The Dark Heart of Italy (18 page)

The irony is that the two humanists who have most often been the
scourge of the Catholic church, Dario Fo and Pier Paolo Pasolini,
have often used religious material – or at least moral criteria – to
criticise the dehumanisation of modernity. They were endlessly
accused of degrading Italy with their plays or films (even today there
is usually a great sucking of teeth when the name Dario Fo, Nobel
prize-winner, is whispered in Catholic circles), but they recognised
what was happening long before anyone else: cinema and then television
had unleashed the genies of eroticism and consumerism, and
the country had somehow, according to the critique, lost its soul and
its piety, even its politics, along the way. ‘Consumerism,’ wrote
Pasolini, ‘has cynically destroyed the real world, transforming it
into total unreality where a choice between good and evil is no
longer possible
.’
3
He called it ‘cultural genocide’. Dario Fo, in his
play
Big Pantomime with Flags and Puppets,
foresaw a world in
which viewers are hypnotised by a televisual diet of football and
advertisements
.

Witnessing an industrial revolution in the space of a few decades,
various intellectuals argued that Italy’s new-found obsession with
possession (carnal or consumer) had eroded the moral fibre of the
nation. Either that, or consumerism was a disguise, an attempt to
pretend that poverty no longer existed. Italo Calvino wrote of ‘the
suspicion that all our ostentation of prosperity was nothing but a
simple varnish on the Italy of mountain and suburban hovels, of
emigrant trains and the swarming piazzas of black-clothed
towns
’
4
;
with strikingly similar diction, Pasolini asked ‘You know what Italy
seems like to me? A hovel in which the owners have managed to buy
a television
.’
5

And it’s television that is now at the critical intersection of erotica
and politics. The story of the ‘new wave’ of Italian broadcasting,
coinciding with the end of the golden era of Italian cinema, began in
July 1976. The Constitutional Court decreed that the state RAI channels
would retain the monopoly on national broadcasting, whilst at
the same time allowing unlicensed, private channels to broadcast as
long as it was on a ‘local’ scale. In 1978 a new, local channel sprang
up:
Telemilano
. It served the residents of a suburb of Milan called
Milano 2, a residential complex of some
3
,500 flats which had been
built and sold during the previous decade by Berlusconi and his
anonymous investors. By 1980 there were
1
,300 private television
channels; three years later, despite buy-outs and mergers, there were
still more than 700. In 1980
Telemilano
became known as Canale
5
.
In 1983 Berlusconi bought Italia Uno, and a year later he bought
Rete
4
. Those three channels eventually bought out almost all their
rivals, such that the entire private sector broadcasting was unified
under the Mediaset umbrella of Silvio Berlusconi
.

The smaller the enterprise, of course, the more important the
advertising revenue. Thus Berlusconi’s nascent television channels
were the early models for
today’s
television. Programming was
seamlessly integrated with advertising in the same way that now a
programme is interrupted for a ‘promotional message’ and news
items are there to plug a product. Rather than being ‘alternative’, the
new private television channels and their low-budget programmes
survived by becoming advertising vehicles. Often the advertising
arm was barely distinguishable from the broadcasting business. The
advertising revenue of the Mediaset channels was looked after by
Publitalia, Berlusconi’s advertising company which, by 1990, was
responsible for 24.
5
% of the entire television advertising market (the
figure is now nearer 60%). It was an arrangement that was to
become a leitmotif for
Berlusconian
business: the buyer and the seller
incarnate in the same person, the left hand closing a deal with the
right
.

The Mediaset studios are still based at Milano 2. If you go there,
the whole place feels like something from
The Truman Show:
it’s a
kind of unreal, bourgeois bubble. No one need ever leave the million
square metres of the estate: there’s a chemist, a school, a police
station. There’s a strange combination of concrete and greenery: all
the blocks are a rusty red colour, and are linked by bridges and
paths which weave over lakes and roads. It all feels slightly
1970s
,
not least the names of the blocks: Palazzo Aquarius and so on. The
manhole covers have a simple M2 imprinted, along with
Edilnord
,
the name of Berlusconi’s construction company. At the centre of the
complex you can see a tower of satellite dishes and the symbol of
the Mediaset empire: the snake
.

Those three Mediaset channels, owned by Silvio Berlusconi, are
even worse than the rest of the channels. Watching Mediaset is like
watching out-takes from Sesame Street without the clever bits.
There’s a merry-
go-
round of about twenty personalities who seem to
be on television rotation duties. The same
VIPs
(pronounced to
rhyme with ‘jeeps’), footballers and ageing
compères
appear on
different shows on different channels, so that in the end each programme
ends up looking like the last. Invariably the band strikes up
half-way through the show, and everyone jumps to their feet to sing
a syrupy song from the 1980s as the studio audience claps in unison
and sings along. (Another of the favourite musical genres is ‘cartoon
theme music’.) Horoscopes are minutely discussed on the hour, and
magicians and wizards and sexologists often sit alongside the panel
of ‘political experts’. The mawkishness of these programmes is
amazing. If you try and keep count of the number of times someone
on Mediaset says
bellissimo
you’ll be in triple figures after half an
hour
.

