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.
 156 Maurizio Viano out a textual analysis through eyes
searching for “the pleasure of the text.” And in the third, I will
visualize a constellation of cinematic and literary works whose
comedic portrayal of the Holocaust constitutes a little known canon
of which La vita é bella is but the most recent example. Reception
The film has become a sort of metal detector whose alarm bell
signals ideas, defects, goodness, hypocrisy or wickedness in people’s
DNA. (E. Gruber) The Award for the Best Jewish Experience,
obtained by Benigni’s daring project at the Jerusalem International
Film Festival, is truly “a blasphemy,” for “the Holocaust
misrepresentations of Life Js Beautiful’ are “unforgivably obscene”;
but “there are further horrors beyond the movie: a-historic film
critics who slaver over it, fuzzy-thinking crowds who embrace it,” and
favorable Jewish reviewers “who definitely should know better.” Thus
ends Gerald Peary’s review in the Boston Phoenix, leaving those who
“don’t have the honor of being Jewish” with no choice but to feel
intimidated.2 That moral intimidation in Peary’s strategy is clear from
his review’s opening move: “Peary? My family name was Pisarevsky,
changed at Ellis Island by American officials. My parents are
Russian-born Jews. What you see below is, I suppose, an angry
Jewish column.” Peary’s anger, however, is less cognitive than
rhetorical, a justification for dismissing the film and its author while
feeling good about it. Peary even calls Benigni, whose father spent
two years in a Nazi labor camp, a “revisionist.” 2 Legend has it that
Charlie Chaplin, when asked whether or not he was Jewish on
occasion of the release of The Great Dictator (1940), replied: “I
don’t have that honor.” 3 There is a follow up to Peary’s review. After
reading it, I called the Phoenix’s film editor, Peter Keough, asking
whether he would be interested in another viewpoint. ‘Maybe as a
letter,” he said, hesitatingly. I wrote a couple of pages, and,
predictably, they were neither published nor acknowledged. One
week later, the BJFF presented The Train of Life at a local theatre.
The comparison with La vita é bella was unavoidable. Josh Kun, in
charge of covering the Festival, wrote that Train of Life, unlike La
vita é bella, “isn’t so much humor about the Holocaust as it is humor
imagining a way out of the Holocaust.” Clearly he had misread La
vita é bella, since Benigni’s film is exactly “humor imagining a way
out of the Holocaust.” I wrote a one-page letter, asking for an
explanation and “begging” them to publish at least some of the
sources I had suggested, where interested readers (who we all knew
were/are many) would be able to find something substantive about
La vita é bella. Needless to say, my letter was neither published nor
acknowledged. I should add that Peary is a knowledgeable cinéphile
with a passion for the New Wave, Godard, etc. My attack is ad
positionem and not ad hominem. Besides, his review of Benigni’s
film is exemplary to the point of unconscious self 
 Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter 157 Peary’s is
but the extreme case in a series of negative reviews that appeared
in several major publications (e.g., The Village Voice, Time, and The
New Republic) upon the film’s release in the U.S.4 Their dismissal of
La vita é bella often adopts Peary’s strategy: moral indignation. Only
J. Hoberman, in The Village Voice, attempts an actual reading of the
film, his anger being a cognitive tool that produces textual
knowledge rather than moral outcry. Consistent with his premises,
Hoberman drags Spielberg along with Benigni into the mud, for “‘it
was Schindler’s List that made mass extermination safe for mass
consumption.” The existence of a very large number of non-angry
Jewish reviewers belies the assumption that being Jewish should
automatically lead to hating La vita é bella. Abraham Foxman,
director of the Anti-Defamation League, was approached by leaders
of the Italian-Jewish community concerned by and divided on La vita
é bella. Before viewing it, Foxman quipped that a comic film set in
Auschwitz “cannot be done, [it] is trivializing” (Kotzin 44). He
changed his mind afterwards: “The film is so poignant, it is so
sensitive, it is so informed by creative genius, that the answer is — I
give it a wholehearted endorsement” (Kotzin 45). Likewise, in the
Jerusalem Report, Daniel Kotzin argues: “Throughout, Benigni is
walking the thinnest of lines taking the risk in almost every camp
scene of lapsing into the offensive, of cheapening his subject. It
would take only one false note, one poorly judged wisecrack, to
destroy the delicate fabric. Yet extraordinarily — the more so, given
Benigni’s madcap movie-star persona — there are no slips, the
poignant balance is maintained” (41). Lest we too believe with Peary
that Jews favorable to the film “should know better,” attitudes
towards La vita é bella depend less on whether you are Jewish or
Gentile than on other factors. In some cases, it is plain political
animosity in moral garb, as with Giuliano Ferrara’s vicious campaign
from the pulpit of the right-wing newspaper // Foglio. Ferrara, on
Silvio Berlusconi’s payroll, is merely settling the score with Benigni
who, at the time of Berlusconi’s brief parody, and I could not avoid
making him into a straw-man of sorts. As I suggest in the course of
my essay, his reasons for bashing La vita é bella go beyond his
Jewish-ness, and originate in something that is rarely emphasized,
even though it should be. 4 Kauffmann goes so far as to suggest
that “apparently he [Benigni] couldn’t devise enough material to set
the whole film in the camp, so he fills the first half of the picture
with his slapstick (silhouette) adventures” (26). Schickel, arguing
that the film “trivializes the holocaust,” suggests that “sentimentality
is a kind of fascism too, robbing us of judgment and moral acuity,
and needs to be resisted” (117). (I cannot help asking: If he is so
concerned with people being robbed of judgment and moral acuity,
why does he write for Time, a magazine that is the epitome of
ideological whitewashing?) I have no problems with Hoberman’s
negative stand, since he takes the film seriously enough to turn the
review into a site for useful information and stimulating opinions.
