The Myth of the Economic Boom and Postwar Male Crisis in the Filmic Tradition of Comedy Italian Style

My dissertation investigates the Italian film genre called commedia all'italiana (comedy Italian style). In order to distinguish and analyze the commedia all'italiana as a film genre, one must understand its evolution and unearth its origins and predecessors in postwar Italian cinema. The first part of my research (chapters 1--2) is a sort of part destruens in which I comment and criticize the widespread opinion that commedia all'italiana represents an evolution of the most successful comedy threads of the 1950s, and particularly of the so-called neorealismo rosa. On the contrary, the former represents a total break with the traditional comedy plot, whereas neorealismo rosa reestablishes the centrality of romance as a positive resolution of postwar crisis that is typical of classical comedy. Like the successful neorealismo rosa, major Italian film comedies in the 1950s can be called neorealist comedies both in style and themes for their being in keeping with the working-class family apology that was characteristic of neorealism, whereas commedia all'italiana represents a radical change from the narrative pattern of classical comedy. The gradual commercial success of the commedia all'italiana parallels the evolution of the new urban middle-class toward a "critical mass" which represented both its main subject and its audience.;My second aim is to show that commedia all'italiana is a genre committed to revealing the delusory nature of the national symbolic fabric that was central to the Italian middle-class. The bitter irony that characterizes this genre lies in the (male) protagonists' awareness of the collapse of what is, in Lacanian terms, the Italian symbolic order, and therefore of their symbolic role. This collapse precedes the 'boom,' since the fall of the fascist regime and the end of the monarchy after WWII created a traumatic gap in that order. This trauma dissolved traditional symbolic links and marked the entire social edifice with an irreducible structural imbalance. I argue that commedia all'italiana is a reaction to this crisis, and must be considered the Italian postwar myth, in which the Italians tried to overcome the collapse of their symbolic order. At the same time, this genre reveals the Pirandellian discovery of social identity as merely a mask. In other words, commedia all'italiana justifies the new amoral society at a high price, because it exposed the tragic, 'humoristic' equivalence of all systems of values, and the performative essence that constitutes our social mandate.