The first shot of Fellini's "City of Women" is from the POV of a train, about to enter a tunnel. Of course, this opening image immeadiately conjures up a Freudian interpretation with a connotation of sexual intercourse. I want to combine this sexual notion, however, with the more obvious concept of the train. The train invokes a journey; a start in one place to arrive at a destination. What we can then derive from this shot is that Marcello Mastroianni's Snaporaz is about to go on a journey of a sexual bent.

While it may seem blasphemous, I would like to draw attention to the numerous similarities between Snaporaz's journey, and that of the generic "quest," more specifically, the Holy Grail quest of the Crusades.

The initial component of a quest, is the declaration of the hero. King Arthur and his knights are chosen by God to go on their quest for the Holy Grail. In the format of this film, however, the declaration is a bit less pious. Fellini's camera has established Snaporaz as our protagonist for the film; he is the focus of our eye as well as of the narrative.

Snaporaz begins his quest for the sake of a seemingly frivolous conquest: the attractive woman sitting across from him in his train compartment. In their encounter in the bathroom, she questions his masculinity, to which he can only reply that he will be ready in a few minutes. Although Snaporaz has all of the mental drive, he seems to lack the drive of his libido. As an audience, we are given the impression that perhaps Snaporaz has past the prime of his life and performance. There was once an ideal past to which he is now aspiring.

We must now harken back to the equivalent in the Grail Quest: the wasteland (which we can also see in T.S. Elliot's work of the same name, and Milton's Paradise Lost). The legend of King Arthur describes a loss, a certain state of decay which has come about in his Kingdom. At one point there was a paradise community; an otherworldy state in which men and women lived naked in harmony with the earth. There were also maidens who lived by sacred grottos which fed and healed travelers with the waters of springs and wells. But through a cataclysm or a slaughter, (the legends differ), the maidens of the wells were killed and the sacred grottos dried up.

Snaporaz's inability to perform in the bathroom can be examined as his own sacred well having dried up. He has the thirst, but no means to quench it.

There also exists a parallel between the death of the maidens, and the women at the Feminist convention. Running the risk of appearing sexist, Fellini the women of the convention as defeminized. They denounce their male partners, they sing about a world without men, and practice self-defense by kicking a dummy in the groin.

The maidens of the wells that Snaporaz once knew are no longer. In his eyes, they have been replaced, or rather slaughtered, by these women subscribing to radical feminism. The paradise that Snaporaz once knew is no longer and, like King Arthur and his knights, he pledges to bring a return of the original sacred wells.

Snaporaz barely escapes from the convention with his genitals intact, when he comes across his guide figure: the soot-covered woman in the boiler room of the convention's hotel. At first, we see her as a character who could represent divine intervention. She agrees to help him find his way back to the train station so that he can continue his travels. What he doesn't realize, however, is that his quest is to take a different course.

After an interesting ride on a motorcycle with the boiler-room woman, she stops at a greenhouse and begs him to make love to her. Snaporaz vehemently declines her advances. Although this might be interpreted as a matter of personal aesthetics (the woman is quite heavy set), Snaporaz will still not make love to her. He remains unable to act in a sexual manner, implying once again, that the quest for the restoration of his paradise still remains.

At this point, Snaporaz undertakes another popular type of quest: a journey into the Underworld. Greek mythological characters were consistently sent to Hades as a part of their quests. Even in something as modern as Star Wars, we see Luke Skywalker entering the Underworld in Degobah, where he climbs into the cavern to fight his own demons which exist as Darth Vader's body, but essentially, his own face.

Snaporaz's underworld is a car-ride with the drug driven teenage girls. This scene takes place at night, the darkness invoking a feeling of fear and terror that is normally associated with hell and the underworld. He is trapped in a car with these women whose faces have been made-up in such a way that they appear ghost-like, with their heavy white foundation, mangled hairstyles, and dark-circled eyes. Their demonic behavior scares him so much that he escapes form the car and is then chased by them down the street until he comes across the castle of Dr. Zuberkock.

The pinnacle of all Grail Quests occurs when the crusaders find the castle of the Fisher King. According to legend, the Fisher King was the keeper of the Holy Grail. The Fisher King has an ailment of some kind, the majority of stories point to the fact that it lies in his impotentancy, and once the crusader healed the King of this malady, he would reveal the Holy Grail.

Interestingly enough, Snaporaz's Fisher King is anything but impotent. The name Zuberkock alone uses bastardized German in a way that directly implies his prowess in the original Italian "Katzone". We then find that Zuberkock is having a party that night to celebrate his 1000th female conquest. While Zuberkock does not need to be healed of anything before he presents the Grail, his castle does contain the goal of Snaporaz's quest. But Snaporaz does have a few revelations to go through before his quest is complete.

After being tucked into bed for the night in Zuberkock's castle, Snaporaz's wife enters the bedroom. She mounts him and has intercourse with him against his will, after which she rolls off of him and goes to sleep. This is undoubtedly a role reversal for this married couple, and we can assume that Snaporaz has subjected his wife to many similar nights. This is the first major realization for Snaporaz concerning his sexual activities. Now he is being forced to understand things from his wife's perspective and hopefully he will have a bit more compassion in the future which would lead to the restoration of his paradise.

Snaporaz, left unfullfilled by the encounter with his wife, crawls under the bed to find himself forced into an arena where he is instructed by the crowd to enter the ring to meet the "ideal woman." Snaporaz finds the ring empty except for an old woman who tells him that he has succeeded. When he finds the ring empty, it could imply that there is no ideal woman who will resolve his quest. He is left standing alone, indicating once again that he must restore paradise by examining himself.

Further self-exmaination occurs then as he enters an amusement park where he is shown memories from his life. We see Snaporaz's boyhood maid's legs, a fishseller who strokes an eel, a masseuse at a spa, leather-clad female motorcylcists at a circus, a woman in a beach tent, a woman at a cemetery, and a prostitute with a very large posterior. Then we are shown a scene of dozens of boys lying in a giant bed masturbating to images of Marlene Dietrich and Mae West among other screen sex-objects. While all of these women represent a fantasized femininity, the final image is the most important. Here we see that Snaporaz, like most young men, was raised with the idealized feminine sexuality of the cinema (which, as Fellini himself acknowledges, is a projection of male sexuality).

This sequence is supposed to reveal to Snaporaz that he needs to escape this self-centered, idealized notion of sexuality. If he can overcome his own personal conflicts with sexuality, he can recreate his paradise. This is his Holy Grail.

Snaporaz then wakes up from this long dream/quest to find himself back in the train, sitting across from his wife, who is dressed in the same hat and boots as the attractive mystery woman from the opening sequence. Through this we can deduce that Snaporaz has found again his Paradise with his wife. She is actually the object of his rampant desire from the first scene. And we can conclude that Snaporaz will end his sexual objectification of women and lead a healthy, non-sexist life!

Dr. Brian M. Grosz
Four Italian Filmmakers
October 1998