Indeed, it is a tribute to his intelligence and professionalism that his
“negative” review does a better job on La vita é bella than many of
the opposite sign.
 158 Maurizio Viano leadership of the Italian government,
openly voiced his contempt for the Italian media tycoon. In most
cases, however, the appreciation of La vita é bella is made difficult, if
not impossible, by the presence of an obstacle that often goes
undetected. An examination of the critical judgments on La vita é
bella, conventionally framed within a low, middle, and highbrow
hierarchy, reveals that within the limits inherent to all
generalizations, the higher the reviewer’s position, the more
negative is the review. A case in point is what happened in Boston
and New York. The two major newspapers, The Boston Globe and
The New York Times wrote on the film in enthusiastic terms. The
weekly “cultural” magazines aiming at more sophisticated readers,
The Boston Phoenix and The Village Voice, panned the film. Likewise
most of the film specialists that I have interviewed either shrugged
their shoulders or expressed contempt. Students, on the contrary,
were enthusiastic, and so were several academics from disciplines
other than Film Studies (including Jewish Studies). We are faced
then with an obstacle that leaves popular or non-specialized
audiences and those who negotiate film ratings for them unaffected,
an obstacle to which middle and high brow film “authorities” are
more vulnerable. This situation is not surprising, for “the obstacle”
belongs to the slippery terrain that the French sociologist Bourdieu
ascribes to habitus as “the incorporated form of one’s class position
and the conditionings imposed by it” (112): taste. Taking La vita é
bella seriously goes against high cultural taste. Taste — Bourdieu
never tires of repeating — is economic and cultural capital made
real. Academic film scholars and high-brow critics (people like Peary
and I) usually belong to “the fractions (relatively) richest in cultural
capital and (relatively) poorest in economic capital” (112). Artistic
consumption is for us one of the most “distinctive” socio-cultural
practices. It yields distinction in the form of symbolic profit/status,
and distinguishes us from those who do not know better. By
displaying refined tastes in the arts, we constantly (re)define and
(re)position ourselves. Bourdieu writes: What is at stake is indeed
“personality,” i-e., the quality of the person which is affirmed in the
capacity to appropriate an object of quality. The objects endowed
with the greatest distinctive power are those which most clearly
attest the quality of their appropriation, that is the quality of those
who appropriate them, because their appropriation demands time
and skills that, insofar as they require a long investment of time —
like musical or pictorial culture — cannot be acquired in haste or by
proxy, and which therefore appear as the surest indications of the
intrinsic qualities of the person. (319-20) We tend therefore to
valorize those films whose consumption indicates that we do not fall
for the baits of the entertainment industry (sentimentalism,
mediahype, easy-to-understand plots, immediate pleasures). To
complicate things further, we do not appreciate being reminded of all
this, as if recognizing the
 Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter 159 social
function of our cultural habits diminished their value. Our tastes,
choices and reactions must appear as the result of freedom, talent,
and intelligence rather than socio-cultural logic, apprenticeship, and
privilege. Benigni’s physical, comic style has little potential for
yielding distinction. In Italy, his films have a mass following, but are
commonly shunned by “serious” critics. Indeed, dignified aloofness
typifies high culture’s reception of Benigni’s films. For example, the
intellectually sophisticated, Italian film journal Duel did not offer a
substantive reading of La vita é bella (which they had done for
Titanic). Likewise, in France, the prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma
refused to give La vita é bella even the negative recognition of an
attack, as testified by Thierry Jousse’s report from Cannes: “a totally
disproportioned Jury’s special Grand prize for Roberto Benigni’s La
vita é bella, which deserves neither its detractors’ angered, grand
moral declarations nor the excessive praise of its supporters, who
unhesitatingly compare it to Chaplin (!) [sic]” (22). Not surprisingly,
Peary situates himself “in the minority who find Benigni a
bothersome amalgam of agitated tics and feeble jokes.” Had La vita
é bella not touched a raw nerve in the Judeo-Christian body, it would
have been met with the same fate as his previous films: silence.°
Benigni is aware of this situation, which is after all the product of the
choice he made when he developed a “popular” comic style
(comicita popolare). Drawing a distinction between humor and “the
comic,” he likens them, respectively, to eroticism and pornography,
and jokingly declares himself a pornographer, too physical and
unsophisticated to please refined spirits (Benigni, www1).© Much as
he may seem at peace with the populism of his comedies, Benigni
has now and then manifested his resentment for the way in which
his films are rigidly typecast as “low.” His interviews are filled with
high cultural references (for example, Schopenhauer) that often
surface in his films.’ In fact, his respect for and increasing
appropriation of a traditional cultural capital (for example, his recent
public readings of selected cantos from Dante’s J/nferno in 5 Of
course Benigni’s films would fall under the occasional scrutiny of
Italianists, historians of popular culture, and scholars of the
Commedia all’italiana. By “silence,” I intend the lack of scholarly
interest in either Benigni as an auteur, or his films as texts worth
exploring for reasons other than their being among the very few
Italian cultural commodities capable of holding their own against
Hollywood’s neo-colonial hegemony. 6 | accessed this interview,
which can be downloaded, on the World Wide Web. It is one of the
interviews that fueled my conviction, voiced in this paragraph, that
Benigni has a wide range of cultural interests ranging from the
Buddha to Schopenhauer, from Dante to St. Francis, etc.
