Michelangelo Antonioni’s Trilogy of Decadence and the Conundrum of Alienation

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

-T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets 

A recent discussion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s trilogy with two of my dear friends prompted me to revisit the trilogy in its entirety. After rewatching all three films, I was first amazed by their everlasting sublimity and by Antonioni’s full command of his craft. He is an anthropologist of the niceties of modernity and its stifling discontents; he questions the proprieties of all characters, even and especially when they are hounded by a stifling sense of alienation. 

Antonioni’s trilogy of decadence is not only preoccupied with this image of alienation and loneliness, in fact, the trilogy is also obsessed with an imagery of lack, a lack at last almost taken for granted, that we, the viewers, keep expecting an instance or image of it at the turn of each new scene; lack of sui generis eros between Anna and Sandro in L’Avventura who are about to be married, lack of an intimate bond between Lidia and Giovanni in La Notte, who are in fact already married, and lack of commitment between Victoria and Piero in L’Eclisse. This leitmotif of lack subsists in the entirety of the trilogy. It points us to the smothering sense of alienation that permeates the lives of all these characters.

 This idea of a smothering modernity is insinuated very early in the trilogy, particularly in the first scene of L’Avventura, when we see Anna walking out of the villa and we hear her father conversing with one of the working men around his house; as we see them both conversing, the dialogue commences:

“Soon this poor villa will be smothered.

To think there were woods here once. That ‘ll all be houses.”

“Yes, there’s nowhere to run.”

 This laconic dialogue is far more interesting than it seems, especially in that it foreshadows much of the thematic preoccupation of the three films and sets the tone of L’Avventura, in particular, and the trilogy, in general. A tone which later will be delineated as characters being existentially smothered among the brutalist buildings and landscapes of modernity. This brief dialogue is also interesting because it precedes Anna’s excursion with her friend Claudia and her fiancé into the ocean, and into a wretched island, an excursion where, ironically enough, ‘there’s lot of space to run’ as opposed to nowhere that we hear in the first dialogue of the film. The dialogue, along with Anna’s dialogue with her father, which comes right after, both presage an ontological unrest that would unfold in the entirety of L’Avventura, an unrest that first inflicts Anna’s character, even though, as Claudia later tells her, she should not exude, and then extends to other characters equally, namely Claudia and Sandro, after Anna disappears in their excursion.

 L’Avventura sets out to delineate bourgeois characters who are decidedly disconcerted. Anna, in particular, is the most obvious example of this among all characters; she is disconcerted with seemingly everything. The sense of alienation that permeates the landscape seems to trouble her, perhaps more so than it does to other characters. Hence, existence itself is an overwhelming endeavor in the heterocosm of L’Avventura, a heterocosm in which characters are decidedly incapable of establishing authentic and sui generis relationships, whether it is a tight-knit relationship with human beings or a rapport with their natural habitat and contrived milieu. It is a heterocosm wherein neither knowledge of oneself, nor knowledge of others can alleviate their state and rouse them out of their dire conditions. This departure from the city into the ocean and wild landscapes is also interesting in that it points us further into the sense of alienation that afflicts the characters. This state of being in extremis is not just an instigation of being mired in cities with their stifling buildings and architecture. It simply has to do with man’s being in the world. Antonioni seems to suggest that man’s or human’s being is not entirely consonant with their contrived habitat; the enormity, or rather fullness of these buildings and architecture does not fully match man’s energy, nor does it contrive a fullness and amelioration of his own existence. In fact, these buildings and landscapes, in Antonioni’s trilogy, only exacerbate man’s own being in the world as he is left to wallow in a seemingly metaphysical state of loneliness and alienation amidst ominous and sinister landscapes, whether these are the enormous rocks and vast wilderness, or the city’s architecture and buildings we see in the film. This is perhaps more conspicuous in the surrounding landscapes that we see in L’Avventura before and after Anna’s disappearance, and how they echo the same alienation we see before their excursion into the island. 

For poets, particularly the romantics, and possibly for other filmmakers as well, the natural world or landscape is invariably exalted by virtue of its cardinal role for the poet. That is, this natural world is regarded as an ontological purgatory wherein the self, or being itself, is made unadulterated, purged, purified and transfigured in accordance with the sublime concord and harmony of the landscape. For Antonioni, this is no longer the case; indeed, this is even made topsy-turvy, particularly in the trilogy.  The barren, smothering, and alienating landscapes of L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse seem to mirror and reflect characters’ ontological state. This allusion, or rather analogy with the poets, is not entirely haphazard or arbitrary. Much like the romantic poets, even modern poets, Antonioni imbues his trilogy with an imagery of not feeling at home in the world, particularly in a fundamentally industrial modern world. This imagery that is recurrent in Romantic poetry and literature is all the more enunciated and demystified L’Avventura and La Notte.

