V and La Dolce Vita

[meikle at mail.utexas.edu]

Heikki writes:

>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.

Ah, but what of that heartbreakingly young waitress at a seaside cafe whose
wistful but all-knowing innocence entrances Marcello near the end of _La
Dolce Vita_, and who beckons from shore to Marcello at film's end as he
sadly turns away and wades into the surf with the rest of Fellini's
hothouse decadents to celebrate a monstrous dead fish that's washing in,
knowing that he is already beyond saving.  Her name is Paola, and the dates
are right to make her the source of Pynchon's Paola.  To go a bit further,
could _GR_ really exist as we know it without Fellini, THE filmmaker for
intellectuals at the time Pynchon was coming into his own, and without the
bizarre rocket superstructure at the end of _8 1/2_?

Jeff Meikle