FILM / Games People Play / Helena Verbivska
Image © Pegaso Cinematografica | Italnoleggio Cinematografico
Marco Ferreri’s masterpiece Dillinger is Dead, certainly subversive and unique in its style, picked up what was in the air, in the antimainstream air permeated with social unease and shifting perspectives of ’68, to be more precise. Waspish humor amplified by an acerbic account of contemporary alienating conditions, which cannot help but separate people from each other in humdrum, unsentimental bouts of unanimous apathy, is not something radically unfamiliar to the mood driving the works of Ferreri. As the characters inhale poisonous fumes produced by the industrialized world and exude isolation impulses, the nameless void becomes an issue to be sorted out or harnessed in one way or another. Hardly any sumptuous profundity could be tracked down and explored exhaustively in whatever these characters strive to impart onscreen. At any rate, they are merely estranged humans at their absurd outright best, loitering about claustrophobic cells and looking for entertainment or oblivious slumber.
Marco Ferreri puts forward three modes, three strictly delineated homogenous deserts, in which the principal character Glauco, a gas mask designer, operates – the mode of being at work, at home, and somewhere above, apparently in a dream. The point of departure that orchestrates the entirety of film’s symbolism, not laden much with the plethora of details though, is Glauco’s profession which pivots on the focal object, namely a gas mask, an epitome of strong necessity to protect oneself from the direct interaction with an outside world, which might be dangerous and unfriendly. In comparison to the industrial heaviness felt through the walls and solid structures constituting working, almost restless, climate, home interior is more attuned to comfortable detachment and unbounded whimsicality resembling the state of ennui. In other words, home is a temporarily isolated continuum that gives free rein to the subject who waists the leisure time there, the time appropriate for obtaining all-consuming distractions.
Domestic trappings turn a spotlight on the symbol which points to translucent revolt, the unspoken topic of secondary importance, or rather unnoticed item lost amidst the cluttered furniture. I’m talking about the revolver which does not possess the attributes of its own, for it is wrapped in a newspaper whose title “Dillinger is Dead” symmetrically alludes to that of the film and, reversely, the film itself rests on newspaper’s announcement, constituting a circle, not so much vicious circle as a witty one indicating plot twist that might come into life and, in equal measure, might not. The more the title ferments in one’s hypothetical mind as the plot unravels, the more insistently this film inaugurates a suggestion informing that someone is going to die or is otherwise already dead. The Dillinger’s ghost floats all over the place, evoking absolutely nothing, pure nothing out of the environment it came. The symbol of revolt allowed in domestic surroundings is repurposed the next moment after its discovery: the revolver morphs into a toy gun, gaining accouterments of both peace and uselessness. Toy gun in pursuits of the vacuous target; this is how the closed space called home, receptacle filled with verisimilar memories, appears.
Glauco does justice to his existential profession that makes people’s breathing a little better, harmonizing exposure to civilization: he begets camouflage de novo, which functions as tremendous but necessary lie buried deep in the ground so that by looking at it you see an instrument of play and miss violence intrinsic to it. Here comes one of those unbearably hot summer nights pushing humans to the limits of their innermost idleness and compelling apathy. Finally, you have free hours to bring together all leftovers of so-called private life and cook something delicious, palatable at once to the senses and the curious mind despondently wandering from one land to another until goose is cooked, and you are done with it.
The working day is over, Glauco returns home, Glauco cooks, Glauco seduces a maid, kills his wife, leaves home, and sets off for Tahiti. It’s as simple as that. Yet orphaned from their context and taken separately, these intriguing junctures do not matter at all. Sullen impassivity pertaining to each face in the film, honestly, to each lackluster face-to-face encounter, violates slender borders between universes, confuses three existential modes, and injects impulses for alienation, commencing on such an invisible but haplessly sensible gaudy note which brings to the scene tiresome, languid pacing of the mundane. Entering the territory of an insipidly luminous dwelling that belongs to a parvenu Glauco, you are to get ready to brush up against the tacky sickness, which pulls all the triggers in the house and reverberates on every corner.
Indeed, Dillinger is finished, and his criminal deeds mystically – through the link of an ambiguous quality – mirror the protagonist who in no way is in touch with a gangster lifestyle. The link witnessed by Glauco establishes a constellation of details which ascribe to the revolver factual features, a certain life experience in the set of events, namely the duration illustrating the criminal activity of the gangster Dillinger and an instance of his death, features that elude physical basis as the matter to be proved and remain suspended above the elliptical ocean of possibilities. If this revolver is not the object with which Dillinger was killing people, at least it is a call for either going out from your shell or fortifying defensive positions in there. Wallowing in memories flashed out by video recordings and projected onto the wall, Gaucho spends the lonely evening of puerile entertainments.
Michel Piccoli, whom Ferreri gave freedom to play the role just the way he considered sound, intended to make an impression of an ‘eternal child or this childlike rebirth of ‘mature man’’. Piccoli has truly accomplished that level of absurdity that obliges us to withdraw from saying anything clear about the character: Glauco is too inscrutable to be called shallow and not complex enough to induce empathy. What captures the gist of the protagonist’s meanderings is a scene in which he effectuates preliminary movements climaxing further in a murder: Glauco empties revolver’s cylinder from bullets, urging a harmless toy gun to emerge, and, in a while, puts them in it again as if he undergoes ‘childlike rebirth’, preparing to treat his game in a bit harsher and more earnest tone.
First, Glauco deconstructs the functions revolver primarily stands for, turning it into an innocuous non-productive piece of metal, painted in red and with polka dots on it; then he finds delight in resuscitating a childish insouciance and enacting the unreal, something he would never do. Glauco uses the toy to play out his suicide, foolishly grimacing in front of the mirror, and the next minute promptly switching to the sleepy wife. That’s it: the dead wife is a big refreshing farewell to this world tearing apart and a friendly hello to exotic countries where no one could identify him. Whether Glauco slays the old self by shooting his wife or not, the game he was indulged in helped to break free from the state of alienation and screw over the tedious reality, devoured and obliterated at the end. An allusion to the hero who is irrelevant to the plot settles such a humorous slant that renders the given poignancy unsustainable and dull-edged. Dillinger is significant in so far as newspaper’s information with his name in it has some weight for the reason that a revolver springs into existence with regard to being wrapped in the abovementioned piece of paper and dug out by Glauco, who, playing with it all along, eventually uses it by the end of the film. An additional perfunctory detail looms in bold, destabilizing the narrative from the outset, fuelling the acentered universe and undercutting subjectivity as such.
What is the most accurate way to demonstrate alienation than subjugating seemingly principal character, which misses any distinctive longings and specific traits as a person, to the non-human element of the story, to the revolver and a series of its hypostasis? The irony is that the funny games Glauco plays wind up no less unfeasible and uncertain. Unexpected, still unsurprising finale problematizes that primordial sickness, exacerbated ennui, giving rise to disheveled freedom which is nothing more than the ghosts of childlike irresponsibility and adult fatigue.
Helena is doing her PhD thesis at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in the field of narrative studies mainly oriented toward the applicability of possible world semantics to the analysis of narratives and fiction. Insatiable cinephile, she is passionate about art house cinema and film semiotics. Some of her philosophical ruminations concerning films, literature, and philosophy can be found in Koine.community (https://www.koine.community/helen-verbivska-олена-вербівська-елена-вербивска/ ). Helena lives in Kyiv, Ukraine.
