Mamma Roma
Beyond the Ordinary
Pier Paolo Pasolini was so complex a figure, so protean in his interests as writer, poet, theorist and filmmaker, that to understand a Pasolini film isn’t only an act of textual analysis, but equally a speculative account of a work’s reverberative possibilities. If genre is about taking filmic style and seeing how it fits into a given generic form, however flexibly applied, authorship also examines style but does so through the prism of an artist’s sensibility. Clearly, some filmmakers are both auteurs and genre-focused directors from whom we can extract a vision, but whose sensibility cannot be separated from the genre within which they often work. There was more to John Ford than westerns, but Ford without the western might have been a minor filmmaker, and while Vincente Minnelli made plenty of films that weren’t musicals, his reputation resides strongly on films like Meet Me in St Louis, The Band Wagon and Gigi. Both Ford and Minnelli mastered a genre and discovered a vision through those within which they worked.
But what happens if a filmmaker has no genre to lean on and is wary of narrative assumptions of any sort? Pasolini leans on two potentially contrary forces: reality and myth, with Accatone and Mamma Roma exploring the world of the Roman borgate, which Lorenzo Cibrario describes as ‘‘a sort of Italian banlieue (suburban areas filled with vitality and poverty), in which Pasolini himself [initially] lived.’’ (Italy Segreta). Indeed, Mamma Roma was based on a specific case: Elisei Marcello, 19, was jailed for several years and died in an icy cell with his hands and feet bound to a table.
The mythical could be found in his adaptation of the New Testament, ‘The Gospel According to St Matthew’, and also Oedipus Rex and Medea. Yet Pasolini’s singularity rested on combining myth with reality, drawing on locations that gave texture to myth, and drawing on myth to give texture to reality. In Mamma Roma, it was as if Pasolini wasn’t only interested in the injustice of a teenage thief locked up for years for minor offences; he was drawn also to that image of a young man tied by his feet and hands, seeing in it the mythical potential he would explore in his next feature about Jesus. It is there, too, near the beginning of Mamma Roma, where a frontal shot of the dining table during a wedding resembles the last supper. Pasolini’s shift from extending neo-realism to adaptation might have seemed like a move towards a more conservative aesthetic. Instead, it appeared to be all part of a complicated relationship with giving dignity to the lives of the poor in the earlier instances, and acknowledging in Oedipus, Medea etc. that myth came out of harsh material realities, and that though thousands of years have passed between Ancient and modern Rome, this is the same environment merely many years apart. There is a severe quality to Pasolini’s work, whatever the period and whatever the setting, as he takes apart myth and elevates destitution.
If genre often insists on closed worlds, on a semiotic system that leaves the viewer chiefly aware of the tropes and demands of the world it invokes based on the expectations of the viewer, Pasolini was looking for a different system of signs, and this is partly why he found himself at odds with other semioticians of the sixties. Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Christian Metz in different ways, wished to register the artificiality of signs, and how cinema could be read as a system that could be de-coded and comprehended. Pasolini insisted on a sort of semiotics of incomprehension, by claiming that film was a language very different to the one on a page, and you couldn’t turn an image into the equivalent of a categorial sign. It was too profuse; too many meanings could be read into its smallest unit of a frame. ‘’No matter how detailed the shot, it is always composed of various objects or forms or acts of reality.’ (Heretical Empiricism)
Pasolini’s wasn’t chiefly a coherent demolition of others’ arguments; it was more a realisation of the signifying complexity of his own work, and one way of looking at this is to see the contrast between the work his cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli, did on a couple of Sergio Leone westerns, and his work on most of Pasolini’s movies. Leone wanted to tease the viewer generically, well aware that when a train arrives, there is likely to be trouble, when a person spits on the ground a fight will ensue, and when a gunman enters a bar, another person might exit through the window. Leone’s genius was for slowing down and ironising the codes, and Delli Colli was a masterful companion in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West. It was a mythology of sorts, but a pop mythology, a notion of the West that had passed through more than half a century of movie awareness.
