Culture Slut: 60s Cinema
Make it stand out
You want a Bugatti? You want a hot body? You want a Martini? Well bitch, you’ve already got it! Get your glamorous life together and join the rest of us by the swimming pool of the ultimate hot girl summer. UK Covid laws are up in the air, planes have been grounded, holidays have been scrapped again and all bets are off. Baby, we have never been more in need of La Dolce Vita. We are going to make the most of this unknowable summer and truly let the sun shine on our faces, no matter where that may be, what plans we had, or who we are dipping our toes in to.
During the long dark winter months of lock-down, dreaming of a restriction-less summer, I found myself diving back into one of my favourite eras of cinema; 60s Italian Art house. The clothes! The locations! The women! The drama! The sex! The consequences! The vengeance! The glamour! I want it all, and more. If my holidays this year are being put back in their boxes, then by God, I’m going to make every day feel like a day under the hot Italian sun, drinking a dirty Martini, contemplating burgeoning sexual desire, fabulous clothes, swinging music and breaking societal norms. I'm going to be Silvana Mangano, Anita Eckberg, Donyale Luna, and I’m going to transcend this dreary grey island, never again having to hear words like “Delta variant”, “unprecedented times” or, worst of all, “staycation!”
Helpfully, I've decided to put a list together for all you lucky readers of how to really live your life in these sunlit days, and how you can be more like some of the most beautiful, powerful, outrageous women of Italian 60s cinema. This summer might feel like Paradise Lost, but it wont stop us all finding La Divina within ourselves! (failing that, at least it might give you a good list of films to get your through some dark, hot and sticky nights.)
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Make a spectacle of yourself in a public place because you are so beautiful and glamorous and sexy.
This one is easy if you look like Anita Eckberg in Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece La Dolce Vita. Eckberg plays a jaw-droppingly sensual actress who becomes a veritable whirlwind of sexuality, blonde hair and bountiful flesh, ensnaring everyone who comes into her orbit. Her appearance culminates with her climbing in to the Trevi Fountain in Rome because she is literally too hot for us to comprehend, an untouchable goddess of fire and lust, submerged in the water of life itself. In some anniversary interview for La Dolce Vita in the 00s, it showed Eckberg as a much older woman revisiting the fountain at night, clutching a fur coat around her. “They do not call it the Trevi Fountain any more, since then it has always been Anita’s Fountain!” she laughed gleefully and shook out the sheets of her long blonde (still) hair.
How I would recommend recreating this for yourself is to just really glam up on an unexpected night and let loose. Don’t choose a Friday or Saturday, too many other dressed up people around, go for a Tuesday maybe, or a Wednesday. Put on your very best stuff, do your hair and make up, look absolutely glowing, get ready to stop traffic. Find somewhere to parade around, fountains are clearly tried and true for making an impact. Bonus points if you get dragged out by community support officers and escorted home.
Fuck a house guest and A) realise you were very lonely and go out looking for more hot guys, or B) have a religious experience which forces you transcend mortality and become a local saint.
Not going to lie, this might be my favourite thing on this list. This is part of the plot of Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema, in which a bourgeois Milanese family play host to a mysterious (and hot) house guest played by Terrence Stamp who are all seduced by him in turn, and have their lives irrevocably changed when he leaves them behind. This is a particular favourite film of mine, and honestly, all the reactions to the loss of THE HOTTEST ANGEL IN HEAVEN seem appropriate to me, from paralytic comas to train station cruising, but I'm going to personally recommend following in the path of the mother of the family’s, and the maid’s.
The mother is played by Silvana Mangano, and she is at her strangest and most beautiful. Her strong nose gives her the most powerful profile in cinema, and her dark hair and barely-there-eye-brows make her seem otherworldly, a marble statue come to life, a lofty Galatea type. She is gladly seduced by angel boy Stamp, and when he leaves she realises how empty her upper middle class life has been up until that point (come through, communist Pasolini). She thinks how lost she was before finding him, and promptly starts cruising the city in her car looking for more hot young men to pick up. If dick brings you joy, you can always find another boy.
“Have a pussy so hot that you can light up the night and set fire to the rain. “
This is in stark contrast to the family’s maid, played by Pasolini regular Laura Betti, who is virtually mute throughout the film’s runtime. She is so moved by Stamp’s hotness that she immediately tries to kill herself (relatable), and after he seduces her she has a full on religious experience. When he leaves, so does she. She goes back to her home village and just sits on a bench for weeks and weeks, eating only nettle soup and performing miracles, such as healing local people and levitating. Eventually it gets to be so much that she goes and buries herself alive in the foundations of a new building, weeping ecstatic tears of regeneration. I'm very into this and feel like I would do the same.
If you were looking to recreate this, I would maybe sleep with one of your friends in your shared airbnb staycation in Bournemouth (kill me now) and then spend the rest of the holiday looking for shady locals down on the seafront drag and asking them to finger you behind the arcades, OR just spend the next few days crying in bed and refusing food until you rise again on the last night and find a hole to bury yourself in on the beach. I have done variations of both and honestly, just the drama of it is the most satisfying part.
Have a pussy so hot that you can light up the night and set fire to the rain.
