Liberal no. 38/1999
Dear Mina,
a recent survey gave us yet another certification on the tastes of Italians. After the Sanremo Festival, it would be the Miss Italy pageant that would be the most well-known and popular event among our compatriots. All that is missing from this pretty picture is the soccer championship and the national-popular omelet is made. I don’t know what to say, but from this data it seems to me that I can conclude that what characterizes our people is always and only the desire for escapism. From your point of view as an observer and baton-taker of patry customs, what is your assessment of the contest? Obviously if you’ve been watching it on TV.
John C., Milan
Dear John,
“women represent the triumph of matter over intelligence, just as men represent the triumph of intelligence over customs.” Oscar Wilde’s trancing aphorism seemed to me the most effective and appropriate comment when, the other night, the meat of the Salsomaggiore market was scrolling across the screen. Of course, I knew full well that I would not be attending a live meeting of the Academy of the Crusca. But even leaving aside the “thes” and “thes,” the difference of which is now unknown to most, and taking it for granted that the level of the dialogues set up by the misses with the heroic Fabrizio Frizzi would not have been on par with those of Socrates with his disciples, one cannot remain impassive in the face of linguistic gems such as “Suffice it not to repeat itself,” or “The jury is up to their job.”
It is also true that it is usually believed that mulieval beauty need not coexist with other gifts, and that a pleasant maiden can be forgiven everything, including massacres of the subjunctives. But when the perpetuation of luogocommunism takes on this inevitable ritual cadence, which every year in early September expands like a blobber from Salsomaggiore to the whole of Italy, I cannot hold back an amused and bitter laugh. In short, the bandwagon of these maidens brought to the television butchery has succeeded in disproving the second part of that other aphorism of Oscar Wilde, who claimed that “the female sex is a decorative sex. It has nothing to say, but that nothing it says gracefully.”
Were it not for these svarionistic delights, I would be dangling dangerously on the couch waiting to go into irreversible hibernation. The statuesque display of the beauties made me have vague thoughts of village fairs, where they carried fat cows, complete with cowbell and rosette around their necks. A jumble of equine teeth, Frizzi’s increasingly ashy colors, and unheard-of and unforgettable phrases from jury members, such as “They’re all very pretty, even the excluded ones; I wish they could all win.” In short, a freak show of pre-Basel era asylums, more indigestible than a large glass of castor oil, a masochistic and mastodontic pounding on the balls that only a spectator-kamizake, like me, can choose to inflict on himself.
And while we didn’t border on the ridiculous this year with sentimental victories awarded to girls from traditionally marginalized “categories,” things didn’t get much better. But in reality, it does not even make sense to compare this edition with previous ones with the intent of unearthing some element of novelty: in the eternal return of the same to itself there is no variation, but a hypostatically unchanging reality. So much so that only the miss’s eventual lack of tears or the revelation that there is nothing in the winner’s past to dig up and no scandal to flaunt are newsworthy. Perhaps the only revolutionary choice would have been to award the last Miss Italy title of the millennium to a member of the jury, I don’t know, Gil Cagné, for example.
After three days of kilometer-long broadcasts in which virtually nothing happened, the jury was destroyed, to the point that Civil Defense would be needed. The faces of the jurors were amoebically frazzled and wrinkled with an aura of boredom, yawns and dripping tricks, occasionally interrupted by historical statements about the thrill of winning or the fact that, after all, it is just a game. The psychological profiles drawn up for the three finalists were more insulting than the tests in summer weeklies. Even the monument Sordi, crumbling with boredom, produced a desperate final sermon that deserved to be recorded for free distribution by the National Health Service for insomnia treatment. Unbelievable. And the tears on the winner’s face made me think that Oscar Wilde was right again when he said that “weeping is the refuge of ugly women, but it is the bane of pretty ones.”
RAI executives wring their hands over stellar ratings. And we, having reassembled our crumpled pricks from so much event, console ourselves with a videotape of an old Totò film when he, in a show-stopping number, sang “Miss, my dear miss.”
