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“The final sequence in La Dolce Vita refers us once again to the breakdown of human communication. In the aftermath of the wild party that concludes the film—significantly, the celebration of an annulment, and thus of the dissolution of marriage—the real viciousness and self-destructiveness of Marcello are fully revealed. Stumbling out into the morning light like a kind of circus parade, the revelers come upon a group of fishermen who are pulling a monstrous creature out of the ocean. This mysterious “sea monster” horrifies yet fascinates those gathered on the shore around its body. The blank, staring eyes of this creature look directly into the camera—and at us. Its enigmatic stare renders a kind of mute judgment against the folly and cruelty of human beings, our superficiality and materialism, our hunger for novelty and amusement, our preference for the trivial and inauthentic in art and life. The creature, like some ancient sea monster cast up in the modern world, evokes a feeling of corruption that links a primordial sense of evil to the banality and superficiality of the contemporary scene. (…)”
[John Parris Springer, “Fellini’s Roman Circus”]
