CRITICA

One: In a conspiracy theories’ democracy, the more far-removed we are from the credible, the more we will be believed.

On the 11th of April 1953, the corpse of a 21-year-old Roman woman, Wilma Montesi, was found on the shore of Torvaianica, close to Rome. Wilma was the daughter of a carpenter of modest means, she was engaged to be married to a police officer, and the autopsy showed that she was still a virgin. The police concluded that she died accidentally by drowning.

Soon enough journalists from various sensationalist papers began to weave a series of insinuations and speculations, and the investigation was reopened. This resulted in a political hurricane that shook Italy for over a year. 

Italy was then ruled by the Christian Democrats led by Alcide De Gasperi, while the socialists and communists were the opposition. At the time Italy was a country molded by Catholic sanctimony. Even divorce was illegal, and film censors would cut scenes that featured kisses they considered to be too passionate. 

The memory of the Montesi case remained very much alive even many years later among members of the political left. The consolidated version of the events was as follows:

“Wilma Montesi was a girl who began to hang out with a group of high-ranking individuals in a villa in the area of Torvaianica, in particular with the musician Piero Piccioni, then aged 32. Here parties and orgies involving alcohol and drugs took place in which Wilma was involved. One day she died unexpectedly, possibly due to drugs, and the libertines consigned her body to the waves of the sea.

Piccioni was the son of the then Deputy Prime Minister Attilio Piccioni. In a reversal of the biblical rule, the sins of the child were visited upon the father: Piccioni’s father had to resign, putting an end to his political career. The young Amintore Fanfani, a young Christian-Democrat leader, seized the opportunity to take over the leadership of the Christian Democrats. [The Christian Democrats went on to lead Italian governments until 1992!]

In that villa, political personalities and other celebrities indulged in bacchanalians with girls. Piccioni’s son and two other suspects were arrested. The left-wing opposition lashed out against the corrupt world of clerical power. The lawyer Giuseppe Sotgiu, a leading figure of the Communist party and defender of the journalist who had launched the trial of the libertine people of the Capocotta estate, shined as the Grand Inquisitor of Italy. He denounced the immoral customs of the Christian Democratic regime. The police were accused of covering up the responsibilities of powerful people, the prefect of Rome was indicted and arrested for trying to bury the case.

However, some journalists accidentally discovered that Sotgiu had accompanied his wife to a brothel in Rome, where she apparently had sex with young men while her husband enjoyed watching. This caused Sotgiu’s credibility as a moraliser to plummet. Then the whole affair subsided. To this day, the causes of Montesi’s death have not been clarified.”

Years later, I took the trouble of checking the facts, and I realized that the above account, like the whole affair, was a collective delusion. We would see many similar cases later on in the Western world. The underlying theme of all these scandals is: ‘They [the people in power] have a secret life where they engage in various sexual perversions’. I would speak here of debauchery theories.

The suggestion that Montesi’s death was somehow related to the villa in Capocotta came from some sleaze sheets in search of a scoop, and they were taken seriously. There is no evidence that poor Wilma, who seemed to have been a decent straight-laced girl, had anything to do with that villa; after all, she was a virgin. Piccioni’s son himself was ill at home the day of Wilma’s death. Some of the ‘testimonies’ collected later were clearly the product of morbid mythomaniacs. 

In fact, little by little, the case subsided completely. In 1957, Piccioni and the two other defendants were absolved of all charges and declared innocent. Piccioni went on to pursue a brilliant career as a musician.  In a 2015 book, the criminologist Pasquale Ragone collected all the documents that proved how Wilma’s death had nothing to do with the world of the Christian Democrat potentates.

Beneath the blanket of a prudish and reactionary ‘petty Italy’ dominated by the Christian Democrats, a lava of unconfessable sexual fantasies was bubbling.

The ‘logic’ of how so-called ‘factoids’ are created can be illustrated with the following example: 

‘An inhabitant of a small rural village commits a murder in Rome. It is discovered that the murderer’s father was a friend, as a young man, of the current mayor of that particular village. Hence: the mayor of that village is implicated in the crime’. 

An argument, of course, on which the sworn enemies of the mayor of the village will tend to jump on. This perverse logic is much more common than we think.

Two: In Italy, in the course of the 1950s the media occasionally suggested that certain important people had taken part in ‘pink balls’ (heterosexual orgies with girls) or ‘green balls’ (homosexual orgies with male boys). Later, new political sex scandals would fascinate the masses of the entire planet. The most famous from the early 1960s involved John Profumo, Minister of War in the British Conservative government headed by Harold Macmillan. This aristocrat had had a brief affair in 1961 with a beautiful 19-year-old adventuress, Christine Keeler, remarkably dumb and who went from bed to bed with members of high society. The problem was that Christine had also had an affair with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché in England. It was immediately assumed that the country’s security had been put at risk – although I find it quite unlikely that Profumo would reveal military secrets to an uncultivated girl! But the factual basis, however slender, was there, unlike in the Montesi case, which was a figment of the wildest imagination.

