Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Guido’s Nose
Toward the beginning of the mind-reading magicians scene,
right after Gloria and Mezzabotta dance together, Guido wears a
funny-looking false nose, fondling and tapping it. Guido, bored
with the entertainment and his company, has apparently shaped the
false nose from a dinner roll. More than a mere idle gesture, making
the false nose contributes to the film’s extended Pinocchio metaphor.
In the well-known story, when the puppet Pinocchio tells a lie,
his nose grows. Guido, thinking of himself as Pinocchio, relates
his dishonesty to his nose and taps it with his finger at significant
moments. Right before Guido’s first daydream of Claudia serving
him spring water, for example, Guido taps his nose. He repeats the
gesture at the café right before the harem fantasy. In both instances,
Guido is uncomfortable before he plunges into his fantasy, and the
fabrication seems to be a sort of defense mechanism for him. Guido’s glasses,
which he touches or pulls away from his eyes before moments of fantasy
or dishonesty, have a similar symbolic significance.
The Rocket Launch Pad
Since the producers are eager to start shooting Guido’s
film, they begin construction of a rocket launch pad that Guido
designed even before he had completed a screenplay to accommodate
it. As it turns out, Guido realizes that science fiction is the
wrong artistic direction for him and gives the orders to tear it
down before construction is even complete. The launch pad, which
consumed two hundred tons of concrete alone, is a prodigious mistake
with important symbolic significance. Like the fabled Tower of Babel,
the shuttle is a symbol of arrogance, but rather than signifying
Guido’s attempt to be closer to the gods, the shuttle alludes to
his creative pretension. Guido spends much of his professional life
among doting admirers, and without proper criticism to temper their
praise, he feels an excess of artistic license that allows him to
“lie,” as he puts it, or to be artistically insincere. The potentially
phallic nature of the launch pad apparatus also suggests a reminder
of Guido’s sexual arrogance and infidelity.
The Rope
The traffic jam of the opening sequence represents the
suffocating presence of the film industry in Guido’s life, which
he escapes miraculously by floating into the sky. He is free for
only a few moments before two businessmen, the manager and the publicist
for actress Claudia Cardinale, yank him back down to Earth with
a rope. Guido struggles briefly with the rope before he descends.
The rope serves as a symbol of the film industry’s control and near
ownership of Guido’s life. The producers who fund Guido’s creative
projects nag him, the press never leaves him alone, and Guido himself
is tied to his movies by his own concerns about artistic integrity.
Toward the end of the film, during the screen tests, Guido takes
advantage of a delicious opportunity to reverse the rope’s symbolic
function when he imagines his producers using it to hang the irritating Daumier.
The Spring
Fellini was interested in the work of Carl Jung, the psychologist
who wrote that the anima (the repressed feminine
component of the male unconscious mind) is responsible for the connection
to the spring, or source of life, in the unconscious mind. Likewise,
the supposedly curative spring in 8½ has
symbolic meaning that is at once related to female psychology and
youth. The spring, then, is a perfectly appropriate “cure” for Guido’s
major challenges, which include confusion with women and fear of
aging. Claudia Cardinale, whom Guido plans to cast as his lead actress,
is a personification of these qualities of the spring. This link
between Claudia and the spring is especially clear in Guido’s fantasy
of her in his bedroom, during which she repeats, “I want to create
order, I want to cleanse.” The moment when Guido decides not to
include Claudia in his film is thus doubly meaningful because while
it marks his creative revelation, it also signifies his realization
that there is no simple “cure” to his challenges.