Considerations of space kept me from providing a history of
Benigni’s cultural/cinematic career, for which see Simonelli and
Tramontana (16-22; 136-59), and Martinelli (91-122). 7 In addition
to the interview cited in note 6, see also Rebichon’s “Le Musée
Imaginaire,” where the Italian director surveys his own artistic and
cultural tastes.
 160 Maurizio Viano both Italy and New York) betray his
anxiety over a seemingly impossible promotion of his comedies to a
higher status. Benigni’s desire for a higher status is less a symptom
of ambition than of a genuine wish that his ideas on comedy and
laughter be taken seriously. Convinced that “laughter can save us,”
Benigni resents comedy’s ancillary role (Miramax press kit 21). His
latest films aim to bestow legitimacy on comedy by reframing topical
issues through the subversive lens of laughter. With Johnny
Stecchino (1991), for example, he confronted one of Italy’s worst
scourges, the Mafia. According to some critics, in fact, Benigni’s
satire of a Mafioso’s masculinity was an effective deterrent against
the fascination that the gangster image exerts on young men, even
more effective than the countless realistic films on the subject. In //
Mostro (The Monster, 1994), his depiction of a petty thief mistaken
as a serial rapist was in many ways a regression to his earlier style of
predominantly sexual jokes. On that occasion, however, Benigni
spoke of “the big challenge of transforming a dramatic subject into a
comedy” (Benigni www2). La vita é bella constitutes Benigni’s
attempt to maximize this challenge and prove his comedies’ potential
once and for all. “I had this strong desire to put myself, my comic
persona, in an extreme situation”; and “the ultimate extreme
situation is the extermination camp, almost the symbol of our
century, the negative one, the worst thing imaginable” (Stanley 44).
The Holocaust then is not an end but a means — “I did not want to
make a film about the Holocaust” (Stanley 45). That is, the means to
prove that (his type of) comedy can respectfully treat the Holocaust
and suggest an outlook that tragedy is unequipped to convey. It
should be noted here that Benigni’s project, far from cheapening it,
confirms the Holocaust as history’s worst nightmare and reinscribes
it in the collective memory through an unusual code. Although a
means to an extraneous end, the Holocaust was not cynically
exploited by Benigni as a sure attention-getter. The proof that La
vita é bella is not a cynical market move lies in the historical and
cultural awareness that sustains the script.8 Take the title, for
example. The film’s working title was Buongiorno Principessa! a
tribute to the phrase which first introduces Guido’s (the protagonist
played by Roberto Benigni) mythopoietic power to the audience.
During post-production, Benigni came across the statement “life is
beautiful” in Trotsky’s letters, written in the seclusion of his Mexican
bunker when the Jewish communist leader already knew that his
days were numbered. Trotsky’s words 8 Because of lack of space, I
cannot discuss writer’s Vittorio Cerami vital collaboration with
Benigni in the film script (see bibliography on Benigni). Already a
collaborator of such directors as Pasolini (e.g., Hawks and Sparrows)
and Amelio (e.g., Open Doors), Cerami co-wrote Benigni’s last four
films, from // piccolo diavolo (1989) to La vita é bella. Everything I
say about the script must be thought of as the result of a
collaboration of two people rather than the work of a single auteur.
 Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter 161
immediately resonated with the spirit that animates La vita é bella,
and became the definitive title. As such, it operates on multiple
levels. In everyday language, the expression “ Dai! La vita é bella!”
(Come on! Life is beautiful!) is often employed to cheer someone up;
it asks us to look at the causes of our despair from a broader
perspective. “Life is beautiful” functions on a cinematic level as well,
for it links Benigni’s film with Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and
the optimism for which the Italian American director is (in)famous.
Moreover, unlike Buongiorno Principessa!, the new title has no
apparent diegetic justification; it puzzles viewers and forces them to
ask questions. Benigni was certainly aware that while nobody would
recognize the reference to Trotsky, his title Life Is Beautiful would
expose it to further critical venom. “Can you imagine anyone who
actually survived the camps saying that?” predictably asks Peary.
Had Benigni wished to soften the prejudice and suspicion that a film
marketed as “a holocaust comedy” understandably aroused, he
would have kept the original title. Evidently, “artistic” motivations
had priority over marketing diplomacy. By calling, as it were, Trotsky
on the witness stand, the new title offers the example of someone
who celebrated the beauty of life under oppressive circumstances,
someone who, like Guido in the film, was Jewish but did not make
Jewish-ness the basis of his personal identity. Benigni’s efforts are
likely to go unnoticed since, superficially, La vita é bella has all the
qualities that most film specialists despise. Their habitual distaste for
Benigni’s slapstick is exacerbated by the film’s popular success and
by the feel-good, Capraesque humanism that oozes from nearly all
favorable reviews. (Kotzin, for instance, calls it “a dazzling exposition
of the way in which love, tenderness, and humor can sustain the
human spirit under the most oppressive circumstances” [40]). Add
the sentimentalism inherent the story of a father with his innocent
child in a death camp: from Bicycle Thief to Cinema Paradiso, Italian
films have often won the favor of their audiences through the
sentimental powerhouse of children in trouble. It is an emotional
terrorism that works for “them,” the popular audience, but not for
“us.” And if the obstacles of physical comedy, sentimentalism, and
media hype were not enough, La vita é bella is also not bello.