An enquiry was held in 1963, from which the mores and licenses of the English nobility and political world emerged. The case began to fill the front pages all over the world. Not only was Profumo forced to resign as minister, but Macmillan’s entire conservative government then resigned in 1963 and the Labour Party won the general election of the following year. 

Reduced to its true dimensions, this is a rather banal story: a teaser has several lovers, among them a minister and a foreign attaché. But the facts are pumped up by an extraordinary mythopoetic force. A factual molehill is inflated into a media mountain because of the salacious halo of the factoid.

I could go on with a long series of events of the kind Bruno Latour would call faitiches, factishes, a portmanteau word of ‘facts’ and ‘fetishes’. Here I recall the clamour caused in 1998 by the Monica Lewinsky case, which led almost to the impeachment of President Clinton. In the autumn of 1998, I was in the United States: practically every TV network talked non-stop about the ‘case’. The whole of America had entered a voyeuristic bubble. 

Then we had the bunga-bunga parties attributed to Berlusconi. In 2010, when Berlusconi was still Prime Minister, it was rumoured that during lustful evening gatherings in his villas, with the participation of attractive, often underage girls, he practiced bunga bunga… something the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi is said to have taught him. No one ever found out what bunga-bunga actually meant, and here we can observe the power of the signifier: bunga-bunga was an enigmatic container that anyone could fill with their wildest sexual fantasies.

Three: Let us return to the 1950s. Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli perceived the mythopoetic power of the Montesi case and transposed the delusion into their film La Dolce Vita (1960). The final part of the film shows us an orgy, which Fellini filmed in a villa not very far from Torvaianica itself. It was as if the creators of the film were saying to the audience: ‘You’ve been fantasizing about high society orgies for years. Now we’re going to show you one!”. The film’s protagonist, Marcello, is a tabloid hack for a sleaze magazine of the sort that created the Montesi case. Later, in the 1960s, I witnessed some ‘orgies’ myself: they were more or less imitations of the one seen in La Dolce Vita, since, as we all know, life imitates art. ‘A group romp’ became a trait of the alternative youth culture of the late 1960s. 

The final part of the La Dolce Vita does not in fact reconstruct an orgy as it would have been practiced at the time, it invents an orgy so that people could finally imagine one, and possibly imitate it.

And yet nothing exceptional happens at the party in La Dolce Vita. A girl does a strip tease, but doesn’t complete it. We catch sight of a young man dancing naked, and then alcohol, music and dancing. Drugs did not really circulate at the time. A party like that would seem restrained today even compared to an end-of-year party organized by Catholic students. It is more of a project for an orgy that never actually materializes. But what fascinated audiences at the time was precisely the orgiastic mood of the whole thing. And where is the heart of the orgy, that which really cannot be shown?

After the orgy, the bon vivants at dawn, as if attracted by a magnetic force, walk towards the beach. Here they see a stranded sea monster, a devil ray, which seems to be looking at them. Some have read the scene as an allusion to Wilma’s body found on the shore of Torvaianica. But why does the scene strike us as if it had a profound meaning?

The creators of the film were probably inspired by the final part of Buñuel and Dalí’s legendary film L’Âge d’Or (1930). Here we watch the aristocratic libertines from Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom coming out of a castle one by one, having consummated a long series of sadistic orgies. The last is the duke de Blangis who resembles Jesus Christ, and who turns out to be a serial killer of women: in the final scene, women’s scalps adorn a cross. Here too, at the end, we find a femicide, as we would call it today, just like in the Montesi affair. 

In the orgies millions of Italians had imagined, and to which the Montesi story had given a hallucinatory consistency, something unspeakable, but ultimately also unimaginable, had to take place. The belief is that they indulge in pleasures that are not only forbidden but … indescribable. Divine. Hence the allusion to something sacred, the invisible black hole around which the orgy itself revolves. Indeed, the fantasy was nurtured that the Torvaianica orgies were attended by a nephew of the Pope… a metonymy of the Pope in person, who in turn… signifies vicar of God. As in Buñuel’s film, the supreme reveler is not Satan but… Jesus Christ. The sacred orgies of the bacchants, during which a young woman eventually dies, find their reincarnation in mass media gossip. Even in a secular film like La Dolce Vita, the post-orgy finale emanates an equivocal odour of mystical enjoyment. There is a sea monster, evoking Hieronymus Bosch-like torments and delights. Then, in the final scene of the film, a slim girl who inspires a profound sense of purity says something to Marcello, but the sound of the sea makes her words unperceivable: like a voiceless angel, she tries in vain to call Marcello towards something we will never know. 

Just as we will never know what bunga bunga was, an empty, enigmatic signifier that sums up the full mystery of power. The mystery of boundless freedom, of unbridled pleasure, of impenetrable complicity, which nevertheless leaves as a residue a dead female body, the scalp of immense privileges.