The Spectacular Commodification of Rome in Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores the postmodern image economy with regard to the depiction of Rome as a global city of the spectacle in Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza. It argues that an incongruity exists between the director’s auteurist and modernist aspirations to offer a film on Rome that provides depth models of beauty and truth while employing commodifying postmodernist film strategies and techniques of enchantment by spectacle. In other words, how does Sorrentino’s representation of Rome as a beautiful eternal city, a space not just overloaded but purposely overcoded with traces of the past, enter into dialogue with Rome as the seat of the debased and banalised image regime of our contemporary society of the spectacle first delineated by Guy Debord? Fellini is used as a point of comparison to investigate how Sorrentino grapples with similar dilemmas but in a substantially more advanced postmodern image regime of commodification involving advertising aesthetics, heritage filmmaking, and a diminished sense of historical immediacy.