Benigni is not the type of director that will astonish you with
sweeping camera movements, against-the-beat editing, non-
narrative detours. His films are not for those who value style over
content, difficulty over simplicity. It is my contention that Benigni’s
unsuitability to high brow taste prevented, prevents and will prevent
most high brow critics and film scholars from taking La vita é bella
seriously. Which is too bad. If they did, they would discover what I
myself was able to discover in the wake of a fortuitous event that
confirms the legitimacy of my hypothesis — I know all about the
intellectual bias against Benigni’s vis comica because I had it myself.
When the manager of the Key Sunday Cinema Club invited me to
Washington to be the guest speaker at a preview screening of La
vita é bella, |
 162 Maurizio Viano hesitated. Much as I respected Benigni’s
long standing militancy as political satirist, I was no fan of his
movies. Luckily, however, I accepted and set out to do my
homework: articles, interviews, and multiple viewings of the
videotape. My first impression was skeptical and had it not been for
my responsibilities, | would not have watched it again. But I did, and
as every film scholar knows, it is the second viewing that tells “the
truth” about a film. Released from the duty of following the plot and
from the pressure of laughing at gags unsuited to my taste, I began
appreciating La vita é bella’s quotes, internal rhymes and intertextual
links. An allegorical structure of sorts was emerging. Far from
cheapening the Holocaust, the film prodded me to know more.
Allegory The war against the Jews was in many ways a war against
the imagination (and at bottom the Jewish conception of God): to
suppress the workings of that. imagination — to deny the sufferings
of the Jews any sort of symbolic representation — would make that
a war that Hitler won. (Leslie Epstein) A few people I know joked on
how they went to see the much talked about, touching film about a
child in the Holocaust, and after a half hour they felt puzzled: “Did I
enter the wrong theatre?” they all asked themselves. With the
exception of two premonitions (immediately defused by Guido’s
optimistic and childishly naive nature) the first hour of La vita é bella
is pure farce and fairy tale romance, with no hint of the impending
tragedy. Inevitably, detractors hissed that the first half betrays the
authors’ real interests — making people laugh — and proves their
facile approach to Jewish reality in 1939 (Kauffmann 27).
Undoubtedly, the optimistic Guido is not a realistic portrait of the
average Italian Jew in 1939. But even more unrealistic is his son
Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini) hiding out in his father’s barrack, or the
cryptic image of prisoners carrying anvils all day every day.?
Everything in this fairy tale is unrealistic, or better, has no
verisimilitude. To many, of course, the Holocaust allows for no
artistic license: its depiction must obey the rules of tragic realism,
the only mode/mood commonly deemed appropriate for fictions on a
reality that vastly surpassed fiction. But “according to what I read,
saw and felt in the victims’ accounts,” Benigni remarks, “I realized
that nothing in a film could even come close to the reality of what
happened. You can’t show unimaginable horror — you can only 9
Actually this image is a visual quote from Pasolini’s Accattone. During
his ill-fated attempt to reform, Accattone tries working. He has to
unload huge scraps of iron all day. After a while, he collapses with
fatigue and exclaims: “Where are we, in Buchenwald?”
 Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter 163 ever show
less than what it was. So I did not want audiences to look for
realism in my movie” (Miramax press kit 19). In fact, La vita é bella
intentionally conceals Guido’s Jewish-ness for about forty-five
minutes and rids the film’s first half of tragedy. Benigni’s choice
emphasizes an uncontested historical reality: the “Italian-ness” of
the Jews, their participation in Italian history at all levels. The
storehouse that Guido’s uncle Eliseo (Giustino Durano) lends to
Guido and his friend Ferruccio has a bed on which Garibaldi, the
symbol of the Italian unification process, allegedly slept. Eliseo also
mentions an original manuscript of one of Petrarch’s biographies. We
remember that Francesco Petrarca is the name of the school where
a fascist official is expected to explain the Race Manifesto and where
Guido (Benigni) offers to the entire student body and teaching staff
a funny and intelligent satire of racism’s arbitrariness. Until the late
1930s, Italian Jews lived, loved, and laughed like anyone else in
Italy. This remark does not intend to repropose the convenient
stereotype of “the good Italians even when fascist.” Puncturing this
idyllic image is necessary, but so is it also to recognize that there is
some truth to the stereotype. AntiSemitism did not enter official
Fascist ideology until race laws went into effect in 1938. Mussolini
himself had a Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, until 1936. As
Susan Zuccotti reports, in what has been called the definitive study
of the Holocaust in Italy, “the vast majority of assimilated and non-
political Italian Jews reacted to the racial laws with shock and
disbelief’ (43). Although all Italian Jews were affected, the situation
was far from being homogeneous. As testified by the tragic fate of
the Ovazza family, there even was the case of Fascist Jews who
blamed the race laws on Zionism and non-patriotic Jews, and went
on deluding themselves until it was too late (Stille 17-90). Many
Jews downplayed discrimination, regarding it as a symptom of
Mussolini’s opportunistic desire to win Hitler’s favor and create the
possibility of forfeiture of assets as well as bribes and corruption
Italian style. “On July 13, 1939, the government introduced an
Aryanization program, by which a special commission could simply
declare arbitrarily that a Jew was not a Jew” (Zuccotti 39). In this
deadly farce, Guido’s oblivious optimism in 1939 constitutes an
absurd response to an absurd reality. The intentional creation of an
optimist Jew who averts his eyes from the signs of impending
tragedy is more than a reflection on the advantages of disidentity. It
serves architectural reasons. By refusing to make Guido and his
uncle Eliseo icons of a foretold disaster, the film lets comedy reign
supreme throughout the first half. Cleverly, something similar, but of
opposite sign, happens in the film’s second half. Shortly after the
prisoners arrive at the camp, the film’s funniest scene occurs: Guido
“translates” for his son’s benefit the camp rules as they are shouted
by one of those who are playing the mean guys. It is the beginning
of the “game.” It is also the exhaustion of the film’s vis comica, and
we practically stop laughing. Benigni’s gags are virtually non-
existent, and
 164 Maurizio Viano viewers’ facial muscles are too busy
containing emotions and tears to afford the liberating luxury of
sincere laughter. The lack of jokes is, of course, a sign of Benigni’s
respectful restraint. But as happened with the first half, letting go of
comedy’s prime objective serves architectural reasons. It purifies, as
it were, the second half so that tears replace laughter, fear replaces
optimism. La vita é bella has a remarkable architecture because it
creates a filmic space that is virtually symmetrical. It is, however, a
weird symmetry. Far from producing the sense of balance and
comforting harmony traditionally associated with it, symmetry here
disorients viewers by forcing them to experience the anxiety of an
unexpected schizophrenic attack. La vita é bella splices together two
halves that do not belong together because they are, in fact,
recalcitrant opposites, one the negation of the other: slapstick
comedy and tragedy. The legitimacy of the film’s aspirations to be
treated seriously starts here, in the deliberate and uncommon short-
circuiting of two modes of representation that may tolerate and even
profit by mixing, but cannot be merely juxtaposed without seeing
their identities and effects unpredictably altered. La vita é bella is
not a tragicomic film, but it is first comic and then tragic. The
tragicomic is a healthy, if occasionally disturbing, mix that aims as a
rule either at making comedy serious by bestowing gravity on its
lightness, or at defusing the depression provoked by tragedy. The
latter is uncanny and unsettling, potentially sickening and always
disorienting, insofar as spectators are forced into a schizoid
experience. In a sense La vita é bella successfully helps its viewers
to imagine what many Italian Jews must have felt: the eruption of
absurdity and the transformation of one reality into its opposite. In
this way Benigni’s film is faithful to reality: it dramatizes its deepest
implications. To put it differently, La vita é bella is faithful to reality in
spirit and not in the letter, the same way that depth psychology
claims faithfulness to the ultimate reality of a person. The film’s
architecture, its global structure, is too deliberately dual not to
become significant in and of itself. Try to visualize these two halves,
disposed one after the other, and opposing one another as white and
black would. I am proposing to look at the film’s formal arrangement
as a spatio-temporal allegory. Spatially, the two opposites are kept
separate and yet over-determine one another, a bit like the yin-yang
symbol, where the black and the white are well defined and
symmetrically juxtaposed, but each contains a speck of the other as
a memento of their interdependence. Temporally, as Benigni himself
reminds us through a humorous pun that works only in Italian, we
are reminded of the devastating wisdom of the Old Testament’s most
mysteriously modern book, the Qohelet: “A time to laugh, a time to
cry.”!9 La vita é bella’s deliberately strident, dual structure is then
allegorical, a trait perhaps to be expected because 10 Un tempo per
ridere, un tempo per piangere. In Italy, film showings include a
break in the middle, the two segments of the film being called primo
tempo and secondo tempo.
 Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter 165 of
Benigni’s recent interest in Dante. As The Divine Comedy’s structure
of 3 times 33 cantos was itself an indication of the mysterious reality
of the Trinity, so La vita é bella’s architectural schizophrenia suggests
the irreconcilable duality in human history. It also points, as we shall
see, to Taoist wisdom as the only possible way to accept and live
such duality while transcending it in thought. Seen in the light of the
film’s architectural allegory, both ending and beginning deserve
attention. The ending seems to re-propose schizophrenia by first
violating then upholding the rules of comedy. Predictably, detractors
concentrated only on the happy half, on the “many, many from his
camp (too many) who survived” and who “seem immediately happy”
(Peary 9). True, there is a sunny feeling about the last few minutes
of the film, but it cannot be seen in isolation from the fact that
Guido, the protagonist of what is perceived as a comedy, dies.
Benigni reminds us that he has created a film persona out of his
string of comedies. He is a bit like Donald Duck, and his death in La
vita é bella is as jolting to most of his followers as the death of
Donald Duck would be: “I am really Benigni in the film, and children
identify with me. They ask their parents: ‘Why did they kill Benigni?’
