Pleasure and unpleasure

This article looks at Giulietta Masina’s role in Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti and the part she plays in Fellini’s re-shaping of the oppositional stance which underpins his artistic mythos. To highlight her unique contribution to his evolving meta-narrative, this article compares the importance of taboo erotic pleasure for Masina’s character, Giulietta, and for Fellini’s male protagonists in earlier films, in their parallel efforts to defy the social prohibitions on pleasure, especially extra-marital pleasure, potentially limiting their personal liberty and self-determination. This comparison reveals the various, subtler facets of pleasure uniquely experienced by the male protagonists, which are illuminated by Freud’s understanding of the psychological contradictions at the heart of pleasure, including what Aaron Schuster calls the pleasure of pleasure’s ‘failure’. Conversely, the implications of the far less subtle, even grotesque erotic pleasures which tempt and terrify Giulietta show Fellini refining his ethos of personal liberation by extending the reach of the self into the furthest regions of prohibited pleasure, and exploring extreme, unpleasurable pleasure, or jouissance.