The Ego of a Century
Martin Eden
Pietro Marcello, 2019
With Martin Eden Pietro Marcello presents his own interpretation of Jack London’s semi-biographical novel, staying faithful to the story and its sensibility, though enriching it with a more profound and enlarged perspective. Marcello deconstructs the elements of the American writer’s Bildungsroman, broadens its horizons, and uses the story as a key to understand and analyse the whole last century. Indeed he extracts and detaches the pieces of London’s story throughout different times and spaces to create a multifaceted character who becomes the archetype of the whole modern society along an entire century.
Marcello thus plays and interferes with the timeframe of the novel, and chooses to set the story in a non-precisely defined period of time. A decision that situates the narrative in an atemporal dimension, where the post-war ambience alternates between the late-19th-century magnificent and baroque villa of the Orsini family (Morse in the book), the 60s setting of Eden’s brother-in-law’s sloppy house, the 70s framework of the recurrent images of two children dancing to a far more modern music, the archive footages from the 20’s and 30’s, and the contemporaneity of the faces filmed along the streets of today’s Naples.
“Not only does Marcello mix fiction and documentary forms, which is a preferred practice of his, but he also manages to build a narration that sustains and rather legitimises the heterogeneity of his film.”
Indeed, by setting his story in Naples, Marcello returns, as he did in his previous film The Mouth of the Wolf, to a harbour city, and, more precisely, to the so-called city of mille culure [a thousand colours] because of its ability to integrate different cultures, people, and languages. And this decision fits perfectly with the heterogeneous form of the film itself. The Italian filmmaker adopts a vast plurality of filmic languages, combining his beautifully constructed shots with subjective viewpoints of the protagonist, archive footage and shots set in the streets of today’s city. A collection of diverse expressions that has a well-defined role in Marcello’s work. Not only does he mix fiction and documentary forms, which is a preferred practice of his, but he also manages to build a narration that sustains and rather legitimises the heterogeneity of his film.
Social mobility
Indeed, his Martin Eden, a sailor, seems capable of navigating comfortably between all these different spaces and times, in his journey from poor seaman to rich and famous writer.
Martin Eden lives between the harbours, the ships and his sister’s family. His life as a sailor seems to proceed without difficulties until he saves the life of a young well-educated man, Arturo (Arthur in the book) and enters the bourgeois world of the Orsini family. A whole different ecosystem, in which Martin Eden at first feels like an alien. However, the love for Arturo’s sister, Elena (Ruth in the book) empowers him to change to make himself worthy of her love. That’s when his other journey begins, not on a ship this time, though not less precarious nor dangerous. He permanently decides to abandon the sea and instead to look for fame as a writer. He moves to the countryside, where the film’s photography recalls the bucolic landscapes of Lost and Beautiful. Between ups and downs, when he finally reaches the success, he also loses Elena’s love, and - paradoxically enough - his social escalation becomes a self-deconstructive process, a glimpse over the failure of his beliefs. His journey throughout the film gradually becomes the emblem of a bigger, more general process of disillusionment and defeat.
Martin Eden’s social-climbing stays central in Marcello’s work as it is in London’s book. There is a strong willing, in his interpretation of the novel, to portray the individualism and the willpower that drive the main character. However, Marcello operates by broadening the horizons of this criticism towards the individualistic self-made man philosophy, translating it from a personal story to a reflection on how the idolatry of individualism has misled the whole 20th-century society.
Defeat and powerlessness
Throughout the film, there are many scenes where the more political part of the book emerges, and Martin Eden clearly states his absolute conviction towards the ‘pure’ individualistic philosophy, freed from any lord or leader to respond to, as the only way to change the world. Only the fittest survive, and thinking collectively means finding another power to get subjected to. In this sense, the scene where the presumed fascist politician claims to Martin Eden that “the people are with him” underlines Eden's faith in the individualism, persuaded that people cannot act collectively without being enslaved by the power, echoing the words of Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”, who lifted the people from the burden of freedom to enslave them with his power.
“In a world where the ego is worshipped and where individuality overcomes solidarity, the weakest will always be defeated by the fittest. ”
But, as Dostoevsky also remarked in his famous passage, “the more rebellious and ferocious than the rest will destroy themselves”. Indeed, Martin Eden, who thought he could handle the burden of this individualistic freedom, at the end has left the only choice of destroying himself, failed by his ideas and won by the hypocrisies of the bourgeois world that he first chased. As he moves across different environments, chronological spaces and diverse languages -filmic and not- we discover his power to beat anything that will obstruct his path. However, in his climbing to the top of society, he finds that he has now to deal with the responsibility of his own individuality, that left him no freedom. It seems that the only, instinctive choice is to annihilate himself and return to the ocean, where his journey started and where he will be forever consigned to oblivion.
Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden thus becomes the paradigm of a century, with its sense of defeat and powerlessness towards the world. A paradigm that, at the end, even passes over the last century and embraces today’s society as well. In this regard, the last scene, with Martin Eden sitting on the shore, is emblematic: an old man is screaming that the war has just been declared. We do not know what war he is referring to; the atemporal dimension of the film is unclear enough to make us doubt. In this scenario though, the camera discloses some ruins from the Second World War and, on the other side, a group of African immigrants who could be found in any shore of the southern European borders nowadays. The following close-up of Martin Eden’s face reveals us the sense of it: the indifference of his eyes is crucial to understand the relevance that Marcello’s adaptation has even today. The atemporal setting of the film, that has a crucial role especially in this very last sequence, reveals that when the glorification of one’s own individuality persists within the human condition, violence and wars will always be present. Indeed, Marcello’s narrative rides through the different decades of the 20th century to land, at the very end, in today’s society; the ultimate defeat of Martin Eden’s individualistic belief highlights that in a world where the ego is worshipped and where individuality overcomes solidarity, the weakest will always be defeated by the fittest.