A world riddled with umbilical bonds and the recorded orgasms of Madonnae. He watches them behind his square glasses, his mirrors and curtained windows, as they all break and their frames stand hollow. Make no mistake, this is a man on his deathbed in fear of purgatorium’s verdict: ‘While we've been shut up in his harem, we've had the time to watch him. To observe our jailer; our lord.’ He once invented a woman, and out of her fourteen more were born. They were his metaphors, his hypotheses, his obscurities. They kept multiplying into a thousand mouths that smiled and moaned in pleasure, into a thousand Armless Venuses that draped him in silken sheets. But the maestro ages and his myths have to age with him. ‘We’ve found out about you. We know everything about you.’ Corroded, the chain of symbols parades before him and he laughs ruefully through Marcello.
The artefact begins to float upwards—enormous and anointed with her neon tiara. ‘You’re the clown, the Martian. You can't hide any more. We've got you in close-up’; rooted as you are, to the same desert earth. Shoot Her down and he goes down with it. ‘He cannot live with us any more. He cannot live with himself.’ He climbed so far into the cave of representation, the light of the real now blinds him. All the more tragic, he was the one that plucked his eyes out.
The naked dreamer, paralysed, shivers. Draw up your overcoat darling, settle back to sleep. Smick smack, smick smack and a bust of mama to kiss goodnight.
La città delle donne
Federico Fellini
1980