Fellini's avowed purpose in Amarcord is very straightforward: "I simply wanted to create a portrait of a little Northern Italian town for a couple of hours. A town with its fantasy, its cynicism, its superstitions, its confusions, its fetes, and the passing of seasons." The film, however, is much more complex than a simple reverie or unvarnished history. No one remembers quite like Fellini, as we all know, so the film is really a quite personal and idiosyncratic vision of social history.

Fellini's loving portrait of his little town lacks a unifying plot; Amarcord is an impressionist mood piece that generally outlines the seasons of the year and the stages in life. There are births and deaths, weddings and orgies, holidays and holydays, parades and movies, motorcycles and peacocks. Yet beneath the frivolity and sentimentality, under the gentle satire and savage grotesques, lies a rich perception of the appeal of fascism…. To visit Fellini's home town in the thirties, to know the families there, to share Titta's relationship with his teachers, his mother, the town prostitutes, his schoolmates, and his church may finally be the only way to understand fascism. The very emotional, and seemingly harmless, attachments and taboos Fellini so lovingly delineates grew into a mass movement, a fanatical movement where inflamed emotion replaced reason. (p. 25)

Intellectually it's sometimes hard to tie social forces like fascism, militarism, sexual repression, and religion together; cinematically, Fellini draws the connection with ease. Youths who hear of saints crying when they masturbate can easily fantasize about fascist figureheads lauding them and their virgin brides. The glories and ceremonies of the ancient Church of Rome can quickly shade into the glorious rebirth of the Roman Empire under fascism. The majesty of sacramental liturgy can also be paralleled by the exhibitionism of military ceremony. Religion, nationalism, and repression thus go hand in hand in forming an authoritarian personality. (pp. 25, 27)

Light and dark, the best and worst, are strangely mixed in life and in Fellini's films. Fellini's touch is a gentle one, however, and to view too much of Amarcord as a structural vision of the roots of fascism would be to belie the other obvious charms of the movie: the peacock in the snow, the madman in a tree, the overendowed tobacconist, and Fu Manchu on his motorcycle. The thirties were not, Fellini intimates, a black era populated only by dark forces, for even his most earnest fascists do little more than use castor oil for their third degree. Instead of ominous symphonies, Fellini offers us what he calls "little music," a pleasant interlude "to be heard without needing to serve the chorus of eroticism and violence." (p. 27)