The idea that sticks out in every direction from "Fellini Satyricon" is that man without a belief in God is a lecherous beast. I think it's a really bad movie—a terrible movie—but Fellini has such intuitive rapport with the superstitious child in the adult viewer that I imagine it will be a considerable success…. Fellini is not a sanctimonious manipulator …; he makes fantasy extravaganzas out of tabloid sensationalism, but he appears to do it from emotional conviction, or, perhaps more exactly, from a master entertainer's feeling for the daydreams of the audience. He seems to draw upon something in himself that many people respond to as being profound, possibly because it has been long buried in them. When he brings it out, they think he is a great artist.

Fellini's pagans are freaks—bloated or deformed, or just simulated freaks with painted faces and protruding tongues…. The freak show of "Fellini Satyricon" is a grotesque interpretation of paganism, yet I think many people in the audience will accept it without question…. Fellini's popular strength probably comes from primitive elements such as these in a modern style that enables audiences to respond as if the content were highly sophisticated. (p. 134)

Like a naughty Christian child, Fellini thinks it's a ball to be a pagan, but a naughty ball, a bad one, which can't really be enjoyed…. In "Fellini Satyricon" the party scenes are no longer orgiastic climaxes. Fellini uses Petronius and other classic sources as the basis for a movie that is one long orgy of eating, drinking, cruelty, and copulation, and he goes all the way with his infatuation with transvestism, nymphomania, homosexuality, monsters.

"Fellini Satyricon" is all phantasmagoria, and though from time to time one may register a face or a set or an episode, for most of the film one has the feeling of a camera following people walking along walls. The fresco effect becomes monotonous and rather oppressive. It's almost as if the movie were a theatrically staged panorama, set on a treadmill…. Fellini never does involve us: we seem to be at a stoned circus, where the performers go on and on whether we care or not. And though there's a story, we anticipate the end a dozen times—a clear sign that his episodic structuring has failed. Afterward, one recalls astonishingly little; there are many episodes and anecdotes, but, for a work that is visual if it is anything, it leaves disappointingly few visual impressions…. It's a tired movie; during much of it, we seem to be moving past clumsily arranged groups and looking at people exhibiting their grossness or their abnormalities and sticking their tongues out at us…. Fellini's early films had a forlorn atmosphere, and there were bits of melancholy still drifting through "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2;" if the people were lost, at least their sorrow gave them poetic suggestions of depth. There was little depth in "Juliet of the Spirits," and there is none in this "Satyricon." Perhaps Fellini thinks Christ had to come before people could have souls, but, lacking emotional depth, the movie is so transient that elaborate episodes like Trimalchio's banquet barely leave a trace in the memory.

Somewhere along the line—I think it happened in "La Dolce Vita"—Fellini gave in to the luxurious basking in sin that has always had such extraordinary public appeal…. And, though he doesn't appear in them, he became the star of his movies, which are presented as emanations of his imagination, his genius; he functioned as if the creative process had no relation to experience, to thought, or to other art. As this process has developed, the actors, and the characters, in his movies have become less and less important, so at "Fellini Satyricon" one hardly notices the familiar people in it—it's all a masquerade anyway…. I feel that what has come over Fellini is a movie director's megalomania, which has not gone so far with anyone else, and that part of the basis for his reputation is that his narcissistic conception of his role is exactly what celebrity worshippers have always thought a movie director to be…. People coming out of "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2" could be heard asking, "Where do you suppose he found them?"—as if he were a magician of a zookeeper who had turned up fabulous specimens. This increasingly strange human zoo into which he thrusts us is what people refer to when they say that there is a Fellini world. (pp. 134, 137-39)

Fellini's work has an eerie, spellbinding quality for some people which must be not unlike the powerful effect the first movies were said to have. Perhaps the opulence and the dreamlike movement of his films and the grotesques who populate them are what some people want from the movies—a return to frightening fairy tales. I don't think "Fellini Satyricon" is effective even on this level, because I don't find the Pop decadence beautiful…. I should say that emotionally his "Satyricon" is just about the opposite of "free;" emotionally, it's a hip version of "The Sign of the Cross." There's a certain amount of confusion in it about what's going on and where, so some people may take it "psychedelically" and swallow it whole…. Maybe if Fellini personally didn't impress people so much as a virtuoso they'd become as conscious of the emotional and intellectual shoddiness they're responding to in his films. The usual refrain is "With Fellini, I'm so captivated by the images I don't ask what it means." But suppose it's not the "beauty" of the images they're reacting to so much as that step-by-step intuitive linkage between Fellini's emotions and their own almost forgotten ones? I'm sure there are people who will say that it doesn't matter if Fellini's movies are based on shallow thinking, or even ignorance, because he uses popular superstitions for a poetic vision, and makes art out of them. The large question in all this is: Can movie art be made out of shallow thinking and superstitions? The answer may, I think, be no. But even if it's yes, I don't think Fellini transformed anything in "Fellini Satyricon." (pp. 139-40)