Marilyn’s Ashes: Celebrity and Authorship in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia

In the aftermath of the economic boom in Italy, the exponential growth of the film industry and the new centrality of television contributed to the mass production and consumption of new icons and to the birth of a star system modeled after Hollywood. Newspapers, fashion magazines, and tabloids concentrated on the lives of new Italian celebrities, and not only singers, actors, and TV personalities, but, as Marcia Landy shows in her book Stardom, Italian Style, also film directors (187). Fellini, Visconti, Rosselli, De Sica, and Antonioni were just a few of the new star directors who had to deal with newfound celebrity. After the success of his first films, Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), Pier Paolo Pasolini too no longer aspired only to be a famous poet and writer in Italy; he sought the role of international celebrity at a time of particular success for Italian cinema. The first to speak of Pasolini in terms of “spectacular authorship” was Simona Bondavalli, in a thought-provoking article that analyzes how Pasolini used interviews to control the interpretation of his work and at the same time to critique media culture. According to Bondavalli, his construction of an author-character, through the manipulation of his own image, imbued his work with his personal presence and gave him the opportunity to critique the cultural industry from which he felt alienated (31). Indeed, Pasolini’s transition to cinema in the early 60s coincides with his discovery of the power of images within the new context of mass-media society and with his growing distrust in the representative ability of the word.

Pasolini was fully aware that celebrity (and the personal myth that comes with it) is never the product of a spontaneous process, but rather a construction, “a product deriving from the media, entertainment, or public relations industry” (Scott and Tomaselli 17). This construction, along with assumed authority, necessarily involves the commodification and alienation of the subject. In this, Pasolini is close to Guy Debord’s theories in The Society of Spectacle (1967), which he anticipates in some respects. Indeed, for Pasolini as for Debord, the system of spectacle is able to falsify all of production as well as the perception of images (Debord 18). Pasolini’s attitude towards the myth created by his media presence is thus very ambivalent. For example, in 1964, he writes to the readers of Vie nuove, a weekly magazine associated with the PCI, declaring his refusal to take part in any mythology: “I don’t want any part of your mythology, not even for that piece of success or the defamatory or celebratory spreading of my name it could grant me” (Saggi 1025). This apparent resistance to accepting his new status as icon of the mass imagination is also part of the construction of a public persona, that of an author who is the unwitting victim of the media and of his own success.

In a television interview with journalist Enzo Biagi, recorded in May 1971 but broadcast only on November 3, 1975 (the day after his death), Pasolini critiques the anti-democratic nature of the television medium as the producer of an incommensurable power disparity between those pictured on screen and those watching it. Not content with his host’s dismay, he asserts that success is nothing but the flip side of persecution (Pasolini, Interviste 179). The reason for the delay in the broadcast of the interview seems to clarify Pasolini’s aphoristic statement. In Italian law, in fact, public television could not grant air time to anyone currently involved in a lawsuit. In 1971 Pasolini found himself involved in a trial as the nominal director of Lotta continua, the principal newspaper of the extra-parliamentary left, charged with incitement to crime and anti-national propaganda. At the same time, his Decameron had been reported more than twenty times for obscenity and consequently banned, and he was still dealing with a police charge from a town outside Catania for the alleged slaughter of some sheeps during the production of the film Porcile. The absurdity and the quantity of...