hold a candle to black-and-white Immortals: Liz, Grace, Sophia, Ava, Lauren, Audrey, Gina . . . 

Fame-wise, it?s the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, redux. {RAA: And Remember what Happened: THE MIDDLE AGES !!!!!!! ]

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/
844887--if-only-fellini-could-see-us-now
 

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