The Lesser Examined Coming of Age: Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971)

Abstract

This study is a combination of Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological studies and Christopher Bollas’s theories on object-relations psychoanalysis to contextualize the age-induced anxieties as revealed through Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). I will utilize Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age, which focuses on the affairs of older people as they are disparaged by a society that problematizes and isolates their aging bodies to establish the situation of the film’s protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), within a larger sociological climate. This conscious, lived experience Beauvoir describes is the manifestation of what Bollas notes as the “generative state”: a mood space that allows for a subject to regress into a former, childhood state to negotiate their current affairs, often brought forth by personal crisis. The subject, in this case, is Gustav—an aging composer who travels to Venice per recommendation of his doctor following a poorly received concert, which led to sickness. The anxiety boiling inside him cools over time with help from his generative state—communicated through the film’s visual form and gesture—upon first sight of Tadzio, a boy who embodies the traditional Western standard of beauty found in the young. He further acts as Gustav’s object of desire, that is a longing for both youth and the physical abilities it provides, which ultimately allows for his recognition of life’s inevitability death. Death in Venice, in its simultaneous examination of beauty and decay, operates both as a reminder of the harm in denying one’s age and as a criticism of the societal antipathy that leads many, like Gustav, down a self-loathing-filled path fueled by aging, and finally demise.