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A bit of ultra-pessimism

I would guess about half of the people I know here in Venice wouldn’t appear on any employment statistics, yet nobody I know is jobless. Italy is a country of soul-twisting bureaucracy, where the rules seem designed to make it impossible to follow all of them all of the time (and like dark matter, there are somehow more rules than are countable). The paradoxical effect of this is, of course, that a vast amount of economic life happens off the books, or in nero (‘in the black’), which is to say paid in cash. Most people I know will have some situation where they’re paid in nero – they have one type of contract but are paid more than that contract is designed to allow, or they’re subbing in for someone who does have a contract so often that you might as well call it a jobshare, or they simply have no contract at all and are paid cash in hand, per shift or per week or what have you. And the species of employment involved may be a surprise – not just shops and restaurant moonlighting, but museums, concert halls, and even more middle class work (in advertising, marketing and so on) is often off-grid, with the latter usually paid well below the industry standard – indeed, below what the minimum wage would be, if Italy had a minimum wage.

In recent years, some estimates have Italy’s shadow economy (including organised crime) as accounting for as much as a fifth of the country’s economic output. I say in recent years, because of course the pandemic has been a particular crisis for unofficial labourers, whose loss of income has gone unrecognised by government relief programmes. This shouldn’t be a surprise – to qualify for unemployment benefits, a citizen has to prove that they have previously worked in Italy for at least a year, under a contract that has been officially terminated. Being unable to find work, straight out of school or university, is not considered enough.

Lack of sympathy with the low-income is deeply ingrained politically, largely because these in nero workers aren’t paying any tax and are seen as cheating the system. But let’s remind ourselves that this is a system that has a base-rate of 23%, whatever you are earning – below €15k a year, you still pay that amount. This is in contrast with the UK, for example, where any earnings up to £12.5k are untaxed, because of course they are, expecting people earning so little to pay tax is ludicrous. It’s inadequate, but it’s not nothing. Yet such are the structural inequalities of Italy, where the poorest have to pay as much as the many in the middle third, and are vilified by those considerably better off for even trying to find another way to survive (rents in recent years have taken off in much of the country, following the example of elsewhere in Europe). Crackdowns on informal work are applauded as forcing those people join the real economy. But often they have no choice, with employers only offering cash-in-hand – and what are they meant to do, refuse? It is employers, largely due to the exorbitant costs of administration placed upon them, costs which flow into the pockets of Italy’s army of lawyers and solicitors and accountants and bankers, who are resisting joining the real economy, not workers. The solution, as ever? Tax the poor further. The necessary tension in Italy between a sort of libertarianism of informality and the officiousness of the bureaucrat and the ledger used to bring forth a fruit of a certain kind – in the age of pandemic politics that tree is dead and barren.

With all this in mind, is it any wonder that most people I know have retained a politics of essentially the revolutionary left? Italian politics is something that most people under 40 have at best vestigial engagement with. The psychology of trasformismo – for things to stay as they are, things will have to change – is so embedded, that complete overthrow is considered the only option, the only thing that would really clean out the stables and start again. And yet everyone I know is also aware that this is pretty much an impossibility as they’ve seen it so many times before, most recently with the Five Star Movement, and most consistently with whoever promises to shake up the PD, surely the most useless major political party in the west. Not to mention this is a country in which the Communist Party itself is a decrepit relic of an ancien régime, with hands as dirtied as anyone by the various scandals of thirty years ago (after which everything changed, which is to say everything stayed the same). There might be some hope in the recent ‘Sardines’ movement, but there is little sign of any real impact.

All of which leaves them with nothing but red gestures, the attitude of political hopelessness, the damned who know they are damned, life’s unlucky losers flunking the rent and calling it a victory. What we are left with is a revolutionary situation without a revolution, decline gone endemic, a wheel turning slowly backwards, forever. If there was going to be an 1848, or even an 1832, someone seems to have forgotten to set the alarm clock. It is hard to see a way to solve an essentially insoluble impasse. In the meantime, the revolutionary and the unofficial will go together as naturally as the colours of a roulette board – and the house has always already won.

Venice in the imagination

In which the author commits an ‘as I write this’

As I write this, my partner and I are experiencing a very particular type of inconvenience – namely, the ambiguous fortune of living in a cinematic city when only your street will do to really nail the mise-en-scène. The fact that they rocked up four hours late to set up, the advertised 3.30 start yielding to a 7.30, you have to chalk up to showbiz insouciance – tempting though the national stereotype was, it turns out this crew is shooting an Austrian TV show – and I must accept that the needs of art supersede the buying of groceries. The fish can wait; movies coming through (I do have to say the film folk were very pleasant and did compensate our time – in Venice, however, complaining about people who give you money comes as naturally as breathing).

