Rome, Open City
Rome, Open Cityi is as consumate piece of agitprop as one could possibly encounter. This is excusable, considering when it was shot, and besides -- it's an almost complete catalogue of idei comune, the received nonsense of the period.
The Germans don't really like the Italiansii, notwithstanding the Germans themselves are no kind of master race but just a buncha butchers (so says one of their own, even!) and loose women on drugs are bad (loose because on drugs, and drugs because loose, and at the end the fur coat gets recycled "for next time" anyway) and oh, I hope you realise the monarchists owe the communists because this one actor in this one communist production didn't squawk on them (in character), so totally.
It's nonsense through and through besideswhich Harry Feist's a megaham, Anna Magnani gets shot within five scenes, and well... Aldo Fabrizi is great in the role of the magical jew -- who here happens to be, without any shred of irony either perceived or in any case intended, a Catholic priest. Imagine this situation, people so thoroughly insulated from thought they blindly miss the ridicule drowning them. The disadvantages of war, you know.iii
———- 1945, by Roberto Rossellini, with Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi. [↩]
- Who the fuck does ? "Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche" is enough to make one's skin crawl -- if that one's me and he's seen it before. Entirely everything that's wrong with Argentina was brought about by Italian immigration ; I find it'd have been perfectly excusable if they ended up a closed chapter during WW2. [↩]
- No, the problem of war isn't that a bunch of fucktards, important and powerful in their mind only, end up shown exactly how far their hallucinated "rights" actually extend. It's not the "victims", it's not the morons finding their mass grave that are the problem of war.
The problem of war is exactly the contrary : that the inferior, the soon-to-be-defeated, the "victims" of the future improperly attempt to separate themselves from their own existence, as the inferiors that they are, owing homage to their superiors, as the slaves that they are, owing obedience to their masters. In this arbitrary, harmful and ultimately indefensible act of wilful blindness lies the problem of war, in the "acting as if it wasn't" lies the problem of war, and there's strictly no difference between the tribulations of Rossellini, failing to notice how ridiculous he is in his set of idle pretense, and any other moron, equally failing to notice the exact same thing. The problem of war is nobody on a stick declaring himself a "ministry of cyberculture", the pretense, idle as it always is, doomed as it always is, of the anal child. That's the only problem of war.
Yes obviously all such exercises end in tears. The important part is to not misplace the tears, by shedding them on the deserved graves of the morons involved. The uppity idiots, the marauding morons get hurt because that's their nature, much like raindrops fall once large enough. Raindrops are undeserving of tears -- instead, tears should be shed on the untimely graves of all those stuck trampling the deserving underfoot, instead of freely and easily collecting the many and varied homages they're owed. [↩]
