Thoughts on Monica Vitti in Red Desert

William Heidbreder, copyright (c) 2025.

The recent Film at Lincoln Center series billed Vitti as “la modernista.”  As a character actress (who for a time was Italy’s leading female film star) she was a Sixties type, fetchingly spontaneous, expressively, lively, and “free.” These are ideas of character, of psychic and social organization, that appealed to many young people at the time.  One can want to be like, or enjoy being with, such people, as many viewers did. 

I do think Vitti’s best work is the “tetraology” of films made with the director whose (lover and) muse she was, Antonioni.  In L’Avventurra, La Notte and l’Eclisse her character smartly sees through others, even if she might succumb to one of them, as she does in l’Avventurra, first in enchantment, then with maternal sollicitude expressed in resignation. But in Red Desert, whatever else we say about the film, we know that the Vitti character Guilana has problems, interesting ones.  Appropiate then that I devote the rest of this piece to that.   

We see this film differently today and a good part of American society no longer anxiously figures so many people as crazy.  A word about this is in order not only because this attribution is so often made, often with absurdly inscouciant jerks of the knee, but because here it is inescapable.  She was in a clinic, having tried suicide, banal facts that must have some relation to her interestingly configured and iterated existential crisis.  The “anti-psychiatry” movement that was so central in the late twentieth century to the intellectual left (before its semiofficial repudiation by liberal-leftists who determined that libertarian styles of radicalism are really Republican, and rampant cultural disaffection is dangerous to good citizens who after all do need the streets swept clean, of the down, dirty, and dangerous) was in its infancy when this film was made, along with ecology and feminism, matters the film begins with visual icons of. Still, many of us today are with Guiliana, not so inclined to patronizingly observe that she is neurotic (obvious enough, so what of that?) and needs a good doctor (as Pasolini suggests, though this film does not aim at her joining a clinic but starts after her departure from one) or perhaps a big sister in the feminist wing of the professor set who can assure us that she is really just oppressed (argued easily enough).  Anti-psychiatry, feminism, ecology: social malaise must have a principal cause, choose your marching flag.  But these are matters of circumstance, part of the scene in which Ms. Guiliana find herself placed in 1964 Ravenna, where she is wife of the obtuse engineer Ugo who doesn’t even get what she’s doing over on Via Alighieri (street of great poets, the imagined mentor she needs like a Virgil to show her the way?).  We do, we are Giulianas, and it is not even about gender, really, so while you’re welcome to add gay liberation to the above list, with arguments that are valid and true, what I’m looking for is something else. 

Antonioni was a key figure historically in shifting the art of narrative film away from some long-dominant dramatic conceits —which incidentally were shared, certainly at play in Italian film criticism at the time—by Marxist, feminist, and other socially-oriented critics whose politics is after all rather dramatic in its narratival and logical structure, most obviously in Hegel and classical Marxism, but also in other political “social movements” that came to fore when “the cause of the (industrial) workers” began to falter, a possibility clearly staged, by this director who was a man of the left if complexly, in the film’s opening scene with its lone skilled worker marching into the empty factory yard in ignorance of the Party boss. The shift was of course to center narrative film on the visible and audible text rather than using these formal elements as mere techniques and thus ornament, as mainstream commercial cinema still mostly does.  Artworks are not made to advise officials on how to manage the plebes.  This is a film about a way of being in the world, how everything then might look sound and feel, and what some work with shaping the forms of this experience might enable us to see and grasp.  And at the level of practical solutions to her “problem” (of living), it must be said the story here fails.  

For at the end she is faced (again) with a scene of ugly toxic chemicals in the environment, where she is walking with her little boy.  He asks her if the birds will die if they fly through the yellow smoke.  Yes, she says, but they’ve learned not to, they avoid the nasty shit.  They learned the ‘anal’ lesson of good personal economy of ‘hygeine’, the household management (oikonomia) of good governance where toxicity is concerned, and we might wonder why this doesn’t thrill every ambitious young future (‘environmental activist’) executive and social worker in the theater (so that would they all cheer, which in many viewings I still have yet to witness), as much as we all know (and as a housewife and mother, we presume she does) that shit does need to be managed.  Which has what to do with a way of seeing?  What this tells me is that the film’s structurally juxtaposes a theatrical visual ‘meaning’ to a narrative logic that cannot handle any peripeteia. 

Why shouldn’t the narrative as redemptive machine (think Aristotle’s Poetics, which posits art as therapy) fail?  One needs a sense of being in a social world and historical time with unresolved problems such that, as Marxists used to say, there are no “individual solutions.” (Or, since Thatcher, “alternatives”).  Maybe in the midst of what Beckett called “worsening” there is only — a vision?  Though, yes, I agree, just celebrating leaves us ‘begging’ all sorts of questions. 

