Joelle

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

On Thu, 15 Aug 1996, jm wrote:

> I saw a film called "Nico Icon" a few months ago when it played briefly in
> Ann Arbor, and it made me think that maybe Joelle was intended to be like
> Nico played in reverse, a sort of mirror image ala V. perhaps.  If Joelle
> goes from sinister to human, Nico went from human to sinister.  She
> practically became a walking corpse.  She even turned her son onto heroin.

"You haven't spent much time with the indole crowd. They're very elitist.
They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic, generations of
blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community orgies, cantons
lost up there in folds of mountain that haven't known an unhallucinated day
in the last 500 years - keepers of a tradition, aristocrats -" (Viking, 261)

We can see these people's relatives in _La Dolce Vita_, where Fellini's camera
caresses the 17(?)-year-old Nico, among noblemen and women (like herself) and 
other upper upper class people, for some minutes before the end. Nico looks 
thriving, but also doomed already, the child of thin stratospheres. Like V 
(among other things), she's (and was to be) a vanishing reverse-Virgin of 
violent and deteriorating Europe. There are also some Hollywood people in the
film, but, to go on using Henry Adams' terminology, they don't make as apt 
a parody of the American Dynamo as Benny Profane does.  

Heikki