Nightmare

This is an impromptu speech made by the God-like director Pier Paolo Pasolini at the end of a documentary about his life and career. This segment was set in the coastal settlement Sabaudia, central Italy.

He relates the modern consumerist culture in Italy to the lobotomy of the soul. This is long but please read / watch it, it's heart-breaking.

Thanks to my soul-kin Jack Frost Jinx for sharing this. Consumerism is subtle murder.


"Here we are in front of the structure, the shape, the profile of another city, immersed in a strange, grey, lagoon light, altough surrounded by a beatiful mediterranean maquis, it's sabaudia. How we made fun, we intellectuals, of the regime architecture, of cities like sabaudia, and yet looking at this city now we feel something completely unexpected: it's architecture has nothing unreal, ridiculous, the passing of time made it so that this architecture, lictoreal like, takes a quality, so to speak, inbetween metaphisical and realistics, metaphisical in a truly european way, that resembles the art of the chirico, and realistics because, seen from the distance, you feel that the cities are made, speaking in a somewhat rethorical way, to the measure of men, you really feel like there are families in there, proper families, human people, complete living beings, whole, full in their humbleness.

How do we explain such a thing? which seems miraculous, a ridiculous city, fascist, that seems so charming to us: we have to examine this fact, I mean, Sabaudia was built by the regime, there's no doubt about it, but in fact it has nothing fascist, if only some exterior traits, so I think that fascism, the fascist regime, in the end was nothing more than a bunch of criminal who took the power, and those empowered criminals in fact could do nothing, they were not able to leave a mark, not even scratch the surface, of the Italian reality, and so Sabaudia, even if it was built by the regime following certain rationalistic criteria, academically aesthetizing, doesn't found it's root in the regime that built it, it's rooted in that reality that fascist dominated with tiranny but couldn't touch, I mean it's the small-town, rustic, paleoindustrial etc. etc. reality that sprouted Sabaudia, not fascism.

But now it's the opposite, the regime is a democratic one, but one that has created that indoctrination, that homologation that fascism couldn't obtain. The power of today, which is the consumer civilization, instead realizes it perfectly, destroying all the specific reality, taking away reality to the different ways of being human that Italy storically produced in such differentiated ways. It's this indoctrination that is destroying Italy for real, I can say without a doubt that the truth is fascism is exactly this power of the consumistic civilization. And this thing happened so quickly that we didn't even noticed! it's kinda like a nightmare, that happened in the last five, six, seven, ten years, it's like a nightmare during which we have witnessed Italy crumbling all around us, disappearing.

Perhaps now we are awakening from this nightmare only to look around and find out that there's nothing we can do anymore.."