Leone brilliantly inserted himself into the western genre and, in his own way, became no less accomplished in mastering its codes than John Ford had before him, though for far more facetious ends. Pasolini instead wanted to ask anthropological and ethnographic questions about how societies operate based on in-groups and out-groups, on scapegoating and status, on offsprings and outcasts. In Mamma Roma, the titular character is a prostitute who now mainly focuses on her street stall, and her son Ettore a teenager she wants to protect and help to succeed, but who is also caught up in a street gang that robs items from hospital patients while they are sleeping. It is for this crime he ends up in prison, and in turn dies strapped to a table after he starts to lose his mind. Pasolini neither quite makes it a film about social justice, nor about criminal ambition – it is neither quite neo-realist nor gangster film. Perhaps nothing allows a work to be more auteurist than a designation making it so specific that the best way to describe it is through a designation associated with the director’s very name: the film is Pasolini-esque.
But to understand what this means is to comprehend aspects of the terms we used (in-group/out-group, etc) and how Pasolini makes them function quite differently than they might in neorealism or gangster cinema. Neorealism has in-groups and out-groups, as we see when the father and son in Bicycle Thieves go to a restaurant and they feel out of place next to the other guests, and we see it in Goodfellas when Henry Hill beats up his new girlfriend’s preppy neighbour. In neorealism, the character is often an outsider demanding the viewer’s sympathy in the context of their relative passivity; in the gangster film the genre often plays on our developing disapproval as they try to gain insider status through more and more brutal behaviour. However, to understand the complexity of Pasolini’s relationship with these terms, we can look at the scene where Mamma Roma persuades a prostitute friend to seduce a married man, all the better so she can blackmail him as she turns up just as the assignation is about to take place. Her purpose is to persuade the wealthy restaurateur to give her son a job as a waiter, and sure enough, he concurs.
Mamma Roma refuses to allow her son to start humbly, to begin at zero and get an education and a trade, as the priest she speaks to implores her to do after she asks him if he can help her find her son a job. The priest’s remarks are echoed by the 24-year-old woman Bruna, who 16-year-old Ettore is seeing. ‘‘You don’t want to study, you don’t want to learn a trade?’’, she asks, after he says school is boring and gives him a headache. The film offers no immediate sympathy to this boy, whom we might find lazy and a little stupid (while neorealist figures are often hard-working and resourceful), and he doesn’t have the initiative of a gangster who will use his wiliness to get on. When he gets a motorbike, it is part of the mum’s blackmailing deal. He even allows his mother to engineer the end of his romance with the often warm and considerate Bruna when she asks her prostitute friend to sleep with Ettore, and thus forget his first love.
Pasolini has put at the centre of his film a mother who thinks she is doing the best for her son while only contributing to ruining him, and a boy who is feckless, idle, weak-willed, and dishonest. Why? It wouldn’t quite be enough to say that the director wishes to escape neorealist dictates without falling into gangster tropes, though there may be truth in such claims. After all, as Pasolini said of the former in the context of his own work. ‘‘In neorealist films day-to-day reality is seen from a crepuscular, intimate, credulous, and above all naturalistic point of view. Not naturalistic in the classic sense—cruel, violent, and poetic as in Verga, or total as in Zola; in neorealism things are instead described with a certain detachment, with human warmth mixed with irony, characteristics that my own work does not have.’’ (Scraps from the Loft) We would still be left with the question what does he wish to convey, and this is where the other terms are useful. Pasolini’s work has always been interested in scapegoat culture, and thus it would make sense that, despite his radical Marxism, he would make a film about Christ. But if Jesus is the most famous of all scapegoats, there are plenty others in Pasolini’s work: the children Medea sacrifices in her rage; the sacrifice of Oedipus as his parents give him up at the beginning of the play, and the self-sacrifice at the conclusion as he takes his eyes out. In Accatone, the title character sacrifices the woman he loves to prostitution, and in Salo, of course, numerous figures are sacrificed to the cruel pleasures of the Fascists in the title location at the end of the war.