Forget WAP, that's so 2020, this summer we are BURNING down the house with our goddess fire pussies. This is the role that the iconic black proto-supermodel Donyale Luna plays in Fellini’s Satyricon from 1969, which carried the equally iconic strap line: Rome - Before Christ, After Fellini. Luna portrays Enotea, a beautiful young woman who spurns the advances of a sorcerer who then curses her with the most fire pussy imaginable, which doesn't sound that bad, I mean, who wouldn't want the option of breathing flames out of your own sacred orifice any time you wanted? She becomes a goddess in her own right, stoking the inferno of sexuality in ancient Rome and literally starting bush fires as acts of intimidation. The loose hero of Satyricon, Encolpius, visits her in the hopes that she will use her magic pussy power to break an impotence hex that has been placed on him, and she puts him through the wringer, allowing him to make love to her as both a beautiful young goddess and also in her ugly withered old wise woman form. If you cant take me at my Mad Madame Mim, then you don’t deserve me at my Elaine “Love Witch” Parks.
To pay tribute to this, I would definitely focus more on the metaphorical hot pussy than the literal, though I did once see a great burlesque act do things to a cigarette that can never be unseen. Treat that kitty cat right, pamper it, stroke it, dress it, write poetry to it, treat it to a three course meal of its choice. As things open a little more again, I fully encourage you to go have your regular STI screenings and scheduled check ups, because I bet you didn’t do any last year in lock down. Take care of your pussy and yourself! Be the hottest bitch around, whether your pussy is wet, or feeding the fires of desire! (No, but seriously, all you guys, gals and non binary pals, go back to your doctors and get back on track with your sexual health and general medical well-being.)
Fall madly in love with a handsome stranger and go on a killing spree for him, starting with your brother and finishing with your own children.
OK, OK, I know, it sounds a little extreme, but hear me out… IT WAS WORTH IT. This is the plot of Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea, starring renowned opera singer (and my number one star) Maria Callas, based on the original Euripides tragedy of the same name. Medea is the high priestess and daughter of a royal family in a strange and barbaric land, who when she meets the adventurer Jason decides to leave with him. In order to do so, she must kill her own brother to stop her father from chasing them with his army, but to be honest, haven't we all considered sacrificing a sibling for the greater good? (jk, love my sisters.) Several years pass, they have children, but the very hot Jason (played by an Italian Olympic long jumper with some very good legs) has decided he’s ditching Medea for a younger hotter princess, leaving her to be exiled. Medea is having none of it, and through a combination of magic, grit and steely determination she causes the princess’s suicide and kills her own children just to teach Jason a lesson. I'm not saying its the best response to a personal crisis (“As long as you know I exist I want to suffer!”), but I bet she felt a bit of release at the end of it.
To be honest, I don’t think I would suggest you do something similar, but you can take refuge in knowing that something like this was already happening to Maria Callas in real life. She had been in a high profile celebrity relationship with multi millionaire Aristotle Onassis for several years until one day he vanished for a few weeks and then re-emerged with a richer, younger, more publicly adored wife in the form of Jackie Kennedy. I bet Callas wished she could have sent Kennedy a cursed dress that would have set her on fire, or maybe killed one of Onassis’s dogs do get back at him for breaking her heart and embarrassing her on the world stage (jk, love dogs.) In summer 2021, maybe she would just leave a mean comment on Jackie’s instagram from a throwaway account, and chuck all of Aristotle’s succulents out of the window, one by one.
Look very picturesque whilst pining at parties for that one hot guy, but move on quickly when he turns out to be a fuckboy. She who laughs last laughs the laughingest.
We’ve all been there, and may soon find ourselves there again. As lock-down ends and we can finally go back to bars and parties, you might see THAT ONE HOT GUY you’ve been mooning over on instagram, falling deeper and deeper into crush-love as the days pass and isolation deepens, but take a leaf out of Anouk Aimee’s book and be adaptable. Aimee plays the vampy Madalenna in La Dolce Vita, the dark and sleek invert of Anita Eckberg’s busty blondeness. She appears in several of the film’s vignettes as the well known commitment-phobic Marcello’s sometimes mistress, always in fitted black dresses, always exquisitely lit. She is THE cool girl, the effortless fantasy woman, the dark goddess who ripples with her own sexual desires and authority. In one sequence, growing bored of the parties, she speaks to Marcello from a separate room in a crumbling mansion’s chapel annexe, and asks if he will stop the games and marry her. He doesn't answer directly, but this non-answer is enough for Madalenna and before he’s even spit out enough words to change the subject, she in the arms of another devastatingly handsome young man. Absolute queen moves.
Never pin all your hopes on one person, or even on an empty government promise. Always have a back up plan, be ready to make your change at the drop of a hat. Life is too short to mope. Life is too short to feel rotten about what could (and SHOULD) have been. We’ve all had a year and a half (and counting) stolen from us, don’t let fuckboys, or Boris, or Covid, take even more. Talk to your friends. Mix a cocktail. Change your bedsheets. Watch a good film. Wake up the next day and be fabulous. The sun shines only for you. You’ve got this.
Words and Images: Misha MN
