La Dolce Vita amazes indeed the very faculty of eyes and ears. Eyes and ears are not just the targets, though, but recurring symbols for what author-director Fellini has on his mind. (p. 425)

The music of the film parodies itself, and the point of Fellini's images of sound seems to be that they fail. It was, of all people, Robinson Crusoe (though he was surely not the first) who pointed out that sound and language are the means of which human beings can achieve more than an animal relation with each other. Sound and language in La Dolce Vita, however, seem always to fail to create such a relationship. (p. 426)

La Dolce Vita seems more tied to reality than Fellini's earlier work, but only "seems." It really has that same strange hankering after myth as his other films. His script for The Miracle reached essentially toward the traditional mating in the fields of sun-god and mortal woman. The White Sheik with its horseplay on different kinds of hats balanced the impotent male of church and marriage against the absurdly sexual male of the fumetti (visual images again). I Vitelloni constitutes a parody of the whole male pantheon, while, in Le notti di Cabiria, a tawdry and pathetic image of Venus renews herself in water after venal Adonises have chosen and abused her. La Strada is the clearest of them all, a classic agon between eiron and alazon over a (more or less) mute woman that could have come straight out of Cornford's Origins of Attic Comedy. La Dolce Vita has the same theme and mythic dimension as the others, men overpowered physically, morally, or psychologically by the gorgonlike image of woman. (p. 427)

In this matriarchal world, men become mere consorts, lover-kings, ridiculous, impotent….

Throughout the film, from the vulgarized Christ at the opening to the transvestite dance of the homosexuals at the end, man seems weak and helpless. Throughout, women lead men—Maddalena leads Marcello to the prostitute's apartment; Sylvia bounds up the steps of St. Peter's leaving behind clusters of exhausted Romans, and the haunted-castle sequence ends with the old principessa-matriarch leading the shamefaced "men" of the tribe off to Mass. Throughout, men seem awed, overcome by women, often trying to make themselves into women, sinking down into women. The men seem unable to get places; they have to clamber, grope, fly, break into places women seem to sink into effortlessly. (p. 429)

The film, then, uses its two central images, sight and sound, to set off men against women. The women are goddesses, mythical, unreal belles dames sans merci, the sight of whom bewitches men into a kingdom of improvisation and illusion. Man is impotent, helpless, Marcello's dying father or Steiner, with his sounds and language, frozen, turned into stone by the fixity of his life. (Indeed, sacred to Cybele was a small meteoric stone acus, supposed to have fallen from the heavens.) Marcello, Everyman, is caught between these two alternatives, male and female, his mistress vainly seeking to play the role of goddess and petrify him into matrimony.

These themes all come together in the final dreary episode, the despairingly hedonistic party that follows Marcello's appearance at the scene of Steiner's suicide. (p. 430)

As with any important work, La Dolce Vita defines its own art. Fellini's concern about turning people into images finds its expression in what might be called the rotogravure style of the film. Fellini had both sets and costumes of La Dolce Vita designed to photograph in exaggerated blacks and whites, so that everything in the film would have the hard, contrasty look of a flash photo. The film itself seems almost to be composed as a series of stills rather than as a moving picture. Fellini's sense of the new, the unexpected, his theme of improvisation, finds its expression in the episodic structure (here, as in Vitelloni, this episodic quality seems a weakness of the film; only in La Strada, it seems to me, did Fellini overcome this his besetting vice). Fellini's brilliant use of dissolves also suggests a kind of impulse or improvisation (the best example being the opening dissolve where the gilt image of Christ suddenly, startlingly becomes a gilt Siamese dancer). This sense of improvisation, by the way, is not inappropriate for perhaps the only major director in the world who likes working on a chaotic set, who insists a script can only be an outline and "writes" his pictures by improvising on the set….

The good, grey Times insists on a Fellini "taking the temperature of a sick world," and that is no doubt true, but it is also a Fellini preoccupied with dehumanizing people, making them into things (Cabiria) or heroes (La Strada) or gods (The White Sheik), but in every case, dehumanizing them, making them into images—not an unnatural preoccupation for a man whose work in life is to turn people into celluloid. (p. 431)