The parents can only answer by saying that he is Jewish. So, the
children ask, ‘What does it mean to be Jewish?’” (Kotzin 40). The
film’s beginning is retrospectively so revealing that viewers should be
forced to see it again after the end. The credits flash on the images
in an unusually slow and unpredictable manner, and cover three
sequences. In the first, we get a shot of Guido in a camp uniform,
walking with his son asleep in his arms. Fog makes vision difficult
and a voice-over reminds us that the film we are about to see is a
fairy tale (and therefore demands the suspension of the rules of
realism). As if to make sure that we do not miss the prescription of
fabulous semiotic lenses, the words fairy tale are uttered twice in the
space of one short sentence. Also, Italian viewers are immediately
aware that the voice-over is not Benigni’s. Whose is it then? Only by
the film’s very end, in the scene of the “many, many, too many”
survivors in the sun, do we find out that the voice-over is Giosué’s,
Guido’s son, who then retrospectively becomes the narrator of the
film. La vita é bella is the grateful recollection of a son who
commemorates his father’s sacrifice in a spirit that would have
pleased him. Giosué’s voice-over begins and ends the film, imparting
a circular shape to it. But the first shot’s pivotal function extends
beyond the voice-over. It is also a flash forward, for, some twenty
minutes before the end, we return to the same shot. Walking with
Giosué in his arms, Guido mutters to himself: “What if this were
nothing but a dream?” And no sooner does he stop mumbling than
we get a POV-shot of a heap of corpses: what looked like fog is in
fact smoke from incinerated bodies. Indeed, it would be hard to
imagine a more effective way of making the first sequence resonate
with the rest of the film.
 166 Maurizio Viano The second sequence contains a ritual
invocation to the creative muses and another prescriptive gesture,
barely disguised in the sudden eruption of freewheeling slapstick.
The scene per se is unfunny, a predictable brake failure in a car
speeding downhill. In the allegorical scheme, it draws a tempting
analogy between the zigzagging vehicle containing the author and
the film itself. Significantly the invoked deities are Chaos and
Bacchus; and one can hardly think of better choices, since the ideas
of a refusal to follow a predictable structure, the eruption of disorder,
and the willful straying of Rimbaud’s “drunken boat” (to name just a
few) are all evoked. The image of a brakeless car that cuts through
the fields downhill, however silly, is then at once the material
support to a slapstick routine (it has in other words a diegetic role)
and an apt allegorization of the text as an intoxicated/intoxicating
fairy tale that will stray not only from the rules of realism but also
from those of fairy tales. It is also the film’s attempt to convince
skeptical minds that La vita é bella’s slapstick is sustained by a
textual awareness modeled after classic texts. The third sequence
shows Guido’s accidental encounter with his princess-tobe, Dora
(Nicoletta Braschi), and offers the first example of what is the true
common thread uniting the two halves of the film. It is the one thing
capable of running through both “the comic” and “the tragic,” that is,
the game (i/ gioco). The game does not start in the camp; it starts
with the courtship of Dora, hence the film’s working title Buongiorno
Principessa). The game is the ability to transform each event into
another story, the possibility that what happens in the unfolding
narrative called reality may have another meaning in the make-
believe text spun by Guido’s imagination. The game opened by
Buongiorno Principessa! consists in the art of living life as if it were
an allegory to which our imagination can provide the key. Each
occurrence can be lived in its humdrum, material significance, or it
can also be seen as the indication of another text. When Guido calls
out “Maria!” and the key drops from the window, he is successfully
superimposing his own mythical story onto normal, everyday events.
By saying “Buongiorno, principessa,” he spellbinds Dora into
believing that she too is part of a fairy tale. The phrase “Buongiorno,
principessa” is the invitation to enter a mythical world in which our
life overflows with secret connections and possibilities within our
reach, provided we awaken to them. The game, then, has a name:
spirituality. Spirituality of any kind is going to demand a similar move
from us; namely, that we stop thinking that our life has only one
dimension/reading. You can reject the game/spirituality, and roast
and boast in the material world. Or you can conceive the possibility
that everything that happens here and now, in history, can be
wrenched away from a narrative that is increasingly devoid of sense
and can be grafted onto another story, another realm. Of all the
reviews I read (both negative and positive), only J. Hoberman’s took
pain to unearth La vita é bella’s spiritual dimension. Of course,
Hoberman’s leftist ideology regards the film’s “fantasy of divine
grace” as “nonsense,” for it amounts to lying to children and
 Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter 167 spectators
alike, re-proposing a latter-day version of the opium of the people.
