«We come from decades in which spirituality was derided in the name of Marxist hegemony», says Gennaro Nunziante – if you don’t remember the names: the director of “Buen Camino” – in an interview, and I’m here to reassure him: there is no Marxist hegemony (there isn’t even any spirituality, but we’ll get to that later).
I don’t know if a left-wing cultural hegemony has ever existed – perhaps yes, and fortunately: if there hadn’t been a left-wing cultural hegemony in Bologna, I would now be lost like some of my peers whose adolescence was not shaped by Francesco Guccini and Nanni Moretti – but it certainly no longer exists.
To find out, just open the newspapers or social media and see how they deal with the takings of “Buen Camino” and the death of Brigitte Bardot. Both events that overflow from the pages of the shows and become (inadequate) reflections on the world are overseen by a single cry, a single alarm, a single drama: eh, but it’s right-wing.
It’s all a ridiculous act. Those who explain to you that Checco Zalone, with his discovery of spirituality (spoiler: he doesn’t discover spirituality, he just tries to please his teenage daughter, like all the parents of my generation, including those who make newspapers), makes that half of Italy for which films aren’t usually made go to the cinema. As if there were another half of them, as if there were three million or so other Italians who normally go to the cinema to see other films on another weekend.
Those who explain to you that people necessarily go to see it, there is a monopoly, there are contracts with exhibitors with the obligation to keep it for three weeks. As if the owners of the usually deserted cinemas couldn’t wait to dismantle the film that finally makes them earn money like when the cinema existed. As if people arrived saying please, let me see an arthouse film, and then, oppressed by the monopoly but determined to spend two hours at the cinema anyway, resigned themselves to seeing Zalone.
I’ll tell you with a little drawing, the Wall Street Journal published it on Sunday in an article entitled about the impossible happy ending for that modern antiques activity that is cinema in theaters. The drawing was a diagram of the total takings in cinemas every year in the United States of America, that is, a place where going to the cinema is indeed an activity that is no longer in vogue, but it is certainly not a disused activity like here (we are still the only country in the world that managed not to even go to see the sequel to “Top Gun”, that is, the popular film of the moment when we finally returned to the cinema after the pandemic: we only go to the cinema if we have to take a selfie like at concerts, therefore only for “Barbie”, only for Cortellesi, only for Zalone; only for that Milanese PR jargon: event, experience, emotional shower).
The chart says that in 2018 cinema in theaters moved just under 12 billion dollars in American cinemas. 2025, just over eight. The room is going to die. And if he goes to die there, let alone here.
While the critics (and Nunziante: no one is more denied than the authors to understand the works) toy with the idea that the right and the left exist, and that Checco Zalone, with his – oh yes – pilgrimage, fits into the first cultural trend, and while other critics think that those three million Italians who, with their digestion not yet complete, go to see him at Christmas go there because the monopoly imposes it on them, do you know what happened?
Anyone who was around in the twentieth century knows what a popular phenomenon looked like. It’s that thing where you went as a guest on the “Maurizio Costanzo Show” and the next day everyone – the bartender, the baker, the parking attendant, your colleague, your children’s babysitter, the dental hygienist – looked at you with a new look, telling you that they had seen you. It was when the mass media were, in fact, mass.
It was when “The Octopus” had seventeen million viewers. Costanzo no, Costanzo went in the late evening, and did more or less the numbers that “Buen Camino” does in a weekend: the numbers that define a phenomenon as mass, the numbers beyond which you can say that everyone has seen you, that everyone is talking about it. Popular culture ended when we started calling million-viewer prime time hits.
Now numbers no longer mean anything because we have unlearned that thing that the pollster in “The West Wing” taught: numbers lie. We think they can be read without context: Khaby Lame has seventy-eight million followers, let’s make him do something, it’s a guaranteed success. Then you have him make a book and it sells three thousand copies, because seventy-eight million means nothing if you don’t specify the currency. Seventy-eight million people hitting “follow” on someone they’ve heard of, you’ll understand. In comparison, the act of turning on the television and putting on Channel 5 was demanding.
It’s not right-wing or left-wing reasoning that makes you get the analysis of numbers wrong: it’s stupid reasoning. We haven’t become more right-wing (maybe, that’s something that can be resolved): we’ve become stupider.
