CO[S]MIC
The Fool (played by Richard Basehart) comes in at a point as a manifestation, being the internal supplement of the system's outward form — and his time is short: coming in as a beating heart for a small quarter, then disappearing. The Fool is what is lacking. As a Loki, he is a restructuring agent; a hybrid notion, an unstable combustion / intersection of all intent; like a pressurized cornerstone supportive of the whole structure; not an individual, not a character study, but the presence of absence. Nature as is, undelayed.
His disappearance is one of great terror for Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) : not because she has lost a close friend, but in a violent image the thing which she so obviously sought (though unable to articulate in words, and perhaps never even reached the threshold of her attention), something felt to be immediately not present in her life, that which the whole film dances around in between Zampano (Anthony Quinn) and herself, of which vividly controlled the driving-agency of Il Matto, has extinguished in her spectatorship. The vitality is gone, and the Fool disintegrates back into the ether-matrix.
The energy falls into a literal coldness, and what seems to be a deep neuroses strikes the balance, affecting and confusing both Zampano and Gelsomina. Any direct reason is unspoken, but the entire formal world reacts. The necessary negative concentration collapsed, the symbolic order disentegrates. From that moment on, in terms of this single consciousness (the totality of the narrative), it is a winding of the clock toward its deconstruction.
What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light. - Borachio, Ado, W.S.
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