I struggled to discern exactly what the plot of this show might have been. The action for which we were granted ringside consisted merely of some young lad (a wrong ‘un for sure, given he was wearing the universally-known Hoody of Ill Repute) absolutely legging it down the street, followed closely at the tail by a cameraman who, crouching and swaying chaotically while running as fast as he could to keep up, looked like I imagine a hen would while running from a mudslide. I have no idea if our street helped the lad (presumably) escape from whatever it was that was chasing him, but he was at least helped in his quest by unusually strong illumination by Venetian standards, our small, rotting, wooden roof-terrace providing the perfect angle for a lighting team to brighten his night. Of course it’s possible that this just made him more visible to whoever was chasing him, but them’s the breaks I guess.

Assuming he made it to the end of the street and turned right, another fictional universe would have greeted him with a more alarming sight than a cop or a creditor of the underworld. The bell tower of Santa Maria Formosa didn’t make it past the first act of Spiderman: Far From Home, Peter Parker’s webby exertions not enough of a scaffold to counter the damage done by a mysterious elemental monster possessing the water (no more spoilers from me but, you know, if you didn’t get it, come on). Venice is used to a bit of destruction on the popcorn side of things: Casino Royale, the good newer one, atomised an admittedly fictional palazzo, while The League of Extraordinary Gentleman levelled an entire chunk of the city (though, to be fair, our heroes managed to prevent the whole place from going under, so small mercies – doesn’t explain how the hell the Nautilus could navigate canals that are max five metres deep, but that’s another day). Perhaps only New York is more used to getting this rather aggressive urban-planning treatment on the big screen, and that might be more an extension of its role as the default setting for movies.

Because, while it frequently finds itself cast as collapsing rubble, New York at least gets a couple of compensations. Firstly, the number of movies, books, everything set there is almost at saturation point (never quite fully though – every time some mediocrity like Pretend It’s A City makes you wonder if that’s it for things to say about New York, a small gem like Russian Doll jumps in to say otherwise). New York is considered from every conceivable angle and through every conceivable lens, rich poor glam scuzzy sweet sour addazzle dim¹ dingy, good clean family fun and the less clean family antics of mafia types, the place to be and the place to escape from, the hope of the world and the end of it. Which leads me to the second compensation: when New York suffers destruction, it is only ever apocalyptic, that a world without New York or its landmarks is a world already fallen. Independence Day showed it meant business with that dramatic zapping of the Empire State Building (sure, the White House and others went down as well, but top-billing was reserved for King Kong’s former climbing frame); The Day After Tomorrow got the point across by freeze-cracking the Chrysler Building; even within the MCU, though the Avengers saved the city, the fact it became a warzone was symbolic of the seriousness of the threat – planetary-level destruction incoming, first stop you-guessed-it. A world without New York is unimaginable, in cinematic terms, because New York is effectively world-sized. The range of known stories within it could easily coalesce and blur like a multiverse collapsing in on itself – Carrie Bradshaw running from the invading aliens, Saoirse Ronan ending Ladybird by being saved from the Chitauri by Captain America. A demise in one universe feels like a demise in all of them, of a place where we all, within the dimension of fictional media, actually live.

Venice, by contrast, is rarely the lead character in the tragedy; rather, destruction in Venice is the harbinger of greater destruction to come, a dress rehearsal for the real Armageddon. The tempting answer, and perhaps the one implied, is that Venice is dying anyway, if not actually already dead. It feels synonymous with its own decline in a way that few cities do, but also in a way that summarises how much of the world looks at Europe as a whole. It would be sad to lose it, but it is, after all, a museum flooded with swamp-water and foreign visitors. But this is only true if we keep telling ourselves it is, and keep making it so (that old thing about going on holiday somewhere and complaining that it’s overrun with tourists). The real reason Venice is used as a warm-up act in this way is the same reason it is seen as so contingent: movies and books set there almost never treat of the city from the inside but only from without, as flying through, the reality of it at arm’s length. If New York itself can sometimes be seen as a character, Venice is mostly only a backdrop – without real agency of its own, there solely to reflect something of the characters’ self-regard (or, more pertinently, to issue some seme of decadent glamour to the audience). In what way, for instance, is The Tourist about Venice, really (and never was a title so describing of a movie’s true purpose since Revenge of the Nerds)? Or even the Venice-section of books like The Wings of the Dove or Brideshead Revisited? Venice stands for something symbolic, but it is only ever a reflecting moon in these stories, generating none of the light itself. In fact, when it’s invoked in Annie Hall, it is only to reflect the apparently dying light of New York, not even a sign in itself but a sign for a sign.

