Reality Bites

Why a doc about the Italian Prime Minister is scarier than Benicio Del Toro's "Wolfman."

The changing landscape of popular culture is also the subject of a very different film opening this week. This one’s a documentary about a man who is never seen in public without one crucial accessory: a smile. His attire changes, the amount of hair on his head fluctuates, but that photogenic grin never leaves his lips. It’s a pleasant smile at first glance, but the longer your look at it, the more unsettling it becomes, because it never seems to go away.

It’s almost like he can’t stop smiling, like Batman’s nemesis The Joker. But this man isn’t a supervillain, he’s the prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi. And as Erik Gandini, the director and narrator of the new documentary “Videocracy” observes, he’s also the wealthiest man in the country and its largest media owner. Berlusconi controls or owns six of the seven national networks in Italy. Imagine if Rupert Murdoch also owned CBS and CNN along with Fox and then became the president of the United States.

“Videocracy” isn’t a simple Berlusconi biography, but rather an attempt to explain his grip on the country by surveying the modern Italian cultural landscape, particularly the state of its television programming, which makes mainstream American TV look like “Masterpiece Theater.” One of Berlusconi’s televisual innovations was the creation of veline, the scantily clad women who now appear on nearly all Italian television shows. A veline poses beside the show’s hosts, never speaks, and performs occasional dance routines and stripteases to keep the audience from changing the channel. It sounds demeaning, but Gandini cites a poll that claims 80% of Italian girls aspire to become a veline, which is considered a fast track to celebrity, riches, and a marriage to a famous football star. And you thought “Teen Mom” was presenting unhealthy role models for children.

Gandini wanders from studying Berlusconi to veline auditions to following other characters, like a wannabe reality star named Ricky who claims to be the first man in history to combine the martial arts of actor Jean-Claude Van Damme with the musical stylings of Ricky Martin into one hard-kicking, soft-rocking package. The spectrum of “Videocracy”‘s subjects is both a strength and a weakness. Although it does feel like Gandini’s provided a broad sample of Italian culture, he may have done so at the cost of deeper insight for superficial variety (which, come to think of it, is a pretty good description of his primary subject).

I would have preferred more background on Berlusconi — how he developed his theories of television and then implemented them, how he transitioned (in Gandini’s words) from the president of TV to prime minister of the country — and at least a little analysis from media critics or pop culture analysts (Gandini, as narrator, is the film’s only commentator). Still, this is a reasonably comprehensive introduction to a fascinating topic, and it supports its case with plenty of eye-popping footage. The Berlusconi campaign ad where a variety of women (and just women, no men) sing an ode to the politician with lines like “Thank God Silvio exists!” is like something out of Orwell, or at least a Terry Gilliam film.

The one supporting character who breaks away from the rest of the pack and seems worthy of a documentary all his own is Fabrizio Corona, a gossip mogul and controversy magnet who’s sort of Italy’s answer to TMZ’s Harvey Levin, if Levin looked like an underwear model and let a documentary crew shoot full-frontal nude footage of him taking a shower. Corona oversees a crew of paparazzi, then sells their pictures back to the celebrities they photograph. If that sounds like blackmail, congratulations, you just passed the Moral Standards Of An Italian Paparazzi Test!

When Corona’s activities land him in jail, he becomes a celebrity himself, and to keep in the spotlight, he fashions himself into an exaggerated villain of tabloid journalism. Suddenly, a guy who previously talked about his distaste for celebrity transforms into the very thing he hates. He sold his soul for a nightclub appearance fee. Which poses a provocative, though admittedly unoriginal question: if everyone wants to be on television, and the only people on television are idiots, will people aspire to idiocy so they can get on TV?

Let’s hope not. To those of us who hear constantly how our culture is dumbing down our children and how we’re exporting garbage art to the rest of the world, “Videocracy” is simultaneously reassuring (we’re not the only ones with bad taste in television!) and horrifying (we’re not the only ones with bad taste in television!). Whether the Italian populace’s voting habits were influenced by Italian television is debatable; that they have repeatedly elected Berlusconi is not. They weren’t even put off by that smile, though some might reconsider when they see the final shot of this film, which starts from a very wide shot and slowly zooms into a tight close-up of Berlusconi walking in a large crowd during a parade. Smiling.

“The Wolfman” opens wide on February 12th; “Videocracy” opens in New York on February 12th.

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