La Dolce Vita

There are many possible ways to watch this. One way is to treat it like a regular, fun movie, which I would highly recommend. It is easy to watch, a great story, wonderfully written and directed, showing how a man tries to make sense of his life in Rome as he jumps from party to party, full of bubbly music and characters with beautiful faces.

Another way is to watch it with a few shakes of existential dread sitting by your side, as you try to figure out everything from technology, human connection, media, love, and that feeling of indescribable euphoria when you drink ice water for the first time that night at 5:22 AM in an IHOP after leaving a random house party with six people who don't know your name that are also in that wierd post-drunk/high come-down phase.

But by trying to watch it in the latter fashion, I think one will quickly find that attempting to figure all of that out while watching the film is borderline impossible. So I recommend just watching it as if it were a fun movie and maybe save the existential dread for later if you are so inclined.
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The new-new testament is the Wellbutrin commercial. A 180- to 200-word-per-minute legal disclaimer at the end now tells the story of a prophet, an influencer who is rolling manicured fingernails over a box of boner pills. They are staring directly into the camera lens and saying, "This is who you are, and this is who you must become," in flashing white Arial font, one word at a time, to millions of Users locked in two-story homes on streets named "Glencrest" or "Hollowbrook". A 30-second video (for which this prophet will be compensated handsomely) is recorded, edited, and uploaded for millions of these Users to see. And this influencer does it over and over and over, day after day, year after year, the manicured nails arpeggiating across millions of kaleidoscopic boxes and packagings. In each 30-second video, they perform a nose scrunch that cuts each vital artery; a post-DeBakey open-heart surgery is completed moments after the iPhone's power button is pressed twice in quick succession, enabling Apple Pay to scan the face and return the User back to themselves through the purchase of boner pills. The iPhone is put back into the User's front pocket, its top-left corner on the precipice of piercing the labia/scrotum.

Seconds later, an Instagram notification triggers an underwater earthquake in the User's body, sending a tsunami that travels through the spinal cord and eventually reaches the brainstem's gates. The device's haptic feedback vibrates the upper thigh and fully charges the vagina/penis. Their battery icons now fully green. Like a gunslinger in a Western, the iPhone is lifted from the pocket at some of the fastest speeds on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Today there are even iPhone-slinging competitions and the best prospects are closely scouted for scholarships to top-ranked training programs paid in proportion to how quickly they pull the phone out of the pocket. The tsunami's ripples are about to fade nicely, almost ideally, and the battery icons are still fully juiced as the User pulls the phone centimeters away from the tip of the nose so the pupil can dilate further, allowing the device to scan the face efficiently and automatically open Instagram.

The notification is read and says that an account has uploaded a new thirst trap of Robert Pattinson. Also in 30-second-format. It contains a tailored 30-second snippet from a song, engineered in a Santa Barbara recording studio specifically for thirst trap videos. A team of music engineers with college degrees streamlines the creation process on Slack messaging channels. No one will know any part of the song other than those 30 seconds. The artist will play in venues where the audience screams song lyrics for only 30 seconds, and the buildup to the snippet's first words will feel like the buildup to an orgasm; once that snippet is reached, a collective euphoria will occur. For the rest of the concert, no one will say anything, and the audience will all be pumping their fists and giving each other high fives before heading for the exits. As they walk back to their cars, they listen to the same 30-second snippet in a separate thirst trap video. This time, it is not Robert Pattinson but his dialectical negation, J.D. Vance.

The phone is returned to the User's front pocket, and 30 seconds later, another earthquake rumbles beneath the surface again.

Such a story, and many others like it, is what the new-new Testament is filled with, in specifically, the 180- to 200-word-per-minute legal proceeding right at the end of the Wellbutrin commercial.
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I remember hearing a professor state in a lecture that the world arrived at an impasse once Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "God is dead, and we killed him." Nietzsche's God isn't to be understood here as the God of religion, but as an ordering principle for how we ought to live our lives. By claiming that "God is dead", he means to say that there is no longer any sort of guideline that tells us what is meaningful about our lives, what we should pay our attention to, what we should clip our fingernails in the morning for. The ideological scaffolding of God, its Jenga tower, is toppled, and we are now left to live in a world where anything is permissible. What is one to do in this world where God is dead?

This is precisely one of the many questions that is asked in La Dolce Vita. How does one find meaning in their life? How does one float through the world without completely recoiling when anything is permissible? What ideas or objects are turned into the symbolic walking canes we clutch upon in order to move across daily existence?

It's a very personal experience watching this and it's really hard to write everything I think about it because it feels like I'll leave out something special but the best way I can convey this Nietzschean strain is that the first scene serves as a metaphor for the rest of the film, and it only makes sense at the very end, when you look back and reflect on everything you watched.