Crisis-women: Prostitution and Capitalist Modernity in Lina Wertmüller’s ‘Love and Anarchy’

“That pig must die!” declares Salomè, with tears in her eyes.

The pig? Mussolini.
Salomè? An anarchist prostitute embroiled in an assassination plot against Mussolini’s life.
The brothel? A sub-public sphere in the heart of Rome where the social contradictions of capitalist modernity reach boiling point.

This is the crux of Lina Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy (Film d’amore e d’anarchia, 1973), a bawdy, anarchistic tragicomedy set in pre-WWII Fascist Italy. The film, which revolves around Salomè, her coworkers and comrades in the brothel, and Tunin, a naive peasant intent on assassinating Mussolini, interrogates the murky dualism between the personal and political, sex and politics, victim and agent, private and public, bourgeois and proletarian. When Tunin arrives in Rome, he teams up with Salomè, who has entered into a relationship with Spatoletti – Mussolini’s head of security – in order to find out details about security placements in an upcoming rally. It is at this rally that Tunin plans to assassinate Mussolini. But complications ensue: Tunin meets Tripolina, another prostitute at the brothel, and they fall in love. The assassination plot is submerged beneath a deluge of contrasting emotions, commitments and beliefs, and Salomè and Tripolina end up thwarting Tunin in his attempt on Mussolini’s life. By putting them at the heart of a web of political and emotional intrigue, Love and Anarchy interrogates the contradictions embedded within the figure of the prostitute: Salomè, Tripolina, and the other women of the brothel consequently emerge as what Esther Leslie calls “dialectical image[s] of social relations”.¹

Leslie explores the centrality of women in Walter Benjamin’s critique of capitalist modernity in her analysis of his Arcades Project (Passagenwerk).² Whether worker, wife, prostitute, shopper, or female mannequin, women take centre stage in Benjamin’s treatment of commodity relations, implicated as both consumer and consumed.³ Drawing on Charles Baudelaire’s poetry of 19th-century Paris, Benjamin’s analysis of urban commodity capitalism provided a theoretical constellation of modernity attuned to the role of women and gender politics in processes of modernisation. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of the “ideology of separate spheres”, in which an artificial polarity between public and private based primarily on gender stratification saw women confined to the domestic sphere and omitted from socio-historical processes.⁴ This division, however, was only attainable for a minority of bourgeois women – rapid industrialisation meant that many working class women were increasingly engaged in commodity production and industrial labour, entering the public sphere through the labour market. This initiated what Leslie describes as a “crisis in social relations”, particularly concerning bourgeois ideologies of gender and sexuality.⁵ Conventional and culturally intelligible femininities came under threat as women performed ‘masculinising’ labour, and, for Benjamin, this reached its most extreme form in the “female fauna of the arcades”.⁶ A new “market of female types” – particularly prostitutes, factory workers, and female mannequins – swarmed the nexus of commodity production and consumption (the shopping arcade), and were subject to extreme processes of commodification and objectification.⁷

The shadowy but pervasive theme of prostitution in Benjamin’s writing has often been critiqued by feminist theorists who argue that he is insensible to the subjectivity of the prostitute and reduces her to an objectified archetype. Leslie says otherwise; she shows how the leitmotif of prostitution in Benjamin’s work amounts to one of the most dialectical explorations of prostitution and capitalism.⁸ Like Marx, Benjamin sees these women as exemplifying the violent project of capitalist modernity, in which all subjects become objects so as to consume and be consumed. He understands prostitutes as “emissaries of a whole system of exploitation, reification, alienation… stand[ing] in for every person in commodity-producing society”.⁹ As perhaps the most potent consubstantiation of the triadic capitalist/worker-commodity/consumer relationship, the prostitute becomes an allegory for capitalist exploitation. Interestingly, although she is a victim of exploitation (as are all workers), she is simultaneously an agent capable of exposing and annihilating the social conditions that form her. In Benjamin’s understanding of female sexuality as politically dangerous, the prostitute poses the greatest threat.¹⁰ She negates the tyrannical dogma of biology and nature beloved by both fascists and capitalists, in which sexuality and gender are trapped within the framework of biological essentialism. The prostitute, traditionally framed as apolitical, emblematic of social evil, and exemplifying the tyranny of commodity relations, emerges in some feminist writing as anything but.