This imagery of the outer space or landscape is excellently brought to the fore with the second film of the trilogy: La Notte. Antonioni’s study of modernity and his preponderant preoccupation with themes of ennui, loneliness and alienation are fundamentally in conjunction with man’s ontological being. He is, after all, interested in a rigorous examination of the human condition. The question of human relationships, particularly romantic ones, and the proprieties of each individual within such relationships animate the whole trilogy. Romantic and emotional relationships eventually fall asunder before they even begin to forge as we see more vividly in L’Eclisse; just as characters themselves are ensnared in an overwhelming existence of alienation, a romantic or emotional adventure has itself become an alienating endeavor.  This idea is expressed more vociferously in L’Avventura when Anna and Claudia go to see Sandro in the city. Anna tells Claudia:

“[I]t’s a torture being apart. It’s difficult keeping a relationship going with one person here and the other there. But it’s convenient. Because you can imagine whatever you like. Do you see?”

“Whereas when somebody’s right there in front of you, that’s all you get.”

 This brief interaction between Anna and Claudia is yet another instance of how love itself is as alienating as everything else. In fact, being apart, as Anna avers, is less alienating and has less anguish than being in love, primarily because you are left to wallow in your own illusions and images with no one to intervene and shatter these built-up images that one has built in agony and dismay. Beleaguered by this dire condition of alienation, the heroes of the entire trilogy invariably respond to these configurations by resorting to romantic relationships in the hope that eros, or love, would provide an answer to their overwhelming dilemmas, alleviate this conundrum of alienation, and put an end to this unrest that hounds them, only to be confronted with yet another sinister prospect. The prospect that love, or a romantic relationship contrives no solace amidst these ghastly landscapes, it is as overwhelming as life itself. This is exactly the case with La Notte in which Lidia and Giovanni are caught in the grips of a loveless marriage. From the very outset, La Notte leaves the viewer in the throes of a deteriorating marriage and debilitating bonds. It is yet another stark instance of alienation, an alienation that extends even in marriages.  In La Notte, the viewer is bombarded by a cinematography of cold and brutal modern architecture and buildings. The import of these images is to point the viewer further towards the almost grisly and ghastly relationships individuals have in La Notte, Lidia and Giovanni’s relationship as a prime example. They echo Lidia and Giovanni’s own marriage, a marriage in which communication itself falters, the same attempts of communication constantly fail in L’Avventura as Sandro tells Anna right before she disappears that words are “more and more pointless”. Hence, the heterocosm that Antonioni depicts is one in which words themselves have lost the power to enact clarity and demystify any confusion between individuals. Instead, they only exacerbate things now; they “create misunderstandings” between lovers as Sandro tells Anna. With La Notte, the juxtaposition of modern urban buildings and Lidia and Giovanni further implicates this sense of emotional distance between the couple, even between their own selves, and their own search for a wholeness of existence. 

In this regard, love, eros, or a romantic relationship is the beginning of terror which culminates in dismay, in the Rilkean sense, since Rilke, an earlier prophet of alienation like T. S. Eliot in poetry as well and like Antonioni later in cinema, famously asseverated in the Duino Elegies that beauty is the beginning of terror.  This is more or less echoed beautifully in L’Avventura when the mystery of Anna’s disappearance starts to fade away, and her fiancé and her friend Claudia start an emotional affair with each other. Sandro tells Claudia at one point in the film: “Who needs beautiful things nowadays, Claudia? How long will they last?” Once again, much like the poets, Rilke in this case, Antonioni goes further in his portrayal of alienation. This latter has engulfed everything. The Beautiful, the good, and the sublime, like love, have almost deteriorated and become alienating forces. They are no longer the ultimate and absolute end they once were.

 With the final film of the trilogy, L’Eclisse, Antonioni concludes his project of decadence in the most brilliant way possible. The film tells the story of Vittoria, a literary translator who lives in Rome, and her emotional entanglement with Piero, a young and lively stockbroker. L’Eclisse presents the viewer with a bleak vision of alienation and decadence, a heterocosm that is seemingly replete with inert emotions. The world of L’Eclisse is far more dyed in alienation than that of the former films of the trilogy. Alienation has subsumed almost everything that even the perennial sentiment of love is foredoomed to fall asunder and eclipses, no matter what unfolds. With L’Eclisse, we are back to witness a nascent relationship that is already foredoomed to become evanescent, indeed, before it even begins.  

Burdened by such overwhelming existence, what is left for characters is to ostensibly fade away into obscurity and relish in an evanescent life. With the story of Vittoria and Piero, we are reminded, just as in L’Avventura, that nothing really happens when faced with such configurations, and when characters’ basic desires are apparently fulfilled. However, unlike L’Avventura, which ends in a rather hopeful tone with the intimations that a caressing hand might be the beginning of something invigorating, L’Eclisse ends in a bleak vision with a seven-minute sequence of desolateness and ennui. The ennui of the familiar and the acquiescent, where we keep expecting something dramatic to happen, or just something ordinary, but nothing really happens. We wait for Vittoria and Piero to honor their promise and meet at the same place they met before. Instead, Antonioni’s camera wavers around for seven minutes, depicting desolate and abandoned alleys where nothing extraordinary occurs, and the import is not what is portrayed and is there, it is in fact what should be there, but it is not simply because it has been eroded: both the possibility and solemnity of such endeavor have been entirely eclipsed, at the end. The ending of L’Eclisse suggests that for such characters, and in such bleak vision, every new emotional and romantic endeavor, which in itself has become a tantalizing prospect, only yields a new sense of alienation instead of being a harbinger of equanimity and edifying sentiments.

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