Rome, the dystopian city: Entropic aesthetics in Fellini’s Toby Dammit and Roma and Pasolini’s Petrolio

Abstract

This article focuses on the emergence of a dystopian imagery of Rome in Fellini’s Toby Dammit and Roma and in Pasolini’s Petrolio. In these films and novel, the cohabitation of vernacular and modern elements that had characterized Fellini’s and Pasolini’s works in the 1960s ( Ragazzi di vita and Accattone, Le notti di Cabiria and La dolce vita) suddenly fades away. What surfaces instead is a dissociated and chaotic cityscape that tends toward a state of maximum disorder and to the incorporation of diversity into sameness. I propose an interpretation of this paradigm shift of Rome’s imagery through the concept of ‘entropy,’ which in thermodynamics and information theory refers to a process of gradual decline of a self-enclosed system. I will first discuss the material mutations of Rome’s 1960s map through an examination of urban analyses by Benevolo, Cederna, and Insolera, before moving to a close reading of Rome’s image in Toby Dammit, Roma, and Petrolio. What I argue is that the process of dissociation and fragmentation of Rome’s map theorized in urban studies is replicated at the aesthetic level by the sense of entropic confusion and the loss of spatial coordinates that mark Fellini’s and Pasolini’s 1970s engagements with Rome.