Not all these sacrifices are equal, and some possess dignity and others ruthless self-preservation. But what Pasolini wished to do was elevate the ordinary without arriving at the conventionally sacred, and this resulted in a paradox when it came to The Gospel According to St Matthew. ‘‘With The Gospel I wanted to break away from this technique because of a very complicated problem’’, Pasolini reckoned. ‘‘I thought that my style—possessing naturally these qualities of sacredness and epicness—would go well with The Gospel also. But in practice, that was not the case. Because in The Gospel this sacredness and epic quality became a prison, false and insincere, and so I had to reconstruct my whole technique and forget everything I knew, everything that I had learned with Accattone and Mamma Roma, and begin from the beginning….All this was due to the fact I am not a believer.’’ (Film Comment)
We may have noted that Mamma Roma has images that can seem to possess a religious aspect, but this becomes part of a disjunctive aesthetic that allows realism to become provocatively mythical. To adopt the same style towards the gospels would be a tautology It would suggest he had made a film about belief when he consistently wanted to make films about sacrifice as a societal question over a transcendent one. When he shows near the end Ettore tied to the table, the director isn’t proposing that Ettore is a Christ-like figure; more that Christ was an Ettore-like one. In other words, society is constantly finding scapegoats to justify its actions, and Ancient Rome wouldn’t be so different from modern Rome. The question becomes not what transcendent state certain individuals can reach, but what sort of sacrifices will society demand to achieve its version of cohesion. The irony of Mamma Roma is that Mamma is the self-sacrificing character who will do anything for her son, but her son is the sacrificed character that allows the societal its continuing capacity to function. Ettore is locked up for a crime he did commit, and is hardly an innocent. But such a thought would be a neo-realist one based on morality and humanism (and hardly invalid). However, Pasolini’s is mythically societal as he wonders what deep social patterns create scapegoats and victims. Were he to offer Ettore as an innocent, his innocence would be more prominent than his victim status, and it is the latter that would seem to concern the director.
Ettore isn’t a victim because he ends up incarcerated and then dies. That is only the conclusion to his status. He is a born victim as a goat plumped up to be sacrificed happens to be, and it is as though Pasolini wishes to present Ettore as oblivious to this fate he may think he is escaping but is instead fulfilling, just as Jesus and Oedipus would meet their fates also. When Pasolini says, ‘’in England or France or America people do not remember the Industrial Revolution and the transition in its wake to prosperity. In Italy this transition has just taken place. What took a century in England has virtually happened in twenty years here’’ (Scraps from the Loft), he is pointing out the rapidity of change that will leave characters, slow to respond, left behind. Changes over a century work their way through several generations; with Ettore, it must do so rapidly, and he can’t meet that requirement. The priest and Bruna may propose that he should get a trade and an education, but he is someone who has come to Rome from the countryside. His mother might say she didn’t have a child for him to turn into a hick, but without an education that is exactly what he will become, unless he chooses a life of crime. He insists on the latter and ends up dead, falling into the wrong crowd, but a young man who would seem quite a likely member of it. His mother may insist he ‘‘should be around young people who study and work hard rather than those he hangs out with’’. But he is hardly a boy led astray – he is a stray.
Yet this isn’t an issue of moralism; more one of naturalism as Zola’s idea of behavioural traits inevitably coming to the surface, aligning with historical determinants that would leave peasant boys in the city without a trade or an education, likely to fall into petty crime. Ettore is a type Pasolini wants to turn into an archetype, to give dignity to an existence that has no likelihood of receiving it, and giving it that dignity not through recognising injustices the characters are victims of (Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D.) but by proposing every type can be turned into an archetype given the right iconography. Ettore is a slouchy teenager with unkempt hair, an ill-fitting suit and little integrity, yet by the end of the film, he is elevated to tragic status by the inevitable. The characters in Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. are victims of their circumstances, and this leads to sadness but not tragedy, if we assume sadness is readily rectifiable and the tragic much more stubborn. A bike and a home respectively is all the characters need in the earlier films. They are decent people in indecent circumstances.