Brigitte Bardot dies, and the replica of Alain Delon’s death was useful: eh, but he was right-wing. Eh, but it was racist. Eh, but she was homophobic (never met a guy who wasn’t crazy about Brigitte Bardot: what did you choose a sexuality with an aesthetic sense to do, otherwise). When did we become so stupid as to think it’s important to share what actors think, people who were buried in unconsecrated ground, people paid to make faces? Did you believe Keats and that bullshit that beauty is truth? Is it the fault of the humanities faculties?
I’ve been listening obsessively to “History repeating” for days: Shirley Bassey was good for Zalone and it’s great for Bardot. «In your opinion the first article “failure of the new Zalone, will not reach sixty million in takings” for what date can we expect it?» I wrote on Facebook on December 26, 2019: “Tolo tolo” would be released five days later.
Six births later, Aldo Cazzullo asked Luca Medici, inventor and actor of Checco Zalone, to comment on his professional separation from Pietro Valsecchi, producer of his previous films and legendary art collector. Medici replied: «“Where am I going?” it grossed 65 million. “Tolo Tolo” only 48. There is one less Burri in the Valsecchi hall. An empty space in the wall. What a pain.” I thought: these always identical controversies are not a question of right or left, they are a question of money.
Then I saw the excerpt of the interview reported by an influencer who provided his audience with the necessary elements to understand a joke that would otherwise have been too sophisticated: Alberto Burri was a guy who made paintings. I thought: this lowering of the level isn’t a question of right or left, it’s a question of no one knowing shit anymore, and those four collective notions that have remained have advanced from the twentieth century, and to make everyone understand how ignorant Checco Zalone is you have to make him someone who doesn’t know who Ernest Hemingway is, because if he didn’t know who Jonathan Franzen is he would be just like the general public.
Then Bardot died. And I saw zealous thirty-year-olds explain to us that Juliette Binoche is much more representative of French cinema (but where are we, in a Zalone film?), that no one had ever seen a film by Bardot (but where are we, in the scene where Zalone doesn’t know who Hemingway is?), that the life of a fascist is not celebrated. As if, in the celebration of anyone’s death in 2025, photogenicity didn’t count first and foremost. As if there had been, in the history of the world, someone more photogenic than Brigitte Bardot (perhaps just Monroe, who also had the wisdom to die before mass opinion).
I thought a lot about Delon’s death because they were friends, he and Bardot, they were beautiful and right-handed, they were beautiful enough to not give a damn about being morally right; and also for that friend of mine who, upon Alain Delon’s death, wrote to me that he was the last asshole with style. Which is also a good definition for BB, the clear aesthetic model on which all the stylish bitches of recent decades have been trained, from Kate Moss on down. Would you buy a used ideology, or at least a styling session, from a bitch with style?
There is no Marxist hegemony and there certainly isn’t that of spirituality. On the other hand there is the hegemony of peremptory opinion. There is the hegemony of believing in ideological bullshit of all kinds, as long as it is said in a prescriptive tone. There is the hegemony of wanting to write “I” without having the necessary training (Milena Gabanelli, I say to you: but was that little story about the youthful visit to Bardot with a use of verb tenses that would have been repeated in middle school, was it really necessary?).
In the summer of 2000, Harold Bloom, the most important literary critic of the twentieth century, published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Could 35 million book buyers be wrong? Yes.” Comparing himself to Hamlet, he took up arms against that sea of trouble represented by those who loved “Harry Potter”. You’re all going stupid, said Bloom, addressing the New York Times and others quick to praise the success of a book with, he reported, seven sentences made on a single page. He doubted whether it was better for children to read sloppy books than not to read at all.
Then it happened, as we know, that “Harry Potter” seems like the “Recherche” compared to the pornography that they now call romantasy and that makes little girls read instead of watching YouPorn, and parents can boast of having raised strong readers. As it turns out, no one knows how to criticize anymore, and we are left here, in Bloom defunct, with the hegemony of those whose only objection to an unwelcome success is: eh, but it’s right-wing.
The hegemony of not understanding the world especially when paid to do so, and therefore of being amazed every time people find a little piece of the twentieth century in doing what was once normal: having all seen the same film and being able to talk about it at dinner, “but how funny is the joke about September 11th?”; knowing all the same sex symbol and being able to converse about preferences, even if it’s just “better blondes or brunettes?”: it still seems like we’re in Group 63, compared to the average conversation of this retarded century.
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