Fun until the end: The nightclub fantasy in the Italian cinema of the economic miracle

Abstract

This article examines the use of the nightclub trope in three films from the early years of the Italian “economic miracle”: Luchino Visconti’s White Nights (1957), Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961). Availing myself of psychoanalytic theory, I discuss how, in these three films, the nightclub is deployed as a hermeneutic space that sheds light on the functioning of the then nascent ideology of consumption, specifically on the way it captures the subject through fantasy. Capitalism earns our allegiance by creating the illusion that the ontological lack that marks us as subjects is in fact only contingent, and thus remediable through the acquisition of an empirical object (a commodity) that might yield the total enjoyment we crave. In mainstream Hollywood cinema—the chief disseminator of the capitalist ideology—this illusion is mostly fostered through the fantasy of the successful sexual relationship (or romantic fantasy). Through the nightclub trope, Fellini, Visconti, and Antonioni deconstruct this fantasy by letting it unfold well past the point at which Hollywood endings would stop, until it inevitably unravels into an encounter with the Real: nothing but loss awaits us at the end of fantasy. Yet this traumatic moment is politically crucial: once we realize that the enjoyment we failed to attain was always already lost, we will be free from the capitalist injunction to consume and accumulate—from the crippling illusion that our happiness lies but one more purchase away.