Which brings us to maybe the Urtext of Venice fiction in its modern form. Death in Venice treats the city as undoubtedly a sort of character. Its nature doesn’t just reflect Aschenbach’s extinction but seems to drive it: intending to take the modern steamer to Lido Aschenbach is effectively kidnapped by his gondolier, forcing him into a mode of transport from another age and which Mann explicitly refers to as ‘a coffin’ (the Charonic imagery is also pretty plain here – and, lord knows, the lagoon can get pretty Stygian when it wants to); the city hides its cholera from the tourists, Aschenbach only finding out about it when a barber lets it slip; that this secret menace in the heart of the city is paired with the secret in the heart of Aschenbach, his growing obsession with Tadzio, an obsession which leads to his not fleeing the city when he had the chance, and leading to his own quietus after the ingestion of (what else?) tainted fruit. Venice here is a symbol, sure, but nonetheless a symbol with a kind of in-world power, willing its own destruction as much as being pushed towards it from the outside.

Nevertheless, you can’t pretend that it is treated as an actual city with actual inhabitants. Aschenbach’s point of view is entirely that of the tourist, and his view of the city, the ‘fallen queen of the seas’, is only that of the outsider (one example is the outrage at the city debasing itself with its crass commercialism, as if crass commercialism weren’t half the city’s wealth to begin with). The Venetians themselves are less people than vaguely malevolent entities, sprites and tricksters with no obvious inner lives, but rather sent to bedevil the foreigners with malicious enchantments. Tadzio, the object of Aschenbach’s lethal yearning, is a parallel of him rather than the city, Polish like himself, his own lost youth, rather than Aschenbach’s personal dilapidation as mirrored by the fading glories around them. As in Don’t Look Now – which also culminates in a great chase through the labyrinthine streets in pursuit of a filial apparition, only to be deceived by the fatal bewitchments of the town – the agency of the city exists insofar as it is a sign for the death, decay, madness, ill-health, and all-around unwholesomeness of our unwitting foreigners. Indeed, crucially, it is with the foreigners we are meant to identify, as if to see Venice from the inside is necessarily an unimaginable thing, the eldritch logic of the spirit-realm lying beyond the comprehension of human beings.

To all of this, some caveats. First of all, sheer dimensions – obviously, New York will have a greater multiplicity of stories, greater capital to wield over the cultural imagination, because size simply matters, and Manhattan alone has something like 30 times the population of the historic city of Venice (though the latter has more than halved in the last half-century, so Mann has less of an excuse on this front). Second, we could say that we’re only looking here at stories by out-of-towners and so they will, of necessity, lack some authenticity of lived experience (and, again, easier to have stories with the authenticity of lived experience if your town is home to millions rather than thousands – the size of your talent-lagoon makes a meaningful difference). Nevertheless, it’s notable how even in Italy there aren’t a lot of attempts at producing genuinely Venetian-set books and movies. Examples like Senso or Casanova are period dramas that, even if they make some sort of gesture towards realism, nonetheless take exotic holidays to the glorious past, and thereby condemn modern Venice by omission. For everyone else in the world, Venice is what it was for Alfred Musset in ‘Dans Venise la rouge’ (1844) – ‘a golden shroud thrown over bones’.

All of which is understandable, but unfair. Venice may not have the life of New York, but it has a life, especially a student life thanks to the reforms to its universities in the sixties and after. As far as I know, only one movie manages to hit this with any accuracy – Dieci inverni (‘Ten Winters’, 2009) by Valerio Mieli from his own novel, a college-and-aftermath romantic drama which, as the title suggests, only shows the city in winter. This isn’t a coincidence, as this emptier, white-cold version of the town is one far better known to those who call it home than to visitors. Sometimes indeed, as was especially noticeable during a locked-down December and January last year, the city had something of the post-apocalypse about it, blanched and deserted, dialect reverted to main language status, and while something felt missing it’s also not flippant to say that something else felt reclaimed. Venice not a sign for anything but itself. There are stories worth telling there. (Here I have to add the disclaimer that I haven’t yet got round to watching Atlantide, a film featuring actual local young people living around the lagoon, everything I’ve heard about which sounds promising.)

As for my brush with Austrian TV stardom, I wouldn’t even know where to look for a two second glimpse of my front door. If I am right, though, and it is some sort of crime drama, that may bode rather well – as Morse did for Oxford and Rebus for Edinburgh, Donna Leon’s sometimes-mocked but always-read series of detective novels featuring the intrepid Inspector Guido Brunetti may give a sensational angle on the town, but it is nonetheless an acute one, with the actual flavour of how it might be to live here. If television the other side of Friuli can start seeing the place like that – as a dirty, disorganised, informal, messy collision of lives – then maybe we are entitled to a little hope.

1Pace Hopkins, New York’s beauty is hardly ‘past change’…