Directed by: Federico Fellini
Written by: Federico Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi
Starring: Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born
Available on: Amazon Prime, Criterion Blu-ray
I found Fellini’s Satyricon at about half-past midnight, alone in my parents’ living room with nothing but their Prime account and a deep sense of disgust at the world. It wasn’t what I’d planned to watch—something sick and stylish from Korea, maybe, or a philosophical slow-burn from Japan—but the title hooked me. Ten minutes in, I wasn’t just watching. I was somewhere else. Two hours later, I emerged as if from some hallucinatory rite, dazed and unsure if I still lived in a world with electric kettles and school assemblies.
This is not a film. It’s a vision. And not even a vision with a clear point—just an extended dive into a universe that has none. Satyricon is to Hollywood historical epics what syphilitic decay is to a marble bust: the same outlines, but twisted, collapsed, and humming with rot. There is no narrative arc, no redemption, and—mercifully—no moral lesson. Fellini took the fragmentary remains of Petronius’ Satyricon and leaned into their incompleteness. The film feels like a scroll half-burned, a text scribbled by madmen. You get glimpses of something coherent, and then it dissolves again into strange chants and half-lit corridors. The central pair—Encolpius and Ascyltus—wander aimlessly, bickering over a catamite, getting sold into slavery, crashing parties, surviving earthquakes, and stumbling through what might be death rituals or might be dinner. The world itself seems exhausted: Rome, not in its glory but in the terminal stage of its cultural syphilis.
Fellini isn’t interested in explaining anything. He doesn’t care if you’re confused. The viewer is simply there, dropped into a land where gods are dead, rituals are grotesque, and meaning has stopped trying to exist. It’s a move that’s almost libertarian in its cruelty: you’re on your own, mate. Figure it out. Or don’t.
What makes Satyricon brilliant is that it feels like Rome. Not the fantasy Rome of polished marble and brave speeches, but the Rome you get from reading between the lines of Tacitus and Juvenal—the Rome of vomit, blood, theatre, and empty eyes. Trimalchio’s banquet is the best-known scene, and with reason. The man boasts that his boy lover can read and multiply, as if he’s conjured up a wizard. In a world without punctuation or positional notation, he might as well have. That’s the genius of this film: its strangeness isn’t just for aesthetic effect. It’s rooted in historical difference. This isn’t a morality play in togas. It’s a foreign civilisation, seen without translation.
Fellini makes no concessions to modern taste. The dubbing is disorienting—bad on purpose. The language skips between Italian, Latin, Greek and nonsense. The characters stare directly at the camera, smeared in paint and draped in gold. Their faces are unreadable. There’s no soundtrack of noble strings or choral gravitas. Instead, you get silence, or wind, or weird electronic murmurs. It all says the same thing: You do not belong here.
There are scenes that don’t leave you. One is a theatrical ritual in which a slave is mutilated onstage to simulate divine power. The audience barely notices. Blood is just another prop. It’s casual and horrific. And in that horror, more honest than all the BBC reconstructions of “Daily Life in Pompeii.” This is a world where the boundary between entertainment and atrocity has collapsed, and nobody minds.
Fellini’s Rome has no moral architecture. There’s no right and wrong—only spectacle, sex, death, and power. It is, in a sense, the natural end of any society that tries to run on wealth without belief. And if you think that’s not relevant to modern Britain, you haven’t been paying attention.
If I have one objection, it’s to the relentless focus on all-male sex. Yes, the Romans didn’t share our categories. Yes, upper-class men routinely sought pleasure with boys and women alike. But Fellini’s obsession borders on caricature. The film becomes a kind of Greco-Roman Grindr dreamscape, where every emotional beat is filtered through the body of a teenage boy. Even the dream sequences feel like they’ve been staged at a very expensive bathhouse.
That said, the imbalance is instructive. Satyricon isn’t interested in what you want. It’s interested in what it was, or might have been: a civilisation so decadent it turned inward and downward. There’s no truth to be found—only desire, decay, and a kind of eerie beauty. Fellini isn’t peddling shock for its own sake. He’s staging a thought experiment: what does a world look like where gods have died, liberty means nothing, and pleasure is all that’s left? It’s not a warning. It’s worse than that. It’s an observation.
And the observation sticks. By the end, as Encolpius stares blankly into the void, covered in war paint and ennui, you realise that this film isn’t just about Rome. It’s about us. Or what we’ll look like in twenty years, once the NHS has finished amputating our dignity and the Department for Culture has banned the last Shakespeare play for being insufficiently inclusive.
Watch it. But not as a history lesson. Watch it as prophecy.
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