But Pasolini wants to show Ettore is a product of compressed industrialisation and familial catastrophe. When in one of the film’s lengthy tracking shots where Mamma Roma walks the streets and characters come in and out of the frame as she walks, she speaks to one about her ex-husband, Ettore’s father. ‘‘He was a son of a bitch because his mother was a bloodsucker; his father a thief.’’ Why were they like that, the man asks, and Mamma Roma replies, ‘’because his mother’s father was a hitman, and his mother’s mother a beggar; his father’s mother was a madam; his father’s father was a snitch.’’ If they had money, they would be fine people, she claims. But who is responsible? Neo-realism answered that question with the hope of social amelioration, but Pasolini leaves it as a metaphysical proposition contained by the industrial shift and the genealogically inevitable, one that no immediate social intervention could resolve.
Partly what makes Pasolini’s films so perplexing is that they neither retreat into generic expectation nor advance into the socially ameliorative. But by thinking of his work archetypally, one can see that he wants the immediacy of environment aligned to the abstractions often present in genre and myth. The point of realism has often been to deny both myth and genre, giving purpose and place to ordinary lives. But what if one gives to realism the potentiality of myth (as he does in different ways in Accatone, Mamma Roma and Theorem) and gives to myth realism, as he does in different ways to The Gospel According to St Matthew, Oedipus Rex, and Medea? It allows him to bring the past into the present and the present into the past, turning mythic figures into everyday personages, and everyday people into mythical personages. Pasolini tells us that Accatone is worthy of Bach; Ettore is worthy of Vivaldi. The music gives grace to characters who might seem dis-graced, just as the director has no need to elevate Jesus, Oedipus and Medea and uses contemporary, even melodramatic compositions or no music at all in the mythical films’ denouements. Yet whether Oedipus or Accatone, Ettore or Medea, these are all figures capable of archetypal force.
However, in conclusion, we need to say a few words about Mamma Roma, surely as important a character as Ettore and the source of the film’s title. She may not quite be as memorable a mother as Medea, Mary or Jocasta, but that doesn’t mean Pasolini wouldn’t wish to claim for her an equal significance that he would know he could take for granted in portraying these other mothers in his later films. Anna Magnani plays her with all the ferocity Maria Callas brought to Medea, and the difference between the characters would be one of different times, not different sensibilities. If Medea murdered her children, Mamma Roma smothers hers in a misplaced affection that contributes to his inevitable ruin. When early in the film Mamma Roma arrives in the village and follows Ettore along the street, witnessing him stealing from a stall, she doesn’t confront him with a reprimand. She instead beseeches him for a kiss. Throughout, she finds ways to placate him and make his life easier, and even the job he takes, and promptly leaves, is of course based on blackmailing someone into employing him. Mamma Roma talks a lot about improving her and Ettore’s circumstances and being around the right type of people, but she turns herself into the wrong sort of person. This isn’t because she works the streets; it is because she has false beliefs and reckons her son is entitled to a better life without doing anything to earn it. Yet it is as if this false belief is contained by a deeper one that Pasolini pushes upon us: that Ettore’s life is destined for tragedy and Mamma Roma’s for grief. She might be able to say with Medea that everything is useless, nothing is any longer possible, even if she has tried to give her child the best opportunities in life. Medea’s kids die as collateral damage in a world of kings and queens; Mamma Roma’s son dies, a genealogical figure who can’t escape the history of thieving parents and grandparents, pimps and prostitutes. The film asks us neither to judge nor propose solutions. It asks us to accept that the dignity of a being is as valid now as it was two thousand years ago, and as valid for those at the bottom as those at the top.
© Tony McKibbin