Other than adverts and
Europop
singalongs, programming is
reliant upon films. In one of his many masterstrokes, Berlusconi
bought the Italian rights to hundreds of American films and miniseries,
beginning the era in which Italy became a mass importer,
rather than exporter, of ‘culture’. The trend has continued, so that
Mediaset broadcasting is now like one long cinema screening of snuff
films and B-movies. They’re broadcast, of course, under the title
Bellissimi
and by now it’s very rare to see a film on Italian television
which
hasn’t
been imported from America, occasionally Britain. It’s
rare to watch a film in which the lips move when the words are spoken.
(Italy’s most famous actors are now its
dubbers
.) And those who are
fed up with incessant advertising breaks can, since the growth of
video rentals, pop out to rent a video, probably from Blockbuster
(also owned, in Italy, by Silvio Berlusconi)
.

The law, however, maintaining
RAI’s
national broadcasting
monopoly was still in force in the early 1980s. Eventually, though,
the law was changed because it had already been blatantly broken.
Berlusconi wasn’t broadcasting nationally, he was simply broadcasting
the same programmes at the same times across the country,
albeit on local channels. It was national broadcasting in all but
name. Someone could watch the same imported film at the same
time in Palermo or Parma, where different stations would coincidentally
have a co-ordinated programme schedule. At one point,
since such broadcasting was illegal, the programmes were taken off
the airwaves; the ensuing outrage from viewers who needed the
next episode of
Dallas
or
Dynasty
enabled Berlusconi to present
himself, as he would often do in later years, as the man representing
‘freedom’ against ‘oppression’
.

The legislative sleight of hand by which Berlusconi’s broadcasting
scheduling became legal was known as Law 223 or ‘the
Mammí
law’
(named after the Minister for Telecommunications). It was proposed
in 1984 and passed, eventually, in 1990. It sanctioned the de facto
national broadcasting by Berlusconi, ending for all time the
monopoly of RAI and creating the RAI-Mediaset duopoly. Five government
ministers resigned in protest at the legislation, already wary
of Berlusconi’s omnipotence. The then Prime Minister was Bettino
Craxi, who had been best man at Berlusconi’s second marriage and
was to become godfather to Berlusconi’s daughter. Craxi’s offshore
accounts later received a 23 billion lire injection from an obscure part
of Berlusconi’s Fininvest empire (called All Iberian)
.
6
Berlusconi was
sentenced to two years and four months for the alleged bribe, though
on appeal he was acquitted because of the statute of limitations. The
crime, as so often, had passed its crime-by date. Berlusconi had
become ‘His
Emittenza
,’ an ironic play on words which evoked both
his ‘eminence’ and his broadcasting ‘emittance’. Not only did ‘the
Great Seducer’ (another nickname) own the means of production, he
owned something much more important: ‘the means of seduction
’.

The tactic is blissfully simple. It requires a small box in the corner of every room, plugged into the wall. It requires an aerial to receive the right broadcasts. (Eventually, the notion of ‘the right broadcasts’ might become irrelevant; if the owner of the ‘right’ channels should also head the government, the rival state channels – rivals politically and economically – will also be his.) That benevolent media tycoon pays himself for advertising space on his own channels in order to promote his own products. As he becomes inexorably richer, he also becomes the consumers’ most trusted entrepreneur. They recognise and agree with his Orwellian mantra ‘old is bad/new is good’. Eventually, the mores of millions of viewers will be so familiar to him that they can be turned into faithful voters, guaranteed to be receptive to any slick promotion by a new political party.

By now the most convincing explanation, albeit the most mundane, for Berlusconi’s political appeal is the simple fact that he controls three television channels. Having a politician who owns three television channels turns any election into the equivalent of a football match in which one team kicks-off with a three-goal advantage. Victory for the other side, even a draw, is extremely unlikely. Certain programmes, like the parliamentary programme
on Sunday,
Parlamento
-
in
, are like long party political broadcasts. Some Mediaset channels are worse than others. Rete 4 has an anchorman – Emilio Fede – nicknamed ‘Fido’ because he’s so sycophantic to his boss. He’ll introduce a news story with a comment like: ‘These stupid commies!’ Rete 4 is the channel that anytime Berlusconi is making an important speech will beam it live, without comment or criticism, into millions of homes across Italy. The other two channels are only minimally more balanced. Even there journalists, like referees walking into the San Siro Stadium, appear overawed. Asking hard questions of Berlusconi is akin to criticising not only the politician, but everyone in the television studio who are employed by him, and so it’s simply not done. The partiality, as with referees, might be accidental, subliminal, but it’s very obvious.

Thus Berlusconi has been compared, not unfairly, to Mussolini: both had a balcony from which they could harangue, cajole and persuade adoring viewers. Berlusconi, being the head of Italy’s ‘videocracy’, is only different because he owns an electronic balcony. The defence is that such partisan broadcasting is actually democratic: RAI is so riddled with left-wingers that Mediaset guarantees, not objectivity, but at least democratic pluralism. Without Berlusconi, the thinking goes, we would only be at the mercy of political henchmen.

But more than just painfully partial towards its boss, Mediaset television has achieved something even more disguised. It has seduced a society to the extent that politics and ideas don’t seem to exist. Italy’s noble visual culture has been reduced to endless erotica, and the small screen is now a cheaper, bittersweet version of
La Dolce Vita
: a world obsessed with celebrity and sexuality, to the exclusion of all moral values (Fellini, not surprisingly, for years objected to his films being shown on television). In many ways, the real problem with Mediaset isn’t that it’s political in the purest sense; it’s that it’s not political at all. The only thing on offer are bosoms, football and money. Even someone who enjoys all three eventually finds it all boring. ‘
Panem et
circenses
,’ says Filippo, ‘that’s what the ancient Romans called it: “bread and a
bit of a show”. Give that to the masses and they’ll be happy’. An American friend, quoting Pynchon on paranoia, is even more dismissive: ‘If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers!’