Giuliana needs the right friends of companions, and we get the sense that for Antonioni Italy, and Europe, in 1964 might not have the kind she needs.  I think what she wants with Corrado is some way of being touched (to say affectively as well as physically does suggest a possible quandary, in this film anyway, where character and environment suffer from a separation that both entices and troubles her) that somehow doesn’t work for her, and it may be interesting to ask why, since we are given ample grounds by her discourse to wonder if her ‘neurosis’ is a factor.  (Some critics for this reason have attributed the evident failure (by her report) of this anguished love-making to said neurosis). I am a bit apt to doubt that Corrado really loves her nor she him, though it does seem she wants to be made love to— and she writhes at their physical touching because even though it makes her see the room and all its furniture as sweetly rose pink, it doesn’t work for her.  As she says, she doesn’t know how she can live in the world, how she’ll make it; she fears she can’t.  She’d like Corrado to help her.  So she is in a way a woman who wants to be made love to and can’t be somehow (for she is separated).  That puzzles him enough that he just gives up and walks away when, back in her empty gallery shop space, she confesses to him that even this didn’t work for her.  Along the lines of Freud’s famous unanswered question (“What does a woman want?”), we could (mansplainingly?) ask what does Guiliana want?  She had told Corrado she was looking for a way of seeing, to which his reply is that that aesthetic desire is identical to his own ethical one, finding a way to live, which he will (fail to) accomplish by packing off to Argentina with his business and its workers, who look puzzled as they are being instructed about the great opportunity and what they bosses will provide them there.  If Guilana found a way of seeing, what would that be like?  As in 8 1/2, or Andrei Roublev, what is seen along the way by the soul in search of art is more interesting than the “solution.”   So while, yes, it would of course be lovely if you’re a guy to think maybe you might succeed where Corrado failed, such a gendered way of understanding her character tends to downplay the problems of living/seeing that she complains of, and the film stages, with regard to the character/environment relationship that is here so problematized. 

And yet she’s troubled.  She both wants and fears being surrounded by a wall of things and people to have at hand (the poison is also the cure).  She fears she can’t make it in the world.  She’ll fall into an abyss.  Disconnected. Perhaps this is an “existential” problem worthy of the Shakespearean monologue we get after the encounter with the Turkish sailor: See, since people are alone in the sense that “bodies are separated,” “if you prick me you don’t bleed” (though I might), therefore perhaps I should just realize that I have my life to live (be an independent woman, a bit courageous).  A trivial true thusly summarized, moving as performed.  So call the film’s ethics, if that means character, story, and problems to be solved on roads to be taken, “existential,” though that does simplify the problem a bit moralistically and, as much as such notions thrilled many theatergoers in the 50s and 60s, is inconclusive, if not unsatisfactory.

We’re not all crazy unless it’s crazy to find that the world around you feels like some problematical fabric within in and by which we are affected and constituted.  Aesthetic experience as such must depend on something like that for its perceptual richness, but is it a problem?  Or is the question what does that look, sound, ‘feel’ like?  There are also possibilities of totality and fragmentation in experience and thought of subject or object, self or ‘world’ confronted in relational exteriority.  And that can mean that the order and chaos are variables differently arrangeable, as in musical (and cinematic) texts. Which means orders and contigent, and incoherent multiplicities given: there being no given ordered world to represent, you may arrange the images in the order you like.  So it is chaos that is prior.  (Though a boss calling you to order may always demand it be imposed). And the social world today is more chaotic.  People don’t fear falling apart and losing their given framework, so much as, while scattered and fragmented, we compose our sense of things.  We’re in precarity, and shit has to be managed, as beauty somtimes strikingly emerges or is found present, in background or foreground. If film can be, as Godard said, “a form that thinks” (and not only “a thought that forms” our sensibility), then contemplating a film we have seen is asking what questions it poses, composes, phrases.  Guilana certainly speaks for Antonioni in proposing a search for a way of seeing.  The ‘argument’ of Red Desert may be: “I,” subject of cinema (including actor as seer, in this like and unlike filmmaker and spectator) have problems (the ethical question is how to live a good life) that I recognize as the question: how can make sense of my experience, beyond the practical problems involved of managing my life somehow.  Guiliana wants an answer, but it can have none, so it persists as a question, though she does give voice to the film’s displacement of the ethical on to the aesthetic. Antonioni did much to make narrative cinema as visual as it is narrative.  But to find a way to see is to find not an object but a method; not what to look at but how to see, not an image (or love object) but, and for the unsettled person she is, a way of seeing.  My argument about Guiliana a ‘type’ is partly that her life problems, at least in they she understands her predicament, are indicative of something common today and that, like the neofuturist transformation of industrial form into splendid color that coexists with the irremediable industrial waste, is a matter as much to be affirmed as critically diagnosed (perhaps both), in a way that still clamors to be better conceptualized and understood.