Fascism’s dogmatic preoccupation with the nation’s body politic, particularly in terms of gender, racial, and class difference, leaves the prostitute occupying a shadowy and paradoxical zone. Within Fascist Italy, governing forces went to great lengths to erase the gaps between nature and culture, taking every opportunity to naturalise gender difference in order to exploit women’s reproductive capabilities for the fascist and imperialist cause.¹¹ In 1927, Mussolini launched a pronatalist “demographic battle” campaign, which sought to recentre women as mothers and housewives so as to “improve the race”.¹² This was achieved by taking women out of the workforce and asking them to return to the home in order to repopulate the post-WWI Italian population. The regime encouraged Italian women and families to reproduce with welfare benefits, tax cuts, marriage bonuses, better health care, monetary compensation and national recognition. Women who queried or rejected the demands of fascist propaganda were seen as presenting a distinct threat. This is most aptly represented in the figure of the donna-crisi (crisis-woman), an economically independent woman depicted as “extremely thin and consequently sterile […] [which] purportedly confirmed her cosmopolitan, non-domestic, non-maternal, and non-fascist interests”.¹³

As a caricature of the modern women, the donna-crisi is manifested in the character of Salomè. An anarchist prostitute uninterested in reproduction and motherhood, Salomè has a svelte frame, theatrical make-up, fashionable clothing, bleached hair, and worldly, modern ways, a presentation that riffs on the imagery of the donna-crisi popularised by the fascist propaganda of the time. The donna-crisi became an excuse for the fascist regime to increase its surveillance, regulation, and control of women, particularly those who did not conform to hegemonic fascist femininity.¹⁴ Many prostitutes were added to the fascist government’s official registry of “subversive people”.¹⁵ Paradoxically, Italian brothels were actually managed by the state, and purchasing the sexual labour provided by licensed prostitutes was considered a “normal part of life for the virile Fascist male”.¹⁶ Brothels were a contradictory site for the regime, both a necessity and a source of concern due to the increasing numbers of women entering the profession, forsaking their role in the demographic battle out of economic necessity. Uniquely positioned, these brothels often became the nexus of political action.¹⁷ In Love and Anarchy, the brothel is frequented both by fascist officials and anti-fascist revolutionaries. By proximity the prostitutes are privy to clandestine political strategy otherwise inaccessible to women. Salome’s strategic relationship with Spatolleti and scheming alliance with Tunin is therefore possible precisely because of her position within the brothel.

Like the prostitute, Lina Wertmüller is a contradiction. Critics have accused her films of being reactionary, dogmatic, perverse, anti-feminist, and intellectually and politically disingenuous.¹⁸ But these claims don’t stand up to critical engagement with Wertmüller’s oeuvre, missing the subtlety with which she explores the contradictory nexus of class, national identity, gender and sexuality, particularly as they play out in personal relationships. Her blending of a myriad of styles – working with parallelism and paradox – to present populist parables of class antagonisms is sophisticated rather than ideologically and visual incoherent. Humour, irony, parody, farce, social realism and melodrama coalesce to create hilarious yet lyrical and politically hard-hitting films. This is the case in Love and Anarchy. Rather than providing a moralising feminist treatise on the sex trade, in which prostitutes feature as nothing but voiceless victims, Wertmüller locates the prostitute socio-historically and examines her material reality. Discussing the centrality of prostitutes in Love and Anarchy, she describes how:

Although these women are prostitutes who sell their bodies to men for their livelihood […] they still manage to actively engage in political struggles against the bourgeoisie. Mariangela Melato [Salomè] is the political mind of this picture. It is she who is torn between pragmatically using the politically naive Giannini [Tunin] to commit this political act, and wondering whether he is prepared for this action and its consequences.¹⁹

Salomè and Tripolina’s immersion in both the private and public spheres is essential to their antifascist action – they are both uniquely located in capitalist modernity. The public arena of Love and Anarchy is no idealised urban sphere in which disparate individuals could come together and undermine hierarchical social organisation, but a highly regulated fascistic landscape. This is keenly observed by Wertmüller: throughout the film the barren public spaces are, until near the end, occupied exclusively by fascist officials, the prostitutes, and their clientele. Historical sites of public participation and collectivity such as the Roman Forum and Capitoline Hill feature as ghostly relics, the city nothing more than a playground for fascist agents.

In Love and Anarchy the brothel is the only creative space; hybrid, sub-public. It is a site of worker-consumer relations that resists the apparatuses and ideology of fascist Italy, the locus of the film’s action. Its interior, a shadowy theatrical site of performance, spectacle, and artifice, is a foil to the sparsely populated exterior spaces of Rome, littered with fascist monuments and rationalist architecture signalling imperial glory, reason, and the victorious past of Ancient Rome. The brothel and its performances abound with irony and parody; the prostitutes are bawdy and extreme; their costumes are opulent, fashionable, and their make-up heavy. In a musical montage, we see the women of the bordello strut around the living room, hoping to entice customers. As ‘La Petite Tonkinoise’ plays, each prostitute descends the stairwell and enters the room, winking at the infatuated men. Wertmüller’s camera objectifies their bodies: they are split up, reduced to body parts, their commodified sexuality on display to both the johns and the audience. She cuts off their faces, and at one point shows an entire row of nude torsos. The close focus on their pearls and various adornments is a scopophilic fragmentation that would make classic Hollywood proud. But Wertmüller’s carnivalesque visual language is a parody of this urge, and manipulates the spectator into an awareness of their voyeurism.²⁰ As the camera moves between the stupefied ogling of the johns and the energetic, calculating eyeballing of the prostitutes, Wertmüller attributes dynamism, energy, and imagination to the women. They appear to revel in the theatricality and their vigour stands in sharp contrast to the mens’ passive prurience. In their vaudeville performance they initially appear as objects of vision which we view as voyeurs, yet as the performance progresses our gaze increasingly identifies them as with energy and action. Although initially complicit with the johns, the spectator’s identification ends up with the prostitutes. This transition is alienating in that it forces an awareness of oneself as spectator, as active participants of political meaning-making. It is here that Wertmüller is at her most potent.