Indeed, our take on the game depends on our willingness to take
seriously the sudden eruption of spiritual needs, the return of the
sacred, that characterizes the end of the millennium. Where do we
stand? Is it a lie or a light? And the question of La vita é bella’s
alleged revisionism should be thus reformulated: Is it morally
legitimate, when representing the Holocaust, to suggest that
spirituality provided a key, if not the key, to unlock the camps’
doors? The game played by Guido is also intimately related to the
fairy tale that the film purports to be. The game consists in the
ability of living one’s life as if it were also a fable, a mythical world
populated by gods and monsters. Thus, the Holocaust was, yes, the
result of Nazi terror and Judeo-Christian history; but it was also the
possession of some humans by the very demons they had
unleashed. It is not a matter of choosing one reading instead of the
other — both explain what happened. That is what life as an
allegory means. That is why La vita é bella’s fairy tale can lift us
from the Holocaust, not because the Holocaust has been cheapened
but because our spirit has been enlarged. Thus as a fairy tale
visualizing a fabulous light behind the darkest shadow in human
history, La vita é bella is itself an enactment of the game. Benigni’s
film is the dream that comedic imagination triggers in our minds
once we reconsider Guido’s question before the heap of corpses —
“What if this were nothing but a dream?” — in the light of the film’s
spiritual allegory. It is, in other words, time to confront the air of
Eastern philosophies that transpires from La vita é bella. 1 do not
know whether Benigni has joined the ranks of the many Buddhist-
Christians populating the Western hemisphere these days, but to
better understand this film, the game, and the fairy tale, we must
now blow up a detail in the film and make a rather lengthy
philosophical detour. Early in the film, Guido hears from his friend
Ferruccio (Sergio Bustric) a pop version of Schopenhauer’s
philosophy. Ferruccio claims he is able to sleep anytime he wants by
merely exercising his will, and credits the German philosopher with
divulging such power. Guido is intrigued by it. He will use
Schopenhauer successfully a couple of times. He makes Dora turn
around in the theatre, and above all he wills the SS’s dog away from
Giosueé’s hiding place. It all seems like an innocent, low-brow, and
basically inaccurate use of a philosopher who is still popular enough
to suffer all sorts of appropriations from “below.” Benigni, however,
seems to be aware that there is more to Schopenhauer, that his
work is a site of competing readings, and that his philosophy
matters. After the death of Marx, Schopenhauer is the most widely
read among the nineteenth-century’s great thinkers, mainly because
he was the first Westerner to incorporate elements of Eastern
philosophy into his system. Buddhism and the Upanishads had a
large influence upon him and interacted with Kant to give rise to
formulations that would subsequently trickle down in many beliefs
and ideologies. Schopenhauer’s central idea is that life is regulated
by the “will to
 168 Maurizio Viano live,” which is not of the mind but is
rooted in the very fabric of our bodies. We think that our mental
representations are autonomous, but everything that we think is in
fact subordinated to the physical duty of avoiding suffering and
empowering our lives, even if it entails making other people suffer. It
is an impassive and impersonal mechanism that Schopenhauer
regards with a wisdom and a fatalism borrowed from Eastern
thought (and easily mistaken for pessimism). Life is indeed a game,
and the ultimate deity has the dual face of Shiva, whose cosmic
dance at once symbolizes creation and destruction, laughter and
tears. Prompted perhaps by leftovers of Christ’s most ideal message,
Schopenhauer theorized the possibility of rising above selfishness.
He regarded Mahayana Buddhism as the example of a possible if
difficult escape from the rules of the selfish game played by the will
to live in all organisms. Some exceptional human beings may reach
such a level of empathy with the suffering of others that they come
to regard it as if it were their own. At that stage, the stage where all
suffering matters, these extraordinary individuals stop obeying the
tyrannical will and practice compassion, or, to put it in Buddhist
terms, they become bodhisattvas. We are now in a position to
appreciate the complexity of the use that La vita é bella makes of
Schopenhauer. In the first place, the fact that Schopenhauer is a
German philosopher resonates with a film on the Holocaust. This
fact is particularly true since Schopenhauer was appropriated,
needless to say superficially, by the Nazis through Nietzsche’s “will to
power.” The “will to live” (that Schopenhauer regarded as the rule of
the game called life) became, in the Nazi reading of the philosopher,
a legitimation for their aggressive search of Lebensraum, or vital
space. Benigni/Guido thus pits one misreading of Schopenhauer
against another. What might go lost in the farce is the subtle irony of
a film that takes a philosopher misused by the Nazis and plays him
against them, thus revealing their ignorance as well as the possibility
of oppositional readings. Guido shows the possibility of a pop
reading of Schopenhauer that does not result in Nazism but in a New
Age-ish “fuzzy-thinking.” More than that, the film also offers a
practical example of a life made beautiful by the sacrifice of an
individual, Guido, who embodies the German philosopher’s idea(1) of
an exceptional human being . For Guido regards life as a dream, a
game, and is capable of so much love as to detach himself from his
own contingent suffering. A numinous father, he exemplifies the
individual who overcomes the gravitational pull of the will to live,
thereby putting someone else’s pain before his own and sacrificing
himself. Schopenhauer’s role in the allegorical scheme is but an
example, undoubtedly the most substantive, of the pleasures offered
by a close reading of the film. The Nazi doctor’s name, Lessing
(Horst Buchholz), evokes the author of the 1778-79 play Nathan the
Wise, which, for the first time in German culture, championed
religious tolerance towards the Jews. When Lessing stealthily draws
Guido aside, La vita é bella makes viewers hope that the doctor
intends to help.
 Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter 169 But
Lessing loses sleep over a riddle that he cannot solve, and oblivious
to Guido’s reality, asks him for help. Is the film suggesting that
writing (or making films) against oppression is futile unless backed
by practice? Is it a sarcastic commentary on the value of intellectuals
and their riddles? Be that as it may, the character of Lessing haunts
us as much as he is himself haunted. And there is another ironic
reference to a German great in the film: the composer Jacques
Offenbach, whose Barcarolle we hear twice, and who was, yes,
Jewish . Last but not least the father’s and the son’s names,
respectively Guido and Giosué Orefice, cleverly function on both
narrative levels, the historical and the allegorical, the real and the
game. In Voices from the Holocaust, Sylvia Rothchild interviews two
Italian Jews, Ora Kohn and Gastone Orefice. The former is from
Turin; the latter, whom I shall call G. Orefice to stress the similarity
with the film’s protagonists, is from Livorno in Tuscany, the region
from which both Benigni and Guido come. (The film’s first half takes
place in the Tuscan town of Arezzo.) Fragments of Rothchild’s
interview with G. Orefice were published in the already mentioned
The Italians and the Holocaust, Zuccotti’s authoritative study that
Benigni — I believe — must have consulted while researching the
film. Indeed G. Orefice’s testimony fits perfectly La vita é bella’s
design: “The majority of the Jews were more Italian than Jews,”
says G. Orefice, “and thought they were living in a good regime —
until the persecution began” (Rothchild 211; Zuccotti 26-27). In
addition to being a Jewish last name with a referential dimension in
the history of the Holocaust, orefice means goldsmith, and it may
therefore carry a symbolic potential, for Guido neither fashions
objects of gold nor deals in gold articles. In fact, the Orefice family
was not sent to the concentration camp because the Nazis wanted
their material wealth (aurum). Ultimately, two members of the
Orefice family overcame their fate by virtue of the spiritual wisdom
and personal sacrifice of Guido, who was tested like the just (the
gold) of the Old Testament (Sap. 3:6). Guido, besides being a man’s
name with a famous antecedent in Italian cinema — the spiritually
starved, albeit self-absorbed protagonist of Fellini’s & 1/2 — is also a
form of the verb guidare, which means at once to drive and to
guide. Leaving unexplored the driving symbolism (although the film
introduces its textuality as a brake-less car), let me concentrate on
Guido as guide. We have seen how Guido’s game practically guides
Giosué out of the Holocaust. Giosué (Joshua) is the name of the
prophet who guided the Jews into the Promised Land, and the book
of Joshua is the first after the Torah, describing Israel’s entry into
the Promised Land. Guido, or guide, is another Moses, who drove
Israel out of Egypt and through the desert but was not allowed to
enter the Promised Land. A military leader, Joshua led Israel across
the Jordan and into the Promised Land. In the film Giosué sees the
advancing, victorious tank as the sign of his father’s kept promise.
As an innocent and defenseless child, he symbolizes a future life that
has nothing in common with the bloody victories of his Old
Testament
 170 Maurizio Viano namesake, the defeated Nazis’ policy of
extermination, or even the Americans’ welcomed arrival on a tank, a
war machine par excellence. Guido is the one who enables Joshua to
be the final guide of his people; he is the father, or the Father, who
propels the Exodus and sustains the crossing of the desert. (Exodus,
Numbers and Leviticus are full of God’s rules for a “game” the
correct playing of which warrants the Promised Land.) As every Jew
sadly knows, even something so absolutely horrible as the Holocaust
had its positive sides: the return to Israel. The “Abbiamo vinto!”
(“We won!”) at the end of La vita é bella is not the happy ending
that seals a trivialized Holocaust. It is the cry of triumph with which
a people marked for extinction transformed their darkest hour into a
new beginning. But there’s more: Giosué/Joshua/Yeshua is not only
the name of the prophet of the sixth book in the Old Testament. It is
also the Jewish name for Jesus. In the film, Giosué materializes
suddenly halfway through as the product of the fabulous love story
between Dora and Guido. I am not suggesting that Joshua is a
Christ figure. If we remember, however, that Christians and Italian
Catholics. especially have the bad habit of forgetting Jesus’s Jewish-
ness, we may appreciate this additional ramification of the son’s
name. It is a reminder to ali Italians that their cultural hero is in fact
the Other, someone they themselves persecuted while blaming the
Jewish Other for it. Holocaust Laughter La vita é bella is not the first
film that attempts a comedic approach in the depiction of Nazi
monstrosity. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940 — Guido’s number in
the camp is the same as Chaplin’s Jewish barber’s — Lubitsch’s To
Be or Not To Be (1942), and Mel Brooks’s 1983 remake of the latter
had already done that. Of course Chaplin’s and Lubitsch’s films were
pre-Holocaust, but they can be considered as precedents of La vita é
bella. Their authors thought that comedic spirit and laughter would
constitute a weapon and a medicine, a response of resilience to an
enemy that expected only tragedy’s lament. There is also a
mysterious Jerry Lewis film, The Day the Clown Cried (1971).
Reportedly about a clown called on to sugarcoat extermination in a
death camp, this film was shelved before its release, apparently
because producers were afraid of public reactions. Finally, Lina
Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties (1976) brought grotesque comedy to
the camps, but it did not really touch the Holocaust directly. In
addition to these films, there is a small but significant body of
literary works that dared to stray variously from realism and high
drama to introduce “the comic”: Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the
Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1948), Andre Schwarz-Bart’s The Last
of the Just (1959), Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar (1969), Leslie
Epstein’s King of the Jews (1979), and Aron Appelfeld’s