The Satyricon was one of the most moving films I have ever seen. There was so much symbolism and so many undercurrents. I present a composite critique.<br /><br />Fellini's omissions and additions neither contradict nor violate, but further define the surviving fragments of the original Satyricon. He had the task of making a continuous work of art of a scarred, fragmented torso with its head and limbs chopped off. Some of Fellini's sources of what is not in Petronius are from Suetonius, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal and Propertius. One might liken his reconstructing to that of a paleontologist giving form to a few dozen fossil bones. He stated that his intention was not to show vice or corruption, but to give an unbiased look at a morally decaying world. The film prefigures both the world of Rome prior to Christianity and the post-Christian world presently lurching toward birth. The moral violence that punctuates the film prefigures the irrational savagery of our own age.<br /><br />Fillini rejects what has been written about the ancient world and sticks to what has been painted. The scenario synthesizes art, moving like music and spreading out like a suite of paintings, a catalog of images without character development, story, or drama. Dream-like images of anguish and obsessions demand great intellectual effort on the part of the viewer. His images are mesmerizing, like the waters of the Styx, and hallucinating like the canvases of Hieronymous Bosch. Painted flesh is brought to life and retains the sense of life on fragments amid the ruins.<br /><br />We are presented a vast living fresco of Roman decadence as a metaphor for present society and as an allegorical satire of where we may be trending. The film is a window and a mirror where we may see both past and present at the same time, a world without moral anchoring, a nightmare world, a decomposing body infested with vermin. It is a fable for our times, equating moral decadence with apocalypse. Fellini constructs it with fresco-like mastery.<br /><br />We are both fascinated and repelled. The young and the beautiful are as monstrous and impure as the old and the ugly. Fellini uses the grotesque to try to reclaim the viewers' lost sense of the mysterious, the transcendent and the holy. This grotesqueness zaps us into an encounter with another reality. Surrealistic elements dominate, pushing aside the human elements. Dissociations, or an alienated and incoherent simultaneity, are used to create the atmosphere of a dream. Fellini said that his film was "the documentary of a dream." The dream is frightening, because it is endurable only through intense and irresponsible indulgence followed by interminable escape. The characters are exiles in a world that is both of their own creation and beyond their control.<br /><br />The film is heavy with Freudian symbolism. The over-painted fresco-like faces represent both the external masks of surface relationships and the masks that hide the darker impulses and compulsions that threaten to overwhelm and assume the identity of the ego. Fellini's film is a surrealistic vision of a hedonistic world where there is only the mask of the ego; there is no real ego to impose logic or reason, and no superego to impose ethics or morality. It is an id world that must inevitably consume its pawns, because it moves only on primitive drives, a world without innocence, purity, mutual commitments, restraints, or real love.<br /><br />As a theme, one might say that the story is about the sexual education of Encolpio set in the context of a morally declining world. He triumphs over his opponents via his physical beauty; a wish-fulfilling dream of the adolescent who, confronting a terrible and corrupt world, finds that he can wander through it relatively unscathed, thanks to his youth and beauty. He disarms his opponents with his surface aura of innocence and sexual attraction, which saves his life more than once, but it emasculates him in his own conscience, eventually rendering him impotent with women. Fellini's oversexed, devouring women are not mother figures or love figures but symbolically wish to castrate. Rather than objects of idealization for completing the inner merger of male and female elements of the psyche they are nightmarishly intent on emasculation. They can function only as copulatory devourers. However, the death of Ascilto, Encolpio's alter ego, symbolically represents the death of Encolpio's homosexual desires and self doubts, restoring him to manhood and erasing his impotence.<br /><br />Like the fragmented remains of Petronoius Arbiter's Satyricon, Fellini's film ends as an unfinished sentence. The characters are as if in a transfer pattern, frozen, plastered into separate decaying walls of broken masonry; it is our window to the world of Rome, but a world that mirrors a portent for the present and the future of our own world.<br /><br />This is a film well worth viewing again and again to uncover its symbolism and deeper facets.