Wertmüller is careful to not frame the prostitutes as archetypal victims or martyrs. Rather, she muddies the boundary between personal and political, anchoring each character to the socio-historic moment in which their political position was formed. Salomè is avenging the murder of her lover, Anteo Zamboni, lynched by a mob after a failed assassination attempt on Mussolini in 1926 – in fact a real-life event and a historical mooring seemingly in opposition to Wertmüller’s intensely artificial visual style.²¹ Similarly, Tripolina’s actions throughout the film emerge from the love she feels for Tunin. Initially, her character is cast as romantic, innocent, and apolitical, a contrast to Salomè’s hard-nosed and savvy donna-crisi. She is located out of history and politics, somehow more attuned to nature, innocence, and the feminine ideal. As Grace Bullaro argues, she is often placed in the womb-like bedroom, or in natural settings.²² Within the microcosm of the brothel, Tripolina and Salomè represent the dualisms of nature and culture, of public and private, so central to capitalist modernity and fascist ideology. Wertmüller inverts these: when Tripolina falls in love with Tunin, she becomes hardened and world-weary. Later, she argues with Salomè over whether to wake Tunin so that he can accomplish his mission, telling Salomè that “no cause is worth a poor young guy having to die like a dog.”  Salomè retorts that feelings are a luxury before collapsing into Tripolina’s arms. In the end, they do not wake Tunin. When he realises he has been thwarted, he declares that he will kill himself. In the chaos that follows, officials storm the brothel and Tunin is captured and killed. We see Tunin, Tripolina, and Salomè’s political action essentially written out of history, the assassination attempt relegated to the work of an “unknown man overcome by a fit of madness” who then “took his own life by violently beating his head against the walls of his cell”. The complex interaction between political and personal commitments that unfolds over the course of the film, the political (in)decision of Salomè and Tripolina in relation to the broader anti-fascist and anarchist struggle, is reduced to a single act of madness.

In Love and Anarchy, Wertmüller reveals how those on society’s margins rarely figure in grand historical narratives. The film amends this, focusing on the microcosm of the brothel and the women within it as the locus of political action. Although the political action ultimately fails, it is Salomè and Tripolina who are the political minds of the film, not Tunin. It is precisely because they are prostitutes that they are capable of exposing and annihilating the social conditions that lay waste to the working women of capitalist modernity.

1 Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Modern European Thinkers), London: Pluto Press, 2000, p.114. 2 Esther Leslie, ‘On making up and breaking-up: woman and ware, craving and corpse in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project’, Historical Materialism, Volume 1: Issue 1, 1997, p.74. 3 Ibid, p.73. 4 Ibid, p.16. 5 Leslie, ‘On making up and breaking-up’, p.75. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid, p.74. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Leslie, ‘On making up and breaking-up’, p.74. 11 Natasha V. Chang, The Crisis-Woman: Body Politics and the Modern Woman in Fascist Italy, Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 2015, p.14. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid, p.3. 14 Ibid, p.7. 15 Claudia Torrisi, ‘The Anti-Fascist Sex Workers Who Were Institutionalized for Challenging Mussolini’, Vice, 2017. (Online). 16 Isobel E. Williams, Allies and Italians under Occupation: Sicily and Southern Italy 1943-45, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p.195.  17 Hedwig Wagner, Places And Spaces: The Public Sphere and Privacy in Lina Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy, Gender Forum II Issue 16, 2006. 18 Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, Regista di Clausura: Lina Wertmüller and Her Feminism of Despair, Italica Vol 76, No. 3, 1999, p. 389. 19 Paul McIsaac and Gina Blumenfeld, “YOU CANNOT MAKE THE REVOLUTION ON FILM”: An interview with Lina Wertmüller, Cinéaste Vol 7. No 2., Spring 1976,  p.9. 20 Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, Regista di Clausura: Lina Wertmüller and Her Feminism of Despair, p. 391. 21 Grace Russo Bullaro, Man in Disorder: The Cinema of Lina Wertmüller in the 1970s, Leicester: Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2007, p. 37. 22 Ibid.